Masterclass: Make the Most Out of Audit Hub

Okay. Hi everyone. It's good to see everyone again and I look forward to showing you through the Audit Hub today. So we'll start off with, as always, I'm going to share my screen and we're going to put the webinar presentation up. So here we go.

So today, the core focus is going to be on the Audit Hub system. And our goal with this webinar is to help explain how the Audit Hub will work, explain how using the Audit Hub is going to help you when you next come to being audited. We're going to show you how to create an audit schedule, how to make the audit question sets that you're going to use, how to actually run the audit, and then show you what features you can use when you're being audited or when you need to review how your audit schedule is going for the year so that you can see exactly what you need to do to make your audits a little less stressful and a lot easier.

So, to start off with, I'm just going to talk you through the general steps of Audit Hub. So, it's quite simple once you know exactly how it works and the steps to follow. So, the first step is to set up your Audit Hub settings. Okay. So, we'll go through that in a moment, but it's really important that we get the settings right because that makes everything connect and work together.

The next thing we're going to do is create or upload your audit requirements. So, audit requirements are the Q-Hub name for basically your audit questions or your question sets or your audit templates you might call them, which are designed to help the person doing the audit, the auditor to understand what evidence they need to capture and to mark each audit requirement as either compliant or non-compliant.

We then are going to show you how you can build audit templates and where that would be used and then finally creating an audit schedule and starting to plan your audits in and then running your audit system from that point on. Okay, so those are the core things that we're going to work through today. So, I'm just going to stop sharing and then jump straight into the Audit Hub. So, here we go. Audit Hub is open. Okay.

So, if you haven't seen the application before, Audit Hub is a dedicated hub to just auditing because it warrants it with the way that a lot of people work and the way the ISO standards require audits to be managed. So, once you come to the application, if you're new, this will be blank. So don't worry if it doesn't look like this to start with. It should all be blank as you haven't actually planned any audits.

But what we're going to do first, if everyone remembers step one. So step one was what it was to set up the audit settings. So you're going to come to the bottom in the bottom left and there is the audit settings button. So to start with what we want to understand is what these NCR templates are. So you've got tasks, processes and forms.

So as with many things in Q-Hub, you can use the different tools on the platform like forms and processes and tasks to facilitate compliance activities in the way that you want to do it. So for example, we have some customers who when they're running an audit they want to manage their NCRs through very simple tasks and therefore they set up task templates for major and minor NCRs or even for other types of NCRs that they want to create.

Another type of NCR could be using the NCR process. So you might have seen our videos before on Process Hub. If you haven't, Process Hub essentially helps you build compliance workflows. So things that need to be done in a certain order. So for example, NCRs, you might have the initial NCR captured, the containment stage, then you might need it to go for review with different people and then go through some approval routes. So for larger organizations, the NCR process is a really important feature as it helps to actually facilitate the flow that that NCR should follow before it is closed down.

And then for sort of the medium-sized customers or anyone really who keeps the NCR process simple, one of the best ways to do this is actually just using an NCR form. So, you click select your forms. You pick from the forms that you've got on the platform or if you haven't got any, you can go to resources and download the NCR form. We select our NCR form. And we might also want to be able to raise a supplier NCR straight from this NCR from the Audit Hub system. So, now we've got our NCR form connected.

And what this means is that when you raise an NCR during an audit, because I've selected five of these different options, I will be able to choose which NCR template I'd like to use. So again, it builds flexibility. But if you just add one simple NCR template, let's say for example, we took off tasks and processes and we just added an NCR form, then you would only be asked to set up the NCR with the form when you come to doing your audit.

So the next thing that we're going to look at is the bottom section. So approved auditors is a feature if you want to control who is allowed to be selected as an auditor. So this can be quite useful for maybe larger sites when they only want select quality managers or process owners to be able to run audits. So it's very simple. You just click select users and then it will give you the ability to pick from your user list.

