What is a layered process audit?
A Layered Process Audit (LPA) is a management tool that is used to ensure that tasks are completed according to the specified standards, emphasize the requirements of the standard, and recognize areas of improvement in a workplace. It is a system used for quality management and is vital to the manufacturing process. This is to protect against serious risks such as product recalls, warranty issues, customer complaints, and employee frustration.
Ideally, any established process in an organization can be assessed through this technique. Layered process audit checklists are methods and practices employed in the manufacture of a product, ensuring the quality, safety, and performance levels are maintained or constantly improved.
An LPA audit should have between 10 and 15 short and precise yes/no questions that are focused on vital stages in the production process. Although some businesses use an identical audit for every layer in the organization, it is critical to have separate audit checklists for each level.
Reasons to Implement an LPA
Some of the benefits that may result from implementing an LPA include:
- Improves customer satisfaction
- Improve the overall quality of the process and final products
- Reduces instances of poor quality resulting from faulty processes
- Increases cash flow for the organization
- Updating vital processes is much easier
- Enables the organization to complete processes on the first try
- Improve communication between plant operators and management
- Reduce waste materials due to rejects or reworks
- Ensure that tasks can be measured and standardized
- Improve the relationship between leadership and plant operators.
Components of an LPA
The successful implementation of an LPA requires coordination within the organization to maintain quality by ensuring conformance in the processes used in production. An LPA has three main aspects:
- The LPA method uses a layer of auditors to ensure that the stages of production are kept consistent and that any problems arising from non-uniformity are resolved instantly. Specific personnel in the organization such as shift supervisors and middle managers regularly (daily, weekly, and monthly) conduct the same checks using identical audit templates to point out and address inconsistencies in the stages of production.
- The second component is a layer of audits whereby the same audit template is used throughout the whole evaluation. This requires collaboration and coordination between the appointed auditors in the organization, who take control of the LPA process. The audit checklist should be designed to be as precise as possible to ensure reporting is more efficient.
- Arguably the most vital element of LPAs involve audit evaluation, follow-up, and correction. This is about analyzing the stages of production to identify inefficiencies in the process and applying measures to prevent further issues arising from non-conformity in the process.
How to Implement an LPA
Implementing an LPA can be summarized in five steps. However, if not done properly it can prove to be a waste of time since it requires a lot of coordination between different stakeholders in the organization. The main steps are:
- The first step is to choose your team. Appoint an LPA team made up of different employees from various departments in your organization including marketing, production, distribution, and management. The team should have a wide variety of perspectives on different aspects of production and management to limit reliance on specialists.
- Now that you have a team, prepare a set of audit checklist questions that you want to be discussed. Remember to keep your questions short, objective, and precise to avoid confusion. It would be ideal if different departments participated in formulating the questions.
- Come up with an audit plan putting in mind all the different layers of the audit that you want to implement. At this stage, you have to decide who will conduct the audit on which layer and how often.
- It is finally time to execute your LPA after taking it from the design to the implementation stage. It is vital to follow up on progress to ensure corrections are made on time for a more efficient implementation.
- The last step is to evaluate the data collected to ascertain if the program has been effective. The efficacy of the audit should be measured and improvements made to increase the efficiency of the program.
It is critical to remember that LPA implementation is an ongoing activity for a business and constant changes have to be made to improve performance metrics. The quality of questions also play a big part in the effectiveness of this technique; make sure you come up with relevant questions for the best results.
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