What are inspections?
Inspections involve visiting a location, collecting data, performing evaluations, and returning your findings to a central office for its storage or further action. The purpose of these inspections is to prevent risky situations so that no accidents, contingencies or flaws materialise, eliminating or reducing any of them to tolerable values, and keep them within certain limits.
Examples
The variety of industries which depend on field inspections as key tools is… huge! From technical housing site inspections, fire safety inspections, or municipal inspections, to periodic inspections in factories to assess the quality and availability of products in stock, its role is essential to guarantee optimum results with minimum risks.
Problems of paper-based inspections
Most mobile inspections are still done using paper forms in the field. Everyone knows the disadvantages of paper forms, as we mentioned in another article:
- Paper forms can be damaged, lost, or filled out with ambiguous or invalid data. This is a permanent vulnerability for paper-based companies, and thanks to mobile solutions applied to inspection software they are now a thing of the past.
- The data must usually be transcribed from paper, re-keyed into a computer, and checked for errors.
- Paper forms often need filing, archiving and warehousing even after the data is transcribed into an electronic form.
- The need for physical transport and re-keying significantly slows business processes and introduces unnecessary errors and costs.
- The typical problems presented by physical forms amplify the existing conflicts to keep productivity levels high in areas understaffed. In Chile for example, the National Customs Service suffers a lack of regulators. They can only visually check only 5% of the imported merchandise, and they can’t check if the product, quantity and value of the declared merchandise. In situations like these the right technology -such as inspection software– can help recover the loss of efficiency greatly due to lack of staff or other factors.
Against this backdrop, why not go paperless with mobile inspection software on mobile devices for Android and iOS?
What are the advantages of the inspection software?
Thanks to inspection software as 100% adaptable mobile forms integrated to a web platform, now any field inspection which used paper forms can be automatized, even the most complex or thorough ones such as inspections of elevators or working machines, and the ones which last longest, such as Customs audits.
Inspection software platforms switch old paper forms to smartphones, completing the field information digitally, attaching photographs and geolocation to your collected findings. Now with the inspection software everything can be done from the smartphone, improving the productivity, the service quality and fulfillment of the tasks at hand. The data is consolidated and represented graphically in real time on a web dashboard, where the behaviour of performance indicators can be evaluated.
Mobile inspection software offers an online form for several industries which don’t want to depend on paper to carry out their field inspections, saving large amounts of money and time each year. That is why many companies and public entities are measuring the effect of inspection software as a permanent solution to previously undetectable problems.
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.
