„Audit with no finding“ is neither chance nor the examiner’s carelessness. It is the most expensive result you can work for in this business.
The phrase sounds as if nothing happened. In fact, hard design work stands behind it. At an automotive supplier, subsidiary of a group about thirty times larger, it was about the authorizations in the ERP system, measured against GDPR and SOX, with a program volume of around three million euros. At the start there was not the clean landscape. At the start there was the finding.
The finding that triggered the decision
The pattern was called creeping rights accumulation. Roles were not withdrawn on organizational change. The authorization concept adopted from the parent group was cut for a much larger house, so that more roles had to be assigned for the same function, because the building blocks lay scattered across the foreign concept. And over the whole thing, transparency was missing: in the overarching concept of the thirty-times-larger parent, no one saw through it anymore. Only this finding carried the decision: here we have to do something.
The critical design decision was to break away from the foreign superstructure: an own concept, own tools, own documentation and a consistent segregation of duties across all relevant areas, finance, materials management, sales. You do not adapt the larger concept, you build the fitting one. Only that made the clean certification possible.
What firms underestimate about such audits
For an experienced examiner, not only the letter of the rule counts, but the spirit behind it. Has the company understood what the regulation is for? Was the rule followed, or the principle? Were gaps found and closed on one’s own, or was it a defensive battle? An auditor, too, is not an enemy. He has a goal, in reaching which you had better help him. To do that in line with your own goals, therein lies the real art.
When someone reports an „audit with no finding“ to you, ask whether construction stands behind it or luck. Finding-freedom you have worked for holds at the next examiner. Finding-freedom that fell into your lap does not.