Hi,

This is the IFS Help file explanation; 

Compliance Planning

The compliance plan is used to identify reference standards relevant to each business area and also to plan when each reference standard area will be audited.

The compliance plan is typically updated annually, and provides an overview of the planned auditing activities for the following year. The created compliance plan can be utilized to find all planned audits for a specific business area, or all planned audits against a specific reference standard.

Quality Audit

A quality audit is carried out to ensure that the organization has clearly defined quality procedures and that it complies with these. The quality audit is a key part of the quality management system. An objective of a quality audit is to ensure continual improvement within the organization and to highlight areas of good practice.

Quality audits are typically performed at predefined time intervals and are carried out by independent internal or external quality auditors. The term independent is critical and is used in the sense that the auditor must be independent of the function or department being audited.

Audits can be both internal and external. Internal audits are typically carried out by a quality auditor within the organization, and external audits are carried out by an external auditor. External audits carried out will often be for regular accreditation in line with internal reference standards, and are carried out by approved independent certification bodies. Other examples of external audits are customer and supplier audits.

Summary

A quality audit is the process of a periodic, independent, documented, and systematic examination of a quality system, carried out by an internal or external quality auditor in order to ensure that the organization has clearly defined quality procedures, and that it complies with the defined quality procedures.

So in other words, the Compliance Plan is a high-level ‘wall-planner view’ of the the Business Areas and Reference Standards that need to be Audited during the next (say) 18 months.

The Audit Plan is then the actual audits which you intend to perform to achieve the Compliance Plan.

Hi @Richard Owen

Thank you so much your answer. 

Actually, I have another question about focus area which is one of the audit tabs.

What is main usage of the focus area tab?

Can to use the focus area tab to enter both audit questions list and quality management standards like ISO9001.2015’s standards? I have a hasitation about entering the question list cause focus area tab looks like relating to quality management standard that created on reference standards tab in basic data page.

Best Regards,

Ozge

Hi,

The idea of the Focus Area tab is to highlight the reference standard to be audited.

I wouldn’t add the detailed questions here as there will probably be too many and it will be difficult to maintain and manage.  What usually happens is that the Auditor will have a check-list (Word document) with the questions and they will record the findings in the same document and then store it in IFS Doc Man as an Audit attachment.  Any observations or non-conformances can be entered in the Audit / Notes<tab> with NCRs being created directly from the Audit if required. When done, mark the Focus Area as Complete.

I hope that this helps.

Hi @Richard Owen

Thank you so much for your answer.