An auditor writes up what they saw in a sample, so the finding describes the sample and your response has to describe the plant. Define the population, check all of it, and count. Give anything you find outside the sample the same correction, and write down what you looked at and what you found.
Thursday, 6:30 in the morning, the stockroom, before the first shift. The auditor looked at 8 of your 31 assembly stations. Whatever is true of those 8 might be true of the other 23, and nobody in the building knows yet.
An auditor writes up what they saw in a sample. The finding describes the sample. Your response has to describe the plant. That means defining what you are checking, checking all of it and writing down what you looked at and what you found.
Define the population
For an expiry finding the population is every place a container can be. Here that is the 31 stations, the 46 containers on the stockroom shelf and every other material on the floor that carries an expiry date.
Check all of it and count
- The 23 stations not sampled. One more expired container in use: station 5, 6 days past expiry, about 110 parts a day, which is 660 parts. It gets the same correction as the first two, including a peel test of 20 pieces, which passed.
- The stockroom shelf. 46 containers, 3 expired and never issued. Removed and tagged.
- Other materials with an expiry date. 4 of them, two sealants, a primer and a cleaner, 38 containers in all. None expired. They turn over faster. They are relabeled the same way, so the same gap is there waiting.
Put the totals in the response. Expired adhesive was in use at 3 of 31 stations, which is 9.7 percent. The auditor's sample showed 2 of 8, or 25.0 percent. The sample was not wrong. It showed that a gap exists, and a count of the whole plant shows how big it is. The parts affected rise from 6,145 to 6,805.
Say it when you find more
Finding a third container after the audit is the point of the step, not bad news to hide. A response that says "we checked and found no others" with no numbers behind it is the one that gets questioned. Write what you checked, how many, and what you found, area by area.
This is the fourth reason a response comes back: it fixes the sample but not the system. Fixing the two containers the auditor saw does nothing for the third one they did not.
Read more: the free audit finding response builder. Its section on looking beyond the sample flags a response that does not say what was checked.
The mistake to avoid
Checking only the area where the auditor looked. The gap rarely respects the boundary of the sample.
- Take your last finding.
- List every place the same gap could exist.
- Check them all and write down the counts.
Open the printable Monday Board
Related on ShopFloorOps
The plant, the audit, the finding and every number in this book (finding CAR-0417) are a made-up example. The tool sidebars show ShopFloorOps tools, which I make and sell. Every chapter teaches the step itself, so you can use your own forms. New to a term? See the quality glossary.