ARE YOU ON SCHEDULE WITH YOUR SUPPLIER AUDIT PROGRAM?
ARE YOU ON SCHEDULE WITH YOUR SUPPLIER AUDIT PROGRAM?
Let me guess…. The answer is probably ‘NO’! …
As far as your supplier audits are concerned, that may become a bit of a problem: June has just arrived, which means that we’re almost half way through the year. Besides, only a few audits take place in July and August, due to e.g. facility closures throughout Europe. Thus there are 3, maybe 3.5 months left to complete the schedule, as no one want to host/perform audits during the holiday season.
That means that if you still want to complete the whole schedule this year, you will need to have at least 40% of your audits performed by now and have the remainder firmly scheduled with your suppliers. Does that sound like the actual situation?😉
There are a few things that you can do, however:
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Nothing:
This is the easiest way out. As you probably didn’t meet the schedule last year and neither the year before, not meeting it this year is at least consistent 😊. The stress and pressure, both on the increase the closer we get to Christmas, will fade away instantly when the new year arrives. An entertaining manner of alleviating stress is reading our “Audit-No-No’s”. It won’t solve your problems but at least you can rest assured that worse things have happened.
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Start planning
immediately so raudit dates are set before your summer vacation:
Set time aside, e.g. a whole day,to get in touch with your suppliers and discuss audit dates. . Make an overview of all the audits that need to be carried out and spread them over the weeks with available time slots. Now prepare emails in which you propose 3 different weeks to each of the suppliers in a manner that has the least amount of overlap. Chances are that a date will be selected that hasn’t been chosen by someone else. -
Train more auditors:
Sounds easy enough, but everyone knows training auditors isn’t something that can be done quickly. Unless……… you outsource the training program. We offer 1-day ready-to-go basic trainings for supplier auditors: . Combine this with on-the-job training that all auditors need in order to gain experience, and you have additional resources to make your program.
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Outsource some of your audits.
As we have explained in our blog post “5 Reasons for outsourcing your supplier audits”, you can ask for help in meeting your audit schedule in time and with less stress and pressure from the management. What you would like to outsource exactly is up to you really. There are different levels of outsourcing as we further explain in “5 Levels of outsourcing your supplier audit program, and when to use them”.