When it comes to field installation documentation in the construction industry, everyone has their own way of doing things. Take a quick moment to think about how you and your team collect job site information prior to and after work installation. What is the value of those job site photos in real-time? What is the value of those photos years down the road? Here’s a look at common problems construction businesses face with their field installation documentation processes and how to solve them with SiteCapture, a web and mobile application for collecting job site data efficiently.
Incomplete Photos
When collecting data in the field, one of the most valuable assets captured are photos. Photos are an essential piece of construction documentation for any project since they can easily showcase important job site information that is extremely valuable for quality assurance, training, project management and risk mitigation.
But, often times when taking pictures in the field, crews take random pictures here and there on their cell phones or digital cameras and do a bulk upload at the end of the project. It’s not a structured, templated list that encompasses and enforces the company requirements. How many times have you reviewed a group of great photos only to find you are missing that one picture you needed the most of a critical piece of the project?
How to Solve it with SiteCapture
With the SiteCapture app, field teams won’t ever have to worry about taking the right photos again. SiteCapture gives its users the ability to take high-resolution photos and collect data through easy to use templates built off the company requirements.
These can range from 60-second safety checklists before the crew starts working to 10-page compliance forms required at project commissioning. Your field users simply select which template to use and the app guides them through the required information to collect, making it easy to get every single photo and receive reminders if something is missing.
Not Storing or Cataloging Correctly
Another common problem that solar teams can run into with field installation documentation is taking the data they’ve collected and storing it inefficiently. Data that’s stored in unorganized ways wastes time (and ultimately money) when those trying to access it can’t find what they need right away, or information is getting lost.
Some of these inefficiencies include photos stored on random cell phones or texted to the project manager and lost forever when that person leaves the company; as well as photos pulled off digital camera SD cards and dragged to manually-created, unorganized folder structure. Not to mention, photos are not geo-coded and randomly named by the digital camera, making finding the right photo a pain.
Before using SiteCapture:
- Ion Solar’s job site photos were always in an odd order in Dropbox or getting lost and jumbled up.
- PV Pros had their job site assets spread across multiple applications, documents, dropbox folders, and emails.
- 1st Light’s teams were using phones and emailing their pictures or putting them on micro SD cards and uploading to a laptop, which consistently resulted in lost assets.
How to Solve it with SiteCapture
The SiteCapture app eliminates data storage and organization issues completely. When the app is used in the field to accurately collect data, it automatically stores and categorizes that data in real-time for anyone to access immediately.
- Photos are exported to automatically created folders with specific folder names based on the project/customer.
- Each photo has latitude/longitude, time/date, user information, azimuth, elevation and other data automatically saved in the photo meta-data
- Each photo is automatically named based on the field name so pictures of a main service panel, for example, can easily be identified by the file name
With SiteCapture, crews don’t have to manually enter job site information into a database after collecting it and it also allows teams to access all job site data from anywhere. And best of all, no more additional trips to the job site to recollect data.
Get Organized with SiteCapture
If your field teams are experiencing these common field installation documentation issues, SiteCapture can help you solve them!
“SiteCapture’s whole process, and the templates, have made everything really fast. It’s cut down our technician’s field service reporting time by 75% and consolidated 90% of our prior process.”- Jesse Waters, Director of Operations
With SiteCapture you can:
- Streamline your entire data collection process from beginning to end
- Customize forms and templates with the information you need
- Use a simple app to collect accurate data in the field, in real-time
- Capture high-resolution photos with any mobile device
- Store all your field installation documentation in one simple place
- Eliminate the need for multiple job site visits
Ready to put a stop to costly and time-consuming field installation documentation issues with SiteCapture?
