One of the biggest obstacles industries must overcome is the irruption of stricter regulatory frameworks, which in many occasions force companies to update their internal business processes and adapt to the legal requirements quickly if they don’t want to give in to competitors.
Can technology help to make this adaptation less traumatic for companies? Actually, for paper-dependent, bureaucratized companies affected by these new regulations, the innovation via 100% online tools can become a key ally for them to face the incorporation of new game rules more efficiently.
Let’s see an example. In Chile there is a field which illustrates the need of adequacy to new standards perfectly: elevator maintenance. It’s important for specialized companies in the sector to have highly qualified staff to perform field inspections, and that includes ensuring that inspectors in charge of maintenance can have access to the latest technological solutions which can provide answers to the higher levels of efficiency and productivity as expected by the new regulations.
As El Mercurio states, according to an executive order by that country’s Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, in March of 2016 all elevators installed after the year 2000 must be submitted to a monthly certification demonstrating that they are up-to-date regarding their installation and maintenance. This will become enforced since March 21st and since then each building must present last year’s elevator maintenance information.
According to the newspaper, in Chile there are 35 thousand elevators -70 percent of which were installed after 2000’s and therefore are subject to the rule. Considering only the elevators of housing buildings, the elevator maintenance and certification could affect over 17 thousand properties.
Given these figures, according to several sources the number of certifying companies won’t be enough. According to the newspaper Las Últimas Noticias, there is a shortage of staff in this field already, and specialists aren’t able to keep up with the work. By March of this year the situation can turn even more complicated, given the stricter requirements in the elevator maintenance service.
Which steps could the companies in charge of elevator maintenance and certification take to make sure they meet the necessary requirements the law demands?
First of all, the regulatory changes affecting this small group of companies doesn’t have to be necessarily traumatic. It can instead be considered a great opportunity to incorporate the latest technological solutions at hand in order to replace their traditional slow and distressing processes, and take advantage of the increased productivity and efficiency they bring to give some respite to the overburdened field inspectors.
Replacing the obsolete physical forms for mobile forms and a 100% online platform offers a great range of benefits to companies which provide field services, as we discussed on a previous article. One of these is the possibility of reporting the results of the field inspections in real time from the worker’s phone to the central office for faster processing, reducing the waiting times between one building and the other.
Mobile forms also have the advantage of including, for example, pictures of the defects, the GPS location of the employee, or his signature, verifying the performed work. This information gets sent to the central office, avoiding the loss of data or misinterpretations of the information.
Therefore, this transformation should be the first step these specialized companies in elevator maintenance and certification should take, in order to adapt to more demanding regulations.
DataScope is a platform which allows various industries to streamline, organize and evaluate the work of their field staffs thanks to online forms which provide real time indicators 100% adaptable to any field.
You may want to keep reading: Everything you should know about inspection software
