On-site Supplier Audit Checklist

I'm revamping my company's audit program and documents. Does anyone have any suggestions on creating an audit checklist for on-site supplier audits?

My company is ISO 13485 and ISO 9001 certified, but we have various suppliers that aren't ISO approved and are in various types of industries. I need to create a supplier audit checklist that is general enough to use across these industries and qualifications, while still hitting all of the major categories. My other issue is that sometimes I need to do a narrow scoped audit, focusing on a specific process, while other times I'll just need to perform a general audit of the overall quality system. Should I create two different types of supplier checklists?

Thank you for any suggestions you have!

 

That's a good idea Roxane - and it would easily link with our purchasing process. Thank you for your input!

 

I am used to perform different kind of audits to our suppliers (deepening of the reason) So we handled audits for assessment, product and process together, quality systems etc. and most of the checklist were handled as a "doctor case" where the main cover of the document is the "case" and the different kind of audits are the "instruments",this way we carry on our "case" only what we need depending of what king of audit we were going to perform. And as a controlled document it has only one number assigned to this master checklist that have no more than around 8 pages where the 1st was the cover and the rest the different kind of checklist we used, it was very useful and easy to control. Due to the large rotation of suppliers for the short term contract we had with customers.

 

Hi- I like Jose's suggestion because flexibility is built in. There are common elements in any of the audits your describing, however the devil's in the details and having a single checklist to cover all situations gets very cumbersome- I've worked for several companies that tried this and it became very inefficient.

If we recognize that auditing is a process itself, supporting it with at least a work instruction, checklist(s), and an audit report template then tailoring the checklist can be part of audit preparation.

-Joe W.