Applied AI Series: Quality & Safety Audits Made Easy with AI

Recently, ComplianceQuest published a blog titled ‘Using ‘Real’ AI in the Complaints Management Process.’ The blog focused on how CQ EQMS was using AI-enabled features and capabilities to streamline the end-to-end Complaints Management Lifecycle from intake to closure.

We also subtly touched upon how AI was not just a buzzword at ComplianceQuest, and how our CQ.AI framework is being used to drive real business value for quality leaders, health & safety teams, and organizations as a whole. At the end of the day, the end user is looking to save time, increase productivity and make faster decisions. The question for our product team was just that: Can we make that happen with AI? What happens under the hood doesn’t matter. One can use all the AI, ML, NLP jargon out there; The real question is – How is the end-user impacted?

For the product team at ComplianceQuest, it was critical to design AI capabilities that could drive business value.

We truly wanted to build a solution that would empower quality and safety managers – and, in fact, all users across your organization – to improve efficiency, decrease errors, and free up resources. Sign up for a demo of our powerful AI capabilities today!

In this blog, we focus on the AI-enabled features and capabilities in our Audit Management Solution.

Audits Management: Driving Continuous Improvement Using ‘Real’ AI

Audits are an indispensable tool for continuous improvement as well as compliance with quality and safety standards. However, managing the different types of audits, consolidating findings, then acting on findings generated from audits can easily become a challenge, especially if it is needed across different locations.

Let us say the audit manager scheduled an internal audit for a manufacturing site in Chicago. During the onsite audit, the auditor must assign each Audit Finding with a Finding Type (Major, Minor, Opportunity for Improvement) which can be a subjective decision. With CQ, the auditor gets an AI recommendation for the Audit Finding Type based on the description entered by comparing it to similar previous finding in the system.

Once the audit is done, the site manager receives the report of the audit findings. To truly benefit from the audit, the site manager needs to assess the findings, and compare them to previous findings to notice trends or reoccurrences. With CQ there is no need to waste time manually going through previous audit records. The site manager would automatically get a list of similar audit findings with a score for each finding and a recommendation to mark as reoccurring. The manager can then easily start an investigation and escalate to a CAPA if needed.

Key Benefits:

• Decreased risk of non-compliance during external audits
• Quicker detection and management of reoccurring quality and safety issues
• Decreased time and labor needed for audit execution and management
• Decreased manual or human errors and associated costs

AI to Drive Better User Experience During Audits

Quality and Safety processes can be complex especially if being performed with legacy systems. These processes can also involve many repetitive tasks or redundant and time-consuming efforts. As a result, employees can feel discouraged and be wary of adopting their organization’s system, which could in turn threaten product quality.

As you’ve seen from the previous use cases we described, the AI in ComplianceQuest is weaved into the platform and works behind the scenes to make quality or safety tasks and processes much easier. More importantly, it is designed to reduce redundant tasks such as duplicate records or actions and automate the most time-consuming tasks such as identifying reoccurring complaints or audit findings.

ComplianceQuest also simplifies quality and safety workflows and helps users go through the process with intelligent next-best-action recommendations (NBA) at every step, in every process. All these features augment the user’s capabilities and significantly enhance the experience for anyone that interacts with the platform, increasing adoption, efficiency and reducing errors.

The platform also comes with AI features that help non-frequent users. In addition to offering NBAs for every process, the platform comes with a personalized user interface for each user that shows them their pending tasks and trainings. The interface offers an AI assistant to help employees report issues they encounter on the job; as the employee is entering the description of the event, the AI assistant quickly identifies the reported issue as a Complaint, Safety Incident, or Change Request based on the description provided.

In summary, when using CQ, users spend significantly less time searching for data they need or performing repetitive tasks, they are guided through every step for increased efficiency and are served up predictive analytics for better decision making, all in an extremely user-friendly interface.

Key Benefits

• Improved adoption by both frequent and non-frequent users
• Increased completion of quality and safety tasks by all users including trainings and approvals
• Decreased risk and cost of non-compliance
• Lessened impact of new hires in call centers and quicker onboarding

Try ComplianceQuest’s Audit Management solution, which is a part of our EQMS product suite, to experience the power of real AI. Watch the demo here: https://www.compliancequest.com/demo-video/audit-management-process/

In our next blog as part of the Applied AI series, we’ll focus on how AI is being used to streamline, automate, and speed up the Nonconformance and CAPA Management Process.