Advanced Audit For Manufacturing Companies: Fill & Download for Free

CA is your Dad, CS is your Mom and the CMA is your sweet Sibling.CMA = Cost & Management Accountant = Your Sibling. Whenever you are in dilemma, your sibling is the one person who comes to your rescue, to help you decide. This is exactly what a CMA does. CMA is a decision maker and plays the advisory role in an organization.CS = Company Secretary = Your Mom. Your food, your routine, your clothes, your room and every other thing that you need to keep up yourself, is done with the help of Mom. Your Mom does the work of maintaining you. Similarly a Company Secretary does the work of maintaining and running the company by ensuring all legal compliances.CA = Chartered Accountant = Your Dad. When it comes to money, your Dad comes into the picture. He gives you the pocketmoney, helps you grow and looks after your career. He protects you from evils. He is also the person who scolds you when you go wrong in life. A Chartered Accountant does exactly the same work. He helps you with Finance and continuously keeps a watch over you, by auditing, ensuring that you are not doing something wrong. Besides, he also looks after your growth.CFA & Actuary = Don't forget your Uncles. But sometimes when it comes to advance issues of Financing and predicting the future prospects, your Dad alone can't help you. You need to take help of your uncles. Together with your Dad, your uncles help you with all the functions of your Dad. CFA and Actuary do the exactly same work. They help you with the advance types of Financing and forecasting the future prospects of a venture that you are going to take up.Lawyer = Your Aunts who supports you when in problems. Oh yes! When Mom & Dad scolds you, your Aunt is the one who comes to rescue to protect you and sort out the issues. Lawyers play the exact same role, they protect you in case of law-suits and come to your rescue or mitigate your problems.MBA = Your annoying neighbour. We all have those annoying neighbours who are good for nothing. They merely act like intermediary between people, passing information from one person to another and call themselves Managers. Needless to explain, MBAs play exactly the same role. They simply pass information from Junior to Senior and Senior to Junior, label everything as 'Confidential'. They are the information transfer agents.Who are you? = You are a Business Organization. How could you forget yourself? You are small little boy/girl who are still young though very energetic. You look forward to make the best possible use of opportunities and grow as a good person, with the help of your relatives, as mentioned above.Together, we are family! Yes, you at the centre, CA and CS your Parents, the CMA are your siblings, CFA, Actuary and Lawyers are your Uncles & Aunts and without those annoying neighbour a family seems incomplete so we have the MBAs. Together you form a family!Prospects of a Chartered Accountant -CA course is one of the most versatile course.The services of Chartered Accountants are required by every kind organizations like Manufacturing companies, Service companies, Startups, Multinationals, Banks, NGOs, Government Departments, Public Sector Undertakings, Statutory organizations, Foreign Companies, etc. So you can work in any kind of industry.That’s not the end, you also have the option to choose the method of serving these above organizations as an employee i.e. Job, as a consultant i.e. outsourcing agency, as a professional i.e. Practitioner.And if you love to be a boss, one can also become a healthy entrepreneur i.e. Self-employment as well.So as a CA you have the choice of both (a) industry you want to work in & (b) the mode of service to serve them – this is a very rare scenario in any kind of career!Therefore, getting a decent job is not at all difficult. A Chartered Accountant doing a job can earn a minimum of INR 10 lakhs per annum and if you practice, it is like a business, so turnover depends on your skills, but INR 10 lakhs per annum is for sure.The average pay may be lower when you are a fresher, but with experience, your earnings are much higher. The rise in pay is solely dependent on your skills & experience i.e. “How beneficial you are to the organization/your client?”Prospects of a Cost & Management Accountant -CMA are primarily required in large production/service oriented companies, Public Sector undertakings and multinational companies.Small companies, Startups, NGOs, Government departments, etc. do not require a CMA or many times cannot afford a CMA and their role in combined to other roles. CMA has more restricted industry options when compared to CA.This is because business decisions can be taken by anyone, but having a CMA ensures that you make the best business decisions.Also, that CA’s services are a legal requirement, therefore, mandatory while CMA’s services are a business requirement, therefore optional.However, just like CA, you have all the choices of serving i.e. as an employee, as a consultant, as a professional and the best of all self-employment. Most of the CMA go for Jobs, but the number of job opportunities is restricted.The key benefit of CMA is that they can get a job in any part of the world while CA is more useful in home country only.Again getting a decent job is not difficult. CMA can get you a minimum pay of INR 10 lakhs per annum. However, this is substantially low in an early period of a career.This is because CMA is wine, the more experienced they are, higher