EASE Summer 2022 Release

Introduces Observations Workflow and In-Audit Insights, and Enables Next-Level Non-Conformance Management

What's New in the EASE Summer 2022 Release

The Summer 2022 Release of EASE is here! Check out the new features and enhancements below.

In-Audit Findings Insights

Recurring issues are the enemy of any plant floor audit program. If issues are occurring in multiple locations within a plant, being found and not addressed, or if non-conformances are being closed out only to occur again shortly thereafter, then the effectiveness of the audits themselves can be called into question. Beyond quality or safety issues, this can also result in a demoralized workforce. Real-time visibility into audit findings and their corresponding resolutions is paramount.

The EASE Summer 2022 Release introduces a new in-audit indicator for repeat findings. Now, if any audit question has failed anywhere in the plant in the last 30 days, any audit that contains that question will display a notification allowing auditors to see what mitigations have been created, their status and who they have been assigned to, where in the plant the issue occurred, who reported the issue in their audit, and for layered process audits (LPAs), what management layer the auditor belongs to. This can help manufacturers identify recurring non-conformances within a plant faster and, combined with an all-new module for reporting findings outside of audits (below), could enable auditors to suggest that leadership initiate a formal CAPA event to identify the root cause of the issue.

Non-Audit Findings

Plant floor audits and inspections, particularly Layered Process Audits (LPAs), are a critical component of identifying non-conformances and risks before they lead to quality or safety issues. Equally important to fostering a culture of quality and safety, however, is ensuring that anyone on the plant floor feels empowered to report any behavior or conditions that they observe at any time and that there is an effective mechanism for ensuring that any incident, whether positive or potentially hazardous, is appropriately followed up on.

Tracking these observations is often done separately from tracking issues identified in LPAs and other audit programs, making it hard to connect the dots on common issues and potentially leading to quality and safety risks that don’t get the appropriate amount of attention that they deserve.

The EASE Summer 2022 Release debuts a brand-new module for reporting findings outside of assigned or impromptu audits. Using this fully customizable new module, EASE customers will be able to configure what types of findings they want their teams to be able to report. Then, any member of their organization will have the ability to record safety observations, create incident reports, notify maintenance, and more. This includes the same ability to add reference files and photos and create issue mitigations that they would have if conducting an audit. Combined with a dedicated Non-Audit Findings view and all of the powerful visual reporting capabilities of EASE, this will help EASE customers further ensure that no issues are falling through the cracks on their plant floors and identify trends that could indicate systemic issues.

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Issue Mitigation Enhancements

In addition to these new methods of creating, categorizing, and analyzing findings, the EASE Summer 2022 Release includes several enhancements designed to make assigning and closing out issue mitigations easier and more effective. These enhancements include:

At a question level, audit program administrators can now not only require that a photo or file be attached when that question fails, but also that the person responsible for completing the resulting mitigation is required to upload a photo or file before they submit the mitigation
In addition to the comment box belonging to audit question responses, every mitigation created in EASE will now have its own comments box for situations where more information needs to be provided to the person responsible for completing the mitigation
Notification emails for new assigned mitigations have been enhanced to provide more context for the mitigation that has been assigned
For mitigations without a default Responsible or Approving Party configured, the dropdown menu will now display the scope and department for every user in the list.
The Responsible and Approving Party lists will now also be pre-filtered to only those users who are most appropriate to be displayed based on location, checksheet, and user scope

Unique Urgency Levels by Audit Program

For customers that manage multiple audit and inspection programs (such as LPAs, safety, and 5S) Ease recently added the ability to create and assign unique failure categories, failure modes, and countermeasures to each program so that all issues and their resolutions could be categorized more accurately for reporting and analysis purposes.

With the EASE Summer 2022 Release, customers now have the ability to create unique urgency levels by audit program. These urgency levels can be created and modified on a site-by-site basis to most accurately reflect issue resolution expectations at any plant. This will help ensure that every audit finding is appropriately prioritized and deliver greater control over the length of time that a mitigation remains open before it is marked as past-due in the system and escalated to management.

Updates to the New Document and Question Interface

Based on overwhelmingly positive feedback from Advanced Question Logic beta users, Ease will begin expanding access to the new Document Library and single-screen question interface following the EASE Summer 2022 Release. In conjunction, the Summer 2022 release includes the following enhancements to the document library:

In the settings for any audit document, audit program administrators can now set the auditor as the default approving party for any mitigations generated in that audit
If a document is configured to require an approval, a record of all approvals can now be found on the Revisions tab for that document
Questions can now be configured to always require comments to be captured, regardless of response
N/A can now be removed as a possible response from any question
In the Question Library, “Has Attachments” and “Last Revision Date” are new sortable, filterable categories
The .CSV and .XLSX question import templates available through the Question Library have been updated to include all new question and response customization options

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Additional Enhancements

In the Reports module, a new ‘Failures by Selected Tag’ panel has been added to enable the tracking of specific sets of tags
In the Reports module, an optional setting has been added to the ‘Average Score by Tag’ panel to also display scores as a percentage
When creating or modifying Groups within Manage, items can now be reordered within groups or moved to different groups via drag-and-drop
When creating or editing questions, number responses can now be given custom labels to indicate the type of value being captured, i.e. pressure or temperature
All list views in EASE that are able to be exported now support export in both .XLSX and .CSV format
Within daily digest summary emails, Area has been added to the Audits section

Availability

EASE Summer 2022 Release features will be released during the upcoming quarter. EASE releases most new features and enhancements to customers quarterly, in addition to monthly service packs containing additional enhancements and bug fixes. In the case of major updates, EASE conducts a beta program with a subset of customers at specific sites to collect feedback prior to full release. Please contact your customer success manager or the EASE support team for further details and with any questions.