Internal Auditor Training Solutions
Challenge: Maintain a skilled and competent pool of internal environmental and safety auditors and provide effective audit tools for auditors to utilise in auditing the organisation’s systems.
Strategy: Graham A Brown & Associates began working with Macquarie Generation in 2004 developing and implementing an environmental management system (EMS) though our mentoring program. As part of the system development, Macquarie Generation identified the need to maintain a group of internal auditors that could assist in auditing environmental management system implementation, and later safety system implementation.
The pool of auditors were selected from workforce and supervisory personnel and Graham A Brown & Associates provided regular internal auditor training to ensure the numbers of auditors are maintained at acceptable levels. Our unique training solutions include an audit exercise to allow participants to practice skills and techniques learned during the workshop. Internal auditor training was conducted in 2004, 2007 and scheduled again for 2010. In addition, Graham A Brown & Associates assisted Macquarie Generation to develop internal audit checklist and report formats, provided lead auditor support for trainee auditors and developed customised auditor guidance notes to assist auditors in verification of system information and implementation.
Results: Macquarie Generation was certified to ISO 14001 in 2005 with no nonconformances, and is the only organisation we have worked with to be permitted annual surveillance audits since certification. The internal audit program utilises a strong pool of trained auditors to evaluate system implementation at management and team level, identifying opportunities for continual improvement providing valuable results to management. A similar process will be used for safety system audits and the internal auditor course will be expanded to include safety auditing in 2010.
Follow-up: Macquarie Generation and Graham A Brown & Associates maintain a strong relationship and have provided additional management system and auditing services such as training courses for Executives and Managers, safety management system development incident reporting software training solutions, facilitation of risk assessment sessions and emergency response exercises.
