Minimizing Manual Work in Construction Sites and Safety Audits

If you are an audit professional in a construction company, one of your foremost responsibilities is managing construction site and safety audits efficiently. 

Site and safety audits pose unique challenges compared to typical internal audits in other organizations. 

Conducting manual site visits and safety audit reviews consumes a significant portion of a compliance officer’s work time in construction companies. This constraint prevents them from dedicating themselves to more strategic compliance tasks.  

Moreover, the complexity is compounded by managing a large volume of audit documents and the need for collaboration with various site managers and audit teams. 

Challenges

As an Audit Officer in a construction company, you encounter various daily challenges, with some of the prominent ones including: 

• Wasting time on travel to construction sites to meet with site managers and collect physical audit documents. 
• Feeling overwhelmed after sending hundreds of emails and making numerous phone calls to communicate with stakeholders. 
• Spending days in meetings planning audits and assigning tasks to site managers. 
• Lacking an audit monitoring system to track the regularity of audit activities. 
• Dealing with scalability issues when sharing audit evidence through isolated emails and managing them using spreadsheets and shared drives.

Solution

AuditOps by VComply has been designed for compliance and audit professionals seeking an intuitive solution to simplify the audit processes in the organization. Below are a few key features of AuditOps that help minimize manual work for audit officers and their teams. 

Steps to follow

Conducting compliance site and safety audits can be simplified, requiring significantly less manual work and time if you create the audit process in VComply using the following simple steps.

Step 1: Bring all your site managers on a single platform

To initiate an efficient audit process, you must unite all stakeholders and site managers under a single umbrella for collaboration and communication. 

VComply enables you to onboard people on the platform using their email IDs. Once onboarded, you can create specific workgroups to assign audit tasks. 

You can also create site-specific audit responsibility centers, eliminating the need to visit construction sites regularly and saving you and your team hours of travel time. 

Step 2: Create site and safety audit plans and tasks with a set timeline

Once all stakeholders are onboarded, it’s time to create the audit plans and define tasks for all site managers and other stakeholders. 

Leverage the digital space to create audit plans and tasks, link them to specific construction sites, add managers and stakeholders, set audit timelines, and save them in the Audit module. 

Once you create an audit plan and tasks, related stakeholders will receive prompt notifications with details and a timeline. This reduces your burden of conducting meetings, sending emails, and calling managers for audit reminders. 

Step 3: Keep track of audit activities through the central dashboard

When you use a virtual platform for conducting construction site and safety audits, having complete visibility into who is doing what is crucial. Keeping track of audit tasks that are completed, pending, or any uncertain behavior is essential. 

For this, AuditOps has a central dashboard and activity trails where all audit activities happening across locations and sites are presented in charts with due diligence scores. 

Step 4: Facilitate document sharing through the platform

The success of site and safety audits depends on how effectively you manage audit evidence across the organization. VComply allows you and your team to upload audit documents and evidence into the platform. 

All evidence is linked with the relevant audit plans and completed tasks. When you need to check the documents, simply download them from the audit workroom. 

Step 5: Customize audit reports for effective communication

At the end of the audit process, it’s time to create audit reports and communicate with internal and external stakeholders. 

You may have experience creating manual audit reports that took days or weeks and lacked customizations. However, in VComply, you can generate audit reports with just a few clicks within minutes and customize them according to your requirements. 

The reports can be downloaded in PDF or Excel formats for external sharing.