Total Assessment Audits (TAA) in Iowa

摘要

Traditionally, energy, waste reduction and productivity audits are performed for a manufacturing facility independent of one another. Auditors generally deliver recommendations for improvement based on their specialized expertise (energy, waste reduction, productivity, etc.) without regard to how those recommendations may impact other, sometimes less obvious, subsystems or processes within the facility. The audits are typically performed in isolation from the plant upper management and commonly without adequate knowledge of how inherent interrelated operational constraints may directly or indirectly influence the success of audit recommendations. The Total Assessment Audit (TAA) concept originated from the belief that a manufacturing facility is better served using a holistic approach to problem solving rather than the more conventional isolated approach. The TAA methodology partners the upper management team of a company with a multi-disciplined team of industry-specific specialists to collectively ascertain the core opportunities for improvement in the company and then to formulate a company oriented continuous improvement plan. Productivity, waste reduction, and energy efficiency objectives are seamlessly integrated into a single service delivery with the TAA approach. Nontraditional audit objectives that influence profitability and competitiveness such as business management practices, employee training, human resource issues, etc. are also subject to evaluation in a TAA. The underlying premise of this approach is that the objectives are interrelated and that simultaneous evaluation will produce synergistic results. Ultimately, it is believed that the TAA approach can motivate a manufacturer to implement improvements in might not otherwise pursue if it were focused only on singular objectives.