Whether it’s ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 27001 or even AS/NZS4801 or AS/NZS5377, implementing systems compliant to these standards can be valuable and add to your business; enabling growth and development in the years to come.
Over the years our team of auditors have seen it all, you can learn from common mistakes and achieve certification easily.
1. Don’t panic
This may seem intuitive but many people see an audit as an intimidating and generally scary process. The first audit is essentially a preliminary assessment; a “check-up” of your current systems against the standard – it’s perfectly okay to have issues.
2. Prepping up
To start off with, we often encourage businesses to let us see their systems “warts and all” (to prevent the mistakes the next point articulates). So, whatever you do don’t go and do a last-minute all-nighter getting ready. It’s not an exam.
We have developed our self-assessment checklists specifically for this purpose – to help you complete an initial assessment of your systems – download them here.
3. Creating “things” just because
Often, we see procedures, documents and manuals that appear to be created because they were something a client thought that we would want to see and unfortunately more often than not they aren’t required by the standard. This is common especially regarding ISO 9001 Quality Certification – there is no longer a requirement to have a quality manual.
This goes back to the point above – do your research and prepare what the standard requires you to have as that is what we are assessing your business against – if it isn’t in there you won’t need it. Simple.
Some very basic preparation that often gets overlooked is; can you easily locate documents that are likely to need to be looked at – are these at hand? A lot of time ends up getting wasted in audits because things aren’t easily accessible.
4. Make it relevant for you
ISO9001, ISO14001 and ISO45001 are all generic standards – they can be and have been applied to nearly every industry you can imagine. Reading through the standard and considering the requirements within the context of what your business does is crucial. A key role of an auditor is to interpret the standard according to your organisation specifically.
If you think you’re ready to take on the certification process? Request a Quick Quote!
Or if you just need some more information first reach out and Contact us – we are more than happy to answer your questions.
