We’ll get straight to it; digital audits make businesses more efficient and allows colleagues to communicate with each other easily and effectively. A solution that’s centralised automates many manual auditing procedures that means businesses can increase their operational efficiency including health and safety, and quality standards.

Put differently, businesses could begin by just wanting to transfer their paper audits to digital, but they may start gaining many other benefits including saving time and money on safety, calculating and demonstrating the effectiveness of their safety programmes, increasing the efficiency of their operations and standardising quality and safety procedures.

A study carried out by research specialists Aberdeen.com revealed encouraging numbers showing the impact of digital checklists. The ‘best on class’ companies (those reporting fewer incidents) are more than two times as likely to use mobile devices in the field which obviously makes auditing easier and allows employees to offer feedback on issues in real time. Being able to utilise such a tool promotes a proactive, rather than a reactive, approach. And this is exactly what the OpsBase app provides – the ability to report issues as soon as they happen so a solution can be worked on straight away.

Digital audits help keep teams accountable to meet the required standards of the business. They establish an accessible system of checking off day-to-day processes whilst allowing auditors to tick off certain tasks and helpfully remind them of minor ones too.

Important to this are the safety processes that are the foundation of all digital audits. They’ll make existing efficiency systems even more so whilst highlighting those which are not. It’s important not to just digitise older paper checklists when you’re putting a digital auditing system in place. Rather, it’s the perfect chance to go over current processes and see if they can be improved to fit current purposes.

Key questions to ask

• How are you currently communicating new safety procedures within the business?
• Do your new employees have a good understanding of safety processes?
• Are there any areas which need to be retrained?
• Are all the checks you need in place or are there areas that may need work?
• Are the lines of communication between the office and workspace strong enough?
• Do you have a handle on what contractors are doing and how well they’re doing it?
• What is your safety aims and KPIs, if you have them? Are employees aware of these?
• Are you tracking the correct data from your audits?
• Are you able to spot trends from your audit data and act on them?
• Do management teams know how well safety procedures are doing?

This is just a snapshot of the kind of questions you need to be asking when you’re going through your auditing processes. Not only will they give you an idea of where you want your digital audits to excel, they may also be a chance for your teams get involved in the process of searching for new ideas to improve too.

Important points to takeaway

By using a digital audit platform such as OpsBase you’ll increase the number of audits you’re able to do, minimise the time it takes to do them and speed up the process of receiving completed ones from those in the field. Just imagine how much time you’ll save employees by simplifying manual processes like being able to directly add photos to a report or communicating issues and hazards to managers as soon as they happen.

If would like to know more about how digital audits can help your business, get in touch and speak with a member of our team today.