Why Paper Checklists Are Holding Back Your Company’s Growth & Development 

You no longer use paper for invoicing,  project management or communication with all of your company’s stakeholders. Why would you continue to rely on paper checklists for quality control or safety? You may maximize development within your organization and streamline existing operations by eliminating onerous processes around paper audits and reporting. Digitizing your audits will ensure that your organization is ready to scale swiftly and efficiently, with faster audit updates and visibility into the full organization’s safety data. Whether you’re moving from paper to digital or simply want to renew your current digital audits, here are the key things to keep in mind.

Create Audit Templates for Document Control

By digitising your checklists, you can easily manage the various templates that auditors use. You could update the templates instantly and dynamically through your own master template, instead of handing  paper checklists that could take days or weeks to reach their target auditors. You also won’t have to waste time looking for out-of-date paper checklists to assure the success of your new projects. This also makes testing and iteration more easier and faster. Each checklist demands some field testing, and doing so in a digital format is considerably easier than rolling out paper checklists, collecting input via a survey, and then updating the checklist to re-distribute. 

You can swiftly get audits into the hands of staff members and then acquire real-time data on the inspections/ audits like duration and completion rate of audits, thanks to digitization.  After you’ve gathered that data, you may revise the audit and send updates to frontline workers right away.

Because of the near-instant reward, you can grow the audit function very rapidly. Introducing additional locations or auditors as an administrator takes only a few clicks and you’re good to go. 

Another advantage of document control is that you can easily maintain these templates and ensure that there are no variants or versions that need to be normalised for collecting data later. You can even clone the primary template you design and make minor changes to fit certain audit work or work sites. This duplication with slight tweaks gives more standardised reporting than developing ad hoc reports, as well as enforcing a systemic change inside your company. If each template is equivalent and descended from the “master template,” the practise of filling out the same template repeatedly will become established in business practises.

Keeping an eye on auditing stats to track safety and quality compliance

Anyone concerned with quality control and safety compliance has a collection of checklists that they employ on a regular basis. All of these audits are critical to sustaining daily quality and safety assurance standards, but due to the large number of audits undertaken, both the auditor and the manager may ignore them. Each month, a manager may get hundreds or even thousands of paper audits. It’s tough to get the results of these audits back to management in a timely manner if they are undertaken. It could take weeks for a manager to notice that audits aren’t being done on a regular basis. Furthermore, due to coffee spills, grease stains, or other regular wear and tear, those paper audits may be illegible when returned.

With a digital checklist, you’ll be able to see when audits are finished and pinpoint where and when they aren’t being conducted as regularly as they should be.

You may also easily track compliance to monitor how much time each audit takes and whether specific questions are commonly overlooked. Examine the auditing process itself to verify that auditors are empowered to follow quality and safety guidelines.

To ensure that everyone is aligned, automate communication

Audit Flo provides for real-time contact between the auditor and the manager. Depending on your requirements, the report is instantly sent to the manager or a group after an audit is done. On crucial concerns, you can get real-time reporting and communication.

You can also configure notifications using Audit Flo’s API to notify you, when a particular question is answered as “Unsafe,”or when an audit score falls below a given threshold for instance. With Audit Flo, you can create a workflow that can handle any notification request. For example, a cafe may have concerns with washroom cleanliness. In such cases, the team can design an automated workflow so that when a washroom audit’s score falls below 80%, the on-duty managers get a SMS notification and are reminded to focus on those bathrooms. Managers can now be in different areas at the same time, freeing up time that might otherwise be spent monitoring restrooms or checking up on paper reports.

This communication automation isn’t just for auditors and managers; it can also be used to convey quality and safety management progress via automatic audit sharing. . Instead of passing paper reports through several hands as you prepare for a conference to report on quality or safety control measures, you can easily assemble reports and share them with the management team.

Receive fully automated reports instead of manually entering data.

Another significant disadvantage of paper checklists is that any data that has to be saved must be entered into Excel or a database. This raises the possibility of human error. There could be challenges with data collection uniformity during data entry, or even basic inconsistencies like “n/a” vs. “N/A” could have an undesirable impact on processing and analysis. Eliminating data entry and administration of multiple paper forms frees up managers’ time to focus on other, more vital projects.

Assess audit data for macro trends to highlight triumphs and places for growth

The analytics provided by digital checklists are where their true power lies. You now have access to considerably more data than ever before owing to the standardised templates, unified data collection and transmission, and increased organisational visibility.

The analytics allow you to see if the quality and safety management programmes you’ve implemented are actually working. They also keep management and staff members answerable to the agreed-upon standards.

You’ll have fast access to the data with digitized checklists when you review to monitor if your quality and safety initiatives are working – without having to create a single Excel pivot table or rummaging through outdated filing cabinets. With audit analytics, you can improve communication and improve insight into your entire enterprise.

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