The Audit System

TQM requires tremendous abilities of the employees in the own company and at the supplier. By performing internal and external audits it is ensured that quality standards are met and processes improved. In general audits are based on standardized questionnaires (for example of the VDA) but they could also be built on individual profiles. Weaknesses found during an audit imply actions and in some cases also re-auditing. An audit is always finished with the creation of an audit report. The module iQ-Audit aims to fulfil all important requirements in the audit context efficiently.

Workflow

Basically iQ-Audit is built around the following objects:

• Questionnaires
• Demands
• Audits
• Actions (in conjunction with iQ-Projekte)
• Reports / evaluations

Questionnaires represent the requirements of the various quality standards and of your company. They can be used within your audits by selecting them from a questionnaire collection.

Demands are a means for doing the audit planning. They contain data like the unit to be audited, the period of time for the performance of the audit, and the involved persons, and can be used directly as basis for the upcoming audits.

The centre stage of your work - of course - take the audits themselves. The comprise the actual questionnaire, all important basic data, a means for comfortably entering the results, flexible calculation schemes, and the entry point for the creation of (corrective) actions that are to be mapped to the found weaknesses.

All actions can be monitored and triggered to escalation for an arbitrary number of escalation levels provided that the module iQ-Projekte is installed additionally. Furthermore it is possible to let the actions be defined externally and then to import all actions automatically into the system - if desired even with an automatic monitoring.

For presentation issues the software provides a set of reports/evaluations from the simple output of the standard audit report according to VDA 6, Part 3 to a complex evaluation comparing audit result with respect to questionnaire and time frames.

Important Features at a Glance

General

• Support of all important types of audits (internal, external respectively system, process, FMEA, etc.)
• Concise and sortable lists of the questionnaires, demands, audits, and actions available in the system
• Your demands, audits, and actions at a glance
• Attachment of any documents to audits, questions, and actions

Master data

• Freely definable result and evaluation schemes for a flexible rating of your various audits
• Flexible entry of any kind of questionnaires with the possibility to enter extensive descriptions. Each question can be weighed individually and be provided with own texts for rating.
• Master data that is relevant for other iQ-Basis modules, too, is maintained in the iQ-GL module so that it can be used throughout the entire application.

Audit planning

• Concise audit planning by using Microsoft Project; import of your planning from MS Project into the audit system
• Automatic creation of a Microsoft Word document listing the planned audits / demands

Audit performance

• A means for entering the different phases of the audit
• Adoption and arbitrary change of any questionnaire within the collection
• Printing of the questionnaire as reference as well as for capturing the results externally
• Comfortable entry of audit results including found deviations and observations
• Marking of questions as "not relevant"
• Graphical overview over the current results
• Support of different calculation schemes and result mappings - using percentages or counted numbers depending on your needs
• Archiving of documents attached to your audits as external PDF files if needed
• A form for entering the closing reports (with support of standard texts)

Actions (in conjunction with iQ-Projekte)

• Creation of actions to each single deviation, group of questions, or independent of any audit
• Assignment of responsibilities and dates
• Automatic monitoring of dates and escalations if dates are violated
• Monitoring of action processing by maintaining an action history
• Input fields for action results
• Support of follow-up actions and action chains
• Import of externally created actions using Microsoft Excel

Reports / evaluations (some examples)

• Complete report according to VDA 6, Part 3 (for process audits)
• Comparison of audit results including a presentation of the most important problems
• Presentation of audit results in a Microsoft Word document
• Creation of an action plan based on all deviations found during an audit
• Summary of all audit results

Interfaces to Other iQ-Basis Modules

• iQ-Audit mobil to export your audits to a laptop for live editing during the audit
• iQ-GL for a centralized maintenance of all master data that is relevant in other modules, too
• iQ-Projekte for managing actions inside and outside of the audit system, creating projects (with support of MS Project), and using action templates that make your processes even more efficient. This module is also needed for action monitoring, and escalation if this should be done automatically.
• iQ-Mail when it is necessary to send mails automatically (for example as a result of an overdue action)
• iQ-Doku for document management
• iQ-Info if you need to create reports on your own- for example using Crystal Reports