How to Choose a Site Inspection App

I have watched a lot of site inspection programs get bought and rather fewer get used. The ones that fail almost never fail on features. They fail on a Tuesday, on a site with one bar of signal, when a supervisor works through 40 items, hits submit, and watches the form disappear. He does the next one on paper, and the one after that in his head.

So this is not a feature list. It is what a site inspection app has to do before its feature list is worth reading, in the order those things matter, and the questions I would put to a vendor with the demo still open.

What a Site Inspection App Is, and What It Is Not.

A site inspection app runs a checklist against a place, an asset, or a job on a phone or tablet, records the result of each item with evidence attached, and turns a failed item into a piece of work that somebody owns. That is the whole job. Everything else is packaging.

Four things get sold as one product here and break in four different ways. The app is the capture layer. Deciding an inspection is due, who it falls to, and what happens when it is missed is a scheduling problem, covered in How to Build an Inspection Schedule That Holds. Running the same checklist across 50 buildings with local variations is a portfolio problem, covered in How Inspections Work Across a Property Portfolio. A driver checking a truck before a shift is a different record again, with the Heavy Vehicle National Law behind it, and that is What a Digital Vehicle Inspection Has to Record.

Australian WHS law does not name an app, and no product can discharge your duty for you. What the law does name is the outcome. Safe Work Australia’s code of practice on managing risks lists workplace inspection among the standard ways to check whether a control is still doing its job, alongside consultation, testing, and analysing your records.³ The plant code says plant inspection should run to a regular maintenance system, to catch wear and tear, corrosion, damaged parts, and inadequacies in controls you have already put in.²

Offline Comes First, and Everything Else Is Second.

The sites that most need inspecting have the worst coverage. Basements, plant rooms, tunnels, tank farms, remote depots, anywhere with a steel roof. If the app needs a connection to save, the inspection that matters most is the one you lose.

Offline is not a tick in a feature table. Ask three specific things. Does the template download to the device in advance, or does opening it require a call to a server. Does a part-finished inspection survive the app being killed and the phone going flat. And when the connection comes back, does the record sync on its own, or does somebody have to remember.

ComplyFlow’s Inspection app holds the inspection on the device and pushes it up on Complete and Sync; the record only leaves the phone once the sync has actually gone through, and if it is still sitting there, it has not.⁶ That behaviour is the thing to test. Put the demo device in flight mode, complete a full inspection with photographs, force-close the app, then turn the signal back on and watch. It takes five minutes and tells you more than the rest of the meeting. The mobile apps are where this is either right or wrong.

The Photograph Belongs to the Item, Not the Form.

Almost every product will let you attach photographs. Far fewer attach them to the checklist item that failed.

The difference shows up six weeks later. A photograph on the inspection tells you something was wrong somewhere on that site on that day. A photograph on the item tells the person fixing it which guard, which door, which lanyard, and lets you put this month’s photograph beside last month’s for the same item. On a phone, each item should take a tick, a cross, or not applicable, and a cross should open findings, recommendations, photographs, a priority, a due date, and a responsible person without leaving the item.⁶

Somebody outside your team will read the result eventually, and they will read it as a PDF rather than in your dashboard. ComplyFlow sends that report automatically once the device syncs, with the photographs and the attendees’ signatures in it.¹⁰

An Action With No Owner and No Date Is a Note.

This is where most inspection programs quietly stop working. The inspection gets done, the failures get written down, and nothing has a name against it.

A failed item has to become an action with a named person, a due date, and a priority, set at the moment of the finding rather than by someone triaging a spreadsheet on Friday. It then has to be closeable by the person who owns it, from the phone, with a comment, a date, and a photograph of the repair, and it has to carry an honest status: done, partly done, or not yet started.⁸

Ask the vendor what happens to an overdue action when its owner leaves the business. If the answer involves an administrator working through a list by hand, you have found a real cost. Inspections and audits should be judged on how actions close, not on how inspections start.

Templates, and Who Is Allowed to Change One.

A template is a controlled document, whatever your software calls it. If a supervisor can edit the checklist on the way to site, your results stop being comparable between sites and between months, and the trend data you bought the system for stops existing.

