Digital Auditing – Remote Food Safety Audits

COVID-19 has forced the world to be more open minded to remote demonstrations, video calls and on-line collaboration.  One positive thing about this new norm is the willingness for companies to look at what can and cannot be done remotely.

If we said that Food Safety and Quality Audits are now being replaced with Digital Auditing to allow for remote scrutiny, you’d think we were losing our minds.  However, many companies are now viewing this as a viable proposition and looking positively at the upside of online Digital Auditing platforms.

The physical aspects of a quality audit can be done with remote video auditing using installed cameras – simple.  This is now an acceptable way to view a plant, especially if the videos are correctly installed, of sufficient quality and not omitting ‘blank spots’ in the plant that cannot be viewed.  Any CCTV company can supply a solution for 100% plant visibility – they have been doing this for years to provide employee surveillance to protect the employer and employee alike.  The upside of this being that people tend to behave better and work harder when they know they are on camera.

An employee may facilitate an audit by recording the walk-through of the operations from receiving goods until shipping of the final products.  Hand-held devices or helmet-mounted cameras can be used to carry out this type of audit.  While this approach can be very cost effective, it relies heavily on what the employee chooses to capture on camera and can certainly come with blind spots.

Digital Auditing

However, when it comes to the actual quality audits requiring numerous plant equipment and material inspections, safety checks, and employee data entry – this is not so easy using the traditional pen and paper route. That is especially true if compliance is required to meet standards from auditing bodies like BRC, SQF, GFSI etc. 

S.G. Systems new and exciting product ‘AuditTec’ is a cloud based digital auditing and compliance solution that allows 100% of food safety paperwork to be digitized – allowing for a comprehensive and stringent remote audit to be a reality.

SG Systems – Simon Kingman comments “AuditTec is a template based multi module solution, allowing companies a diverse range of audits and  inspections. This makes food safety technical audits, tedious glass and Perspex audits, line checks of packing,  product temperature recording, and weight checking easier and avoids the need for paper records.  AuditTec includes the BRC template to allow users to be compliant faster with minimal data setup”

The solution manages all raised non conformances using a unique escalation path which automatically logs and notifies personnel of any raised non conformances.

Completed audits are easily accessible from the cloud base portal which hosts a dashboard of completed audit performance data, open non conformances.  Audits are backed up with multiple collected images which validates the responses.  

SG Systems – Paul Andrews comments “Historical audit data is easily recalled, viewed, and shared with external auditing bodies. Such data can be from multiple global locations without the need to search files & folders for paper based evidence. This makes digital auditing efficient and timely, in accordance with the guidelines laid down by auditing bodies”

AuditTec ensures companies are Audit Ready Every Day and compliant with the rigorous Supplier and BRC certification requirements.

For more information on AuditTec, visit www.sgsystemsglobal.com