Developing planning tool for auditing management systems

Question

Hi everybody,

I'm new to office365 and SharePoint functions, but I've seen many companies rely on SharePoint and other Office 365 apps to improve planning, so here is my question:

We are a small certification body that audits clients against ISO standards and certify them by accreditation rules. We have around 10 external auditors and not all of them use SharePoint a/o are not part of our office 365 environment. So, we have difficulties scheduling the client audit dates, as we do it manually agreeing by email or phone.

I will be very grateful if you can give me direction on how to do this in SharePoint (possibly without additional costs:))

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Hi @Aleksandar Iloski ，
I have studied your audit steps carefully and I think you can store all the information involved in your audit planning in a sharepoint list. Even if external auditors don't use SharePoint, you can share them with them as external users.
The automatic execution of each step can be automatically executed by creating a flow through Power Automate. (For example, A Client applies for certification service. After the certification body agrees, fill in the quotation in the sharepoint list as a trigger condition, and flow will automatically send the quotation to the client to automatically complete the audit steps). Your entire auditing step can be done just by creating a flow (just the steps are more cumbersome).

Here's the documentation on learning to use Power Automate:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/getting-started
Since I am a technical support in sharepoint, I cannot give you professional support in Power Automate. I recommend that you go to the Power Automate forums for professional help when you are having trouble creating a flow. Good luck to you!

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Answer 2

Hi @Aleksandar Iloski ，
I'd like to check with you: do you want external auditors to use the audit log without a license or do you mean something else, can you explain it to me in detail?
How do you audit clients against ISO standards, certify them through the accreditation rules, and manually agree via email or phone?

If your question is about simplifying audit management with Office 365/SharePoint, I found a free microsoft app that does it. It’s an out-of-the-box solution that installs in minutes .
Innovative approach for managing audits by using BPA Quality and Microsoft Office 365 technologies like Flow for automation, Power Apps for mobility and Power BI for advanced reporting.The workflow generates new audits automatically based on the audit frequency, avoiding manual audit planning.
https://de.bpa-solutions.net/blog/simplifying-audit-management-with-office-365-sharepoint/
At the end of the link is a simple business intelligence report built with Power BI, without any code. This report allows you to check your audit coverage, here by ISO 9001 terms. By selecting a clause, the report will dynamically filter the audits for which this particular clause was audited, the number of issues raised and the associated findings.

Hope it helps you, feel free to let me know if I misunderstood what you mean.

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Answer 3

Dear Haoyan Xue_MSFT,

Thank you for giving me idea at least where to search for.
The link you have sent helped me understand the possibilities of O 365 and SharePoint in my industry (however there is no free app there).
My question was focused only to automate communication regarding planning stage of audits.
All of the apps (like BPA) are focused on internal audits or stakeholder audits, whereas we are focused on Client audits. This means our audit lead time is more complexed... I'll try and explain here shortly:
1 A Client applies for certification service
2 We (certification body) review the application and if approved send and offer
3 After acceptance of offer by the Client, we select persons in charge to execute the audit (mostly based on skill criteria and availability)
4 Upon agreement who will execute the audit, we communicate the possible date with Client and wait for feedback
5 When Client feedback the audit date, we confirm with the persons in charge to execute the audit
6 After acceptance of the agreed audit date, we prepare audit plan, and nominate different persons to review the audit documentation from persons executing the audit (this is known as Veto check)
7 After Veto check is done (hopefully everything is ok) we bring this to a committee to approve release of certificates

As You can see there are many steps, we do it manually, but this audit lead (point 1 to point 7) time must be done within 30/45 days (from audit execution to decision/report only 14 days).

Hopefully I gave you more information, so you can give me more on point answer.

Thank you in forward

Answer 4

Dear @Xyza Xue_MSFT

Thank you for the reply. I'll check it and try to create something by myself.