Development and Implementation of a Second Party Audit for LA Region

In the past company's structure, corporate audits were SBUxs responsibility; SHE corporate groups did participate as part of the audit team. In 2002, a global change took place and the company was divided into regions which would be responsible for the Second Party Audit Program, planning and execution. At that time the regions did not have the functional capability to respond to such challenge.

Development Process

In order to ensure compliance with the Corporate Audit Program, the Global Audit Leadership Team, in conjunction with the SHE Competency leaders and Regional Audit program managers; developed a comprehensive, complete and DuPontxs standards based, Auditorsx development and training program.

Due culture diversity, it was necessary to translate the training material to Spanish and Portuguese; even some instructors took the best of this situation and learned a little bit of other language. Now we speak a new and a different language ?portu-nish?!.

The auditors training consists of the description and field application of the Auditing Process steps:

- Pre-audit, On-site, Post- audit, facility action plan and follow-up reports

- Audit findings classification

- Electronic Systems interaction to capture the audit.

To ensure program's compliance, every year end, is distributed a draft proposing the audit team members and leaders; after sitexs review/approval, a formal program is distributed at the beginning of the following year.

In order to comply with the timing established in the audit standard, a ?warning? message is sent in advance, to the lead auditor, to remind the audit date and the background information necessary to conduct a complete audit such as: previous audit report, pending open recommendations and local regulations websites addresses.

Third Party Quality Assurance audits were implemented in a way that every 3 years the regions receive these audits to identify improvement opportunities in the audit systems. In the previous audit, was identified an opportunity in the timing to issue the final report. To address this situation a 6 sigma project was done and control measurements were implemented, in a way that reports are issued in time, in the last audit it was recognized this control as a ?best practice?.

Results

The auditor's development process has been a success in all the regions. Latin America region has achieved 100% of compliance. MET (the highest qualification to be obtained) was the final qualification during the last QA audit. Improvement opportunity was identified in the quality of the reports: Spanish and Portuguese portions were found in some final reports as well as quality of the findings. To date, we are working in the action plan to get a good result in the next QA audit??and why not?.. a trip to audit a site located in Hawaii as a reward!!!!.