Audits and inspections aren’t just for complying with regulations or finding out what isn’t safe or operating optimally at the moment.looking-ahead.jpg

When used to their full potential, audits and inspections can reveal important, ongoing trends. And that insight can enable your company to:

  • become safer
  • lower maintenance costs
  • improve operational processes
  • make better procurement decisions.

These improvements are made possible by collecting, aggregating, and analyzing audit/inspection data. This too-often-ignored data can help answer key questions such as:

  • Do aspects of our operations have a higher-than-normal rate of safety violations, incident rates, or asset failures?
  • Do certain groups (divisions, crews, etc.) have a higher-than-normal rate of those problems?
  • What types of assets (by function, manufacturer, distributor, etc.) break down most often?
  • How much cost should we budget based on historical safety and maintenance costs in relation to audit/inspection results?

If you aren’t using audit/inspection software, making use of audit/inspection data in this predictive way is unfeasible due to time constraints, labor costs, and the logistical difficulties of manually aggregating data across numerous jobs and locations. Fortunately for companies that understand the predictive value of audit/inspection data, the development of software such as The Checker Software has removed these barriers.

Now your audit/inspection data can be automatically collected, aggregated, and analyzed for trends—allowing you to address problems before they occur rather than only reacting to problems after they happen.

Safety

On-the-job injuries can have a devastating human toll. They also can be financially disastrous for a business. 

Regular safety audits and inspections (the collection of data) are essential in injury prevention, and audit/inspection software makes it easier for personnel to conduct them. The software also instantly communicates results so that appropriate personnel can take immediate action on any issue.

In addition to this on-the-job functionality, the software’s ability to spot safety trends can help identify areas where enhanced training and/or additional safety measures are necessary, based on the safety history for a specific group, type of job, or other relevant factor.

Maintenance

Analyzing audit/inspection data can reveal patterns in when assets break down or otherwise fail. This information can be used to predict wear and develop preventative maintenance strategies to address that wear before it causes failure or becomes too serious.

This use of the data minimizes replacement costs, work interruptions, and additional operating costs due to suboptimal performance.

Business Processes

Audit/inspection results can provide a red flag when some aspect of your operations is causing assets to wear and break down prematurely.

If every time you perform a certain type of job, a particular piece of equipment used for the job breaks down within the next month, you can reasonably conclude that something’s wrong, and it may very well be the way your personnel are using the equipment for the task.

That may not be the problem, but at least you’re looking at what’s really going on and so can figure out if there is indeed a process problem. If you weren’t paying attention to the data, however, you would have missed the red flag.

Procurement

When you have a high rate of breakdown, or a quick rate of wear, for a piece of equipment from a particular manufacturer—and you’ve ruled out incorrect usage on your part—you have an indication that the manufacturing quality is subpar. When you make your next purchase decision about that type of equipment, you will have that knowledge to guide your decision-making.

You also will have clues to what’s important in determining durability as you evaluate your purchase options.

Takeaway

There is no excuse anymore for not getting the full value out of the audits and inspections you’re already doing. Software like The Checker Software—designed specifically for audits and inspections—makes it easy and cost-effective to proactively use the data that’s generated to become safer while positively impacting the bottom line.

Photo credit - Chase Elliott Clark

Tags: inspection best practices

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