Facilitating Internal Auditing

Companies tend to have a lot of stuff to do internal auditing on—performance, quality, environmental impact, etc. You may already know about the influence of an environmental management system (ISO 14000 family) and quality management system (ISO 9000 family), and possibly the increasingly popular information security management system (ISMS, ISO 27000 family).

Of course, you can just make checklists to go through and cross out, but managing everything on paper slows things down and costs a lot just to aggregate the results. That's why it's good to use an efficient information system.

This sample uses a template checklist for all the items to be inspected, which simplifies the second task considerably: input all the necessary items, upload the file, and that's it. The chief internal auditor decides the main topic and the individual auditors go through/cross out all the items according to priority and deadlines.
Today's second workflow (below) merely adds a task for reporting to the CEO. Because accelerating the PDCA cycle is something every company should constantly pursue.

• Internal Audit <Checklist>
• Internal Audit <CEO Check>