What is a site inspection checklist?

Site inspection checklists are one of the most powerful tools construction and industrial companies have for keeping their people, sites and assets safe and working properly.

Sites are inherently dangerous places, harbouring heavy machinery and equipment, lots of moving pieces, and countless people. In order to manage sites and all of these moving pieces before disaster strikes and it's 'too late', we have proactive measures that are taken and documented frequently in order to try prevent these issues arising in the first place.

One such measure is the site inspection and site inspection checklist.

A site inspection forces a person or people to check and inspect a specific phase of work, equipment, machine or item - and provide a base level of assurance that it is in correct working order and as it should be.

The best and most reliable method we have for performing a site inspection is the site inspection checklist - where we check off a of set items which we know to be important in that work or the functioning of that item in order to deem it safe or 'okay'.

The purpose of a site inspection checklist is multi-faceted. The main reason for them is to keep people safe and work moving forward properly, but there are some other positive outcomes which stem from conducting site inspections properly which include:

• Entering data into checklists manually
• Accountability when something goes wrong. If a machine breaks down or someone gets injured in an avoidable accident, people can look back at the checklist and understand who's job it was to check that (where applicable)
• Inspectors and auditors who arrive on your sites will find bulletproof inspection records
• By conducting checklists, people find minor problems and issues which can be rectified before they become larger issues and blowouts which cost more time, effort and money
• People are more likely to take care and being more cognisant of what they are doing in the knowledge that it will be inspected

So if we all agree that site inspections are important and beneficial, how can we conduct and manage site inspections and site inspection checklists more efficiently to optimise our time and be in a position to best action the findings and insights derived from site inspections?

How are site inspections managed today?

To date, site inspections have been managed without modern technologies and softwares. Many companies today still use word documents, excel spreadsheets, PDFs and paper-based forms to create, manage and track their site inspections.

While this does 'work', it saps and wastes a lot of resource and engineering time - with people having to spend decent portions of their work days:

• Downloading, uploading and emailing checklists back and forth
• Formatting word documents into PDFs and vice versa
• Reconciling the information captured on site in spreadsheets and CSVs
• Manipulating this data into charts and graphs to discover insights about site inspections

Because site inspections have been performed like this for so long, people have become accustom to doing work like this - but there is a better way today.