Compass, the UK and Ireland's largest Contract Catering and Support Services organisation has signed an agreement with mobile compliance software company Knowledge Online to implement its software across its entire UK and Ireland business. The auditing software initially covers Food Safety, Health & Safety and Unit Procedural Audits with other audit areas to follow.

Compass Group (UK & Ireland) aims to speed up the collection of vital field based compliance information whilst reducing the amount of manual intervention required to obtain and collate the results. This will be achieved through utilising the online auditing system provided by Knowledge Online. With over 1.3 million audits conducted each year, there is a vast business benefit to be gained in terms of time saved in report writing and reducing paper-based activity. Compass will also have the benefit of real-time issue and action tracking.

The solution will initially be conducted over the web via workstations and laptops located in the individual business units. Mobile staff and visiting auditors will have the option to use E-SAFE on their PDAs.

Commenting on the agreement with Knowledge Online, Director of Risk, Bernhard Mallette said "the auditing solution provided by Knowledge Online supports our strategy of unifying the business units into one common process. We were looking for a company that was able to understand our business processes and integrate with our existing systems. Knowledge Online were able to quickly to deliver what we wanted through their fully managed hosted platform".

Andy McDonald, Knowledge Online's Managing Director said "I am delighted to be working with Compass on such an important business change programme. This is a major deal for us with up to 10,000 user licenses and we look forward to rolling out the audit management solution commencing mid-September".