You may be wondering what the benefits of taking inspection paperless are in a time governed by data flow and advancements in other technologies.
It can seem like a trivial thing to take the business checks and organisational audits that you may carry out from pen and paper to an application. After all what is the difference between making recordings with a pen on a paper checklist, and carrying out the same recordings using a mobile device? What you may not realise when thinking about the real benefits of taking inspection paperless is that the results are both tangible and intangible. Through upgrading from pen and paper inspection methods to digital you are not only future-proofing your methods and following the digital age, but you are also investing in future methods you may not know of now. The long list of benefits of taking inspection paperless becomes all the more evident when you make time for integrating a digital inspection solution into the core of how your business or organisation operates. After all, if you want something to work as well as possible, why not give it the opportunity to make as much of a difference as possible.
Where the real value of taking inspection digital is realised is when you effectively mesh your business’s operations with a digital inspection solution’s functionality. Today its commonplace for premium inspection solutions to provide an application for a mobile device alongside a database portal for management and storage purposes. Working together, these two ends of the same system record and store data, for it to be shared across your organisation in different ways. Where the inspector will record inspection details about machinery, the portal will allow management to go into the data and query for a specific asset and all its inspection/performance history. This includes different inspection types, different facilities, different standards, even different return on investment calculations. By digitalising the inspection data, business analysis can be run on performance of an asset, operation, or facility. Digitalising the inspection data also means that the method of recording can be different for the inspector. Instead of using a pen and paper checklist, the field officer can use a smartphone or tablet and make recordings via standardised response, speech-to-text services, barcode/RFID scanning, or taking pictures with the device camera. As such, the information capture speed is increased, whilst the accuracy and detail can also be improved. Even small improvements to speed and detail can over time show up as a huge win for the business or organisation.