Next we have the audit locations. So these are quite important when setting up for running KPIs later. So here you can set up locations or it could be that you set up internal departments. If you're a company that is running audits on sites or on departments, let's say the Bristol department has actually got an engineering department, we can just add that underneath Bristol. If the Bristol department also has let's say a HR department that we want to audit, we can add them as well. So now when we do our audit, we can assign an audit to these dedicated areas and that will help roll up into our KPIs.

The audit standard options are a feature that we added for more complex audit creation. This allows you to actually build different types of questions within your Audit Hub. So we'll cover that in another session, but for now you don't need to worry about the audit options. And then we have a little option here that we've added from customer feedback, which is would you like the images captured in an audit. So let's say you're doing your audit, you upload some pictures, would you like them all to be at the end in a gallery or would you like to see the images throughout the audit? You can just tick or untick depending on your preference.

Okay, so that is the audit settings. So in summary, all you need to do is pick an NCR template. So, preferably to if you're starting off, download the NCR form from our resources center and then select that form for your NCRs. Add some locations. And that's really the two key things that you need to do.

So, once we have these, what is our next step? Well, now we actually need to create some audits to run. So, we're going to go into the audit requirements section. So, this is basically your audit questions. These are all the different types of things that you want to audit. So, as you can see below, I have lots of examples pre-added to this. Again, you can go to our resources and download some audit templates, or you can use our new audit AI feature and generate your own questions. And you can also build them from scratch or upload it from your own audit template if you have Excel spreadsheets with your audit questions in them.

So, what this does, it allows you to create questions. So if I go on to let's pick a nice easy one like shop maintenance. So you can see for our shop maintenance requirements we are going to ask the following questions. So we have our headers, we have general questions that will help the person auditing understand what they need to do and then we have all of the different questions that would be asked.

If you go into the edit button of your audit, it shows you the sort of customization options that we have for these questions. So you can add additional questions. You may want to put some of the audit questions within a section. So you can create a section title and then add the audits below. This can be nice sometimes if you think of the ISO standards. Maybe you're trying to cover the different sort of core topics by section and have the clauses below them. It's a nice way of doing that.

But what we're looking for here is to just have the general topics that you're auditing and then the questions that help guide the auditor know what evidence they should capture. Under the more button of these questions, you'll see this connects to our audit settings. So we have the standard requirement options which are raise an NCR, mark as compliant or mark as not applicable. So those questions or those options will always be available for every one of the questions that you create unless you want to customize it.

So we'll talk custom audit questions later, but for now we'll just stick to our standard requirement options. What we can also do to try and help streamline your auditing, if you have audit questions like this and you know that if there if the general shop floor area has an NCR raised, you might want to create some template NCR options. For example, if someone picks that there is a non-conformance against the general shop area, we can then make it mandatory that they upload evidence and mandatory that they write in some objective text or objective evidence. We can also then say that we want them to do an NCR and we want it to be used as, let's say, the NCR form.

So now as soon as they click raise an NCR, it's going to default to this form. So where this comes in handy is things like, if let's say you've got an audit when you're checking the engineering department and for some non-conformances they might be internal but let's say you have a question that relates to supplier non-conformances instead of having to give your auditors the option we can just click raise an NCR we can pick our supplier NCR template so now they it will automatically default to that template. So you can see how you can start to customize this in our setup. We actually will help guide you through which options you want.

But for now the key thing to remember here is we want to create questions that are going to be asked during the audit and then save those. One of our newer features which is really helpful is the AI builder. So what I can actually do now is click add new requirement generate using AI. I can upload my existing audit requirements if I have any here. Or what I can actually say is build me a set of questions that can be used to help me audit my ISO 9001 management system. As simple as that. We click done and we'll come back to that in a few moments. It will be sat in our drafts once the AI has generated the requirements.

Okay, so we've added the settings. We've either downloaded or created some of our audit questions. And now we want to make a couple of templates. So we're on step three. So when we go into our templates, we can click add a new template. And what we're looking to do here is make it easier whenever you want to create an audit schedule. We just want to be able to prep from a suite of audit templates so that it's very easy to set up and add the different types of audits that you might do to cover your ISO compliance or to cover your customer requirements, whatever it might be.

