Software-as-a-Service solutions like The Checker are available over the web, with no hosting or installation required, and are quite simple to implement. To ensure the greatest success however even a SaaS project should be approached in a systemic fashion.

In Part 1 of our Implementing Audit/Inspection Software blog series, Planning & Process, we describe the steps to determine 'what' you need the software to do. This post focuses on Solution Design which is the stage where you determine 'how' audit/inspection software will meet the needs of your business. This subtle but important difference will help you to make sure you are capturing important items necessary for the Configuration & Customization stage.

Part 1: Planning & Process

Part 2: Solution Design

Part 3: Configuration & Customization

Part 4: Training & Going Live

As you map each business requirement to the inspection and audit software, you will find many choices that need to be made including things like:

• who does what tasks
• where to enter particular pieces of data
• what values are optional and what values are required
• what user types are needed
• user security

The Solution Design step helps you to formulate the solution to be developed, keeping in mind the end users and the business requirements.

Keep in mind if you have never been required to articulate “how” the software will meet your requirements, it isn’t easy. One advantage of purchasing audit/inspection software instead of developing it in-house is it provides many best practices and will help ease the process. Let your vendor and their knowledge help guide your choices for how to best use your new audit/inspection software.

The outcome of the Solution Design stage is a roadmap that shows what requirements can be fulfilled with the standard features of the software, which requirements can be fulfilled with configuration, and which requirements will require customization.

With this roadmap in hand you will be able to move forward to Configuration and Customization which are the topics of our next blog post.