is value.An experienced CMA beats all other allied professions in terms of knowledge and skills, that he has.A special thing about CMA is that 15-20 years down the line, they are sure to get the high-level executive and managerial positions in Multinational companies and can also make it to the Board of Directors of the large Corporates.The pay at that level is absolutely higher than any other profession. So experience is what matters in CMA, they play the most dynamic role in a company.Prospects of a Company Secretary -Company Secretary are refined version of Lawyers but specialize in Company Law only.With New Company Law, the role of Company Secretaries has got a lot of importance.With the increase in amount of Corporate Compliances, it is becoming very difficult for other professions to hijack the work of Company Secretary and thereby, now every large corporate needs an inhouse Company Secretary.This course is similar to CA and CMA, except that here subjects are more inclined towards Company and allied Corporate Laws.Company Secretary Profession is a stable profession according to me, because here the kind of work is automatically well distributed amongst the professionals. The young ones get the simpler tasks while as they grow in experience they receive more complex assignments.The Salary pay is at par with the CMA professionals. And the opportunities are less initially but with experience more areas open up.Amongst Mediocre businesses, their work is hijacked by Chartered Accountants to a considerable extent and therefore, the number of assignments are lower.But then a need of specialized Company Secretary is felt only when the business is large enough, because only then the burden of compliances increases.

I had been to an audit during my articleship period to a medium size steel manufacturing company in Raipur, then in Madhya Pradesh now Chhattisgarh.During the audit of direct manufacturing expenses, we noticed some labour charges debited to manufacturing labour charges. After going in to little detail, we also discovered that the contractor who is providing the labour to the manufacturing unit, have also entered in to contract with the company to provide the labour to their on going projects of 30 mt steel melting shop with induction route. This has lots of expenses found debated in the capital work in progress head suitably under the project labour expenses.I took one of my subordinate and prepared a plan to check the invoices and support documents in detail. I suggested my team to do the following:Take the month wise billing details of both project labour expenses and manufacturing labour expenses.The details sheet in excel, monthwise, name wise, calculated in order to arrive to the invoice value of each head of labour charges.After getting all in 1 and 2 above, the next task was to cross check the calculations in excel sheet to check any formula error in calculating the payable amounts.After that, the attendances to be verified with that of the biometric attendance or any other source from where the root data has been taken.After verification ad per point 4, the next step was to check the name of workers with their unique worker code in both the sheets of particular month.The next step was to check the overtime if any paid and their calculation.Finally the conclusion of the above.To my surprise, the following outcomes were discovered, knowing which total top management was shocked:The over time was paid to some of the workers for almost 140 hours. This was never possible. Even if the worker have had worked 4 hours every day considering the facts that maximum 4 hours are permitted in every shift and maximum 6 days are allowed to work. And by this way, max overtime should be 96 hours to 100 hours.The name and employee code of some of the workers were found common in the both sheets.Some of the workers attendance were found absent in the main source where as the payment was calculated and made.Lastly, in two months, the invoice was found repeated instead of actual invoice booking.The most important observation was as mentioned in the point no. 1 and 2.On further investigation, it was found that some of the workers had done the double shift continuously which is against the safety rules, to accumulate the over time over maximum possible hours. However, the common name and code of employees in the both the sheet were found to be true.The contractor was very smart to add the name of some of their common workmen in both the sheets. During the attendance, the common workmen use to sign the attendance sheet of both project dept as wel as in operational unit.After our submission of report, the following improvement were undertaken:Contracts were cancelled for projects and awarded to different contractor.Biometric attendance were installed and made mandatory for all the workmen.Over time had been restricted for any hour. No matter if extra manpower were required to deploy.In case of emergency, over time for any group of workmen with names were made mandatory to be approved in advance by the unit head.The repeated invoices were result of provision entry taken which were not rectified with the receipt of actual invoice. So compulsory verification of provided figures and actual invoice were implemented.We were awarded a cash award of INR 25,000 by the management for sucha a vast and detail verification conducted and highlighting the grey areas including implementation of corrective action.Thanks for patient reading and asking the question.

