Service area 03
Auditing & Assessment
We independently assess the adequacy and consistency of practices and use evidence to make improvement opportunities visible.
An audit is not there to hunt for mistakes but to see, with evidence, how the system actually works. In an ELQA audit every finding rests on evidence, is ranked by significance and is reported together with a proposed corrective action. The aim is not to get through audit day but to keep the way of working standing in the period between two audits.
Services in this area
- Internal AuditEvaluating the management system’s conformity and effectiveness.See details
- Supplier AuditEvaluating supplier capability against defined criteria.See details
- Pre-Certification Readiness AssessmentDetermining the system’s readiness before the formal audit.See details
- Process AuditEvaluating a specific process in terms of workflow, controls and performance.See details
Frequently asked
Questions we hear about this service
If your question is not answered here, we can go through it directly in a short conversation.
They can; the standards allow it. The one condition is that an auditor does not audit their own work. In small teams that independence is harder to arrange, and the two workable answers are to bring the audit in from outside or to qualify your staff through internal auditor training.
Yes. Management system standards require planned internal audits and records of them; ELQA reports are written to meet that requirement, with findings traceable to the evidence behind them.
No. A finding is written against the system, not the person; the aim is not to identify who is at fault but to put in place the control that prevents the same deviation recurring. Once people expect blame, records stop being kept and the audit loses its purpose.
It depends on the scope, the number of sites and the number of processes to be covered. The number of days and the time allocated to each process are set out in writing in the audit plan beforehand.