Mobile applications have become more and more important in our daily lives and many businesses have realized the benefits that mobile apps can help to achieve. Replacing paper based site inspection checklists with digital forms will help optimize internal business processes. The digitization of site inspection checklists has many advantages:
- Forms are never out of date – Changing paper based forms is a hassle. The process of recalling outdated forms, updating them in Excel, then redistributing them is a lengthy process that can be easily automated. With a digital site inspection checklist, forms are updated by an administrator on a server and synchronized with a mobile device that the inspector takes out with them into the field. This reduces the updating process to two easy steps and if a special inspection needs to be conducted, or additional inspection points need to be added to an asset, you can send updated forms right to the mobile device.
- Inspectors carry fewer things – Inspecting things means examining, measuring, testing, and capturing images or barcodes/RFID’s. With this, inspectors must carry a clipboard, pen, camera, and barcode/RFID scanner. A digital site inspection conducted on a mobile device can have all these items in one device allowing for quicker, less cumbersome inspections.
- Reduce paper use at the office – Aside from the fact that reducing paper use saves money and the environment, converting your inspections to a digital format means you can manage them more efficiently, eliminate redundancies, and administrative overhead.
- Better compliance – With digital site inspection checklist software, standards are pre-defined and as questions are answered they are measured directly against them. This allows the inspector to easily identify non-compliance issues on the spot.
- Reduce human error & ensure accuracy – Errors due to incomplete answers and poor penmanship plague paper-based inspections. Furthermore, paper inspection forms are often compiled over time and so become disjointed and without a logical sequence to how an inspection should progress. A mobile inspection app allows inspectors to follow a sequence and ensures all answers are complete. Incomplete answers are highlighted and the inspection cannot be submitted until all questions are completely answered. Most mobile inspection devices support image, RFID, and barcode capture which ensure a higher level of detail and accuracy that pen and paper inspections cannot accomplish.
- Increase Operational Efficiency – with digital inspections, reports are generated within seconds which give you information about the health of your equipment at any point in time. Creating reports digitally greatly reduces administration costs and costly, ill-informed decisions due to poor data quality. Furthermore, digital inspections enable quicker inspection turnaround. With the data and reporting feature of digital site inspection checklist software, a preventative maintenance schedule can be established.
Converting your pen and paper forms to a digital site inspection checklist can increase your operational efficiency. Digital site inspection software will save you time and money.
