Choosing the right safety inspection system

What’s worse than finding a safety issue at your workplace that could have potentially injured someone? Not finding the issue.

Every workplace is different; organisations that have several locations will even sometimes have separate OH&S procedures and safety inspection documentation for each location. What’s important is that your working environment has the best possible safety inspection system in place. Too often, organisations rely on free mobile applications or simple paper check sheets that get put in that drawer somewhere — both of which are unreliable and inefficient systems. Industry leaders and companies aiming to improve safety are choosing to move to paperless premium inspection solutions.

Accident and incident reports can become an insightful piece of information for management instead of a dreaded document to fill out. Going digital has not only transformed safety inspection processes for many industries, but also allowed them to integrate other audit or quality assurance within the same solution. Leading paperless solutions are even allowing companies to mesh the inspection program with business intelligence (BI) and/or existing ERP systems.

Industry leaders across several fields are taking advantage of the wave of new consumer technology now becoming common in the workplace. Paperless inspection solutions now consist of an application on a mobile device. The workforce is already educated in the new technology, meaning the new application on the mobile device can be instantly implemented.

Inspectors and field service personnel can make use of a regular smartphone or tablet set up for the business and use all the familiar features available. The camera can be used to take pictures, with further annotation possible on premium inspection solutions. Top inspection applications also have features such as offline reporting, standardised response checklists, automatically suggested corrective actions, speech-to-text and dictation, GPS timestamps and barcode/RFID scanning. Safety inspectors can benefit from numerous features and functionalities of a mobile device if paired with the right solution. Many paperless inspection applications include existing libraries of audit and industry regulation checklists such as ISO 45001 or ISO 9001, basic construction site safety checklist samples or pre start safety templates. The versatility and adaptability of the application can increase productivity and efficiency.

Premium digital inspection solutions can also be integrated with existing BI and other corporate systems such as asset management, HR and CMMS. With free or freemium solutions, companies often lack the control of their own database structure and are blind to potential data misuse from the application companies. This is why many industries are turning to premium for inspection reporting.

Premium inspection solutions often allow in-house and/or cloud (SaaS) hosting, automatic trigger notifications to third parties or different organisation teams such as maintenance, management or other inspectors. Some also have the possibility to have deficiency life cycle monitoring built into the inspection system. This means that companies, organisations and businesses operating in many industries have the opportunity to increase safety, workplace inspection reporting efficiency and the overall productivity of its operations. As clear insightful data is being fed back to all stakeholders when necessary, and information is sent to management and maintenance, problems can be quickly identified and acted on.

Paperless and premium digital inspection solutions can help ensure issues are identified and problems are fixed as soon as possible.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Kagenmi