Optimising Healthcare Supply Chain Auditing

10 Sep 2024

How Shared Audits Save Time, Energy and Resources

Supplier audits are key to supply chain risk management and boosting transparency in the supply chain. As a highly regulated sector, the pharmaceutical industry must ensure that their suppliers meet the required standards for quality, safety, and compliance. Therefore, supplier audits are essential to helping to mitigate supply chain risks, protect patient safety, and maintain regulatory compliance.

How supply chains audits are conducted, and the visibility of quality in healthcare supply chains will certainly gain more focus in the future, with pressures associated with increasing industry regulatory requirements, the continual drive for production performance and an increased focus on climate impact. Shared audits present a unique approach to boost ever better supply chain quality and meet other requirements too.

What is a shared audit?

A shared audit is a scheduled audit that is performed on one supplier on behalf of several of sponsor companies. The shared audit combines different customer requests into one audit and so common audit areas of focus are audited only once. At Intertek, we ensure that we cover each of the areas of interest for each sponsor and the observations are presented in individualized and confidential audit reports.

Shared audits could be conducted against a range of standards depending on the supplier and product supplied. Examples include Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), Good Distribution Practice (GDP), Good Laboratory Practice (GLP), Good Clinical Practice, (GCP), Good pharmacovigilance Practice (GVP).

Our team audits against all of these and we also audit against IPEC guidelines for Pharmaceutical excipients, ISO 22716 (Cosmetics — Good Manufacturing Practices), EFfCI GMP for cosmetic ingredients, ISO 15378 standard for packaging materials, the ISO 9001 standard or EHPM Quality guide for food supplement.

Benefits to clients

Shared audits give healthcare companies the opportunity to join an already planned audit and thus shorten the audit time, facilitate the realization of your supplier evaluation plan, while controlling your budget. This results in both lower audit costs for pharmaceutical companies and fewer audits for each supplier to host, reducing demands on time and resources for all stakeholders and boosting cost efficiencies whilst enabling smoother audit process and scheduling of audit dates. Shared Audits also provide insight into the supply chain, trends and areas improvements are required. As shared audits are conducted by a single third-party audit professional, a consistent supplier audit process approach provides a clearer understanding of what is expected of the supplier whilst still providing a relevant audit report.

A sustainable solution

Sharing supplier audits can help to reduce the environmental impact of auditing. Instead of each stakeholder conducting their own audit of a supplier, a single audit can be carried out on behalf of multiple stakeholders. This approach not only reduces the number of audits required, but also helps to ensure consistency in auditing practices and reduces the burden on suppliers who would otherwise have to accommodate multiple auditors. This can significantly reduce the carbon footprint of the auditing process, as travel is one of the main sources of emissions in the industry. This can ultimately lead to a more sustainable and efficient auditing process, for example, at Intertek, since we launched our shared audit service over 15 years ago, we estimate that we have helped to avoid over 7500 trips associated with supplier auditing covering diverse healthcare supply chains across the world.

More on our shared audit services:

Our confidential shared audit approach and shared audit system allow access to a real-time view of Intertek's forthcoming scheduled GXP shared audits of manufacturers and distributors which will be conducted by our independent, qualified and highly experienced auditors. For more information visit our shared audit online: https://www.intertek.com/pharmaceutical/auditing/shared-audits/.