First let’s get into the problems that the oil & gas, EPC, and capital construction industries are facing when it comes to quality surveillance and PO inspection. Our clients and prospective clients, when we talk to them they are saying to us that it’s hard to plan and budget and coordinate for these PO inspections. Your inspectors are on-site at client locations, they’re doing a whole lot of work on the other side of the world, and it’s difficult to manage. Our clients and prospective clients are also telling us that PO inspectors don’t have on-demand access to the right documents and forms, so inspectors are sitting idle at their location waiting for a document controller to wake up or for a thumb drive to arrive via courier.

What’s happening here is they’re using thumb drive and emails to transmit these documents and equip these PO inspectors with documents and in some cases the inspectors are just asking suppliers for the documents that they need, which isn’t the greatest option because you never know if the supplier has the correct documents or the latest revisions.

We’re also hearing that most Quality Surveillance management tools are incomplete and don’t provide closed loops and paper trails.

Final thing that we’re hearing is that email spreadsheet management isn’t effective and these ad hoc systems present a huge margin for error.

So how do you approach adding order, precision, and efficiency for managing quality surveillance? One thing to look for is a system that
1.  gets your Quality Surveillance team inspectors working in the same system
2.  uses an optimized workflow for your industry to manage quality surveillance and PO inspection
3.  provides a single place for inspectors to find documents and log results
4.  provides accountability and visibility for inspectors and suppliers.
I’m going to go through these four points here and describe how ProjecTools accomplishes all of them. Number 1: Quality Surveillance teams and inspectors work in one system. ProjecTools application is Cloud-based, so users have on demand access to documents and inspection reports. There’s quick and robust searching so team members can quickly access the progress results. There are role based permissions as well, so you can set permissions to allow access to technical and commercial documents, supplier documents, without sacrificing security. There’s levels of security built in based on the user’s role.

Finally, there’s inspector integration. ProjecTools has developed a special web portal to incorporate onsite inspectors. This is a dumbed down version of the ProjecTools homepage that just provides, strips it down and provides only what the inspectors need to get the job done, so there’s not a whole lot of training required and it reduces the margin for error.

The second thing I mentioned earlier was an optimized workflow for your industry. With ProjecTools you can enforce the right workflow for Quality Surveillance and you can automate that workflow somewhat to minimize the effort on the coordination team and the manual oversight and progress reporting. ProjecTools also provides in-application tasks and task management, and this is a huge benefit that a lot of other Quality Surveillance management apps don’t provide. You can create and assign a complete task in the application. What this does is it ensures data is in 1 place. It’s not in an email, it’s not in a spreadsheet, it’s not in 4 different systems. It’s all in 1 place, it’s archived and it’s reportable, which is where you want it to be.

Another thing that ProjecTools does with the workflow is it personalizes all of these tasks. Tasks go out to individuals, so accountability lies with individuals rather than groups. You run into problems if you use round robin task management, where people just see things that and hope that they know that they own those things and they pick up the task and they complete it. There’s no accountability there, so we don’t do any of that. It’s all personalized tasks and coordinators are assigned per PO. We’ll talk about that a little bit later.

The last thing that I wanted to mention about workflows is that time and expense is integrated with the application, so PO inspection can log mileage, time, and expenses to specific PO inspections.

The third thing that I mentioned is there’s easy access to information. ProjecTools provides an online tool that provides inspectors from all over the globe with technical documents and commercial information without a bunch of IT hassle and expense. ProjecTools does provide the latest rev every time. This is ProjecTools after all, the latest revs are always available to inspectors can work from the latest documents.

The document distribution matrix provides another way that inspectors can access the forms and documents they need. PO inspection also have access to the unpriced PO within their little portal so they can see basically the whole PO, just won’t see dollar amounts because that’s probably not relevant to what they’re doing. They can log real time site visit reports, and once they are submitted these site visit reports are immediately available to the Quality Surveillance coordinators.

The fourth thing I mentioned was accountability and visibility. ProjecTools is user based, so tasks are directed to specific inspectors and PO coordinators rather than groups. Notification and due dates are build into the app. PO inspectors can log concerns directly from the applications so if they’re on-site and the supplier is making them wait before they get out on the floor to inspect an item, and they suspect that it’s because they’re hiding things, they can log that as a concern and it’ll be in the system and just adds a layer of visibility and accountability to the process.

There’s also reporting because ProjecTools maintains detailed records of what’s needed, and the paper trail, as with everything, ProjecTools does keep a track record of what’s done in the applications.