Lessons Learned from Field Audits - What the Auditor Sees
Presented by Silky Labie, Environmental Laboratory Consulting and Technologies, LLC
Contact Information: [email protected]
ABSTRACT
TNI sponsors numerous presentations by auditors on common mistakes made by laboratories. Many organizations use these presentations to evaluate their activities to improve their quality systems by eliminating some of the identified activities.
Audits of field activities are challenging. It is an uncontrolled environment, battling heat and mosquitoes or frostbite and curious wildlife, searching for monitoring wells whose risers have somehow disappeared, or creeks that have mysteriously run dry. There are so many details that a field technician needs to think about, that some just fall through the cracks.
Three decades of field auditing have yielded a wealth of overlooked and questionable practices that can serve as learning tools for evaluating and improving field activity practices.