How you can use this App to help meet the New UK Fire Safety Regulations
Streamlined Compliance: Harnessing SafetyCulture App for Meeting New UK Fire Safety Regulations
⚡ Tl;dr
- New fire safety regulations in England aim to improve residential building safety and prevent tragedies like the Grenfell Tower fire.
- SafetyCulture is a recommended inspection management tool that can be integrated with existing CRM or ERP systems, helping landlords ensure compliance with these new regulations.
New Regulations
As of January 23rd 2023, England’s fire safety regime launched new Regulations in a crucial milestone to overhaul the fire safety regime. This will result in visible improvements in fire safety in residential buildings, and help to prevent future tragedies like the Grenfell Tower fire.
As part of meeting the new regulations, I have been looking at practical ways to ensure that landlords are managing inspections necessary in keeping residents safe. There are a lot of apps in the market for inspection management, finding the right one to use will depend on your specific needs.
Safety Culture
SafetyCulture (formally known as iAuditor) is a mobile and tablet-based application that enables users to create inspection checklists, submit reports, and perform inspections. SafetyCulture a Unicorn twice over, has an impressive set of credentials:
👩🔧 It has attracted over 70,000 organisations
🌍 1.5M users to sign up to its platform in more than 85 countries
✅ Powering over 600 million checks per year, 75,000 lessons per day
💰 Has an impressive valuation of $2.2 billion (AUD).
Customers of SafetyCulture include: Schneider Electric, National Grid UK and Brentford Football Club
Integrating SafetyCulture Into your CRM and ERP System
You can use SafetyCulture as a standalone product but if you have an existing CRM or ERP system, SafetyCulture offers a variety of protocols that can be used to combine the inspection tool into your existing app landscape. To integrate you will need to purchase the Premium or Enterprise edition. Integrating SafetyCulture with an ERP system can offer a number of benefits, such as:
📊 Streamlined data: All of the data collected during inspections can be automatically synced and stored in one central location, making it easy to access, analyse, and report on.
💪 Increased efficiency: Automate tasks such as creating work orders, tracking completion status and sending notifications, which can save time and increase productivity.
🔎 Improved visibility: Provide better visibility into safety performance and compliance, allowing you to quickly identify and address any issues.
👨💼 Informed decision-making: You can analyse data more effectively, allowing you to make data-driven decisions that can improve safety and compliance.
👷♀️ Better collaboration: Enable collaboration between different departments and teams, allowing everyone to work together more effectively to achieve safety objectives.
On the other hand, using SafetyCulture as a standalone product would give you the ability to use all its features and functionalities as it is a powerful inspection tool on its own. SafetyCulture is designed to be user-friendly and easy to use, making it a great option for organizations with limited technical expertise. Even without integrating SafetyCulture, it provides advanced reporting and analytics capabilities, allowing you to track key performance indicators and make data-driven decisions to improve safety and compliance.
There are a lot of different inspection management tools available, the one that is most appropriate will depend on your requirements. Don’t be afraid to evaluate the apps and try them out. A lot of apps offer a trial period (some require credit card upfront), a trial allows for you to develop a proof of concept can provide you with the confidence that the product will meet the needs, before investing too much time or money into it.
Scenario
There is a landlord that already have Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, they have evaluated using Field Service and developing a PowerApp but do not deem it to be suitable to implement at this time. They have opted to use SafetyCulture (Premium) to carry out inspections and integrate it into their existing CRM.
They have a team of surveyors that carry out inspections on properties. When an inspection has been completed they want the inspection report to be uploaded to a SharePoint site. The landlord also requires an inspection case to be logged on their CRM. If there are actions identified during the inspection, tasks (Activities) are also created and linked to the case.
Solution
As the landlord is using Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, they will benefit from using Power Automate as their preferred method of integrating with SafetyCulture. Before you begin you will need:
- SafetyCulture Premium Plan or Enterprise Plan
- SafetyCulture API token
- Power Automate account on a paid plan
Here is an overview of the recommended set up:
The following Power Automate demonstrates the actions that the landlord is looking to achieve. The flow is triggered by a recurrence and checks for recently modified inspections and exports the inspection as a PDF, then saves it to a SharePoint Site and logs a case on CRM.
If there are actions, then activities are created and linked to the case. If new actions are added to an inspection and a case already exists, then the flow adds the additional activities to the case.
Note: To trigger the flow it is possible to use Webhooks, for more information visit: https://developer.safetyculture.com/reference/webhooks
Why not use Field Service Inspections?
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service has an Inspection feature. Field Service inspections are digital forms that technicians use to quickly and easily answer a list of questions as part of a work order. Field Service inspections allow you to create forms and checklists for repeatable tasks.
Field Service isn’t something that can just be switched on and ready to use over night. There are important processes that need setting up, such as:
- Creating frontline workers (sometimes called technicians)
- Adding customers
- Creating work orders
- Scheduling work orders to frontline workers
- Analysing your operations
Implementing Field Service needs to set up and configured before you can start benefiting from using Inspections. Field Service has great depth to it and understanding how your clients operate may take time to scope out, before you are able to fully implement.
Developing a PowerApp
If Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service is not suitable then you may opt to building a custom Power App for Inspection Management. Some of the benefits for this approach are:
- A PowerApp can be designed specifically to meet the unique needs of an organisation, which can result in a more efficient and effective inspection management process.
- Organisation’s have full control over the development of the PowerApp, which allows them to make changes and updates as needed, and also give them the freedom to choose their own development team.
- Building a custom PowerApp can be more cost-effective in the long-term for organizations that expect to use the app for an extended period of time.
However, benefits of using a prebuilt inspection tool such as SafetyCulture over building a PowerApp include:
- Pre-built functionality specifically designed for inspection management, such as checklists, forms, and reporting tools.
- It will save time and resources compared to building a custom app from scratch. Also eliminating the need for large upfront costs associated with building a custom app.
- Apps such as SafetyCulture are compliant with industry regulations and standards. They are also supported and maintained by a dedicated team of experts, ensuring the software remains up-to-date and functional.
Conclusion
The new Regulations adopted by England’s fire safety regime are an important milestone in preventing future tragedies like the Grenfell Tower fire. Implementing the right inspection management tools is a key factor in ensuring this.
SafetyCulture is an example of a robust inspection management system that can be integrated with existing CRM or ERP systems to make managing inspections easier and more efficient. With the right tools and protocols in place, we can help to make residential buildings safer for everyone.
Want more content like this?
Let me know in the comments below if you want to read more content on inspection management and I’d love to hear how your inspection projects are going.
