Why are checklists important for compliance and safety inspections?

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There are all sorts of inspection software solutions out there. Some are designed for food safety inspections, others for resource scheduling optimisation, etc. A typical work process for all inspection models is the checklist data gathering. When we say inspector, we always imagine someone with a list of paper and pen in his hand or with a tablet and stylus. The inspector gathers data and uses checklists to do that effectively.

What’s the role of a checklist in inspections?

The checklists are just an ordinary list of tasks that may be specific for each inspection field. They are a tool that prevents inspectors from missing an essential check during the inspection. That’s why achieving optimal use of an inspection checklist is a constant work in progress that must be updated now and then.

Resource optimization and business scheduling software

CASE STUDY: How a regulatory agency cut costs with resource scheduling software?
          • reducing the scheduling time with up to 75%
          • increasing efficiency of operations with 40%
          • fully eliminating errors in the resource allocation process.
Download the case study.

One of the most advertised benefits of using inspection software is the improved productivity that saves inspectors’ time. The time-saving benefit brought by digital checklists is mainly a result of streamlining the data gathering during inspections and automating the preparation of reports. Using a cloud-based inspection scheduling software doesn’t fit a pen and paper checklist. That’s why good inspection management software needs a well-thought checklist functionality. So what should we require from an inspection checklist perspective when researching different inspection management tools?

Related: What’s the benefit of route optimisation in inspections?

What are the benefits of inspection checklists?

  • Checklists improve safety

The use of relevant and detailed checklists in inspection management is crucial to ensuring safety. That’s why checklists must be easy to create, edit and save for future use. It means that inspectors have to be able to develop and work with different checklists – one that serves the daily inspections, the other that does more critical assessments, etc. When the checklists are pre-defined, inspectors can quickly load the checklist template they need on their devices and conduct their inspections without missing something important that may lead to big mistakes.

  • Improved communication between departments in regulatory agencies and enterprises

Inspection data is a constant subject to analysis. The old-fashioned way of going through data is to dig into a bunch of paper and move folders with documents across halls and floors. However, if a cloud-based inspection management system ensures the digital processing of data gathering, then the analysis of inspection data would be far easier to do or send for review by inspection directors, analysts, or some other government agency.

  • The completed checklist is automatically uploaded and stored in the cloud.

That gives flexibility to everyone in the inspection management process, and things happen faster. Inspectors can also attach photos or pdf files to the inspection data. That way, everything will be in one folder and stored digitally. A digital inspection management solution with a sound document management system solves many problems for the inspectors who are still using the pen and paper method for conducting inspections. This problem-solving feature can be tested early through proof of concept.

Related: Why and how should we test a proof of concept of inspection management software?

  • Inspection checklists can be reused, and their data saved

 Inspectors can reuse the last used inspection checklist, so there’s no need to make a new checklist every time before the inspection. The data from digital inspection checklists can be combined with other data and used to visualise trends or just inform the higher management about the big picture.

  • No paper means more security and more access. 

To top all of the benefits, comes the green promise for using less papers and utilising resources with more care to the nature. This is one of the values that stays behind our inspection management solution – Canalix.

Checklists remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. They not only offer the possibility of verification but also instill a kind of discipline of higher performance.

– The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande

Automation is the primary tool that we use to increase efficiency. Automating inspection checklists is an example of how everyone in the inspection management process can save valuable time spent searching for information, making reports, planning and scheduling inspections. All these time-consuming tasks can be reduced to just a few clicks with the mouse. But to work, checklists must be well thought out in the research and buying phase.

Do you want to learn more about the benefits of using configurable checklists in digital inspections? Contact us here.

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Health and Safety Inspection Management Tips For 2022

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If we look at the official data for non-fatal accidents at work in the EU, the statistic will show us graphs that either go up or down. Going up means more accidents at work while going down means the opposite. More accidents mean more expenses. So the reasonable question here for regulators and private enterprises subject to regulations is: how to control the rate of work accidents and keep it down? The indirect answer is: by optimising the safety inspection program of the organisation. You’ll find the more direct answer, one that tells exactly how to do that, below.

The primary purpose of optimising the safety inspection programs is to ensure:

  1. Worker’s safety

Keeping the workforce safe ensures the long-term stability of the company’s worker retention program

2. Good reputation

An organisation with a low rate of work accidents has a good reputation. It’s an advantage and should be recognised as such.

3. No disruption of operations

The safety of the work environment improves productivity and reduces the disruption of operations. Avoiding disruptions helps the company keep their work on a budget.

4. No fines by regulators

Regulations are being updated regularly. That’s why it’s essential to use an inspection solution that ensures that rules are being followed in an up to date manner because fines may seriously sidetrack the company’s plan.

