Virtual auditing is not the same as remote auditing. A virtual audit is when you audit a virtual process. If you are familiar with the American Society for Quality ASQ and if you are interested in virtual auditing, you may have read my article in the ASQ magazine this July 2020. Send us an email to info@theisocoach.com to request a copy.

Today, you walk into an offshore platform and see this huge infrastructure with hundreds of valves, pipes, sensors, PLC etc working altogether and only a handful of people managing all of them in a control room. Similar situation happens in a distribution company, which receives online orders and supply those orders from different parts of the world. The common characteristic in these scenarios is the critical role of digital programs.

There are different levels of virtual. Normally you will find virtual processes interacting with traditional, analog, brick and mortar processes. For example, even a virtual process of distributing items from several warehouses around the country involves a mix of digital processes such as order offering, order taking, order planning, inventory management, etc and traditional trucking services, visual inspection of products and shipments.  Another example is the cement company with mixing, and milling processes interconnected with digital processes connecting the operations control room with a quality laboratory to make sure that quality and production are working together to achieve the required product.

Here it is what matters: These digital or virtual processes take decisions based on a program that was planned by people that I will call programmers these processes are executed and monitored by other people that I will call operational people.

Now if you really want to audit this virtual environment you have to be aware of its components. Auditing a virtual process is not that complex if you follow these 5 elements that I described to you in this episode. It is just a matter of making the right questions, about the things that matter in a virtual environment, and above all, understand the virtual process,

the 5 elements in a value added Virtual Audit:

ONE what decisions is the virtual process taking,

TWO The Program —how is the program designed, how is it executed and monitored?,

THREE the hardware,

FOUR the people and

FIVE the data, which is the blood of the program.

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Episode production:

Audio Intro: Upbeat Party by Scott Holmes Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Audio Outro: Inspirational outlook by Scott Holmes Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/