Tuesday 7 June 2016

Saving time: self-audits on-line

Quantifying the amount of time organisations spend on the self-audit task is difficult.  It will vary from one supplier to the next and from buyer to buyer. What is known is that it is a repetitive task, and needlessly so.  

In my experience as an aviation buyer of 20+ years, vendor management often "falls between the cracks" with neither the quality department nor the purchasing department wanting ownership.  Hardly surprising given how difficult and time consuming it can be to set up initially, and then to control.  

I sent out 500+ self-audits to suppliers, with frequent reminders, keeping accurate records as to if/when they responded, and if they didn't reply I was presented with a non-conformance by the quality department. This was hugely time consuming and took me away from my main task of purchasing spares to support the airline fleet.  Having visited many airlines to discuss AvSMART.aero, I know that my 500 suppliers is dwarfed by those of some purchasing departments, making it an even more onerous task. From a supplier's viewpoint, it's understandable how there would be a delay in returning these forms, if they are receiving the same (or similar) form from potentially hundreds of buyers.  A quality department has many tasks  and rarely dedicate an individual solely to completing these forms.  Often they produce a standard pack, but even this can take time to keep updated, and costs money to reproduce and re-send.

This particular buyer decided to do something about the problem and here's one thing that is easily quantifiable: AvSMART.aero is just one form, easy to update, and changes are automatically communicated to buyers using MyAvSMART.  The initial completion may take 20 minutes, with updates taking very little time at all, simply log in and change information as required. 

Please take a look - if it doesn't fulfil your needs let us know why - we can add questions so it becomes the only self-audit tool you need.  One slightly longer form is far preferable to many, many forms repeating the same request for information.  

Be smart with AvSMART.

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