5 Great Reasons to Go Mobile for Field Inspections & Assessments
It's a core part of many professional's daily routine - the field inspection, assessment, audit. With it goes the mandatory clipboard while you take photos on your smart phone. Here's 5 reasons why using a mobile device to collect photos and observations combined with automatic report generation is the way to improve your business and profitability.
1. Digital All the Way
With the Clarinspect App and automatic report generator your data is captured once, is never transcribed yet can be edited either on the mobile or your desktop back at the office. This ensures accuracy and speed.
We see a lot of highly qualified engineers and other professionals taking field notes onto paper, transcribing those notes into spreadsheets or Word before producing reports. The opportunities for transcription error are great - and the complexity of some of the spreadsheets is mind boggling!
The Clarinspect app makes it even easier with the use of drop downs for standardised notes and recording verbal observations.
“The system saves time. It is faster than writing, and we are no longer reviewing and checking hand-written notes. We now only have to meet to discuss about one job in eight.”
Your field observations are synced "to the cloud" over wifi or the phone network, merged with your report template and emailed to you for editing and forwarding to your client. Simple, convenient, time saving.
Your Report is Written Immediately
2. Photos Go Straight Into Your Report
We all know the procedure - either directly load your site photos from your phone onto your desktop or download them from a cloud storage system like Dropbox, sort the photos and then paste them into your report. Each photo needs to be annotated but after 7 site visits you can't remember why you even took the image!
With Clarinspect your images are contextual. The app can ensure that every photo taken is annotated as soon as it is taken, GPS co-ordinates can be allocated to the image, even the time the image was taken. Photos are uploaded along with your field notes and are included in the final report emailed to you - formatted as you wish, with annotations. The time savings are immense.
3. Safety - Employees, Data, Devices
Health and Safety is a major focus for all professional organisations. In a separate post we talked about using Clarinspect for record health and safety data, and even how to integrate your health and safety assessments with the site assessment - don't worry, the H&S data goes to your systems and only the site data goes to your clients!
With a "born digital" data collection system your data is protected for accuracy as well as safety.
And there is a lot of support for you in learning to use digital devices practically and productively.
4. Automated Reports
This is the big one! Many of our clients report being amazed with their increased productivity on site
“The system saves time. This comes from the reduction in repeated editing of core logs so there is no more back and forth, checking nor alterations.”
but it is the integration of data and images from the site inspection with your report template (you have complete control over the appearance of the report) that gives the immediate benefits.
“That all my reports came out with my logos and in the layout I wanted was very important to me. I didn’t have to adapt my business to the system - it catered to my business needs.”
5. Immediate, Ongoing Productivity Improvements and Profitability
“The productivity improvement we gained by replacing manual paper processes with the Clarinspect service was excellent. With just two inspectors and a manager involved, we predict we will save $10s of thousands per year in clerical support charges while seeing an increase of the number of inspections we do each day.”