Inspections are a routine part of daily work in every industry. Ensuring things are running smoothly and compliance regulations are being adhered to is significant for business operations to run well.
With increasing digitalization transforming business landscapes, many companies are starting to deploy inspection apps to simplify processes for employees that perform field inspections every day and typically fill out several paper forms and checklists to record all the information manually and create post-inspection reports.
Inspection apps – a revolutionary solution to modernizing and digitizing paper-based manual inspection processes. These apps, including infra, vehicle, and machinery inspection solutions, eliminate the hassle and significant time involved in compiling information on paper.
Not only do inspection apps save time, but they also provide real-time visibility into regulation and compliance, increase team productivity, improve inter & intra department collaboration, and help achieve zero-waste sustainability goals.
Let’s explore the advantages and use cases of inspection apps for business.
Advantages of Field Inspection Apps
Bringing field inspection apps for business has helped inspection teams achieve business efficiencies by enabling inspectors to perform their jobs more efficiently.
Other advantages of inspection apps for business include the following:
1. Increased number of inspections
Officers can quickly inspect sites, assets, vehicle, and machinery, fill in the information in the inspection app, and get real-time inspection history data, helping inspection officers achieve up to 80% time savings. This helps increase the number of inspections that an inspector can perform in a day, thus, improving employee productivity, asset security, and adherence and compliance to industry regulations.
2. Standardized report formats
Consistent report formats help collect accurate and more uniform data, irrespective of who performs the inspection. Moreover, inspectors can upload evidential data like photos and videos and generate consistent reports for further action.
3. Efficient real-time reporting and quick action
Most inspection app data is securely stored in the cloud. Not only can officers get real-time information about operations under their purview, but they can also easily call up historical data, resolve issues, track on-field issues, and quickly turn around to schedule maintenance and repairs if needed.
4. Reduce carbon footprint by achieving enormous paper savings
By going digital, businesses save thousands of sheets of paper every day, spread over several years. They also make redundant the storage shelves used to store these records, thus making inspection operations more cost-efficient and sustainable.
The next section talks about the various use cases of inspection apps for businesses and how apps for inspections in various fields can help achieve sustainability, automate workflows, and have enormous resource savings.
Use cases of Field Inspection Apps
Critical Infrastructure Inspection App
Bridges, highways, tunnels, roads, and public works such as drinking water, and transportation are critical to daily life. State and local governments must inspect these assets to protect them from natural and man-made disasters, as well as provide for rapid rehabilitation and recovery in the event of a problem or damage, in order to provide better services to citizens.
Even CPG, Manufacturing, and Oil & Gas organizations must conduct thorough and frequent inspections of factory infrastructure and equipment in order to identify and repair defects, control product quality, meet compliance & industry standards, and ensure the health and safety of frontline workers.
As a result, field inspections are an important part of critical infrastructure maintenance, ensuring that assets and other critical areas on-site meet the necessary health and safety standards and protocols. However, manual inspections by inspectors take a significant amount of time and effort.
Critical infrastructure inspection apps, also known as field inspection apps in common parlance, can help to speed up, streamline, and simplify the inspection process.
- Automatic assignment of inspection jobs to field workers and inspectors.
- Field locating services using Bing or Google Maps.
- Tracking and logging of time spent on the field, especially for jobs with multiple statuses.
- Automatic generation of inspection reports and dashboards for the client (SLGs) and back-office using multiple report formats.
- Mobile-first app with support for multiple languages.
- Flexible integrations with services such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&O Asset Management and Dynamics 365 Field Service.
A real-life success story
An inspection app for the water departments can enable the protection of water assets & infrastructures like distribution pipes, aqueducts, water tunnels, and reservoirs against vandalism and pilferage. It can also help businesses ensure assets for water treatment are running at their best capacity and efficiency and do not require repair or replacement.
As water storage and treatment facilities are huge, conducting critical infrastructure inspections with manual, paper-based resources can be a tough nut to crack, resulting in enormous wastage of time, paper, and costs.
Here is how Acuvate helped the water utility department of one of the largest metropolitan areas improve security and inspection of its water resources using a custom-built Teams app.
Acuvate helped Tasked with supplying around 9 million people with over 1.2 billion gallons of water daily, the client hired a 280+ strong police force to conduct safety inspections across 200 facilities.
- However, a paper-based inspection process was not only cumbersome, but it also led to huge time wastage and lost reports.
- Police officers had to manually select a route for daily inspection, fill in inspection record templates, complete inspection activity sheets, and submit evidence photos.
- Manual collation of data was error-prone, hence accurate reporting was dubious.
- Supervisor sign-offs and reviews took up to 90 days.
How did Acuvate help?
Acuvate modernized and automated its existing paper-based water assets inspection system with a Microsoft Teams App.
- Auto-selection of inspection routes
- Filling inspection sheets on the Teams app — giving supervisors a real-time view of what’s happening.
- Eliminating the need to manually collate and print reports.
- Integration with the department’s database for a quick glance at previous violator records
- Accurate reporting is based on facilities, zones, and individual officers.
Business outcomes:
- 80% time savings
- Increased number of inspections
- Efficient real-time reporting
- Accurate validation
- 100% Data Integrity
- Saves 75k sheets of paper per year
- Achieving sustainability goals and reducing carbon footprint by saving on paper and facilities
Looking for an inspection app? Acuvate is here to help!
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Acuvate can help you build intelligent inspection Team apps using Microsoft’s low-code Power Platform called PowerApps.
We help our clients achieve 80% time savings, 7X paper savings, and 70% reduction in TCO with:
- Customizable form templates
- Image capture and annotations
- GPS-enabled inspection apps
- Customizable dashboards and reports
- Integration with Microsoft Teams and other third-party agencies like DMV, Payment Gateways, etc.
- Faster time to market (2-4 weeks)
We have proven experience and expertise in rolling out successful inspection apps for large SLG agencies in the US, Europe, etc.
