Sofema Online (SOL) www.sofemaonline.com considers the best practice related to effective sampling during EASA-compliant audits.

Introduction - Effective sampling during aviation quality audits is crucial to ensure that the audit is comprehensive and accurate. This becomes particularly important with DATA heavy audits for example during a Reliability System Audit.

Measuring the effectiveness of your company's quality system should be an essential element of the management of your overall quality management system strategy.

The process starts with a review of the organizational QMS policy together with a detailed gap analysis to assess full compliance with all regulatory obligations.

Having established regulatory compliance a further measure for assessing the strength of QMS is to employ a formal “internal” compliance audit process which will be set against an expected organisational standard.

Sofema Aviation Services www.sassofia.com looks at the challenges of using Compliance Audit Techniques to determine the effectiveness of a “supplier”

What do we Mean by Third Party when we talk about auditing?

Means that the organisation is “Stand Alone” or “Stand Apart”. So effectively we are connected to the Organisation for business purposes, however, we cannot exert direct control.

This is an important consideration because in some cases the where the relationship is sub-contractual the “Contracting Organisation” is held accountable for the diligence and acceptable delivery including standards, management oversight and the effective control of competence.