What is the purpose of the audit trail in agri-food quality control software? Discover how this feature records, traces, and secures your data to enhance the safety of food products
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2) What is found in an audit trail?
3) What are the benefits of the audit trail in a quality control application?
3) How does the audit trail of a quality control software integrate Food Defense?
What is an audit trail?
In an application or software, an audit trail is a chronological, detailed, automatic, and tamper-evident record of all user activities, also referred to as an 'audit track' or 'log journal.'
The audit trail allows tracking and documenting all changes and actions performed on the data. In the context of quality control in agri-food, an audit trail is essential to ensure the traceability and integrity of control data!
The audit trail helps detect errors, fraud, and facilitates audit and compliance processes.
In summary, the audit trail is:
📹 A surveillance camera that records everything happening in your system, but you can't delete the footage! 😬
What is found in an audit trail?
The audit trail provides a very detailed traceability of actions taken in a software or application. It allows tracking events on the data recorded in an application:
User Identification (Who?): Each modification is associated with the user who performed it.
- User ID
- First Name
- Last Name
- Rights
Timestamp (When?): Chronological recording of actions, essential for tracing events over time.
- Date
- Time
Nature of the Action (What?): Specifies the nature of the data modification.
- Creation
- Modification
- Deletion
Old and New Values (Why?): Provides details about the modification itself, allowing an understanding of the change made.
- Input field
- Old value
- New value
The audit trail is presented in the form of a table (journal) that exposes, in chronological order, all actions. It is non-modifiable and tamper-evident.
Moreover, during modifications, the audit trail allows tracing the data before and after the modification!
What are the benefits of the audit trail in a quality control application?
The audit trail provides several advantages when integrated into a food quality control application.
Firstly, it secures the data by recording all actions taken on it. This helps detect unauthorized manipulations and prevents the risk of fraud or falsification of information.
Additionally, the audit trail provides complete visibility into data modifications, including date, time, and the user involved. In a typical traceability audit, this simplifies information retrieval and history tracking, making it easy to trace all actions performed on a batch, for example.
The audit trail also empowers all users. Generally, software and applications are accessible with a password and an identifier, and each user group has specific "rights" to perform certain actions. Since all actions are timestamped, it is straightforward to monitor certain users if necessary.
Furthermore, the audit trail contributes to compliance with standards, certifications, or export requirements in certain countries. By recording all actions in the context of quality control, it provides tangible evidence throughout the validation chain of a batch:
Source of analysis results > User input > Result compliance > Batch validation > Certificate of Analysis (CoA) signing
The audit trail is an essential tool in quality control as it ensures traceability, integrity, and data security. It offers significant advantages over Excel in terms of security, traceability, and ease of use
How does the audit trail of a quality control software integrate Food Defense?
In the context of Food Defense, the security of food products is an absolute priority.
The use of a quality control management application or software is already a significant gain in general, but it can become central in ensuring the security control chain.
A quality control application records all data related to food product safety, such as analysis results, for example. However, in many food companies, the use of Excel for quality control often proves to be the weak link in this chain.
The vulnerability assessment of your system can quickly highlight this weakness!
⚠️ Why can Excel become your vulnerability?
- Limited Security: Excel spreadsheets are often shared or accessed in an insecure manner, exposing sensitive data to unauthorized access.
- Lack of Access Controls: Excel offers limited permission management, which can lead to unintentional or malicious modifications.
- Lack of Modification Traceability: Excel does not provide adequate traceability of changes, making it difficult to detect errors or unauthorized manipulations.
💡 The audit trail of your quality control application allows for quickly detecting anomalies, suspicious behaviors, and intervening rapidly to prevent malicious acts.
The audit trail provides reliability and evidence of the integrity of control data to ensure the security of food products
