How Field Inspection Software Transforms Maintenance for Modern Industry

Introduction

It’s a known fact that every year, a myriad of hours and resources are wasted because major maintenance issues are overlooked – they are buried in heaps of paperwork or lost in unread inspection reports. Whenever critical equipment fails, often the blame goes back to an overlooked warning or a missed defect due to manual, paper-based inspection methods. This is because paper-based reports are cumbersome to capture, track and share, and act on crucial information that needs attention.

These types of inefficiencies not only cause failure of your operations but also put your maintenance workforce at risk due to non-compliance with safety practices. It is in this context; digital inspections are slowly gaining ground. Digital inspections or precisely field inspection software provide much-needed solace to the maintenance team, like helping them easily capture real-time data, automate the workflows, and easily compile information that can be seamlessly shared across various stakeholders.  And the best part is no more paper – only digital data that is reliable, accurate, and easily accessible.

This blog dives into this aspect, throwing light on the typical challenges faced by manual, paper-based processes, and how field inspection software can overcome these challenges. So, stay tuned.

Why Manual, Paper-based Inspections are Highly Unreliable and Inefficient

Traditionally, organizations relied mostly on manual and paper-based processes. The reasons for this could be many – organizations do not want to embrace change and feel automation will make things more complicated. On the other hand, maintenance workers assume an automated solution may be difficult to handle or make their work more complex. However, all this is a past story; organizations are now easily embracing digitization to the core, considering the pain points and past history of inefficient, manual inspections methods.

So, what are these challenges that made organizations revisit their traditional mindset to embrace digitization? Let’s understand them briefly:

• Data entry discrepancies: Inspectors mostly make notes on paper that are often illegible or confusing. Above all, human nature is all about making mistakes, so there is a high chance of capturing wrong data or even missing crucial information that can severely impact the overall quality of the inspection results.

• Time-consuming methods: It’s a known fact that collecting, collating, compiling, and making paper-based reports are always slow and requires a lot of manual effort. This hinders timely decision making and ultimately delays corrective actions.  

• Lack of collaboration: When inspection data is recorded physically and on paper, it becomes a challenge for inspectors to share and track that data. This ultimately results in silos and communication roadblocks among their teams and stakeholders.  

• Risk of lost or misplaced documents: Paper forms are prone to be lost easily and also get damaged, posing a risk to data integrity and regulatory compliance.

• Challenges in data analysis: When data is captured manually and is on paper, it becomes difficult for managers to identify trends, predict failures, and take corrective actions, leading to poor decision making.  

• Difficulty in complying with regulations: Due to paper-based inspection reports, it becomes a challenge for maintenance managers to keep pace with the latest regulatory requirements. This poses a severe risk of non-compliance that leads to costly fines and a damaged reputation.  

• Hazardous inspection sites: Often it may require inspectors to check critical equipment that is at remote, dangerous locations (for example in the mining industry), which is difficult to approach, making inspections a real nightmare.  

All these challenges sum up in an eco-system of inefficiency, inaccurate or poor-quality inspections, which ultimately puts an organization and its workforce at risk, leading to missed deadlines and poor productivity. So, what is the path forward? Adopting field inspection software makes things easier, saving a lot of time, resources and of course, saving tons of paper, making inspections a seamless and productive affair.

How Field Inspection Software Overcomes the Above Challenges, Making a Positive Impact

A digital solution or precisely field inspection software can optimize and revolutionize the entire inspection process – right from data capture, compiling, sharing to the final review and analysis.  

So, let’s briefly understand how a field inspection software overcomes those challenges, fostering a qualitative inspection process:

• Real-time data capture: Using a mobile solution, inspectors can easily enter data directly into digital forms that are often customizable and flexible to make any corrections. This way, data is captured safely, ensuring 100% accuracy and accessibility.  

• Easy accessibility to remote and hazardous areas: Innovative technologies comprising drones and IoT sensors make inspections easy in remote, hazardous environments, minimizing human intervention or cumbersome work permits. The data captured through drones or IoT devices can easily be accessed via a mobile solution, making such inspections a seamless process.

• Predictive maintenance: Using AI-powered analytics, maintenance managers can leverage the historical and real-time data of the inspection reports to probe trends, assess failures, and improve maintenance schedules – making a dynamic shift from reactive to a predictive maintenance program.

• Dynamic checklists: A digital form offers high-level flexibility and can easily adapt to dynamic, real-time information using conditional logic. This helps inspectors to customize the checklists based on their specific industry requirements, ensuring that the right information is captured at the right place at the right time.

• Centralized data management: The data collated from a mobile platform can be easily stored and secured in a cloud-based, centralized platform (say, an ERP system) providing instant access, facilitating effective collaboration across all stakeholders.

• Strict regulatory compliance: Unlike paper-based inspection reports, automated documentation and standardized templates help in enforcing strict compliance standards, keeping pace with dynamic regulations. With an automated solution, generating audit reports as and when needed becomes easier, compared to paper-based reports.

• Offline functionality: The best part of such a solution is its offline capability, meaning inspections can even be carried out across remote locations, where internet connectivity is a big challenge. Once the internet is restored, the data gets automatically synced to the backend ERP system, making sure that the critical inspection results are never lost.  

The above features not only mitigate operational challenges encountered due to manual inspections, but also foster a safer, collaborative, and productive inspection process.  

In the above context, look for good digital forms solution like that offered by Propel Apps, a leading supply chain transformation company. This solution transforms routine inspections into a seamless digital experience, directly integrated with work orders and maintenance workflows.  To know how this solution can help your inspection team transition from manual to digital, enforcing best safety practices, schedule a free demo with us.

Final Thoughts

Digital Inspections are no longer optional; but essential in the current maintenance climate. Whether you manage a small, medium, or large organization, manual inspection methods are always fraught with challenges.  While investing in costly machines is one part of the story, maintaining and conducting routine inspections is another important part of the story. By adopting manual methods, you not only risk the efficiency of your machines, but also compromise the safety and well-being of your workforce.

To avoid all this, gradual transition to field inspection software is the only way out that offers a plethora of benefits like elimination of paper, instant data capture, and above all ensuring timely regulatory compliance. So, it’s time for you to adopt the perfect solution like that offered by Propel Apps to inculcate the right maintenance culture across your workforce, laced with efficiency, productivity, accountability, and safety.

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