Resource optimization and business scheduling software

CASE STUDY: How a regulatory agency cut costs with resource scheduling software?
          • reducing the scheduling time with up to 75%
          • increasing efficiency of operations with 40%
          • fully eliminating errors in the resource allocation process.
Download the case study.

A good safety inspection program may be divided into three components:

Inspection planning & scheduling

  • The inspection planning and scheduling component need constant optimising because a good plan can improve resource utilisation and prevent mistakes.

Inspection execution

  • The inspection execution component is the part that can significantly improve the speed and quality of inspections. The use of technology can transform the work of inspectors by allowing them to use pre-defined inspection checklists or benefit from an entirely digital document management system. The digital infrastructure of the inspection management process can remove the manual work that often slows down inspectors.

Training

  • The digital infrastructure allows inspectors to gain better visibility on inspection outcomes and therefore recommend relevant actions and training to the workers to reduce the risk of accidents in the workplace.

modular digital transformationWhy is modularity crucial for your digital transformation strategy in 2022?

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        • The advantages of modular digital transformation
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Read it now.

The importance of digitising the safety inspection checklists

What’s the best way for an inspector to identify risks during safety inspection? Answer: by following a checklist. When everything’s written down on a list, the inspector has a better chance to cover all of the potential risks. The process can be improved even more with a digital inspection management system. When regulatory bodies adopt software solutions for safety inspections, the pre-defined checklists can be easily implemented into the work process of inspectors. For different types of safety inspections, there can be configured specific checklists.

If we step out of the regulatory inspections field and look at the general impact of checklists, we’ll see a double confirmation about their benefits. A lot of research points out that checklists help experts execute their projects more efficiently. In an essential field like safety inspections, the power of checklists must be utilised to ensure the well-being of workers and the community.

Checklists remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. They offer the possibility of verification and instil a kind of discipline of higher performance.

Source: Checklists help eliminate mistakes and improve efficiency.

Why must a safety inspection software have configurable checklists?

Safety inspections are complex, so high configuration must be a part of the requirements of any inspection management solution. A good configurable inspection software will allow regulatory agencies to configure specific checklists for each type of safety inspection – safety inspections for tools and equipment, electrical concerns, scaffolding, etc. Checklists are a very overlooked component in inspection programs. Their function is a gamechanger when it comes to data gathering. Because only detailed and correctly gathered data may generate a valuable inspection report. 

The importance of optimising safety inspection reports

The outcome of a safety inspection ends in a report. The report aims to recommend corrective actions to reduce the risks of hazards in the future. However, a report may not be efficient if the best practices aren’t followed.

The benefits that safety inspection reports bring are:

  1. Capturing error-free inspection data

A good inspection checklist is key to gathering sufficient error-free data that can be exported into an inspection report.

2. Real-time documenting of inspections

Recording inspections in real-time allows inspectors to capture their observations fully. Performing field inspections with a tablet will enable them to capture images in the meantime and attach them to the reporting file. The image can make feedback clear.

3. Complete visibility over inspection data

The digital gathering of inspection data allows inspectors to have better visibility over the inspected subjects. The leverage on data can make inspections more risk-focused and help mitigate risks and improve overall compliance.

4. Make safety inspection reports readable.

Big words and complex sentences have no place in inspection reports. Reports must be understandable and clear. No unreadable handwriting! Automating the generation of inspection reports based on the gathered data and collected observations can ensure the readability of the information.

How to find the right safety inspection software?

The choice of inspection management system depends on the organisation’s strategy. If a government agency follows a cloud-first strategy, its focus must be on cloud inspection services. If the organisation is focused on health and food safety, they should aim at a solution specialising in this sector. The same applies to enterprises that want to transform their internal inspections and audits.

Two rules for preparing safety inspection research:

  1. Find something that will answer your goals – cloud-based solution or on-premise solution?
  2. Find something that will be an excellent fit for your use case – general safety inspections, food safety inspections, environmental inspections, etc.

Related: All you need to know about cloud strategy in government agencies

Prepare a list of requirements and start your research. Then reach out to potential suppliers and book a Product tour or a Demo session that can highlight the features that can provide the execution of the best practices we described above. The next reasonable step would be to order a proof of concept.

Are you looking for safety inspection software? Contact us now, and we’ll help your select the best solution for your safety inspection requirements.

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Inspection optimisation: How to cut fuel costs with route optimisation?

Route optimisation sounds like a thing that you’d expect Google Maps to do for you. But in the work environment of regulatory enforcement and inspection management, inspectors would think otherwise.

Let’s take, for example, the job of the inspector who does construction site inspections every day. Every inspection site includes a list of areas that need inspection checks to ensure compliance with safety standards and other regulations. Sometimes these lists contain hundreds of checkpoints. The small details surrounding the critical work of inspectors make the process slow. Often, inspectors would spend all they travel long distances to inspect one construction site with high priority status and requirement for a high skillset. If the volume of inspection requests grows with time, the Inspectorate will have to hire more inspectors or make the hired ones work and travel more. In both cases, it will mean more expenses.

