Risk Based Certification™

Measure performance against selected standard(s) while checking how well your management system supports your business-critical focus areas.

Organizations today are often scrutinized and asked to demonstrate the performance of their own operations and activities. Combined with best-practice auditing techniques and options for remote delivery, DNV’s Risk Based Certification™ methodology adds value to your audit and business.

A well-functioning management system certified to ISO or other international standards is a great start to build business resilience and sustainable performance. It helps you identify, assess, and manage risk and ensure that business processes are working effectively for you, your customers, and other stakeholders.

The Risk Based Certification methodology was developed by DNV to improve your management system and its ability to support your business goals. It tailors part of the audit delivery focussing on specific risks or other topics you consider important and that are relevant to the audit standard and scope. 

Risk Based Certification™ and the use of such Focus Areas is unique to DNV’s delivery. It facilitates a deeper assessment of areas impacting your business objectives. Focus Areas are identified and agreed upon before the audit. 

Get more out of your certification

Implementing ISO standards helps you to understand your organization and its context in a systematic, structured way. In developing your management system, you will identify interested parties, their needs, and expectations, as well as risks and opportunities for your organization and its context. This includes actions to mitigate the identified risks.

From this analysis, the issues most important to your organization will emerge and can be prioritised.  

It is these priorities that are the basis for identifying the Focus Areas that are assessed during the audit by DNV. 

As a DNV customer, you also get access to our digital Boost My Audit tool. It contains more than 200 pre-defined Focus Areas with corresponding checklists for the various standards and sectors. Use these as inspiration to identify your own Focus Areas. 

DNV’s Lead Auditor will work with you to formulate what to assess during the audit in terms of activities and processes. It structures the audit so that auditor can focus on what matters most, in addition to checking your management system’s compliance with the standard(s) requirements. 

This is done without adding cost or time. The immediate output is the audit report which includes a summary of audit findings and Focus Area performance. It provides a quick insight into areas of importance for you and your management team.  

What you learn from the audit helps you improve your management system. It helps you identify mitigating actions to a broader set of challenges, whether it be operational issues today or hurdles to reach long-term objectives. Risk Based Certification helps lay the foundation to improve your ability to identify and respond to stakeholder expectations and build sustainable business performance over time.

What do you get?

Risk Based Certification™ is designed to help you get more out of every audit. Compliance with the standard(s) requirements results in a certificate. But with DNV you get more: 

  • An instantly verifiable certificate securely stored on our blockchain.
  • Access to the Boost My Audit tool containing more than 200 pre-defined Focus Areas.
  • A highly skilled, experienced auditor trained to focus the audit on matters most important to your business while also checking compliance to a selected standard(s). 
  • An audit report with insight on how well your management system supports your selected Focus Areas.
  • Knowledge that can help you improve your management system’s ability to address immediate issues and support your long-term business targets, thus building sustainable business performance.