How are users notified about audits and corrective activities?

The process of conducting audits and handling corrective activities that respond to identified nonconformities usually involves more than one person. The role of Activity Audit is to ensure that — thanks to a comprehensive notification system — all participants in the process are kept up to date, among others, about:

• events moving process forward,
• current status nad progress,
• significant changes, especially those related to responsible persons and deadlines,
• the risk of exceeding agreed deadlines.

Notifications are delivered primarily via email, and if the user uses the mobile application, also in the form of push notifications.

How often are notifications sent?

Notifications can be divided into messages sent immediately (within up to 5 minutes) after the triggering event occurs, and reports sent at scheduled times, taking the client’s time zone into account.

Event-related information

This is the broadest group of notifications, which are sent within a maximum of 5 minutes after an event occurs. These include:

• Assignment of an activity to be performed – the most common type of notification, informing that another user or a system process has assigned a person an activity to perform. This may include, for example, conducting an audit, taking a corrective activity, or completing any other task. Only the person designated to carry out the activity receives the notification.

• Completion of an activity – after moving the progress slider to 100%, a notification is sent indicating completion and requesting approval of the work. The notification is received by the activity plan owner and participants with the WRITE access level. NOTE: If the person completing the activity is also the plan owner, the activity immediately moves to the accepted status, and therefore no notification is generated.

• Acceptance/rejection of activity completion – if, in the next step, the activity plan owner or another person with appropriate permissions accepts or rejects the request for activity approval, the relevant information is sent to the person responsible for the activity.

• Information about changes in your activity plan – due to its extensive characteristics, changes to a plan may be made by a person with sufficiently high permissions who does not act as the AP owner—read more about the rules for access to the activity plan. In such cases, a notification about the changes made—such as rescheduling an activity—is sent to the plan owner and to participants with write permissions.

• Activity reminder – the Poke function – this function allows the AP owner to send an email reminder to the person responsible for a given activity. To prevent misuse of this option, the owner can use it only once per day for a specific activity.

• Escalation – a notification that is the “reverse” of the reminder described above. The sender is usually the person responsible for the activity, who wants to inform the activity plan owner about obstacles in performing the activity, such as an unrealistic deadline or insufficient resources. The notification is sent to the plan owner and to participants with write permissions.

• Delegation of an activity – users with standard permissions cannot assign an activity to another person, but they can submit a request to change the responsible person. In such a case, the designated person receives a notification, and if they do not respond within the specified time, the request is automatically accepted. This second event also triggers the sending of an appropriate notification.

• Requesting a deadline change – similarly to the previous case, users with standard permissions cannot change an activity’s due date, but they can request it. As a result, the activity plan owner receives a notification. If they do not respond within the specified time, the request is automatically accepted. This second event also triggers the sending of an appropriate notification.

• Reminder about a scheduled check – a check is a function whose purpose is to verify after a specified time—without interrupting the progress of other work—whether the implemented solution has produced the intended result. Any number of checks can be assigned to an activity for selected future dates. As a result, on the given day, the person designated to carry out the check will receive an appropriate message.

• Notification about adding an attachment – files attached to activities often contain key information that is important for people responsible for activity plans and audits. This notification includes information about who attached the file(s) and when, and if the attachment is an image, also its thumbnail.

• Notification of being designated as the activity plan owner – the current activity plan owner may designate another person to take their place. This results in a notification being sent to the new owner. Unlike activity delegation, this operation does not require acceptance.

Audit-related event information

• Audit plan for the next week – in Activity Audit, most audits are issued for a specific day, and consequently the notification (Assignment of an activity to be performed) is sent on that day after 6:00. However, it is possible to enable advance audit planning. In such a case, on a selected weekday (Monday to Friday), all audits for the following week are scheduled. Notifications about this event are sent on the selected day after 13:00 to the person designated as the auditor.

• Information about a scheduled audit – this is a notification whose sending can be controlled in the audit zone settings, intended for the zone leader so that the person responsible for maintaining the standard can prepare for the scheduled audit.

• Information about audit results – similarly to the above, sending or not sending this notification can be managed through the audit zone settings. The message is sent to the zone leader after the audit is completed and includes, among other things, information about the result, identified nonconformities, and proposed recommendations.

Regular reports

This is a group of notifications sent daily after 7:00 in the client’s headquarters time zone. Each notification of this type may include both activities with upcoming deadlines and overdue ones.

Each user can individually set the frequency of report delivery, with three options available:

• Less frequent reports – a message is sent if the deadline of at least one activity falls: today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or in 3 days.
• More frequent reports – a message is sent if the above condition is met, and additionally if the deadline falls in 7 or 14 days.
• No reports – notifications are not sent at all; this is the default option for users during the free 30-day Activity Audit trial period.

Other notifications

• XLSX export – most reports available in the system provide an option to export data to the XLSX format. If report generation takes longer than 20 seconds, the operation is interrupted and the user will not receive the file directly in the browser. Instead, after a short while, the report will be delivered as an email attachment.

• Access provisioning – this is a group of notifications related to account creation and logging into the system.

Other notification features

All notifications contain links leading to related views within the web platform, and if clicked on a mobile phone, to the Activity Audit mobile application (formerly Activity Plan Pulse).

Notifications are sent once every 5 minutes—more precisely at: 0:00, 0:05, 0:10, etc. This brings two very important functions that reduce the number of messages sent by the system, and thus informational noise:

1. If two or more similar events (e.g., activity completion) generating notifications occur during this time, instead of sending X email messages, the system groups them and sends them in a single message.
2. If, during this time, an event occurs that cancels a previous event (e.g., withdrawal of activity completion after activity completion), no notification will be sent.

Summary

The notification system in Activity Audit is designed to keep all participants of audits and corrective activities fully informed about progress, changes, deadlines, and potential risks. By combining event-driven notifications, scheduled reports, and features such as reminders, escalations, and advance audit planning, the system ensures transparency, accountability, and efficient collaboration while minimizing unnecessary communication noise.