Pre-Assessment vs Initial Audit

We had quite a few nonconformities during our pre-assessment.  We've addressed all those issues and a few that were missed by the preassessment auditor.   

To those that have done a pre-assessment audit.  Did the pre-assessment auditor catch all non-conformities?    Or did he miss some that were later caught on the certification audit?  Trying to gauge how confident I should be at passing the certification audit since we addressed all the pre-assessment gaps.  

Auditors and consultants that do SQF gap analysis sessions are not perfect.

It happens and frankly if there are a LOT of lacks or miss worded docs or others it can become downright daunting to get thru an entire analysis.

Now that you seem to have covered all the gigs plus things that your auditor missed you should be good to go for your real audits.

And yes, if you have the same auditor for your real audit he or she just might pick up on something they missed before because ultimately every audit is new.

In the interim you should always be ready for an audit, but also remember that none of us are perfect.

Thanks SQFconsultant!   Unfortunately the auditor for the certification audit will be a different person.  I've been going through the modules multiple times and feel that I have it covered, but am a bit worried that I may have missed something or perhaps misinterpreted a clause.   Fingers crossed.  

Things will be missed in the pre-assessment. Your auditor will find something, that is there job. The goal - for the auditor to not find major issues. 

^^^What they said.  When I've consulted for companies, I've seen auditors flat miss NC's, things I had seen and the company failed to address.  And of course the opposite happens where an auditor reviews something I was certain was compliant and finds a gap within it.  No one, auditor or consultant, is going to be perfect.  All you can do is review the code item by item and support how you feel you are compliant.  If you're not confident in your compliance, dig deeper and figure out what's missing.

Pre-assessments are a good tool if your site is new to the standard. They can help your team fully familiarize themselves with the code, and learn a bit about the "spirit of the rule" in most cases. But auditors aren't robots, each person has a slightly different focus and as others have mentioned part of their purpose is to drive improvement in the company. They do this by highlighting areas for improvement in your process, you will likely always come away with some homework from an audit. 

If you've never had an SQF audit before, the pre-assessment may be a good idea. After that most people just stick to the routine audits.

An auditor of any kind will never see everything because your business is an everchanging entity. What is correct today may be off tomorrow and what is off today will hopefully be addressed before tomorrow. Also, as you fix all the findings from this audit the next auditor (or even the same one) will see different things next time, and the next, and the next. This is how we all get better.