Maintaining control over your fire safety seems like the most obvious measure to take when operating in any building or workplace. Many organisations underestimate what abiding by international regulations such as ISO 20338, recently published by the International Organization for Standards (ISO), means.
Whilst there are many examples of organisations, individuals and communities that take fire safety for granted, it’s imperative for all businesses to regard fire safety with the upmost importance. International standards such as ISO 20338 regulate things like the oxygen reduction systems used for fire prevention; specifying the minimum and maximum requirements for various machinery, equipment and operating environments. ISO 20338 will help to specify the design, installation and maintenance of fixed oxygen reduction systems in particular, applying more to those systems that have nitrogen abundance in the air. This can of course apply for business with workplace environments handling particular materials or chemicals, but also for industrial size production plants.
ISO 20338 works hand in hand with paperless inspection applications that today are becoming a mainstay of the inspection industry. Mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones are proving to be a potent tool for recording data and transferring this to a database. Inspections can run specific compliance reports that are tailored to regulations such as ISO 20338, and other organisational specific checks. Running of a centralised platform, mobile device inspection makes full use of digital, providing automatically suggested corrective actions, business intelligence integration, lifecycle tracking of assets and many other features. Inspectors monitoring progress of assets or equipment can take pictures using the devices’ camera and attach these to reports for easier visual analysis, as well as attaching them as reference material for future inspections. New devices also feature offline speech-to-text services and RFID scanning. All data captured is of course fed back into the software that is either cloud (SaaS) hosted or hosted via in-house servers. This reduces the potential hazard of dusty, non-inspected warehouses and replaces the inspection procedure with cloud-based software. Perhaps the top feature for fire inspection is the ability to share information quickly. Any necessary user can be notified of a failure to comply with a regulation such as ISO 20338, and necessary systems can therefore be shut down until issues are resolved with minimised risk to other employees.
