Internal Controls (ICP): A Practical DIY Guide for Modern Operations
This hands-on guide shows how your team can plan, launch, and continuously improve internal controls yourselves. While you can start on paper, you’ll quickly need a digital tool to connect routines to daily work, ensure the right person is notified, collect evidence, and learn from data across multiple locations.
About terminology
In some regions, like Sweden, this is known as an Egenkontrollprogram (EKP). The closest English abbreviations are:
- SMP (Self-Monitoring Program): Common in environmental, food safety, or health contexts.
- ICP (Internal Control Program): Used more in organizational or compliance contexts.
In this article, we’ll use “internal controls” (ICP) to emphasize the practical controls you run.
1) Plan your internal controls: scope, risks, and ownership (do this first)
Define the essentials before you touch any tooling:
- Purpose and scope: which processes, sites, and teams are in scope.
- Risk register: top risks per process with severity and likelihood.
- Controls and critical limits: what to check, acceptable ranges, and who owns it.
- Evidence: what proves completion (photos, temperatures, confirmations, notes).
- Frequencies: when and how often (daily/weekly/quarterly/yearly).
- Escalation paths: what happens when a limit is breached, and how the right person is automatically notified for action.
- Document control: how procedures are approved and versioned to ensure a single source of truth.
Tip: Planning for a digital platform from the start helps you design controls that are dynamic and scalable, not just static checklist items.
2) Configure your Digital Controls Program (what to set up)
To make controls truly operational, you need a system that brings them to life:
- Templates and libraries: create a core template, then allow for local variants. This ensures consistency at scale.
- Roles and permissions: ensure tasks and alerts are assigned to the correct person based on their role.
- Evidence types: configure your system to capture the right data—be it an image, a temperature reading, or a confirmation.
- Scheduling: automate the assignment of recurring tasks to individuals or roles.
A digital platform is essential for multi-location businesses to ensure every site is running off the same playbook.
3) Run and follow up: turn checks into insight (do this every week)
Execution generates the data you’ll learn from. A connected system allows you to:
- Ensure Completion Quality: get real-time visibility into whether controls are done on time, with the right evidence attached.
- Manage Deviations: let a failed control trigger a deviation report. This helps you capture what happened and assign trackable corrective actions.
- Get a Full Overview: use dashboards to compare missed checks, deviation rates, and resolution times across all your units at a glance.
- Detect Patterns: spot recurring mistakes—like the same temperature issue on the same shift—before they become systemic problems.
- Automate Alerts: automatically notify managers when critical limits are breached or when controls are repeatedly missed.
This transforms routine checks into a continuous feedback loop that surfaces patterns early and prevents repeat issues.
Moreover, this data provides value at every level of the organization. Frontline staff see their immediate tasks, managers can track team performance and address incidents, and leadership gets a high-level view of compliance and risk across the entire business, enabling data-driven decisions for continuous improvement.
4) Handling the Unexpected: A Separate Process for Incidents
Your planned controls are for known risks, but what about the unexpected? A freezer breaks down, a customer has an allergic reaction, or a toilet overflows. These are out-of-the-ordinary incidents that fall outside your daily checklists but require immediate, structured action.
A complete system needs its own dedicated process—an "incident module"—for this:
- Easy Reporting: Any employee should be able to report an incident instantly from their phone, with photos and details.
- Automatic Escalation: The system should automatically notify the correct person or team—whether it's the on-duty manager, the maintenance department, or regional leadership—based on the incident type and severity.
- Track to Resolution: The issue needs to be tracked as a formal case from report to resolution, ensuring accountability and that nothing falls through the cracks.
This separates day-to-day deviations from urgent, unplanned events, ensuring both are handled correctly without creating confusion.
5) Improve continuously: simple cadence that compounds
Adopt a lightweight rhythm that your teams can sustain:
- Weekly: review overdue controls and open incidents; ensure the right people are actioning them.
- Monthly: use analytics to review trends in both deviations and incidents, looking for patterns.
- Quarterly: refresh procedures and training based on data-driven findings.
- Annually: conduct formal internal audits across locations, supported by a complete, searchable history.
A capable digital platform makes this cadence sustainable by keeping information centralized, execution structured, and insights visible to the right people.
This structured approach also radically simplifies onboarding. New employees don't have to guess what's expected of them; their daily routines and controls are already defined and assigned from day one, ensuring consistency from the start.
Make Your Internal Controls Work—and Keep Getting Better
Use this guide to design and run your internal controls yourselves. If you want a head start with a platform designed for setting up routines, managing incidents, and scaling operations with correct assignments and follow-up, we can help you set it up.
