Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) is a concept to ensure that any manufacturer is meeting a certain standard and quality, regardless of operating industry. By integrating a GMP checklist into your inspection process, you can be assured that the products coming out of your warehouse or shop are meeting the standards set by the industry.
Performing a Good Manufacturing Practice inspection can increase your quality, as well simplify the audit trail for safety, product recall, legal and regulatory issues. The checklist itself can be set up to inspect whatever your organisation produces. Whether this is large mechanical parts or handcrafted porcelain, there are certain steps that remain the same across most manufacturing processes. Things such as the personnel and training; quality control systems; packaging and labelling; materials and assets; buildings and facilities and customer service will all apply to most businesses. To inspect and monitor these it is drastically easier to implement a paperless solution and place all checks on one mobile application. Suddenly the vast amounts of paper checklists have all been put on one inspection application; best of all – there’s room for an almost endless amount more.
Good manufacturing practice inspections work best when the inspector or field officer can conduct a simple but detailed, efficient but powerful audit. Using things such as a camera to take pictures of products or scan barcodes/RFID, information capture is sped up whilst the information itself becomes an image in place of text. This removes ambiguity and can be later used as a template for a perfect product/asset condition. Other services can include speech-to-text services to record any notes or any visual check. With standardise response checklists streamlining the tick-box steps, and GPS timestamps helping to historically categorise inspection data, much of the data entry in regular inspection is removed. No longer must an inspector carry out an inspection and then enter this data into a good manufacturing practice database on a PC, all the inspection data from the digital inspection is instantly logged on the system. This means that inspectors can see their data be logged against the historical records for an asset or process, as well as send the GMP compliance notification to management as soon as possible. Cutting out the lengthy process of entering the data again and sending it off can be removed, meaning manufacturing lead times and down times are minimised.
