Introduction
It’s time to inspect your inspection process – is it making you work, or working for you?
In industries where operations extend beyond that traditional office setting, such as Power and Energy, Industrial Equipment, and Heavy Machinery, maintaining high standards of quality, safety, and efficiency is crucial. While the process of ensuring these items are met can look different from company to company, most successful and mature service organizations enact a field service inspection process.
What is a Field Service Inspection?
Field service inspections are systematic checks that verify whether equipment is operating within the defined standards, remaining within compliance regulations, and meeting customer expectations. This process is performed by a service technician in the field, often with the help of field service software. Methods for performing these inspections have evolved significantly in recent years, transforming from sheets of paper clipboards to accessible digital forms, image capture, and workflows.
Let’s dive into why inspections matter and explore key components together.
Why Field Service Inspections Matter
There’s no getting around it: having a field service inspection process is essential. Without one, you’ll be stumbling around in the dark when it comes to meeting regulations and customer standards.
A successful inspection process will help you assess:
- Employee and site safety – Inspections can ensure that safety protocols are followed, and regulatory requirements are met, reducing the risk of injury and fines while enhancing workplace safety.
- Customer Satisfaction – By delivering high quality services for your clients, inspections contribute to building trust and loyalty. This is critical to retain your customers’ business and grow your organization’s practice.
- Operational Excellence – Streamlining data capture through inspections can help identify issues early, prevent costly equipment failures, and improve operational metrics and KPIs.
Keep these in mind when you are reviewing your current process, and ensure you are reviewing your inspection process to keep them up to date.
Before You Continue…
When planning to implement a new inspection process or review an existing process that is in place today, make sure to:
- Have clear objectives and a plan that aligns to those objectives
- Ensure you know what tools you’ll use to support your process, such as digital tools/platforms
- Change management and communication are critical to effectively introduce or change a process within an organization
- Have a training plan and group in place to help enable your team
Now after you’ve thought through those items (and any others critical to your success) you can fine-tune what makes up a successful inspection.
Key Components of a Successful Inspection
Let’s get into how we structure a successful digital inspection process within a service organization.
Offline Support
If you’re introducing new technology to your service team, it has to make their lives easier. Mobile field service software that is not offline-capable limits your technician’s ability to do their job and frankly, will drive them crazy. Give a technician a clunky mobile app, send them to a job outside of a service area, and ask them to capture information – it’ll be the easiest way to get them not to use the solution you’ve invested in. That is not what you want. Give your technicians a tool that will keep them working and focused on the job – not chasing down the Wi-Fi password.
Among other features, offline-capable field service apps must allow techs to complete inspections anytime, anywhere. (While vetting solutions, this is a great indicator to see if they are keeping up with the speed of technology – modern field service solutions should always have a standalone offline capable mobile app [not a link masquerading as an app] for any OS and device).
The Checklist
The most important part of an inspection is ensuring you have a structured and standardized process and path to capture the information: the inspection checklist. For many service companies, this has always been through a paper form on a clipboard that a field technician carries around and jots down notes on. Why upgrade this to digital?
With so many digital form tools or field service software platforms available, it has never been easier to integrate with technology to support a streamlined process for your team.
A digital inspection checklist can be configured to align to your needs and your clients needs. Hit two birds with one stone and make your technicians’ lives easier while providing the perfect deliverable for your clients to keep them satisfied. This checklist should provide a clear framework and sequence for your technician to follow, covering critical areas such as pre-job safety protocols, equipment assessments, compliance checks and additional recommended work opportunities. Additionally, your technicians can accomplish other required tasks within the mobile app, eliminating the need for paper and manual entry entirely.
At its crux, digital inspections are easier, more offline friendly, and faster to use. With the right field service solution, you will be able to easily create and manage these inspection checklists and forms and review data in the back office, increasing efficiency, reducing errors, and ensuring compliance.
Integration
With digital inspections in place, the next step is to ensure the data captured has the ability to be shared with other technology systems, shared dynamically with your customer, or alert your back office based on results for metric tracking. With automation, you can also use your technology solution to standardize your inspections checklists for specific types of jobs, pieces of equipment, or contractual requirements. This will ensure consistency and thoroughness in data collection which then will make it easier to track and report on results.
Conclusion
Field service inspections are vital components of a healthy and growing service organization. Enhance your inspection capabilities, reduce errors, improve compliance, and keep your employees happy with the new standard: digital inspection processes. Explore 9 Reasons to Go Digital here.
If you’re not leveraging inspections today, take this information back to your team and have a conversation about how upgrading your inspection process can help your business today!