So what I mean by this is if you go into one that I've already done, let's say the ISO annual audit, you'll see that's the audit title. We have an audit scope prepopulated which will reflect on the audit output. We have also pre-selected the duration and we have selected which audit requirements we are going to be covering. So you can see I've opened this up and it shows me that out of all of my audit questions in this audit, we are going to be covering the audit questions like so. And then I can click close. So I've got my 28 audit questions that are going to be asked. And then I've also put in this audit that I would like to include a requirement section in the table of contents on the output.

So there's some other features that we'll get into another time. But to start setting up your audit templates, it's as simple as that. Add a title, provide some scope, you can link reference material or attach your internal policies or procedures here so that people know what they're auditing. Particularly if you've got Doc Hub set up and your policies are on there. It's a really nice way of linking it so that you can actually point the person doing the audit in the direction of the documentation that is governing your audit. Okay. Then we can click close or done, sorry, to save our audit template.

Now we're on to the final stage or final stages which is the schedule. So we're going to come into the schedule. I've got some pre-made ones to show you after, but for you guys, it'll be blank and it will ask you to pick a new audit or you can just click the new audit schedule here. So, let's say I want to start auditing my sites and I want to start checking the general, let's say general ISO compliance and I click done. So, that is going to be the name of my audit.

The next thing I want to do is add my first audit. So, I click add. I pick from the template or I can set up a new one straight from here. But I can pick from the template and I'm going to pick my ISO 9001 annual audit. So as I scroll down, you can see all of those pre-built audit template settings have been provided. And all I have to do now is pick who the auditor is going to be. So if we have an approved auditor list, it will only show me those people. But I'll pick myself.

I can pick who I'm auditing. So it might be I'm auditing Sally and Raven. I can select the location of the audit. So, this is going to be on our Gloucester site and I'm going to schedule this in for the 2nd of October. There's a little feature at the bottom that can be quite helpful, which is schedule multiple audits. So, if you're going to do more than one ISO audit per year, maybe two, and you want those maybe like six months apart, it's really easy to go month, I want it six months apart, and I want to schedule an extra two occurrences or an extra one occurrence. And then I can click done. And you'll see what this has done. It has created the first audit for me and it's created my second audit.

Now you remember I put one as Gloucester. It might be that the second audit we actually want to change where that is. So I can click my audit. I can go edit the audit and let's say I want to change this to actually audit the Bristol site instead. And instead of it being Sally and Raven, I'm actually going to be auditing James. And I can save that now. Okay. Okay, let's say we want to add another ISO audit, but this time it's not going to be a 9001. We're going to audit our 45001 health and safety requirement.

So again, you can see now I've got 56 questions because this is pre-linked to a different audit set. So this is linked to our 45001 audit questions. And then I can pick who I want to audit. So this is actually going to be auditing Sally. She's going to be the auditor. And I'm going to put this against Bob. And we're going to pick that this is going to be done against the, let's say, the Bristol department as well. And we want this one in November. Done. There's my 45001 audit.

Now, while the audit is in this draft stage, so you can see I haven't released the audit schedule yet. So, no one will get notifications. We might notice actually, do you know what? If you imagine you've got a couple of audits on here and you notice they're a bit close, we can say let's actually, if I come into my days, I might actually try and move my audit and we're going to say we're going to give us some more time and I can actually put it at a different position. Let's say I'm going to move it from November into a couple of weeks later. Go back to my month view. And now we can see it's still in November, but I've given ourselves a little bit of extra room on the week view. We can see that we've moved the audit up. We can also drag and change the audit time frame and different things like that if you want to from this view, but ideally if your templates are accurate, you don't need to worry about that.

So just to recap on what we've done, we've added the settings, we've downloaded or created our audit questions, we've created our first schedule, and we've started to add some audits. So once we're happy with the audits that we have created so far, so we've got three audits so far, we just click release the schedule. Once we release the schedule, this will then notify the different people that they have an audit. It will send them a task that will appear in their workflow that they now have an audit and the due date for that audit will be based upon the start date and the duration. So all of that information will be sent and shown in an email and also in the person's workflow.

Let's say someone comes back to you and they say actually do you know what I can't do that day. You can come into your audit, click reschedule, change the date to a better time that suits them and that will be updated for them also. Okay. So now we've got our first audit schedule. So let's say we've gone away, we've come back in a few weeks later and now we actually want to do the audit.

So to start with, you would have actually got a reminder that your audit is coming up a couple of days before and I think 30 days before as well. But let's say you've got an audit to do. So on the audit homepage, you're going to see a little audits Gantt chart at the bottom. You can click that. We can go into the month view. Or sorry, we can pick our schedule and then we can go into the month view and you can see the different audits that we have. So you have that option there. But the nicest view is the audits page. So, we click the audits page. I can just go planned audits or I can see my planned and working. I click show my stuff. So, it filters the page by my own work.

And I might say I want to see my general ISO audit. And there we are. We've got our audits that are up and coming. So, I can now click on one of my audits. You might be thinking, why do I only see three? Just to answer that question there. So, if I go general ISO, if you remember, the other audit that I created was actually for someone else to do. So when I untick show my stuff, I see where Sally is actually the auditor. I just want to see my own. So we pick that and now I can go into my audit and I can actually just start the audit.

So you click start the audit button at the bottom. It opens it up into an editable state. I can click the audit option and I can start writing my findings and my evidence in here. I can come away from it. I can go into my working audits. I can pick my schedule. And now see we see it is working. If I jump back in, everything that I do in here is live and will be saved as well.

So, as you go through, you can add your objective evidence. You can add any files, images or attachments as part of the clause or the audit evidence pack as well. You can add an observation which are really good for OFIs. And then you have the option to make it an NCR, mark it as compliant, or mark it as not applicable.

If you would prefer more of like an Excel style view, you can click the table view and then we have a different style, something more similar to what you might be used to if you're doing Excel type audits where you can see all of the questions here. We can click our objective evidence, add something in, upload our files, and then we can mark it as non-conformance or compliance as we go and then I can raise my first NCR.

So if I jump back to the other view and now let's say I need to raise an NCR. We just click the NCR button. We pick our template or if it's predefined or there's only one it would just happen. We've picked our NCR. We can now select major, minor, or not applicable if we don't need the NCR types. But let's say we pick a major or a minor NCR. We add our title text. We can add some description about the NCR. I'll put details in here.

We pick who the NCR is going to be against. It might not always be against the auditor. It could be against someone else at times. So we might pick James. And then we can include a due date if we want to. So if the if it's quite an important NCR that gets closed down within 30 days, we could plan that in to be done within 30 days as well. And then there's this send NCR now button. So at times you may want an NCR to be immediately raised upon someone depending on the circumstances of what you're doing. Other times you might just want to click done. And now we have our NCR in our audit.

And what will happen is once you get to the end of this audit and then you click to complete the audit, then all the NCRs will be sent. Sometimes in real life what happens is you have conversations with the process owners or you have conversations with whoever is carrying out the audit and some NCRs might change from major to minor, some might be removed and made an observation. So that's why we basically hold the NCRs as a template until you complete the audit.

Once the audit is actually completed though, the NCRs will be sent. Those will work go into the relevant people's workflows. And if you go to the findings tab of your audit hub, you'll see all active NCRs, all closed NCRs, all observations, and all actions. On the active NCR page. Once you click on an NCR, you'll see that it has prepopulated the NCR information and it also tells you the audit it was raised against and you can click to go back to the audit as well and it will take you to the direct requirement that the NCR was raised against.

So I will cover the Audit Hub in more detail from like a usability point of view and for the different operators who might be using it, you know, how does it look for an auditor? How does it look from an audit? If they're portal users and that type of thing on another demo. But what I want to do now is just show you the reports page.