First there are 3 rudimentary components in learning manufacturing. First Fundamental of manufacturing, second little of Product and more of Process knowledge about the product produced by the company you chose to join and last but the most important skill is Human Relationship /People ManagementFundamentals of ManufacturingManufacturing is mostly about running behind numbers. Everyday at Plant in Shop Floor (Production Environment), every Production line shall have Product Target for every Shift. All Parts to be produced with expected Quality, this again a number. We can’t afford to produce any number of defective parts and rework them later to make them good, there is a Target for this again. We have targets for Scraps that can get generated in a give production line. There are also Targets for Equipment Efficiency, Manpower Efficiency, Downtime etc. Manufacturing companies call these targets as Manufacturing Operational Metrics and reviewed everyday with utmost importance. Meeting these numbers everyday will be the key responsibility of a Manufacturing Engineer. A Manufacturing Engineer also need to focus on Continuous Improvement of Line Metrics, Support New Model Introduction, Support in Setting up new Production lines, Implementing actions for Reported Customer and Field failures, Technical Documentation for the Production line, Preparing Line for Audits, etc.The 12 most important metrics to measure in manufacturing refer this link to get to know about some basics about manufacturing metrics.These metrics are specific to the role you play and specific to your production line and also varies with each company and referred with different names. I never studied any book to know about manufacturing metrics. As soon as you join a manufacturing company within few days you will get to know about your KPI (Metrics) to the core because it will be your everyday Bread-and-Butter.It is also essential to know certain important methodologies, Philosophies, and Techniques often used in manufacturing. The list include but not limited to Toyota Production System (TPS), Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma (DMAIC) , Statistical Process Control (SPC) , Value Stream Mapping, 8D Problem solving, Root Cause Analysis & Corrective Actions (RCPA) and Process FMEA. Most of these Topics are Interrelated to each other and some are the super-set of others. To start with TPS is a good choice. The Toyota Way by Jeffrey K. Liker is a good book to know about TPS and how it is applied. And to start playing with Numbers in Manufacturing learn SPC followed by Six Sigma. Six Sigma for Dummies by Craig Gygi would help you to understand DMAIC and give idea about which statistical tool to be used where. Map knowledge acquired in Six sigma and TPS to the various Manufacturing Metrics mentioned in point 1 and think of how to improve/control them.Process knowledgeIf we have to explain Manufacturing in a simple Equation,The Equation would be Input ->Process ->OutputThe objective of Manufacturing is to Transform one or more Input Elements, this could be Raw material, Sub- Assemblies, Components etc to a Better/Improved System following a defined Process or Method.The Process followed in each Company is depend on the Product they make. Therefore there is no generic Process followed across Industries. For Instance, PCB assemblies are made by SMT Process, One of the way of making Plastic Part is by Injection Molding, Glass Panels manufacturing process is different from Sheet metal fabrication so it depends on the type of manufacturing company you would like to work for and accordingly you have to hone your skill.General method to improve your process knowledge about a manufacturing process is to do a study to find machines used in fabricating a particular product and who all the Vendors selling those machines. A process to make a product will have sub processes which are executed in sequence and for each sub process there will be many renowned Equipment manufacturers. This is the key to gain knowledge of the process! if you check their web portals you will find bundles of Technical Documentations, Know-How, other generic but important documents about the process for free! for example in PCB Manufacturing, Reflow soldering is a sub process. Finding the Maker of the Reflow soldering machine will enable us to access well drafted Documents