You manage a business. With that role comes the responsibility of ensuring standards are being met across your locations, employees are following procedures, and everything is running as smoothly as possible.
How do you go about it? Pen and paper checklists can be painful, time consuming and lead to unresolved issues as a result of miscommunication between team members.
Here are six reason you’ll want to switch to operational audit software to manage your business.
- Eliminate pen and paper checklists
- Create and complete checklists quickly
- Collaborate with your teams in real time, from anywhere
- Control who can view your audits and results
- Get results in real-time
- Discover recurring issues and put an end to them
1. Eliminate pen and paper checklists
Time is valuable. Operational audit software saves you time spent on data entry, manually creating spreadsheets, graphs and sharing documents.
By switching to operational audit software, it is much easier to track what’s being done and what’s not, without the risk of papers getting lost, messages not being relayed and issues being neglected.
2. Create and complete checklists quickly
Do you find yourself spending more time than you anticipated creating checklists for your business? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to download a checklist template that already includes items with your industry’s standards?
IntouchCheck gives users access to a list of various industry standards and best practices checklists, which can be easily tailored to match your business’ specific guidelines.
Once you’ve created or imported a checklist, users can complete checks anywhere, on any mobile device – even if they’re offline. No need to waste paper printing checklists for multiple locations and manually inputting the results on the computer. Simply press submit, and the data is available in real-time, no data entry needed.
3. Collaborate with your teams
Real-time collaboration with team members – at all of your locations – is one of the most beneficial features of operational audit software. While completing an audit, the manager can:
- Flag issues
- Take photos
- Add comments
- Request signatures from auditors and auditees
Gone are the days of jotting down notes reminding yourself to follow up with a location or order more point-of-sales material. When an issue is found, a notification is automatically sent to the person responsible for fixing it, so the issue doesn’t go forgotten.
Photos are a great way to demonstrate when things are being done right and when they are incorrect. Users can add comments, or annotate photos directly on the image to emphasize problem areas or excellence.
When an audit is complete, you can require signatures from the auditor and auditee before it is submitted. This allows you to track who is performing which audits, and makes it easier for team members to know who to contact regarding specific issues.
4. Control who can view your audits and results
One of the benefits of using operational audit software like IntouchCheck is its tagging system. The tagging system lets you add organizational and feature tags to your locations, users and audits, so you can create a hierarchy. This is a great way to systematize your organization by region, control who can perform which audits at which locations, and control the results users can view.
For example, ensure store managers can only access lists and forms applicable to their locations, and regional managers can only view results from their region.
If you want to tailor your audits by feature, you can ensure certain checklists are only available at locations with that feature. For example, a checklist on restroom cleanliness will only be available at locations with a restroom.
5. Get results in real-time
Use an audit tool that lets you react to issues faster. The longer it takes from the time an audit is completed to the time the results are available, means increased room for errors. It also means issues go unresolved for a longer period of time.
IntouchCheck empowers you with the ability to take action to fix issues as soon as they are found. Results from audits and checks are available in real-time, and notifications are automatically sent to managers responsible for an issue, so you are immediately aware of important details across all of your locations.
6. Discover recurring issues and put an end to them
One of the most valuable reports for managing your operations is report by location. IntouchCheck is a great audit tool because its reporting system allows you to quickly view what issues are occurring at your locations, and which ones are becoming frequent. You can drill down into the issue and view comments and photos associated with it. This helps you come up with a solution for fixing the solution long term, like new merchandising guidelines or photos to accompany guidelines etc.
Conclusion
Operational audit software has significantly more benefits than pen and paper checklists when it comes to managing your business.
- Eliminating pen and paper checklists
- Creating and complete checklists quickly
- Collaborating with your teams in real time, from anywhere
- Controlling who can view your audits and results
- Viewing results in real-time
- Discovering recurring issues and put an end to them
All of these things drastically improve your ability to ensure standards are met across your locations, procedures are being followed and issues are being fixed. Being able to track performance over time allows you to analyze which solutions work best, and how to create a long term strategy for success at all of your locations.
