The Benefits

We no longer have our full resource tied up manually looking at certification, saving at least a couple of hours per day. They can spend more time on other roles and responsibilities such as fire sections. The task has become less onerous as they now only have to deal with the non-compliant (8%) and advisory (18%) issues that come in instead of having to go through 100% of documents trying to find the issues, which is apparent when someone is on leave.

There are many benefits that you don’t foresee until you start to input your certificates and use the trend analysis for your assets. The system pulls extra data out of the documents allowing us to be ultra-safe. We are also able to tweak the software to our specifications accessing what becomes a fail and what is an advisory. This allows us to be extremely precise, it enables the whole process to be less ‘black and white’ / ‘pass or fail’ which is a huge added value.

With regards to our contractors, it has highlighter poor practice that they are relying on their engineers and sending across documents which have not been checked. We are now able to go back to them, with the evidence, to ensure we get exactly what we want back in the future. The majority of our non-compliant documents have shown to be a human error such as a typo or document not being filled out correctly, which has lead to an understanding of the education and additional training engineers require.

Gas engineers have historically not been in an environment to use innovative technology and due to this culture I was expecting resistance ‘we’ve been doing it manually for years’, but they have taken well to the system and have begun the journey with us, which has been great. We are excited to see a real advantage when we roll it out across electric next month.