Paperless IFS/BRC audits — the tablet opens the form, the person signs, the dossier builds itself.

The problem

Audit day disappears into paper — and the good evidence gets lost on the way.

A well-prepared IFS or BRC audit starts a month before and ends weeks after. The quality lead spends the whole day with the auditor, paper in hand, ticking boxes, dictating notes into a laptop between one process and the next, taking photos with a personal phone that they later try to hang on the right batch from their desk. And even doing it well, three things do not add up:

1. Evidence falls out of order the moment it leaves the process. A photo with no context, a note with no timestamp, a signature from a supervisor who changes shift and nobody knows which CCP it belonged to.
2. The quality system does not capture the moment. The QA module in the ERP/MES is built for planned records, not for the findings that come out of the auditor's walk.
3. The final dossier is rebuilt by hand. Days — sometimes weeks — stitching the day's paper together with the line records so they match inside the batch file.

The classic system (operator + checklist + trained eye + ERP) works because people are good at it. What does not work is capturing the auditor's moment: the instant they look at a pack, a temperature, a cleaning step, and decide whether it passes or not.

How it fits the IRIS system

iLEAN does not add another QA system — it is the filler between the auditor's walk and the batch dossier.

On audit day information is not missing: what is missing is connecting the moment to the quality system you already have. iLEAN Connect acts as that filler between the auditor holding the tablet and the QA module of the ERP/MES or the internal repository. It does not demolish what works — it seals the crack.

The auditor taps the CCP. Connect opens the mobile form. Voice, photo and signature stay attached to the live batch. The person signs — the dossier builds itself.

The iLEAN pieces applied to the IFS/BRC audit:

• Connect (mobile form) — a tablet view for every process/CCP. It captures text, voice, photo and signature. It runs on the phone or tablet the auditor already carries, or on a corporate tablet prepared by the quality lead. If the room has no WiFi, it syncs once the link is back; what is critical does not wait.
• Connect (listening inward and outward) — it picks up whatever falls along the way: the operator's answer when the auditor asks a question at the machine, the maintenance lead's message confirming the last intervention on the panel, the supplier delivery note that arrives by email mid-morning. It all enters the system at second zero.
• Agents — they cross-check capture time, the CCP ticked, the production order running and the rules of the IFS/BRC scheme. They attach the evidence to the right batch without asking when the match is clear. When in doubt, they do not invent: they propose to the auditor with one tap. And at end of day the agent prepares the batch file — the boring, concrete agent — so the certification body can read it in one pass.

See the full IRIS architecture →

Before and after

Paper-based audit vs. audit with the Connect mobile form

Aspect	Audit on paper + spreadsheet	With iLEAN Connect + Agents
Evidence capture in-process	Checklist, loose photo, note on a laptop	Mobile form per CCP with voice, photo and signature
Evidence ↔ batch link	By hand, days later	Automatic by time + CCP + production order
Auditor's subjective notes	Sometimes lost or reworded	Verbatim voice, not rewritten by the AI
Quality lead escorting	Double work: takes notes and supervises	Supervises; the capture is already recorded
Room connectivity	n/a	Tablet keeps capturing and syncs on reconnection
Final batch dossier	Rebuilt by hand, days/weeks	Automatic batch file, person signs it off

Impact estimate

Impact estimate for your plant — to be validated with your numbers.

The block below is an estimate to be validated with the actual data of your plant. We put it forward so the committee has an order of magnitude; we refine it during the diagnostic.

• Food plant with IFS Food or BRCGS certification, one annual audit day plus monthly internal walks, HACCP/QA records today on paper + spreadsheet + the QA module of the ERP.
• Connect pilot (mobile form per CCP + batch-matching agent + dossier generation). First value expected within a few weeks: the first internal round already enters the system structured.
• Indicative payback between 4 and 9 months, depending on the hours per shift spent today rebuilding the dossier and the cost of a major non-conformity reaching the certification body.
• Reduction of audit dossier preparation time of ≥ 30%. The underlying lever is not efficiency: it is protecting your ability to pass recertification without surprises.

And the quality lead's reasonable doubt

«What if the AI rewords the auditor's note and leaves wrong evidence in the file?» — hallucination is a problem of free generation, not of anchored tasks. Connect does not rewrite the note: it stores it verbatim. AI only works on anchored tasks (attaching to the batch, sorting by CCP, generating the dossier), where the best models brought the error rate below 1.5%^[1]. And even then, what is critical is not decided alone: the agent proposes the doubtful matches and the person signs the batch off.

^[1] OpenAI paper «Why Language Models Hallucinate», 2025 — on the reliability of AI in anchored tasks.