The idea that a company can ‘manage’ an inspection or an inspector is either overly optimistic or at the very least naive. In Europe, where the production and storage sites are licensed, the refusal of an inspection, or failing to respond to inspectors’ requests, can result in the license being taken away surprisingly quickly.

We would pre-run the obvious tasks, including ensuring that we could create a summary report of the last two years’ worth of deviations encompassing all departments and all the stages of the events. This is dynamic data in an ever-changing database. Depending on how you requested the search, certain events could be included or excluded. Our endeavour was to make sure that all events were there.