The old fashioned way of solving the issue with the growth of workload in inspections would be to hire more inspectors and send them to more work spots. But this is also a costly way. It’s the way of the regulatory agencies that are still not going through digital transformation. The question is, what other way can we offer to them?

Resource optimization and business scheduling software

CASE STUDY: How a regulatory agency cut costs with resource scheduling software?
          • reducing the scheduling time with up to 75%
          • increasing efficiency of operations with 40%
          • fully eliminating errors in the resource allocation process.
Download the case study.

What’s the way to reduce the cost of inspections?

The inspection cost depends on the inspector’s location, distance to the inspection site, and inspector’s salary, of course. Suppose we set up manually the inspection scheduling calendar. In that case, the most complex inspection cases will go to the most qualified inspectors. Sometimes, the most qualified inspectors will have to cover the less inspection ground because of the travelling. That is expensive for many reasons. The inspection management software can bring drastic improvements in inspection optimisation by reducing travel time and fuel costs.

How to optimise routing with inspection software?

Imagine that each inspection request is being automatically assigned with a complexity score that considers the location, availability and skillset of all inspectors. Now imagine that this software can match inspectors with a relevant case. And all that while the software is mapping the most optimal inspection routes and considers all of the constraints. That sounds too good to be true. Data-driven automation and AI come into play and make the life of inspectors and everyone in the regulatory agencies easier and way less expensive.

The example with the construction site inspections is not a limit. This kind of inspection optimisation can be applied to other regulatory areas – food safety inspections, fire inspections, education inspections, energy inspections, insurance loss control inspections, etc.

scheduling resource optimisation

How route optimisation changes things for regulators and enterprises?

When we talk about route optimisation, we don’t mean Google Maps. It is more than just finding the shortest available route between points A and B. It’s about finding the most efficient path for someone at point X and going through points A, B, C, D, E and F and spending different amounts of time for inspection. The inspector must make some stops between these points and spend different amounts of time at each one. Finding the most efficient route for such a complex task is not easy to be done manually. That’s why good inspection management software with route optimisation features is needed.

Summary of the inspection optimisation benefits:

Route optimisation reduces the costs of inspections, improves inspectors’ efficiency, and allows them to cover more inspection ground by travelling less and ultimately safe their time.

Is Canalix a route optimisation software?

Canalix is an inspection management solution focused on transforming the inspection model of regulators and enterprises. Route optimisation is a crucial AI-powered feature of the software. Our clients use it not just for transforming inspection processes but also for a wide variety of resource scheduling solutions. Our customer success data shows that our clients reduced the distance travelled by inspectors by up to 40% and managed to cut costs while improving the inspection process.

Do you want an estimate of how much route optimisation can reduce the costs of inspections in your company? Contact us now.

Related: Why do you have to try a proof-of-concept before buying an inspection management software?

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Digital Transformation in Food Safety Inspections – Why It Matters?

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One of the strictest regulation policies in the EU is in the field of food safety. Food safety concerns directly the health of people and their quality of life. That’s why there is strong sensibility to keeping compliance with regulation from the side of the food industry and enforcing regulations from the side of regulatory agencies.

The growing food safety culture leads to the adoption of new technological solutions that can help regulators transform their food inspection model. However, some countries are struggling with the digital transformation of the food safety inspections more than others. In a culture with growing food safety awareness and improved regulatory practices, transforming the inspection management model can make foods even safer.  That’s why the adoption of IT infrastructures in the food safety inspection model is a step that regulators must be taking on (if they haven’t yet).

What can inspection management software do for food safety inspections?

Ditch the paper, embrace the digital

Imagine the paperwork that food safety inspectors and other administrative entities must do to ensure the flow of inspection management. Inspections checklists, copies of documents such as permits, orders, maps, photos of inspection site, etc. It’s a big load of paperwork. Now if we imagine that the paper is being replaced by software that allows everyone to his job digitally, it won’t be hard to see the benefits in terms of productivity.

Related: Have a look at the food safety inspections offering of the inspection management platform of Canalix.

But the question is how a digital document management system can make foods safer? The answer is in the data. It’s very challenging to organize and present data that is based on paper documents spread all over the cabinets of a food inspection agency. If this data is collected and organized via sophisticated inspection management software, then it can be visualized, analyzed and used for identifying trends and building a better visibility on food inspections. In other words data can be used for making smarter and faster decision making that directly affects the optimisation of inspections.

The bonus thing: the use of inspection software with integrated document management system can improve the inspection management process not only in food regulatory agencies, but also in the food industry itself (by serving as a digital infrastructure for internal inspections and audits).

