Audits on Business Are Not Just For The Farm
Posted on: 21/04/16
“It’s vital that producers look at their business with a critical and detailed eye to ensure performance is optimised and costs are controlled.”
- PigWorld.co.uk, (2016). ‘On-farm audit geared to optimise performance and profits.’ Online <http://www.pig-world.co.uk/news/business/on-farm-audit-geared-to-optimise-performance-and-profits.html> Access Date: 15th April 2016.
The short article published on Pig World may be seen as catering for the people involved in the British pig industry but the point of the post poses valuable lessons that can be applied to any business and any industry.
Audits are carried out in businesses to conduct inspections to ensure compliance to requirements are being met. Audits can reveal a lot about how your business is currently working and if improvements need to be made to the organisation for overall better efficiency and productivity, as well as saving and driving down costs.
The article explains how carrying out an on-farm audit (an internal audit), covering potential efficiency factors such as animal health, could help optimise herd performance and farm profitability.
Carrying out an internal audit on your business processes will assess performance, management practices and potential and different associated risks. By assessing how your business is operating, businesses are able to make key decisions on how to make changes by creating an improvement plan to overcome the current wider scale risk.
Management procedures have increasingly hit the top of improvement plans. Audits have highlighted the issues surrounding the storage of documents, the management of data and the security of information. To improve the management of business data and assets, business management systems have become the solution to gain better control of internal data and processes.
Business management systems are enabling organisations to easily, store, edit and upload business data and documents, while also notifying relevant departments with updates and alerts to changes while keeping track of all audible activities and creating reports to notify senior level staff of improvements and losses in the business.
Implementing business management systems to optimise performance will help organisation stay in line with compliance regulations and consumer requirements – certification on health and safety standards can be better stored and managed when renewal is due; while ensuring improved return on investment and higher profitability on products or services.
Assessing how your business is performing internally will provide a path for successful business growth as you minimise risk and increase productivity and efficiency.
