I’ve written a lot recently about the tremendous potential of audit/inspection software to make audits and inspections more efficient and valuable.

Today, I want to back up a bit and temper my enthusiasm with a very important point—not all companies are ready for audit/inspection software. It takes a certain level of maturity in auditing and inspecting processes to be able to gain enough value from software solutions to justify the investment.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s look at three example companies to see why they may or may not be ready for audit/inspection software.

Company A

The company has a general appreciation of the safety and business value of audits and inspections, but audit and inspection processes are ad-hoc and inconsistent throughout the organization.

Audit/inspection policies and procedures aren’t formalized or sufficiently supported with training, and each department is using paper checklist forms they created themselves to conduct and document audits and inspections. The documentation is entered into spreadsheets, but the process is labor-intensive and the information isn’t easily retrievable and understandable in the spreadsheet format.

The company’s leaders recognize there’s a problem, but as much as they want to address it,  they don’t really know what efficient audit and inspection processes look like. For that reason, they aren’t ready to begin using audit/inspection software. They wouldn’t know what to do with it. They have to “learn to walk before they can run.”

Company B

This company’s management has begun to implement formal policies and procedures for how audits and inspections should be conducted throughout the enterprise, supported with training.

And although they’re still manually inputting results into spreadsheets, they have just started to use professionally produced audit/inspection checklist forms that have a standard, easy-to-use format and are specifically designed to make audit and inspection processes more efficient.

This company is close to being ready to take full advantage of audit/inspection software, but they’re still learning for themselves what’s involved in efficient auditing and inspection processes. Until they have more experience with increasing the value of their processes, they would likely under-utilize the capabilities of the software.

Company C

This company has established policies and procedures in place that are followed, and they’re consistently reinforcing the importance of audits and inspections through training and meaningful incentives. And for some time, they’ve also been using well-designed checklist forms with the same format (e.g., The Checker checklist books) to conduct audits and inspections throughout the organization.

But now that they’ve made it to this point, they’re fully realizing the inefficiencies that remain in their auditing and inspecting processes. They’re becoming keenly aware of the many opportunities to significantly reduce costs, such as:

• eliminating data entry of results
• eliminating the labor involved with the distribution and filing of paper copies of the results
• enabling real-time communication of results so there’s a closed loop between the discovery of a problem and corrective action
• following through to ensure corrective actions have been completed
• using results to guide a cost-saving preventive maintenance program.

This company can visualize how auditing and inspecting processes should work to provide these cost reductions—and they realize from their own experience what’s needed to get there. They understand specifically how software can improve the processes they’ve already been focusing on, and they’re prepared to use it to maximum advantage because of the work they’ve already done.

They’re ready for audit/inspection software.

The Bottom Line

Ideally, all companies would be ready to make full use of audit/inspection software (e.g., The Checker Software). But in reality, many companies aren’t yet mature enough in their auditing and inspecting processes to know how to use the software as effectively as possible. These companies should focus on improving their processes first. That’s hard work, but the benefits of software can then follow.

^{Lower image  courtesy of Scott  Lewis, Creative Commons.}