Audits are stressfull, not only the day of the audit, but also the weeks before when preparing. According to a survey we did with production plants most of the companies spent more than 30 days on audits a year. Companies are audited upon request of their clients or in the frame of standards such as ISO or BRC. More often than in the past audits are not announced upfront. This trend urges you to make sure your system is up and running, and that the system really relies on a system, and not on people only.

The most critical parts of an audit with which companies are struggling are following:

• actions that are not followed up and are still open to be addressed
• finding the requested information instantaneously upon request of the auditor
• consequent follow-up of action plans as defined in a previous audit
• availability of all departments (and not only the Quality department) during an audit

The GoRound can help you to manage your audits future-proof in three ways:

• Using the GoRound for general inspections makes it possible to quickly show the efforts done in inspections. This concerns eg. CCP checks, hygienic tours,… Browsing the archive is very easy, and within a snap you find how frequent inspections were done, and which issues were reported. Issues can immediately be converted to a task which needs to be addressed. The task includes the historic information from the inspection (eg the photo that describes the problem). When an auditor asks information, he won’t have to wait long!
• Follow-up of issues is central in the GoRound. Showing that issues are addressed is of utmost importance in quality management. Avoiding issues is the first thing, but issues happen daily, and you need to document that issues are solved. Issues can come from daily inspections or internal audits, as well as actions defined in previous external audits. We have implemented a automated status management engine that follows how an issues evolves to a task. The task is at some point completed and the effectiveness of the task will be automatically assessed the next time the inspection point is inspected.
• Management and execution of internal audits. In the GoRound checklists can be configured to regularly perform internal audits. Again, this enables you to show that you perform internal audits regularly. Even administrative checks can be done, taking photos of the paperwork that you still have to manage.