Regardless of your organization’s size or the industry you’re in, you can maximize the value of your audits and inspections by following these best practices.
- Establish firm audit/inspection policies and procedures in writing. Personnel should have no question about what needs to be inspected, how frequently inspections should be conducted, or how those inspections should be conducted. Verbal guidance is great (and necessary), but written guidelines provide consistency, clarity, and accountability. Developing written policies and procedures also forces an organization to examine its audit/inspection processes, asking important questions such as “Are we inspecting everything we need to?” and “When we inspect, are we doing a thorough-enough inspection to achieve our goals?”
- Adequately train all personnel. Once you’ve developed written policies and procedures, personnel have to learn them. This requires more than simply handing out a printout or posting
the guidelines on a bulletin board. To make sure your policies and procedures are well-understood and always top of mind, you need a robust training program that ingrains them in the minds of personnel before they begin doing a job that requires auditing or inspecting.
- Use checklists to ensure audits and inspections are done correctly. Even with excellent training, personnel need a checklist of all items to check for whatever is being inspected, whether it be equipment, facilities, worksites, or processes. Properly structured checklists, such as The Checker, list items in the logical order they will be inspected, allowing personnel to simply go through the checklist without having to remember each item. Checklists also hold personnel and organizations accountable by documenting what they’ve inspected—documentation that also can be used to demonstrate regulatory compliance.
- Constantly reinforce the policies and procedures. Initial training isn’t enough. People have a tendency to forget, become complacent, or begin taking “shortcuts.” This tendency is particularly strong in organizations that don’t make it clear, on an ongoing basis, how important it is to do audits and inspections as prescribed by your policies and procedures. You can provide this reinforcement of the initial training with periodic retraining. It’s also vital to provide meaningful rewards for personnel who follow the policies and procedures, as well as to enforce negative consequences when the guidelines aren’t followed.
- “Audit the auditors.” In organizations that have best-of-class audit/inspection programs, there are checks at all organizational levels to ensure that policies and procedures are being followed. A way to think of this is that the audit/inspection program itself needs to be inspected on a continual basis. Everyone, at all levels, should be answerable to someone else.
- Proactively use audit/inspection results to make better business decisions. Audits and inspections should be about more than compliance to internal standards and external regulations. To truly maximize the value of audits and inspections, you can’t waste the valuable data generated by the results. This data can be used in numerous ways, such as helping to develop preventive maintenance schedules, predicting downtime, and guiding procurement decisions. Inspection software (e.g., The Checker Software) can be used to help aggregate and make sense of this data.
Takeaway
You can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your audits and inspections by developing firm policies and procedures, training and retraining personnel, using checklists, holding everyone accountable, and using results to make better business decisions.