related to it.Other way is to find the Raw Materials, Components, Sub Parts used in the manufacturing process and get their Datasheet. The Datasheet will also reveal many niche information about the Process.Also get the International Standards followed in the Particular Process. Example IPC, Clean Room, ESD etc in SMT process. For Every standard there is a well drafted document available and there are mostly Free.So if you try the above 3 ways you will get the overview and many more information which are know only to the Professional dealing with a Particular Manufacturing Process and will be useful while attending interviews as a Fresher or switching from one type of Industry to another. Anyway after joining a company you will have access to all Techniques, Know-Hows and also to Professional Peers which will enable greater knowledge acquisition about that process.Human RelationshipIn my Opinion “This is not a skill but an Art” . I got no books to refer or Ways to learn this. This is something we need to acquire with experience. I am going say some inferences I have and this is just my Personal Opinion.This is most Challenging part and important skill needed for a Manufacturing Professional. Manufacturing Shop Floor is a most Demanding place! Every part produced, Every Minute of Downtime, Every Defect comes out are seriously accounted so nothing is taken for granted. (If you want to get a feel of Shop floor, you can recall the clips from the movie “Modern Time” casting Charlie Chaplin). As a manufacturing Engineer, Your mind will be loaded with Target Numbers and the Time keeps Ticking to hit end of Shift! and in some cases the Tough Boss who can never be reasoned with, in the next day Status meeting will make you a Terminator whose only agenda is to meet the Targets. When someone is set in this monomaniac mode, he or she will tend to give second Priority to other People and their interestsDynamics of the Work Force at Manufacturing: In any Manufacturing company there are 2 types of Employees, White Collar and Shop Floor Employees. If you are a Manufacturing Engineer you will be part of White Collar, your Education and understanding Level of the big picture would be higher and you are the person responsible for meeting the Targets. on the Other Hand Shop Floor Employees who will be working as a Team in production line to meet the Targets. As a Manufacturing Engineer you are not only responsible for your Production daily Targets but also need to have a healthy relationship with your Shop Floor Team. you should listen to their concerns and resolve them promptly. The Shop Floor team should not find you as an Alien but one among them but this the real challenge when the Environment is demanding. Be Trustworthy and Supportive to them. A Misbehavior or Loss of Temper with Shop Floor Colleagues may be due to Pressure you got to achieve Production Target is still a sensitive and is often called as ER(Employee Relationship) issue. In General Shop Floor Colleagues will be part of Employee Union so It would be like You vs The Employee Union and in this case even your Boss won’t help you though you did everything for the sake of company.Also there are many Department in a Manufacturing company. Other than Manufacturing (Production) there are Team like Quality, Material Planning & Logistics, Equipment Maintenance & Advance Manufacturing, Purchase etc.. Shipping Produced Part out the 4 walls of the Company is Team work of all of them. maintaining good relationship with Cross Functional Teams is important but this not that easy when the Place is very demanding . example when your Reason for not meeting KPI is hitting another cross Functional Team and Vice-versa. Things should be handled in a professional and amiable way . The Key to Success in manufacturing is to maintain Good Relationship with all sections of People without compromising your Metrics. as I already mentioned this is not a skill but an Art!So if you feel you are very good at Interpersonal Skills, EQ and People management then you are the one!In Summary there is no One-Stop-shop for Learning Manufacturing. Manufacturing is more of Real life Experience and how we apply our experiences at Shop Floor and get mature everyday. However you can Prepare yourself with the prerequisite knowledge of Manufacturing System and Technique and start a promising career in it.Thank you