Audit Management Best Practice – Seek and Ye Shall Find

Call it a systematic review, inspection, examination, probe, measurement, investigation, analysis, surveillance or assessment.  It’s all comparing what is with what should be.  Whether it's for process safety management, risk management, safety and environmental management systems, ISO-9000/1400, OHSAS-18000 or Control of Major Accident Hazards (COMAH), the audit element is essential to ensure that we are leveraging the processes we designed for success.  Taking the time to build best practice process is wasted unless we ensure that users are well-trained on its use, and that we are measuring against that best practice.  Failure to measure or deal efficiently with the results of an audit will ensure that findings of bad practice are not well addressed.  It may also ensure that best or better practice will not be shared and useful to the enterprise.  Many times the corporate audit group is small and uses archaic methods to record and measure performance.  Moreover, they are still using email to assign preventive or corrective actions and record status in spreadsheets…lots of spreadsheets.  The valuable results of an audit are findings (major and minor), opportunities for improvement and, finally, best practice.  In order to make full use of these results a best practice audit management system is required.  That is the subject of this presentation.