Quality Compliance Systems

Manchester City Council: HATS Case Study - Download Case Study (PDF)

QAP greatly simplifies the administration and reporting of school catering facilities inspections. It is easy to use and the open architecture of the solution will enable authorities to:

Save time on the completion of forms
Prevent repetition and improve accuracy by removing the need to re-enter information on centrally held databases
Ensure the questions are relevant and up to date with changing circumstances
Quickly obtain current and past management information on key performance indicators
Interrogate the survey results in a number of ways

The necessary inspection of school catering facilities requires a large amount of paperwork to be competed and filed for what is effectively a repetitive task. While advances in technology have been able to reduce the time spent on administrative tasks in many areas, this has not been the case for quality assurance questionnaires due to the mobile nature of the job.

Now that has changed with the introduction of the APH Quality Assurance Program (QAP) solution. QAP has been designed specifically to facilitate local authority quality assurance programs and consequently is ideally suited to school catering facilities inspections. It covers all types of school: nursery, primary, infants, junior, secondary and special needs. Since the development of the suite it has grown in statue with the abilities to carry out multiple surveys for different areas, for example Cleaning, Civic etc. The QAP solution is considered as a powerful tool in the areas of inspections with the local authorities.

The QAP solution

QAP is designed to be fully and easily customisable to ensure that the exact requirements of the Local authority are met. It utilises the latest mobile technologies (PDAs & XDAs). This enables the inspector to enter the details onto the system whilst on-site and then automatically update the centrally held SQL database, without the need to re-key any information.

Information structure and process

The solution is based on a 3-tier model:

Tier 1 - Major survey area, e.g. Hygiene standards or health & safety
Tier 2 - Sub sections, e.g. hygiene standards could be split into: staff hygiene, kitchen equipment, kitchen areas and dining areas
Tier 3 - The questions relating to each sub section

Survey answers are entered at the tier 3 level via 2 types of form:

Questions form - allows a Y/N input against pre-specified items
Input form - here both the item detail and the pass/fail status can be entered.

QAP enquiry
QAP provides a comprehensive enquiry program that enables the Authority to view all the data held in the central database. As the database is written in SQL it is very easy to extract statistics with products such as Excel Query. APH can also provide a service to develop standard reports and queries to meet unique Authority requirements.

The enquiry routine performs three functions. Firstly it provides access to the surveys themselves for full viewing of the data. Secondly it provides maintenance facilities to add additional questions and alter the weighting associated with each section or specific question. Thirdly it provides analysis of the survey results producing ranking positions, average scores overall and by section, and bar charts for comparisons. Survey statistics can be extracted to Excel by the click of a button.

Easy to use system
For both types of form the navigation is easy to follow. Each page of the survey can have additional information entered both as free text and by selection from standard pre-set comments. This provides for a more personal response that just a pass/fail status. All survey questions can be modified or expanded to suit changing requirements.

The survey results are based on modifiable parameter tables that can be expanded to meet individual Local Authority requirements

Corrective actions can be entered for each failed question and targeted to a specific person. At the end of the survey these corrective actions are grouped by respondent for feedback.

Once the survey has been completed, the summary form can present the final survey results and give an overall percentage performance. It can then be printed on-site for the catering manager to sign acceptance of the results. If on-site printing of the survey summary is not utilised then the catering manager can sign on the PDA itself.

The agreed survey results are then updated to the centrally held database via the Internet and a mobile phone or a cradle linked to a desktop computer. Up to 20 simultaneous connections can be supported at any one time. Once the survey results have been updated to the central database a PDF format report can be emailed to any required recipient.