biscoPro Inspect – Thames Coromandel District Council
Background
As a Building Consent Authority TCDC must monitor building projects as they are under construction to confirm that they comply with their consent conditions and the Building Act.
TCDC use on site inspectors who complete paper forms for this process. On finishing each inspection the inspector completes a short carbon copy report and gives this to the builder. The detailed inspection form is returned to the office for scanning into their document management system for permanent storage.
The inspectors are required to take photos of aspects of the inspection as a pictorial record of the construction. These are either printed and scanned or zipped up then put into the document management system.
Because the process is fundamentally paper based the inspectors carried a folder with all of the documents in it.
The results of the inspection is updated manually in the back office management system for reporting and billing.
The Need
TCDC knew that they had to improve by:
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Reducing the time taken to perform inspections
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Removing the manual scanning of documents took time and meant a delay in visibility of information across the organisation
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Stopping lost paperwork
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The mess of separate photographs and scanning documents in their document management system
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The customer not receiving a copy of the detailed inspection
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Complex forms and limited instructions resulting in inconsistencies between inspectors
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Lack of analyse or audit limiting their ability to improve the process
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Ensuring that inspectors did not miss items within the inspection
The Solution
Implementing biscoPro Inspect allows TCDC to convert the process to an entirely electronic one with the field inspection data automatically uploaded into the management and document management systems.
The biscoPro server collects information about the consent from the back office system and document management system and combines it into a single representation of the project information for the user.
The inspectors use the biscoPro Inspect client application to connect to the biscoPro server to view and work with the inspection data. When they are ready to go to site the synchronise the data for the day and head office. Out in the field they work with exactly the same client application which now connects against a local XML file and perform the inspections. The offline system also holds any relevant documentation about the project and a copy of the central TCDC library.
The inspectors complete the inspections, print out the results on a portable printer, and synchronise the documents and data back to the central servers when the are next connected to the server either on the network or over the internet.
Moving to an electronic basis allowed TCDC to:
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Improve inspector productivity as the inspection process was quicker
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Integrate the photographs into the inspection document
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Print a detailed inspection report for the customer while on site
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Automatically upload the inspection document onto the main servers
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Being a database system enabled detailed reporting and analysis
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Checks within the system ensured that no items were missed
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Detailed instructions on how to perform the inspection tasks aided the inspectors
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Synchronisation of the offline and online data ensured that everyone had up to date information
Our district