Three questions settle this. Who may create and change a template, as a permission separate from completing one. Can a template be updated in bulk rather than typed item by item. And can it be restricted to one site or made available across all of them. In ComplyFlow, editing a template requires the Create, View and Modify Inspection or Templates permission, checklist items load from a CSV of categories, questions, and instructions, and leaving the project field blank makes a template available across every site rather than one.⁷

The instruction field is the underrated one. A checklist item that says “Guarding” will be answered differently by four people; one that says “Confirm the interlock stops the drive within two seconds” will not.

Who Is Allowed to Complete an Inspection.

This is the question nobody asks in a demo, and it decides whether the record is worth anything. An inspection is a statement that a person with the right competence looked at something. If anyone holding the app can complete anything, the record proves only that a form was filled in.

Regulation 213 puts it plainly for plant: maintenance, inspection and, where necessary, testing must be carried out by a competent person.¹ The app should hold that line. Can a template be restricted to a category of staff. Can the system check the operator’s tickets before letting them start. Can a contractor complete one of your inspections, and do you hold the evidence afterwards when they do.

ComplyFlow does that check on plant: scan the QR code on the machine, choose your name on the shared device, confirm your date of birth, and the app checks your competency records before the inspection opens. Where something is outstanding it sends the person to their own requirements first, and once they are through, their name is recorded as the person who conducted the inspection and set as the default owner of anything that failed.¹¹ That is the plant and equipment side of the same app, and it is the closest thing to a gate an inspection product has.

What the Data Is Worth a Year Later.

This is the part that justifies the licence, and almost nobody buys on it.

One inspection tells you about one morning. A year of them tells you which site keeps failing the same item, which contractor’s jobs generate three times the actions of anyone else’s, and which asset is on its third temporary repair. WorkSafe Victoria makes the point about injury records and it holds here too: keep the list, and you can see whether problem areas exist and whether patterns are emerging.⁴ Safe Work Australia’s plant code asks a register to record exactly that, alongside the responsibilities and the frequency: variations from normal operation, and the trends that may be occurring.²

Safe Work Australia’s 2017 report on measuring and reporting sets out lead and lag indicators for each control, and for inspections it pairs the count of inspections, or the share of sites inspected, with two measures of whether the control is working: the proportion reviewed to schedule, and the number of non-conformances or improvements needed.⁵ Counting inspections measures effort. The repeat finding is the signal.

So ask what the system does with a failed item after it closes. You want to filter every checklist item ever recorded by site, by template, by category, by the person responsible, and by whether the finding was a pass or a fail, then pull it out as a file you can put in front of a manager.⁹ A product that only shows you open actions is showing you a task list, not a safety picture. For a safety manager, the repeat finding by site and by contractor is the most useful number the system holds.

There is a legal edge to this as well. A control measure must be reviewed and revised when it is not controlling the risk it was put in for, and monitoring results showing the control is not working is the example the Regulations themselves give.¹ The third identical finding on one asset is that example, sitting in your own data.

Nine Questions for the Demo, and the Answers That Should Worry You.

Take these in, in this order. The answer that should worry you is in brackets.

1. Show me a full inspection completed in flight mode, then synced. (“Coverage is pretty good these days.”)
2. Where does a photograph attach, the item or the inspection. (“You can add photos at the end.”)
3. Create an action, assign it to someone else, and close it from their phone. (“Actions are managed in the web portal.”)
4. Move 30 open actions from a person who has left to their replacement. (“You would raise that with support.”)
5. Who can edit this template, and who can only complete it. (“Everyone has the same access.”)
6. Restrict this inspection to people who hold a current ticket. (“You would manage that outside the system.”)
7. Let a contractor complete this inspection, and show me the evidence I hold afterwards. (“Contractors would email you the form.”)
8. Show me every failed item for one asset across the last 12 months. (“You can open each inspection.”)
9. Export that as a file. (“There is a report we can build for you.”)

None of these needs a technical answer. They need a live product and somebody willing to drive it.

Stand on Your Three Worst Sites With a Phone.

Pick your three worst sites and go and stand on them with your phone. Note where the signal drops, who is holding the device, and what they are wearing on their hands. Then take your paper checklist and mark every item two people would answer differently.

That signal map and that list of ambiguous items make a better evaluation brief than any requirements matrix, because between them they cover the two things that break inspection programs: connectivity and interpretation. A vendor who can answer both in front of you is worth the next hour.

To see how ComplyFlow handles those nine, book a demo and bring your own checklist. We would rather run yours than ours.