Streamlining and safeguarding your fleet with digitization

Heavy construction equipment is immensely valuable to your business; but potentially dangerous and expensive in the event of mechanical issues that affect performance. Regular inspections are a necessity to ensure every vehicle in your fleet is in working order–but the inspection process itself is often dragged out due to inefficient methods. 

Moving away from paper-based processes
Far too many construction companies rely on paper-based workflows, not least of all when it comes to fleet maintenance and management. However, paper forms can pose a liability for the equipment inspection process due to lag time between the inspection and any maintenance, and the integrity or accuracy of the data.

Adopting a digital workflow and switching to electronic forms for equipment inspections and other jobs presents significant advantages for a construction company.

• Speed – Get information from the operators to the maintenance team faster. Paper inspection processes often take a week or even two to effectively provide service to the machines that need repair and are critical to keeping a project moving forward.
• Cost – Learn about and act on inspection information faster, and cut costs through preventive rather than reactive maintenance.
• Safety – The faster and more effective the inspection information, the easier it is to provide maintenance when needed, thus helping to reduce safety issues within your fleet. Additionally, completing timely and effective inspections ensures you’re complying with all the applicable laws and regulations that keep your workers safe.
• Downtime – Chances are, you don’t have time for downtime. When inspections are streamlined through digital processes, it helps keep your equipment running and on the job–keeping your project on time and on budget.

Leveraging equipment inspection data better through digital workflows
As with any routine procedure, regular equipment inspections generate a great deal of data: both structured data rating the condition of each part, as well as free-form comments and observations.

Every inspection – and the maintenance procedures that might come as a result – will generate more and more information for your business. All this data must be processed and stored to adequately service the machines that need repair and keep your fleet in working order. Trapping it on paper almost guarantees it won’t be utilized to improve your equipment maintenance procedures.

Having access to all the data about your vehicles in one convenient location is a huge boon for your business.

Digitizing the inspection process makes this data easily accessible and trackable. Predictive and analytical digital inspection processes can help your business identify trends, increase efficiencies and be more immediate in responding to and remediating your equipment safety issues.

For example, is there a vehicle part whose rating has just been downgraded from “good” to “satisfactory”? Set up your system to automatically order a replacement part and schedule a repair session with a technician so that you can get in front of the issue before it becomes a big problem for your workers. You can also set up a field on your electronic form to trigger an automatic alert to the mechanic for urgent repairs. This alert can be delivered by email, text or within the application.

Having access to all the data about your vehicles in one convenient location is a huge boon for your business. You’ll be able to track the many different elements on which you collect information, and crunch the numbers to perform quality control and obtain meaningful analytics around your fleet maintenance and management.

Additional benefits of a digital construction equipment inspection process
By making your equipment inspection workflow a digital one, your workers can quickly and easily submit forms and audits right from the field.

These days, technology is becoming more and more mobile, with devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops at the forefront of business processes across industries and around the world.

Your workers in the field, the shop and the office can all communicate and collaborate at the touch of a button—sharing, adding and editing data and seeing their changes reflected instantaneously.

And consider this–the data being capture through a digital process is richer than with any paper process.

• E-signatures – Know exactly who signed off on the information.
• Date and time stamps – Know when the inspection or other procedure occurred to easily track progress and action.
• GPS location – Know exactly where the form was filled out.
• Photos and videos – See what the equipment issue looks like, or even sounds like, for yourself. This element is simply not possible through written description alone.
• Data integrity – Pull inspection information including employees, equipment, job sites and phase codes easily through drop-down menus, allowing the individual filling out the electronic form to always have access to the correct names and information.
• Correct forms – Electronic systems ensure your foremen have access to the right form, and eliminate the need for books or folders of multiple forms that require constant updating as forms change, and can lead to unnecessary delays.
• Built-in routing – An approval and routing process is built in to electronic forms so you always know who approved the form and its status.

Construction is one of the least digitized industries, which also means it’s one of the industries where digitization has the most room to grow. Just the very act of switching from paper to digital means you’re able to avoid the errors, inefficiencies and lost paperwork that have plagued construction companies from the beginning. Digital documents save space, can be easily edited and searched, and are stored safely and securely offsite or in the cloud.

In our increasingly digital world, data is an immensely valuable currency. The revelations you can gain will help you operate more efficiently, and at a lesser cost than ever before. Digital workflow software designed specifically for data capture and analysis can drastically improve your heavy civil construction equipment inspection processes, keeping your fleet safe and on the job.

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Elizah Hulseman is a product manager for B2W Software. She has had a leadership role in the development of B2W Inform, the company’s unified solution for enterprise-wide data capture and analysis. She can be reached at ehulseman@b2wsoftware.com.