Highways, bridges and
viaduct inspections

Industry: Infrastructures

The engineering consultancy branch of one of the world’s largest certification bodies has chosen InspectionSite as the tool to support inspection and supervision activities on a long highway section in Italy.

 

Main activity

The company provides a broad range of engineering services in industries such as Oil&Gas, Infrastructures and Maritime. These include feasibility and specialist studies, preliminary and final planning, project management, site engineering and Operation & Maintenance engineering on plant and systems.

The company conducts visual inspections in the infrastructures industry on behalf of clients and motorway section operators. The purpose of inspections on bridges, viaducts and footbridges is to certify the safety and state of conservation of highway infrastructures, for both newly-built works and for maintenance on existing ones.

The ultimate aim of this activity is to have a complete and precise overview of any defects, to monitor them over time and to implement a maintenance plan based on the priority of the necessary actions.

InspectionSite
La sfida di InspectionSite

Challenges

Before introducing InspectionSite, the client analysed the solutions available on the market for renewal of the monitoring management system in use. Digitised systems were already widely used in the infrastructures industry, so the client was not starting from a “pen and paper” style management of inspections. However, the system used at the time had a number of shortcomings that prevented efficient and effective management of planning of inspections and, above all, rapid transfer of information from the field to the back office. The main issues were:

  • Lack of a solid and streamlined planning of the inspections that could be easily shared with the team of inspectors.
  • Lack of solid support for on-site techs: not only for orderly collection of data and photos, but also for rapid consultation of the reference guidelines for classification of the defects found and an instant assessment of them as compared to the previous inspection.
  • Inspection reports with lengthy preparation times and numerous errors. The reporting activity associated with individual inspections is the bottleneck in a situation in which the time taken to communicate and resolve the defects found is of vital importance.
  • Difficulties in finding and checking reports and documents.  Lack of a single and shared repository in which to find documentation immediately and lack of homogeneity in presentation of reports by the inspectors engaged to perform the inspection.
  • Unavailability of data. Lack of a continually updated database from which massively and rapidly to extract periodic inspection and defect reports ready to be sent to the client.

Soluzione

Solution

 

The company decided to contact Orangedev in order to work together to find a solution that would allow both greater operability on site and a substantial simplification in management of reporting of monitoring activities on the motorway infrastructures concerned. InspectionSite was tailored to this purpose with the following functions:

 

  • Possibility of creating long-term and short-term plans, shared on the calendar with the teams, producing inspection reports pre-compiled with the data on the motorway section inspected.
  • Compilation form designed for rapid collection of data on site, acquisition of photos, videos and voice notes automatically associated with detected defect, automatic computation of the extent of the defect, based on the parameters detected.
  • The inspector can also add notes and drawings on each photo to indicate the defects.
  • Possibility of filling out the form even when an Internet connection is unavailable.
  • Furthermore, based on the components inspected and the defects found, the form provides the inspector with guidelines on the reference standards for assessment of the defect, further simplifying activities on site.
  • The inspector can open the report on a previous inspection directly from the App, allowing on-the-spot comparison with the ongoing inspection and immediate assessment of the defects found, without waiting to return to the office and search for the inspection on the laptop.
  • On completing the inspection, the inspector can display a preview of the report on the App and share it with back-end, automatically signed, in just a few seconds.
  • Each inspection and each individual photo acquired can be geolocated and displayed on the map through web portal.
  • InspectionSite uses data collected on site to update KPIs and statistics and back-office staff can, at any time, extract periodic reporting on the monitoring activities performed, on the defects and on the alert classes resulting for each asset inspected, which are immediately ready to be sent to the client or to the authorities.

Results

 

InspectionSite has led to the following improvements in the monitoring activity that the company performs on behalf of the operator of the motorway section concerned:

  • Coordination and assignment of inspections takes just a few minutes and is performed automatically by the system, without needing to send assorted e-mails.
  • Improved correlation and coordination between on-site and back-office work.
  • Improvement of on-site activities, with the App allowing quicker, more orderly and error-free collection of data.
  • Inspection reporting takes place almost simultaneously with on-site inspection activity itself and time taken to complete and deliver it is considerably reduced, allowing plans of action to be assessed and drafted more rapidly.

Overall, from an operational standpoint, inspection times have been reduced and the percentage of error is close to zero, resulting in greater satisfaction of the end client.

Soluzioni e risultati

Key features

PhotoMark

Sorting and identifying pictures acquired during the inspection, quickly and without pairing mistakes. It is possible to mark each media with information, such as: article code, site name, date and time, GPS coordinates.

Sign

Inspector can upload and save his own signature from the APP or sign directly by the device touchscreen, allowing automatic creation of already signed reports, even in multiple positions or pages. It is also possible to acquire multiple signatures, in case reports need to be signed by various inspectors.

Compliance

It allows you to manage non-conformities in a simple way according to customizable criteria. You can easily see which inspections or individual items are non-compliant and track non-compliances even after their resolution.

Report

Report templates are totally customized according to your needs. Also large-sized and containing hundreds of photos output reports are managed and available in PDF, Word, Excel.

BigMedia

Storage of data and photos in original size without taking up space of company devices or storage. You can easily share them with customers/back oce or download them on local devices.

Import

Allows you to import data related to inspections to be carried out, in order to create reports with pre-filled information.

Mailer

Automatic mails to send copies of reports and/or media to customers or other recipients at the same time.