We recently sat down with Thomas Lorber, CEO and co-founder of Intact, to preview the live webinar that he and his colleague, Intact Solutions Manager and platform expert Robbin van Zanten, will be presenting with the Exemplar Global team on Wednesday, July 31 at 1 p.m. U.S. Eastern time. Register for the webinar here!
For certification bodies and other audit-centric companies, efficiency is of the utmost importance. The Intact platform is a state-of-the-art software tool that can help these organizations maximize the value that comes from their auditors actually auditing, while minimizing the nonvalue-added tasks like entering (and re-entering) duplicate bits of data which so often chew up the auditors’ time.
“What’s really important for our customers is offering their auditors tools to make their work easier,” says Lorber. “It’s not about reducing the auditing time, necessarily, because the auditors should spend their time auditing. What they should not do after an audit is copy-and-paste information from one Word doc to another. Our software helps efficiently prepare the audit and allows the auditor to create the audit reports and the nonconformity reports easily, which means that they don’t have to do double work. It guides them through the process and supports them.”
Certification bodies naturally work with many clients and many auditors, so this tool is an ideal solution to ensure effectiveness at scale.
“Our software is intended to be used by certification bodies, who use a high number of auditors and want to bring the right auditors to the right place and support them in the best way,” says Lorber. “These auditors must be highly skilled and highly qualified, and those qualifications are much more important than their skill in working with software.
“All kinds of auditors working for the certification bodies get benefit from the Intact platform,” Lorber continues. “It’s a very agnostic system, so regardless of the sector or the standard, it makes the auditing work easier and lets the auditor focus on the audit itself.”
Every audit-focused organization has key performance indicators that they need to improve or maintain. These KPIs can fall in the areas of higher revenues, lower costs, better efficiency, greater workforce utilization, or faster throughput. Technology can help in this realm.
“It’s all about the tools that can help streamline the organization,” Lorber says. “For example, regulations often require better documentation. This becomes a driver for software systems to fulfill the requirement.
“Data is another driver,” Lorber states. “A lot of information is stuck in silos, and certification bodies need to collect data in the right way so that they can get additional benefit from it in the future. Our mission, and the real purpose of our platform, is to enable the full use of all this information.”
Any discussion of data must include the realization that artificial intelligence is already changing the way we work in any number of industries, and management system auditing is no exception.
“We believe that the future of auditing isn’t doing more audits. The future of auditing is doing smarter audits. How do you do that? You use data in a good way and maybe connect it with other data sources. AI will be a big part of that.
“It will always be a combination of factors,” concludes Lorber. “There will continue to be a strong need for auditors, and the Intact platform along with AI tools will allow certification bodies to better use of the limited time of their auditors. By utilizing data, you can employ your people in a much better way because if you can quickly point them to potential problems, it makes for a more efficient audit.”
Remember, the joint Intact-Exemplar Global webinar happens live on Wednesday, July 31 at 1 p.m. U.S. Eastern time. All registrants will receive a link to the recording if the live webinar time does not suit your specific time zone. To register for free, visit online here.