Field inspection management software helps organizations move beyond paper-based quality inspections by streamlining workflows, reducing errors, and increasing visibility. With real-time data collection, standardized guidance, and automation features, teams can adapt quickly, demonstrate value, and maintain quality across changing conditions.
Whether critical installations or safety inspections, field teams perform a wide range of essential functions for many companies. By the nature of their work, however, field teams risk being isolated from not just the main office, but from the very processes which produce quality work. When field teams fall behind a quality curve, potential rework and unchecked safety hazards can threaten both bottom-lines and business reputations. And if they’re isolated, field teams may not adopt the culture of quality that safety managers strive so hard to cultivate.
Doing field inspections is nothing new. Even back in the Stone Age, when Fred Flintstone was done with his workday at the Slate Rock and Gravel Company, Mr. Slate probably came around with a stone tablet and a small dinosaur with a sharp beak to chisel in the results of a field inspection of Fred’s work.
It’s been a wild ride for the construction industry. First we have the pluses: a surge in construction spending due to pent up demand post-lockdown, $550 billion in federal funding which will spur large infrastructure projects, and a (temporarily) red-hot housing market leading to new residential housing starts increase of 15.6% in 2021. In this dynamic environment, digital field inspection management platforms have become increasingly important.
In its 2021 Global Construction Survey, global auditing firm KPMG reports that nearly 60% of construction and engineering companies interviewed agree that visibility into (and integration of) risks associated with enterprises, portfolios and projects is important for capital project success. Let’s unpack that.
So, we’ve discussed the problem of construction rework, and the devastating effect it can have on your deadlines and your profits. We’ve also shared how digital quality inspections can help open lines of communication, empower employees to follow the latest processes for quality assurance, and deliver location-based insights to keep supervisors in the know about conditions on-site. But even if you’ve followed all the advice and done everything you can to avoid rework, sometimes it can’t be avoided. Then what?
Few words make a construction contractor’s heart sink faster than “rework” – redoing or correcting work that was not done correctly the first time. Construction work is all about margins – margins for time, employees, and profit – and these margins are notoriously thin. When something must be redone, or worse, dismantled and then redone, all of these margins quickly evaporate resulting in missed deadlines, cost overruns, and projects failing.
Having problems finding skilled construction workers? You’re not alone. The labor shortage has hit the construction industry particularly hard: home builder contractors estimate that nearly three-quarters of a million construction workers will be needed each year to keep up with demand and account for attrition, while 92% of commercial construction contractors report moderate to high levels of difficulty finding skilled workers.
File attachments in Fulcrum
Great news! Today we’re announcing a new file attachment feature that will save inspectors, data collectors, and administrators a ton of work when they need to manage document-based information. Documents are now just another data type: You can add them to any section of your Fulcrum app.
Each day, teams on the ground play a crucial role in performing essential operations like inspections, installations, and ensuring compliance. These operations, while seemingly straightforward, create an abundance of location data that often doesn’t receive the attention it deserves.
Fulcrum enables organizations to eliminate many cumbersome, inefficient paper processes from their workflows to increase the productivity, safety, and quality of their field operations. But some mobile users — especially those with particularly complex and dangerous jobs — have still needed to carry paper safety booklets and bulky SOPs for reference on project sites. Until today’s launch of Fulcrum’s attached document feature.
Organizations that continually increase efficiency, safety, and customer satisfaction all have this in common: They embrace Field process improvement.
When was the last time you went grocery shopping without a checklist? How soon after did you have to go back for something you forgot? Checklists play an important role in our lives, not just by reminding us to buy milk. Health and safety checklists, for example, can prevent accidents, illnesses, and injuries.
No code app development platforms are exploding in popularity, and with good reason.
Establishing a quality culture within your mobile workforce is more important than ever.
As a property manager, it’s your job to not only help your clients preserve the value of their property, but to ensure it stays in compliance with local ordinances. In many states, a code violation multiplies every day it goes unresolved. So a $1,000 violation, left unattended for a week, becomes an $8,000 violation, and so on. To protect your clients (and your company), you need to conduct regular inspections, respond quickly to problems, and confirm that your contractors are performing high-quality work. Between contracts, inspection reports, and maintenance records, it’s a lot of paperwork — and paperwork is the enemy of expeditiousness.
In part I, we talked about increasing productivity in safety, quality, and other inspections. Then, in Part II, we talked about increasing rigor and speed without sacrificing quality. In this post, we’ll talk about speeding up your organization’s reaction time to events that happen in the field is made possible by automating workflows with Fulcrum.
In our last post, we talked about how workflow automation can increase productivity in safety, quality, and other inspections.
Fulcrum workflows automate the process of taking the data you collect and pushing into new processes — without any additional effort from data collectors or their supervisors. We’re excited about it because it’s the first step to helping you:
