COVID-19… moving on…

The last couple of years have been challenging for most people and organisations and the certification industry is no different in this respect.  We’ve all had to look at alternative methods of working in order to achieve the same goal and in our case as a UKAS accredited certification body, that has been to maintain total confidence and integrity in the audit process. 

It finally feels like we are now emerging through the other side of those challenges and it’s time to focus on lessons learnt from those alternative methods, for example: conducting audits remotely.  At Atlas Certification we’re now fully committed to integrating our new risk-based procedure for conducting audits taking a blended approach between on-site and off-site.  The opportunity to integrate a degree of flexibility to our clients means that we can become much more dynamic by focussing on-site audit techniques towards operational controls within your organisation and retain remote techniques for audit activities such as document reviews and discussions with personnel.  We’ll be talking to our clients during the audit planning phase about how we can realise this blended approach to auditing.

“It really is important that our auditors can effectively evaluate operational controls and in many cases this involves them being physically on site to see, hear and observe activities.  At the same time we recognise the innovation and technological capabilities available to us all which means it is often possible to achieve an effective audit without actually being there.  Our risk based model enables us to decide if an audit needs to be conducted physically on site or to use a blended approach.  This has to be a value-adding approach for the industry and our clients, as well as reducing travel impacts on the environment”.  Gary Jones, Director, Atlas Certification Limited.

Our audit team are prepared for this fresh approach to auditing and are looking forward to working with our existing and prospective clients.