5 Signs That Excel Checklists Are Slowing Down Your Audits
Most businesses are hesitant to adopt new auditing technology. It’s possible that the existing practices may seem to be sufficient. Alternatively, organizations may be concerned about investing time and money into implementing a new solution. “The usual paper checklists, Excel spreadsheets, and PDFs may not be flashy, but they get the job done,” these firms argue. Companies that opt for piecemeal solutions lose out on the significant advantages of digital audits.
Staff Members are dissatisfied with administrative overhead
The last thing you want to do is make auditing difficult for your company. Your safety and quality requirements are upheld by these audits. Many employees, however, regard new auditing technology as a hardship solely because they are new and unusual. Nonetheless, auditing technology has resulted in a huge reduction in those time-consuming tasks.
Adding comments and photos to a paper audit often necessitates scanning, uploading, and emailing those attachments. The results of the audit must then be manually entered into an Excel spreadsheet by someone else in the office. It wastes a tremendous amount of time and effort and creates a communication gap. You may integrate those photos and comments straight into the digital audit and send it off automatically with a more integrated auditing system. Employees have a much simpler time not only conducting the essential inspections, but also disclosing any difficulties to superiors or clients, when businesses eliminate the friction in auditing.
Looking for old documents and files always consumes most of your time
You don’t want to waste time digging through digital or physical paperwork, whether it’s for something as basic as addressing an obvious problem or something more official like trying to be OSHA-ready. Keep digital audits in one place so you can quickly locate what you’re looking for using a date-based or template-based search. As well, make sure you can segregate these audits by region, focus area, or auditor. The last thing you want to do when somebody needs to monitor the site safety records for Quarter 2 of last year is sift through an archive trying to understand blurred writing to answer a basic inquiry. A trivial amount of investing in efficient audit organisation and digitization will profit in the long run.
Your analytics is not in sync with your auditing system
It’s time to modernise if you’re still exporting data to Excel or, worse, manually entering data. Each document transmits basic information such as compliance or non-compliance on its own. However, leveraging your organization’s pooled knowledge necessitates looking for trends across many audits. You can also discover process flaws with a higher-level view. You might discover places where employees require additional assistance or information.
The audits are no longer relevant by the time you receive them.
When communication is prompt, the greatest significant efficiency advantage with digital audits occurs. Audits on paper, or even emailed Excel templates or PDFs, might take hours or days to reach the appropriate parties. Field auditors must return to their desks to attach images or submit more information. All of the information is included in the report when using a digital auditing solution. Then, for real-time communication, you can set these insights to email routinely to your clientele, managers, or analysts. You lose your capacity to be proactive if hours or days pass without receiving a site audit. Almost every employee on the premises has access to a mobile device.Employees can conduct audits and transmit digital reports in real time using that gadget. Information gaps are no longer an excuse.
Many organisations, small and large, still rely on paper-based forms, manual entry of data or ad-hoc solutions. Companies are at a deficit if they cling to old processes because inefficiencies require too much time. Worse, you’ll miss out on a comprehensive view of the company. You can detect quality and safety trends at each and every site, in every operation, using an integrated auditing system.
Your business is on the verge of expanding
There’s no better time to adopt new auditing digital solutions if your firm is growing in terms of the number of projects it takes on or the number of workers it hires. Most employees, particularly younger ones, have learned to anticipate more technologically advanced solutions. We don’t have to associate “technologically-savvy” with “tough to use.” or “complicated.” On the market, you may discover robust auditing solutions that are nonetheless simple to use and allow your team to get up to speed quickly.
Another challenge that many businesses have as a result of rapid growth is a loss of visibility & communication from each site. That difficulty is perfectly solved by digital auditing technology. Performing audits using a mobile phone enables on-site staff to show what really is happening at any specific minute on a site via images or notes. They can also provide updates from the field to major stakeholders automatically. Avoid having to enter data and compile a report at the workplace.
