This post was last updated on June 15th, 2022 at 10:53 pm
Safety improvement remains a key concern in the construction industry. Hoistech, a specialist lifting equipment service, manufacturing and testing company, has been at the forefront in helping its customers to improve safety through the services it provides.
Its use of CoreRFID’s CheckedOK system has been a key part of this, helping to speed up safety checks and improve the ways inspecting engineers and equipment users communicate about safety matters. Hoistech first started using CheckedOK in 2010 and expanded its use over the subsequent five years. Its experience demonstrates the value of the CheckedOK system.
“We have worked with CheckedOK for 5 years now. It has helped us to improve our business and safety for our customers.”
– Joe Duignan, Managing Director, Hoistech Ltd
Improving collection of inspection results
Founded in 2000, Hoistech offers bespoke manufacturing and maintenance of electric overhead gantry cranes. It also supplies, services and inspects all types of hoists and lifting equipment, as well as construction excavators, tele-porters, forklifts and auxiliary plant across all of its customer sites. At the core of its business is testing and certification of lifting equipment and breakdown servicing and planned preventative maintenance for the products it installs.
Hoistech operates under the Irish Safety Health & Welfare at Work, General Applications Regulations, under which the Irish Health & Safety Authority (HSA) requires thorough examinations of lifting equipment every six or 12 months depending on the equipment type. Hoistech carries out these examinations and produces the reports required.
It introduced the CheckedOK system to help collect information on inspection results, and provide a common way of working across different asset types and multiple customers. A year later it opened up the system to customers, giving them on-line access to reports and inspection certificates. Since then, the system has been expanded to support inspections of personal protective equipment (PPE) and new ways of working and changes to the HSA legislation. Today it is used by all of Hoistech’s engineers to manage inspections across over 300,000 assets for 5,000 clients.
Automatic reporting on inspection failures
CoreRFID’s CheckedOK solution for Hoistech was designed to simplify the inspecting engineer’s tasks, speed up the collection of information, and improve the accuracy of the data collected. Hoistech has also introduced a feature that automates the reporting of inspection failures which allows management, customers and – as required by legislation – the HSA to be automatically emailed if a piece of equipment fails inspection, prompting corrective action and subsequent retesting.
CheckedOK uses RFID technology, handheld tablets or mobiles and cloud-based software to improve the accuracy and efficiency of reporting. Assets needing inspection are identified by RFID tags. Service engineers can use mobile phones to prompt them with the correct set of inspection for a given asset type. Each asset category has its own set of inspection criteria.
Cloud-based system offers customers access to data
As the service engineer carries out the inspection, the results are recorded, including any photographs taken with the mobile camera. The mobile records the results of the inspection and sends them to a central database in the cloud-based system hosted by CoreRFID. This is then synchronised with Hoistech’s own asset management system. The CheckedOK database holds a list of each asset by location and the results uploaded are used to produce the standard GA1 Report of Thorough Examination required by the Irish HSA.
The system records the time taken for each inspection and generates the next scheduled inspection date after a period of 6 or 12 months depending on the asset type. Hoistech’s customers can view data for equipment on their sites, which means Hoistech is able to offer them a better service by providing up to date information about which assets have been inspected and the outcome as well as confirming exactly which assets are at which location.
The benefits
- Proven system, in use since 2010
- Fully supported with rapid technical response
- Reliable hosting with no data loss over the period
- Evolved to match changing business needs
- Prompted examination tasks by asset type speeds and simplifies engineers’ work
- Reports are easily accessible for Hoistech customers
- Automated production and distribution of regulatory inspection reports