So, once we've got our audit schedule set up, once we have our locations, once we've got a few schedules and you start filling out some audits, this page will auto-populate. So, it shows you all audits that are in progress. It shows you any audits that are pending. And it also shows you all of your closed audits here as well. This on-time and late KPI is automatically populated based on the start and finish date of your audit versus when you had planned to do it. And the planned audits is also live and it shows you anything that you have planned as well.

So the overall compliance score, this is based on if you imagine every requirement that you audit if you mark them as compliant or non-compliant that counts as one or zero. So, if you've audited a 100 different questions across all of your audit programs and 90 of them are compliant, you will have a 90% compliance rating from the system. If we wanted to see for a specific location, a specific auditor or a specific schedule, for example, I can go to my ISO 9001, it changes all of the views based on the data that we have within our system. So it will tailor this depending on what you are actually auditing.

As you scroll down, you'll also see we've got the findings page. So on the findings page, we again have all of our findings by location. So we can see which sites have the most NCRs or what type of things they have. Is it actions? They've got a lot of observations or NCRs. And then we also see findings by schedule down here as well.

Now, this isn't the only place to see the data, especially when it comes to NCRs because we're using other tools in the platform like the Form Hub. It gives you the ability to make a dashboard like this where we can see all open NCRs across the board. This could be NCRs from suppliers, audits, internal and external NCRs. And you also have KPIs like the root cause type, root cause codes of your NCRs, and we can do lots and lots of other reports based on the NCRs that you've set up as well and the templates that you're using.

So, if I go back to the Audit Hub, on the homepage, you've got a few KPIs here or a few quick action buttons. You can go into working to see your audits and that just helps you use this on a daily basis. And the same for the little findings feature here. You can filter it by your stuff and it will show you anything any NCRs that you've currently got outstanding against yourself as well.

So that is a very quick overview and a bit of a summary to show you how the Audit Hub should be set up and how the Audit Hub reports can then be used to show your auditor. Once your audits are running and you go back into an audit, all of that information, all the objective evidence, the NCRs, everything is linked together in the system, which ticks a big box for the auditors because you don't have to worry that you're tracking or you have or haven't captured information because it's always going to be there as the system forces you to make sure you've got the right information.

So, just to wrap up, I just want to finalize by reviewing the steps. So set the settings up, upload your questions or create some, build a template, schedule it in the audit schedules, and then you can start running your audit system.

A top tip from our customers is when you're actually creating the audit requirements, so the questions in step two, try and leave the questions to be a little bit more generic. At times people try and have a question per clause of the audit or even a question per sub-clause which is a way of doing things. But what that can do is it can make the audits a bit cumbersome and it can also force you to have to provide evidence for absolutely everything. Whereas what can be more useful is you might have questions or the main audit questions are against the top topics of the ISO standards or of your customer standards and then the descriptions behind the audit questions like the help text for the auditor breaks it down into what type of evidence that we're looking for.

This allows for more flexibility and it makes the audits a bit simpler as well. So maybe just think about that depending on how stringent you want the audit and the evidence, you can decide on what type of audit questions you're going to create.

So what should we do next? Well, if you're a customer, start setting up your audits if you haven't already. Or if you're on the support plan, ask us to help you on the next call. And we'll help set up the audits with you. Anyone else? If you would like a trial on the audit system, give us an email or message us wherever you're seeing this and then we'll have a catch up and we can give you a trial on how the audits work and how they're run.

If you've enjoyed this, we have some more webinars coming soon. The dates will be released very shortly, but we're actually going to be looking at the Portal Hub and how you actually can build custom dashboards and interfaces for your departments and teams. The KPI Hub, so you actually know what reports we can make. How you can boost your company's compliance with the Doc Hub and then how we can get rid of the problems of calibration with Asset Hub and we're going to focus on specifically calibration in Asset Hub. So those are some things coming soon.

Thank you very much for your time and watching this again and I look forward to seeing everyone on the next call. So guys, thank you and I'll speak to you.

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