Getting to know the Mine Site Sustainability Audit App
The Mine Site Sustainability Audit (MSSA) app is an online application developed and deployed in 2021 by personnel of the Strategic Development and Growth Group of Nickel Asia Corporation (NAC), using entirely NAC in-house resources. The personnel directly involved in its development are Rolando R. Cruz, Mary Lyndsy C. Bartolome, Manuel A. Rivas, Jr., Jo Cristine C. Li, Pamela Victoria R. Galang, Carlo A. Tac-an, Matthew F. Fabic, and Renee M. Daza.
The program is designed to automate the Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) internal audit process for the 8 TSM Protocols adopted by the Chamber of Mines of the Philippines (COMP). The MSSA was originally intended for use in NAC operating project sites by NAC-designated internal auditors and auditees. With the MSSA, the generation, compilation, and reporting of results can be conducted remotely within a shorter time frame and with lesser resources required.
The app is designed for the internal audit of the eight (8) TSM Protocols adopted by the COMP for its member companies. These protocols are:
- ICC/IP and Community Outreach and Social Development,
- Preventing Child and Forced Labor,
- Water Stewardship,
- Biodiversity Conservation Management,
- Safety and Health Performance, and
- Crisis Management and Communications Planning,
- Climate Change, and
- Tailings Management
The application does not cover any kind of audit for other TSM Protocols not adopted by COMP, nor any kind of similar audits intended for other purposes. The audit assessment rating system implemented in the application, while based on the original TSM rating system, is made simpler – answerable by either 1 ("YES") or 0 ("NO"). This binary rating system makes the audit straightforward, with no room for vague audit inputs, either from the auditee or the auditor.
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The audit proper in the app consists of the following items in this hierarchy: (Note: The Levels are not applicable to the Preventing Child and Forced Labor Protocol and the Crisis Management and Communications Planning Protocol)
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For each Protocol, there are Indicators for which the mine site will be assessed. Under each Indicator are Levels to measure where the mine site is at in terms of implementation or performance. For every Level within each Indicator, there are Questions that need to be answered to meet the requirement for a certain level. Lastly, for each Question, there are Evidences that are required to support the answer.
The Level of assessment per Indicator ranges from C (lowest) to AAA (highest).
The resulting assessed level of performance is on a per Indicator basis for each protocol.
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Before the audit, the auditee should prepare in advance all the evidences to be presented to the auditor either via email or a file sharing platform for ease of access.
During the audit proper, which can be done by way of video conference:
The auditor logs in to the MSSA app, clicks on the Audit Proper page, enters the details needed (i.e., mine site name, name of auditee, date), chooses the TSM Protocol for which the mine site will be audited, and proceeds to Audit Scoring.
The auditor conducts the interview with the auditee using the MSSA:
The page will display the list of evidences that are needed on a per Level and per Question basis.
The auditee must present/show the documents, highlighting the statement(s) in the document, which will support the answer to the evidence being asked for.
If the auditor is satisfied with the evidence presented by the auditee, the auditor will mark the evidence “1”. If not, the evidence will be marked “0”.
An evidence for a particular question marked with “1” results in “YES”; “0” is “NO”.
The auditor then proceeds to the next questions up to the level the mine site can be assessed for by clicking on the “Next/Save” button until he/she reaches the last question, after which the “Last/Save” button will be displayed at the end.
A summary page per Level will be displayed after all of the questions for that level have been answered. The list of questions and the corresponding resulting answer of “YES” or “NO” and with the total number of 1's and 0's that were answered for the evidences will be displayed.
If all the questions have been answered with a “YES”, the auditor may proceed to answer questions in the next level by clicking on the “Next Level” button. If there are questions with a “NO” answer, the assessment for that indicator will end at that level; the auditor may proceed to answer questions for the next Indicator by clicking on the “Next Indicator” button.
The auditor continues to the next Indicator until all the questions for the next Indicators have been answered.
Upon reaching and answering the questions for the last Indicator of a particular Protocol, the auditor will be prompted by the app that he/she has reached the last Indicator. The app will ask the auditor to click on the Assessment Summary Report or proceed to the Audit Proper page to select a new Protocol to audit.
The Assessment Summary or Score per Indicator is presented in tabular form and bar graph. The score per Indicator will depend on the resulting answer to all the questions for a certain Level. For example, if all the answers are “YES” to “B”-level questions, the assessment result for that Indicator will correspond to “B”. If not – that is, there is a “NO” answer to a “B”-level question – the assessment result will be at the lower Level “C”. The assessment will end there; there is no need to answer the “A”-level questions.
The app automatically generates and saves the results of the audit and can be accessed in the Reports menu. For ease of review, the auditor may opt to save the results offline by saving it in pdf format.