World of Auditing recently participated in a panel at the Gulfood Manufacturing Summit in Dubai, discussing effective food quality and safety management systems to mitigate risk, maintain compliance, and boost consumer confidence.
One question asked was how the audit role can shift from verifying compliance to becoming a strategic intelligence function that guides risk management.
We shared our belief that auditing is key to designing and maintaining quality and food safety systems. But we added that most audits still focus on one main question: are we compliant or not? That is important, but it’s also looking backward.
For audits to support strategy and corporate risk management, they must shift from verifying past events to detecting where risks are emerging and preventing them before they happen.
That shift means rethinking three things: the inputs, the outputs, and the way we audit.
First, the inputs.
We can no longer rely solely on checklists and records.
Auditors need to pick up on early signals that indicate something might be going off track.
Those signals can come from many places:
- From operations, like hygiene trends, temperature alerts, or shifts in product water activity, for example.
- They can come from people, such as turnover in the sanitation team or missed trainings.
- And finally, they can come from the outside world, like new regulations, recalls, and outbreak alerts.
Then the audit becomes a focused investigation, not just checking compliance but testing hypotheses to understand where control measures might be slipping and if a risk is crystallizing and needs to be prevented. It is about connecting the dots.
Second, the outputs.
Traditional audit reports can be extensive, including, unfortunately, many pages of non-added-value information, as well as well-written or sometimes poorly written nonconformities.
Today, the audit reports are structured to reflect the completion of the audit as per the governance requirements, rather than providing the organization with a clear risk heatmap and areas for improvement
Leaders don’t have time to extract insights from that. They need decision-ready intelligence.
Instead of listing every detail and minor issue, auditors should summarize current and emerging risks, their likelihood, potential impact, and the effectiveness of today’s controls.
That is a very different conversation with leadership. It is about risk, not paperwork.
Third, the how.
Auditing should not be a once-a-year snapshot. Risks are moving faster than that.
We need to shift toward continuous auditing. We should adopt short “risk sprints” focused on key hypotheses, supported by data analytics and live risk heat maps.
That way, the audit function becomes part of the organization’s early-warning system. It is not just reporting what went wrong last year. It helps predict where things might go wrong next quarter.
To make that work, three things are critical:
- First, a diverse skill mix, bringing together auditors, data analysts, and technical experts, people who can interpret data and connect it to real risks.
- Second, a fully digitalized audit function.
- And third, strong governance, so the audits stay independent and their insights feed into enterprise risk and strategic discussions, not just post-incident reviews.
When auditing becomes strategic, it reads weak signals, communicates in risk language, and stays in sync with the pace of the context in which it operates.
It becomes far more than a compliance gatekeeper.
It becomes the organization’s radar, spotting what’s ahead, not just recording what’s behind.
