Released: 20 August 2024

It is important to have visibility and transparency when data about a supplier or production unit changes. Since this data is the foundation of your supplier compliance efforts, we realize that it should be possible to see when changes were made, and who made them.

With this release, all changes are showing for both production units and suppliers:

It is possible to add comments as well, for keeping discussions in Qarma, also relating to updating status of production units.

Also changes that are made through audits, or from data integrations will be recorded in the history and marked with which source the change of data comes from.

The history will include all changes made before this release is made available.

Released 12 August 2024

New option: Notify auditor when audit is assigned

There is a new button Save and notify assignee that will notify the auditor that an audit has been assigned:

This release also includes a few minor fixes of text mistakes.

Released 6 August 2024

Audits performed online: Better progress indicators and other improvements

When performing audits and assessments online, each section now has a colored progress bar to indicate if all checkpoints have been filled in:

When adding a note to a checkpoint, the user experience is improved as it now allows typing directly, and the text field expands to multiple lines if the note is long like in the example below:

Audit report: minor improvements

• Date formatting of PDF report: Date formatting is now consistent to always use this three-letter month and then date and year, like Aug 6, 2024. This makes it unambiguous for all and it’s the way dates are displayed elsewhere in Qarma.

• Auditor summary translation in PDF report: In case the online version of the report showed a translated version of the auditors summary text, the PDF version should do it as well. You can control if you want to see translations automatically in your user profile.

• Confirmed supplier and production unit data in PDF report: When the auditor confirms supplier or production unit data, the online report displays a ✓ . The PDF report now also displays this.

• Supplier or production unit data previous values in online report: When there is no previous value, there used to be just a - to indicate this. This is now more clear with text

  

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• Online report summary: When putting the mouse on top of the colored status box, you can now see the detailed description underlying the selected option as shown in the example below where the auditor selected Excellent which has a detailed description.
  

  

• In progress PDF reports: Previously, it was not clear from the PDF report that the audit was in progress. That has now been changed so that it also shows the In progress marking.

Various minor improvements and fixes:

• Inspections planning (week view): Sometimes the reassign option was not shown in case of many inspections for one supplier. This has now been fixed.

• Inspection PDF report: In the header section, if there was no value to show, the report would show the text “None”. This has now been removed, so the box is empty instead.

• Production unit list filters: In some special cases, the filters included production units that should not have been shown.

• The tool to create corrective actions resulted in a separate email to be sent to the responsible user for each corrective action. That has now been fixed so that only one summary email has been sent.

Data integrations for audits: approval flow information now included in event-based data (webhooks)

For event-based data integrations (webhooks), it is now possible to include approval flow information in the data. You can read more about event-based data integrations here: https://qarmainspect.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOC/pages/596934663/Webhooks

For more information, please reach out to [email protected].

Released 2 July 2024

Audits: Avoid duplication of corrective actions

When creating corrective actions in the mobile app, there is now an indication on checkpoints which have already been used for corrective actions. In the example below, the two checkpoints at the top already have a corrective action created.

If the user attempts selecting those checkpoints again, a warning message is shown:

Audits and inspections: moving images between checkpoints has become easier

When you have taken an image on a checkpoint, it is possible to move it to another checkpoint. This supports a work flow where the user takes a lot of images on one checkpoint without spending time on organizing them, and then spends some time on sorting the images later.

When moving the images, the view has been improved with new design and type-to-search for the checkpoint name:

Released 20 June 2024

For corrective actions, Qarma now helps reminding the responsible person that due date is close. With this release, the system will send email notifications to the responsible person 3 days before due date, on the due date, and 3 days after the due date.

Released 17 June 2024

Fixed: Saving auditor’s summary comment from the app

Before this release, the summary comment was uploaded from the mobile app when the audit was submitted. This would mean that the comment was omitted when switching to another user or device. Going forward, it will be transferred to another device.

Fixed: Showing localized version of production unit data

If production unit data fields has translations, it will now be shown.

Released 4 June 2024

Approving in progress audit reports

It is now possible to set approvals for audits that are still in progress. This allows organizations to speed up decision-making processes while leaving the auditor enough time to fully write up the audit in all details.

Please note that users would in this case base their conclusion on a preliminary version of the audit report which might be changed by the auditor after the conclusion was set.

Bug-fixes: Image orientation

Images can now be rotated in the image preview box.

Fixed: In some cases measurement tables and text tables in inspection reports were shown twice.

Released 30 May 2024

In order to allow our users to work more effectively following up on inspections, we have released a new feature to work with corrective actions for inspection reports.

