Hi Mark, The percentage scoring systems I have come across generally are flawed, unless they are heavily weighted, as they can give a false impression where a mandatory requirement (such as a fire risk assessment) has not been completed for example (i.e. the FRA only possibly attracting 10% of the overall contributory final percentage score achieved, if that makes sense), so a word of warning with this method I beleive. Pete,

If it's for a generally low risk site (e.g. office) I wouldn't bother. Instead, for higher risk sites you could consider a traffic light type colour coding for the inspection findings . Where the determination of the colours is linked to your risk assessment matrix. Then at the end of your report you can show summaries of the numbers of green/yellow/red (you can add more colours if required). You can then please management by showing them interesting quarterly statistics of how the number of "reds" in their org is decreasing. As usual such as system requires good checklists and competent inspectors.

I used one for a company based in construction/utilities some years back. I also plagiarised it for a company based in the railway industry where I later worked. I thought is was good albeit a bit complex and probably not suitable for low risk environments. The scoring provided an overall percentage which could be used to benchmark each site or to identify long-term performance. The scoring 1-10 was on a spreadsheet with various fields such as welfare, fire and emergency, excavations, W@H, equipment, etc. With each score there was a comment to assist a site manager in understanding the severity with a traffic light colour coding. If I recall correctly, 7 was industry standard (minimum) 8 company standard, 9 exceeding, 10 above and beyond. 6 or below was treated as a near miss with 4 being Improvement Notice, 3 Prohibition Notice, 2 Prosecution, 1 Fatality. Each cluster had a recommendation for action i.e. rectify within 7 days, immediately, stop work. I believe it did focus the minds of those targeted individuals.

I have a current system I inherited which results in a percentage. I really dislike it and am in the middle of changing it - the new model uses exactly the methods suggested by Neil at #4 and Ian at #5. I've worked with site teams to create something which they understand better, and gives better tracking of issues. (none of it's new, by the way - these are all elements other people are using, I'm not claiming to have produced anything original!) In a system where good results add up to give a final score (weighted or otherwise) it can be quite hard to spot where the real problems are - which is what you're actually interested in. If you assign positive scores to everything that's good, and lower scores where there is an issue to resolve, it can be hard to realise that a site scoring 88% actually has twice as much needing fixed as one scoring 94% - they both look pretty good. The system I inherited also paid too little attention to the reasons for any scores less than 100%, the reports did detail these reasons but they weren't separated out as issues to track and follow up. What we'll do in future is assign each issue an A, B or C (which come with pre-agreed deadlines for closeout) and track these via a database which has already got all 2015's inspections in it, and the 331 issues raised in them. The tracking and closeout worked well last year, as well as giving much better info for analysis and reporting. To compare overall inspection results we rejected the idea of assigning number values to A, B and C (eg a site with 1 A might score better than one with 4 Bs once you've added them up). Instead we realised that since As will only be for fairly "Stop this now, someone might die" situations, a system like Olympic medal tables is better - one A is a more serious score than any amount of Bs or Cs. The above is all trialling at the moment, but seems to make sense to people. We'll review in 6 months and decide whether to make it permanent.

We currently use I-Auditor and have developed a pro-forma based on our requirements which includes a percentage scoring system, which can be weighted when and where necessary. It works well and is very well received by our site teams. The key is to trial the inspection format first and iron out any glitches that it may have, its never going to be a finished article so be prepared to amend the document over time to suit your needs.