Inspectors inspect more while working less

If the digital document management safes time for inspectors, how can we enable them to use this time to cover more inspection sites and cases? Digital transformation allows regulatory agencies to leverage on technologies such as AI to optimise inspection scheduling and inspection routes so that inspectors can be send on the most optimal inspection routes without causing a conflict in their schedules. The application of such AI-driven inspection management can ultimately lead to long-term cost savings for the regulators because of the optimized resource utilization.

Related: How to reduce the cost of inspections with routing optimisation?

Reduce human errors with the help of data and AI

An employee of the Food Safety Agency may assign wrongfully skilled inspectors to an inspection case. As a result there will be a lot of time and costs wasted for nothing. Automating food safety inspections with the use of data and AI can dramatically reduce the making of such mistakes. The effect of such optimisation can be seen from miles. The question is why it takes so long for the public sector to turn to new technologies that can ensure the safety of our communities?

Related: How AI can transform inspections?

How a food regulator embraces digital transformation?

It all starts with strategy. Your organization has a digital transformation strategy? Good. Then it will be easy for the CIO to prioritize the adoption of inspection software for food safety. Even if your organization doesn’t have a strategy, now is the time to make one.

Contact Canalix here, if you need food safety inspection software and a digital transformation strategy.

Related: Understanding a digital transformation strategy

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Public Sector: How To Approach Digital Acceleration With Inspections?

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“This will change everything” was quite a popular phrase at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the world of business this phrase was mostly connected with changes in terms of digital transformation. But digital transformation has been an ongoing trend for the last 15 years. So what’s the different in digital transformation in the post covid-19 era? The answer is simple: what’s different is the speed of adoption of digital infrastructures. The urgency for action is dictated by the uncertainty in the global situation.

The new world context is affecting the pace of cloud adoption in regulatory inspections as well. A field such as regulatory enforcement that’s focused at ensuring the safety of our communities is a serious matter and the urgency for digital acceleration is very sensible there. It means that decisions must be made on a faster pace to ensure the functioning of law enforcing government agencies in the new reality of mass lockdown with growing infection rates.

If we have to summarize the focus that government agencies must keep in the current COVID-19 recovery era, it will come down to:

  • Government agency need to make faster decisions
  • They should focus on automating inspections and leverage on AI in inspections
  • They should focus on real-time risk assessment
  • They should focus on driving agility in inspections
  • They need to stick to cloud-first approach

And all of these must be done on a much faster pace than before the COVID-19 era. So let’s get to the biggest question in this article:

How does digital acceleration in inspection management looks like?

Like every big question, there are a lot of “depends” in the answer of this one. The digital acceleration in inspections depends mostly on the digital adoption strategy of the organisation. In the public sector this means that the CIO must speed up the decision making in the roadmap of the digital adoption strategy. If there’s no digital adoption strategy in motion, then now is the time to make on.

Related: All you need to know about making a cloud adoption strategy

What are the possible ways do accelerate digital transformation in inspections?

  1. Don’t transform outdated legacy systems, move to an entirely new cloud service designed for inspection management. This can be the faster and smarter approach for transforming inspections. But a careful research is needed.Read our guide: How to find inspection management software online?
  2. If on a central level the government has successful history of cloud implementation, then the good example must be followed. Following an already known path can accelerate digital transformation in inspection. For example if a social care institution has a successful history of implementing cloud based case management solution, then the smart move for this institution will be to follow the same path when implementing an inspection management software.
  3. Reorganize spend and move funds from less valuable initiatives to more urgent ones like cloud adoption.

Related: How to approach cost-efficient cloud adoption?

What to expect from accelerated digital transformation in regulatory inspections?

Doing something on a faster pace in the public sector is definitely not normal. But the new reality must be accepted. This means that there are certain red flags that must be kept in mind when we approach accelerated digital transformation in the public sector:

  1. A balance between efficiency and resilience must be kept.
  2. Inspectors, administrators and functional leaders must be equipped with the required skills.
  3. Configurability that can adequately answer the needs to different use segments in inspections (an inspection software must offer configurability for different type of inspections – food safety inspections, construction building inspections, social care facility inspections, playground inspections, etc.
How You Can Drive Digital Business Acceleration

Related: How governments should prepare for the post-pandemic scenarios?

This all is a part of the strategic planning. Strategic planning includes the conversation for the future and the priorities that must be followed if the most likely future scenario is changed (a thing that already happened on a massive scale with COVID-19). A change of the possible scenario such as the global pandemic might require from CIO’s to change the pacing of the digital adoption strategy for inspections. Disruption is not a bad thing if we are able to predict the outcomes.

Do you need help with the strategic planning for the digital transformation of inspections in your organisation?

Contact us now.

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