We provide the Automotive Industry with worldwide IATF16949 auditing services to improve efficiencies, mitigate risks, and increase compliance with industry regulation.
Internal Auditing:
We provide companies with an objective assessment of their own IATF16949 Quality Management System relative the requirements of the standard and industry best practices. The scope all internal audits are tailored to specific our client’s needs and requirements.
Automotive suppliers contract us to perform their internal audit program for many reasons, but the top 4 reasons are:
- Better Resource Utilization: Everyone is trying to do more with less these days and we understand your have key personnel working on competing priorities. Internal Auditing is an area that is easy to outsource to free up internal resources and it is not particularly costly.
- Identification of Best Practices: Our auditors have seen the implementation of IATF16949 at hundreds of companies and the knowledge we’ve amassed in house is a powerful tool we provide to our clients to improve their systems.
- Access to Expertise: It is expensive and time consuming to become an expert in IATF16949 and almost a full time job to keep abreast of industry trends. Many clients tell us their employees already wear too many hats and outsourcing internal audits is one way to let employees focus on other duties. For small organizations, this is an even bigger challenge – as they may entirely lack the expertise. Our auditors are IATF16949 experts who can impart their knowledge on your organization and help drive continuous improvement efforts.
- Guaranteed Impartiality: Section 9.2 of TS16949 requires that auditors are impartial of the areas being audited which is can often be a challenge. Engaging our certified auditors to perform your internal audit removes any potential doubts about auditor impartiality.
Supplier Auditing:
We see the interconnected supply change as one of the biggest risks to the industry moving forward and want to help you better prepare for the next “black swan” event. Industry leaders continue to advocate enhanced transparency of the supply networks to enhance risk awareness and mitigation activities. The performance of Supplier Auditing is one of the best ways to achieve these goals and ensure requirements of IATF16949 are applied throughout the supply chain. Some of the key driving factors clients select Quality Auditing include:
- Risk Mitigation: 42% of automotive suppliers were impacted by the 2011 Japanese earthquake, which highlights the need to increase transparency of the supply networks to enhance risk awareness and mitigation activities to better prepare for the next major disruption.
- Expertise: There is a new crop of high-tech suppliers to the automotive industry that is being driven by innovation in computers, software, and hybrid technologies. Our auditor network spans beyond automotive and across high-tech industries allowing us to offer auditors with expertise in technology that is new to the automotive industry.
- Scalability & Rapid Deployment: Increased calls for dual sourcing arrangements along with new supplier locations to support emerging industries is resulting in an increased need to qualify suppliers quickly. Our large auditor base allows for rapid scaling up & down to meet these demands.
- Cost Control: Global automotive demand is changing. In 2007, BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) accounted for 30 percent of global profits. In 2012, that share rose to nearly 60 percent, as sales in these regions rose 65 percent and outpaced growth in Europe, North America, Japan, and South Korea. More than half of this growth came from China, which means supply chains are adapting and supplier locations changing. Our network of auditors can serve as your eyes and ears in these markets without the added expense of travel.
We can conduct audits of your supply chain to the requirements of IATF16949, ISO 9001, and/or in-house requirements you may have. The audit will provide systematic and constant monitoring of your supplier’s systems, and help companies to mitigate supply chain risk and implement continual improvement. The scope of our supplier auditing services can range from performance of a single audit to management of an entire supplier auditing program, including corrective action and follow-up.
Training & Compliance Consulting:
We know that initially, IATF16949 implementation and supplier auditing measures cost money and eat into margins – so helping determine an appropriate level of investment risk mitigation is essential. We provide training to organizations interested in improving performance, minimizing risk, and avoiding the costly consequences of poor quality. We offer customized training solutions for a wide variety of conformance and improvement methodologies such as Six Sigma, Lean, performance excellence, in addition to our focus on IATF16949 and ISO 9001 training.
The Automotive Auditing Division provides consulting to support the needs of your company. We are well suited to collaborate with you to ensure that we deliver marked improvements to your existing processes and exceed your expectations. We are available for work on projects of all sizes and look forward to the opportunity to develop a long term strategic partnership.
Standards:
While we have auditors & consultants with experience in a variety of segments of the automotive industry and perform the majority of our auditing against the following standards: