Audits Benefits

Do you perform safety analyses/risk assessment, e.g. road safety audits, benefit/cost analysis, in preparation of developing project scope and design for 3R projects ... 

The impact of a knowledge-based application may appear in many ways improved competitive position, quality improvement, improvement in efficiency, cost reduction, and reduction in downtime, to name a few. Some of these benefits may be hard to quantify others may not be quantifiable at all. For example, the actual benefit derived from a diagnostic advisory system may not be apparent if the process behaves normally. To quantify the benefits, a careful post-audit may have to be done, taking into account the number of faults averted, and comparing the frequency of faults before and after implementation. 

Such sessions often help to bring to the surface those parts of the plant where suspect waste issues or pollution problems are most critical. Such areas of operations are most likely to benefit from an audit and P2 program. 

Consider the environmental benefits and the savings in process and waste-treatment operating costs, along with the payback period for an investment, to decide which options are viable candidates. Once this is done, the audit team can develop draft recommendations to include in the final report and presentation to top management. 

Develop a list of the individual unit processes at your enterprise. Among these, which are the processes that are most likely to benefit from a P2 audit Why ... 

Despite these potential benefits, there are possible problems associated with the use of generic safety audit systems. Questions that need to be considered in the case of such standardized audits include ... 

The benefits claimed for the TRIPOD approach are that it provides a consistent method for auditing a situation to identify deficiencies in the factors that are likely to give rise to errors. These deficiencies can then be corrected to reduce the likelihood of accidents occurring in the future. 

From a practical viewpoint, there are two key benefits to this technology. First, it makes retrieval of data very fast and simple. No one wants to search through reports and notebooks in order to find the associated data for a result that is in question. Second, during a regulatory audit it is crucial that your laboratory is able to produce the specific information with as much detail as is required by the auditor. Again, this task is much simpler when a relational database is managing the information (see Figure 7). 

Many countries use volunteer peer reviewers for accreditation inspections. Although the commitment required can be seen as a cost to the reviewers organizations, a benefit is the training they receive, which can be put to effective use in internal audits. 

This step entails the selection of candidate processes or operations within the firm that warrant special attention. The discovery of where the process could benefit from the adoption of 1ST is the outcome of an Inherent Safety Opportunity Audit done within this and the next tasks. The criteria for identifying these include three categories (a) general safety information, (b) symptoms of inherent unsafety, and (c) inefficiency of safety management. 

An audit report will serve as the formal record of the audit and its findings, and is a major input into selecting the supplier and determining any necessary corrective action. To complete the quotation review exercise the pharmaceutical manufacturer (or its main contractor) should produce a formal report that summarizes the quotation compliance, the key points of the audit report, and the main benefits of each system. The chosen suppher and reasons for the supplier selection should be clearly stated. 

Whenever this kind of activity becomes part of the manufacturing plan, the benefits of the setup-dominant process will be realized. This results because the quality standard, formed by the development function in the performance qualification, is carried over to the production setting. When production then incorporates this standard into its own operating procedures, the quality standard becomes a measurable criterion for performance. This example thus clearly shows how this phase of PV would be a QA tool for auditing. 

The NMMS must be able to benefit from and contribute to other existing tools for measuring or understanding an organisation s performance, e.g. other safety-related information systems, audits, Total Quality Programmes, etc. This also means that the level of acceptance of a NMMS should, in itself, be considered as an important measure of an organisation s performance or "safety culture" (see Chapter 6). 

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