We intend to host a webinar in Mid June highlighting how this new feature could be used for sample inspections and other purposes (will be announced on our LinkedIn page), but until then please find below all the details of this new feature. It will be automatically available as a replacement for follow-up tasks, so there is no action needed on your side. Users who have been using the follow-up tasks feature will get guidance in the report view when the new feature is available.

From the report page, you can select defects or checkpoints which should trigger a corrective action and with a few clicks create a Corrective Action Plan (CAP) for the supplier to follow up.

Getting visual feedback into the reports

One of the key benefits from this new feature is that the images or videos provided as evidence when resolving a corrective action is displayed directly in the report next to the images of the problem. Below is an example of a defect reported (the first two pictures) and then the evidence from the corrective action provided later (shown with the green “Evidence” marking):

This is particularly useful for sample reports where a lot of changes and updates are made based on previous findings, and suppliers will be able to easily provide images for the corrected version.

Inclusion in PDF report

It’s possible to download pdf report including corrective actions by selecting that option in the download menu:

Keep track of corrective actions per supplier

Once Corrective Actions have been created, there is a dedicated menu for keeping track of the status of corrective actions, where you can filter on supplier, due date, status etc.

Resolve from mobile app

In many cases, you want the supplier to provide some evidence that the problem has been solved. The mobile app has a Corrective Actions menu where the supplier can easily take pictures or video and resolve the corrective action. If an approver has been added, it will send an email to this person for approval.

Follow-up tasks

Today, the section on inspection reports called “Follow-up tasks” has been replaced by the new corrective actions. All existing follow-up tasks have been converted to corrective actions.

Permissions

Corrective actions permissions are being split in two with this release:

1 - Corrective actions for Audits and Suppliers

This is the previous section that has just been renamed. It has been left un-touched.

There is also an entry under Features, website which controls whether the corrective action menu is shown or not, this has also been left untouched.

Note that for the mobile app, there is only one entry for controlling visibility of the corrective actions menu, as it included both types of corrective actions.

2 - Corrective actions for Inspections

This section is new and include different scopes than the one above.

The following scopes can be used to control access:

• Creator: The user who creates the corrective action. This user will always have access to editing the corrective action.

• Responsible: The user who is assigned as responsible. This user will always have access to seeing the corrective action plus uploading evidence and resolving it.

• Approver: The user who is assigned as approver. This user will always have access to seeing the corrective action and approving it.

• Group: A corrective action can have a group (can be set on the detailed page). Members of any group that is set on the corrective action will have access through this scope.

• Supplier: Users that are member of the supplier will have access to corrective actions belonging to inspections for this supplier.

• Inspection: Users that have the Show Report permission for an inspection, can be granted access to corrective actions for this inspection as well. To put it short: if you want users who can see the inspection report to also have permissions for its corrective action, use this scope.

User roles will per default have the access that they had for follow-up tasks in the previous version: If the user role had Manage follow-up tasks permissions, it would get all permissions set in the inspection scope (as shown in the above figure). If the user role did not have Manage follow-up tasks permissions, it will only have Show permission in the Inspection scope. You can of course modify these permissions, but the default permissions should make sure that operations can carry on unaffected by this release, only with the added capabilities of the corrective actions as described in this post.

Data export

When exporting inspection data, it is now possible to include corrective actions as a separate sheet:

Furthermore, the inspections sheet will include columns for total, open and closed corrective actions.

Please note that the data format for inspections has not been changed - the addition of corrective actions was anticipated and prepared for when the data format was released.

Released: 23 May 2024

Customize email text when inviting external users for audits and assessments

On the audit edit page, you can select External user as the assigned user.

When doing this and press Preview and send email you will see this message:

In some cases, you may want to modify this text. Clicking Edit email will allow you to replace the text with your own text.

In a a coming release, you will also be able to switch the email text so that it can be sent in Chinese for example.

Bug-fixing: Audit re-assign removes comments

When re-assigning audits that are in progress, any comments added to the audit report would be removed. This has now been fixed.

Bug-fixing: Possible to set approval conclusions on In progress audits

For In progress audits: Although the button was greyed out, it was possible to click and set a conclusion for an approval flow. This has now been fixed.

Released: 22 May 2024

Corrective actions sorting

When showing an audit in the app, the Corrective Action tab now includes a sorted list of corrective actions. If you have a long CAP, this can be very useful.

Bug-fixes

Improvements to app stability when it comes to selecting checklists for inspections and upload of data from the app.