Quality audits and their value added

For many organisations in the process of implementing an ISO 9001 or ISO 14001 quality management system, a significant part of the effort includes value-added audits. This paper examines what is added value of quality audit, how to measure it and what kind of different quality audits do we know. We developed a framework to assist quality managers in organising internal quality audits. These kinds of audits are also being established in schools as evaluations and in healthcare as self-assessment or accreditation. The challenge for these institutions is to take over best practice presented in this paper and instructions for the implementation of value-added quality auditing.