We have already explained how to perform an internal audit for air operators but, how to guarantee the effective planning of audits for air operators? The answer to this question will be developed in the present article, as it is one of the main responsibilities of a quality and compliance monitoring manager.
Let’s say you are the person responsible for the compliance monitoring within your organization and you have to guarantee that all the requirements are met. The section ORO.GEN.200 of the regulations of air operators from the EASA (European Aviation Safety Agency) establishes how the audit program should be performed.
Obviously, there are many requirements and there is no need to audit them all. According to the previous analysis you have already performed, you should do a checklist of the ones that must be audited. The ORO.GEN.200 indicates which areas of your organization must be audited and which ones should be inspected, in order to guarantee the effective planning of audits for air operators.
You, as the quality and compliance monitoring responsible, must be aware that the auditing plan will depend on the size of your organization and the kind of operations and risks you have evaluated.
Besides the internal audits, you must also include your suppliers in the audit plan. In the first, you check that the departments of your organization comply with the required standards, while in the second you monitor the people that supply you with services or products.
If you are an aviation organization and you hire a ground crew in an airport, you will have to inspect it and audit it or find an equivalent mechanism of monitoring. This, of course, is entailed within the effective planning of audits for air operators.
When you start applying this audit planning is when you start having problems. In an audit program, Excel is the most widely used application. Nevertheless, it is a tool that makes it hard to control if you are auditing all the requirements or not. Besides that, it is complicated to guarantee that you don’t miss any supplier, that you don’t leave any department out of the audit, and to control the deadlines which means that all the process becomes harder.
On the contrary, SICOMO guarantees the effective planning of audits for air operators. The audit and non-compliances management software for air operators generates a structure, where you can set-up who your suppliers are, how is your organization and the departments that it has.
You just have to indicate the software which regulations affect you and what program you are going to perform. These settings that can be modified as many times as you consider necessary for its improvement. All this will guarantee the effective planning of audits for air operators as you will not leave out any supplier, and none of the requirements will go unaudited. Furthermore, the results can be printed, exported as a PDF, be signed, and an electronic register will be generated.
You can see the databases with all the records and also the generated PDFs, but if you prefer to have them on paper you can also print them.
Everything is perfectly documented for the planning and for the audit in the reports generated, both the non-compliances and the checklists. The advantage of the management software for audits and non-compliances for air operators, in this sense, is that all the technical-administrative processes of approval of that plan (that are usually a review and an approval) can be done through a workflow within the application.
In this sense, the quality and compliance monitor manager prepares an audit and the auditor reviews that the checklists are correct. If this was done with an Excel archive, it would imply many hours as you would have to go to the authority website, check it with the previous file and create another regulation, then corroborate that there is nothing new and, finally, do the checklist in a Word file, for example.
The management software for audits and non-compliances for aviation operators guarantees the effective planning of audits for air operators and reduces the time invested in them by 60%. The time you would spend preparing an audit, that is usually between 45-50 hours, could be reduced to just 10 with SICOMO.
If you are interested in how can an aviation quality and compliance monitoring manager be updated with the EASA regulations, subscribe to the EASA Quality Compliance Newsletter, where you will find information about new technologies and tools for air operators.
