These days more and more organizations understand the importance of structured incident reporting. Things like customer complaints, health and safety incidents, product defects and quality issues, non-conformance incidents, and internal audit findings are documented and tracked. This is an important step in identifying and resolving problems, but it is only the first one.

Incident reports must be analyzed to identify necessary corrective and preventative actions. Then those opportunities for improvement must be implemented, tracked, and measured. That’s why it makes sense to manage incident reporting and continuous improvement in one combined and integrated solution. Here are the reasons it works:

Incidents and Ideas Can Be Reported In One System

Employees will only need to learn and access one solution to report both incidents and ideas for improvement. If you choose a cloud-based system, it can be accessed anytime, from anywhere, making it easy to ensure that all incidents and ideas are captured. People can submit the incident from a workstation, their own computers, cell phones, or tablets so that it doesn't interrupt their current workflow. You can use the terminology and the workflows that your people are used to while establishing a standard way to capture, implement, measure, and share incidents and improvements across your organization.

End-to-End Control and Reporting

With one centralized solution, there is no gap between the reporting of an incident and the action required to correct it and prevent recurrence. This helps ensure that no balls get dropped and gives management visibility into the entire process. As soon as the incident is captured, the right leaders are notified and can assign it to someone to fix right away. You can see the timeline of events that leads to an incident being fixed and track the impact of that resolution in the same spot.

Investigation and Action Assignments

A unified solution makes it easy to assign individuals to investigate incidents and to pull in the necessary resources to begin and complete the improvement cycle. Most of the time, managers assign the person who identified the problem to fix it - but that doesn't have to be the case. Continuous improvement software makes it easy to build a team around addressing the incident so that the right people are kept engaged and informed throughout the process.

Streamlined Notifications and Alerts

One benefit of a single solution for incident management and continuous improvement is that alerts and notifications are streamlined to cut out the noise and make sure users get all -  and only - the information they need. Each person has their own configurable dashboard to make it so they get the details they want most without a lot of effort.

A Single Version of the Truth

With a unified solution in place, there is only one version of history. You don’t have to worry about discrepancies between systems or try to send status information back and forth. You can search that database at any point in the future to look up old problems, see if an issue has been solved already, check out engagement and activity metrics, and definitively know the impact each improvement is having on your organization.

Incident management and continuous improvement technologies are like peanut butter and chocolate. Both are delicious, but together they are amazing.