Whether using leased or rental cranes or your own lifting equipment, it is fundamental that you have a lifting inspection procedure in place.
The Lifting Equipment Engineers Association (LEEA) is an international organisation respected as the authoritative representative body in the lifting industry. In order to meet the recommendations that are set by the LEEA, you must consider how you will use your lifting equipment and how you wish to conduct your lifting inspection. This goes for the refurbishment and repair, maintenance, hire or end use by an operator of cranes and lifting equipment. For this to occur it is imperative to have a dynamic, tailored and powerful inspection and certification solution in place.
Digital lifting inspection can be completed via a paperless inspection application run on any mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet. Run via Android or iOS, mobile devices lend their features such as the built-in camera to the paperless inspection application. Using this it is possible to take pictures of equipment for the lifting inspection and add them post annotation to the report or the certificate. The touchscreen gives the possibility to make drawings or highlight certain wear or faults with lifting equipment, whilst GPS and timestamps are derived directly from the device itself. The lifting inspection application also makes it easier to keep track of lifting equipment whether it is portable or fixed, temporary or permanent, via built-in historical asset tracking. This is viewable for all users with granted permission via a web-portal accessible 24/7, 365 days a year. Such access and dependability on the system is unparalleled when compared to regular pen and paper inspection procedures. Instead of storage via a cabinet in a stacked filing room, digital lifting inspections can be based on servers in-house or via the cloud (SaaS).
Some of the benefit for the field inspectors include easy access to reference material, manuals, parts, and instructions, voice recognition and speech to text for data collection, capture and “doodle” on images of the defects/non-compliance, electronic signatures, using RFID/Barcode for quick identification of the equipment.
There are also many benefits for management besides access to historical asset tracking and a reduction in storage needs. Management can easier calculate ROI of their assets via analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) provided after every lifting inspection report. They can also configure pre-approved corrective actions that are triggered via the inspection interface by certain data inputs. This can give quick and appropriate solutions to lifting inspection queries that may occur in the field.
All Lifting inspections require assets and equipment to be identified and recorded which means that management and maintenance teams can make strategic decisions long-term. By automatically categorising reports after their data, and by making use of features such as barcode/RFID scanning, this can be accomplished a lot quicker than by using traditional methods.
Are you still using paper checklists for inspecting your lifting equipment? Given all the benefits above, and given that there are few good reasons not to embrace the digital era, why wait to go paperless with your lifting inspections?