Better Building Inspections Through Digitization

The goal of Building Safety Month is to build awareness around the importance of abiding by modern safety codes, standards set by the International Code Council (ICC).

The ICC, founded in 1994, provides guidance for creating safe, affordable, and sustainable buildings and communities; the council’s standards also help increase building resiliency worldwide. Regularly updated and appropriately implemented and up-to-date building codes make buildings more affordable, use fewer resources, and create healthy, safe, and resilient places for communities.

Building Safety Month: Why Digitize Building Inspections?

Many building inspections require day-to-day maintenance to meet the established benchmarks of codes, and we thought it would be helpful to explore the benefits of digitizing those inspections.

One Size Fits All is an Illusion

First thing’s first: when you start digitizing your inspections, you need to remember that every building has its nuances, and your process and forms need to capture those characteristics. Having unique digital forms, expectations, and mandates for each building that can be found in one space will streamline maintenance for team members and management.  

Consistency + Communication = Code Compliance

Ensuring building safety and code compliance is an ongoing event; with so many standards to meet, it can be easy to miss important steps in a paper-based process. By digitizing your forms and procedures, you can virtually assign tasks, send reminders, and alert relevant parties, eliminating the possibility of an overlooked signature, check-in, or something else.

Digitizing the building inspection workflow puts all of these fail-safes in one shared space; your teams, through a digital configuration, can work with the most up-to-date information and expectations. 

The mobility of digitization is another benefit of going virtual; employees can fulfill their responsibilities and document the completion of tasks all from their mobile device. Whether they have to travel a few floors down, or travel to another building within an organization’s campus, every necessary form and checklist is ready to go in their pocket. 

Virtual spaces also enable trend analysis by putting updates, progress reports, and general information directly in front of teams, managers, and other decision makers. Dashboards and other views give clear reports and status updates, keeping the operation front-of-mind.

Data Optimizes Resilience

Dashboards are one of the many ways to utilize the reporting capabilities of an online platform. Not only do dashboards make all operational data available to stakeholders, they also show the status of each inspection workflow. This level of transparency eliminates hang-ups and unnecessary bottlenecks. All together the level of data interaction dashboards enable will help your teams discover trends and rectify pain points before they grow into compliance issues.

Ensure Safety, Maintain Compliance, Optimize Resilience

When it comes to building safety, nothing should be done haphazardly. Digitizing inspection forms allows for you and your team to easily make updates and perform reviews, raise possible red flags, and find solutions before problems get out of control. Being able to customize your forms and process ensures that each building's unique nuances are considered and allows team members to see precisely what they need, and nothing more. 

If you are looking for a platform to streamline your inspection process and simplify your code compliance, take a look at our solution in action.