Site Inspections & Defect Management
Construction Site Inspection & Quality Assurance (known as CSI~QA for short) have been in operation since 2012. In 2019, they expanded their team to three members with over 79 years of experience between them.
CSI~QA works with builders and contractors to audit their sites and help them highlight present and potential defects, reference recognised documents and standards and provide technical and quality training. The goal is to help them improve the quality of their work and reduce the number of complaints received by their aftercare departments. That in turn helps them to save money and improve their reputation.
The challenge
CSI~QA are involved with a number of projects from the design phase, helping clients to establish potential problems from the beginning. Throughout construction, ongoing checks via monthly visits ensure that work is being completed to a high standard or inspections at certain key stages of the building process ensure that important milestones are met.
The projects are as varied as CSI~QA’s clients and include residential and commercial building projects of different scales. They have also worked on several projects that are based solely on cladding since new government regulations came into effect after the fire at Grenfell Tower.
Considering the wide range of their clients’ needs, establishing clear, consistent and reliable ways to communicate and collaborate was a challenge for CSI~QA . Follow-up in the office was also time-consuming. This led them to investigate defect management and construction communication software solutions.
The solution
After testing several different solutions, the team at CSI~QA opted to work with PlanRadar. Functionality across web and mobile devices was a key factor, as the team move from office to site frequently. The software allows users to mark defects on digital plans and its customizable ticket and report templates allow for quick and clear communication with clients.
After an initial test phase, the team at CSI~QA made the decision to encourage their clients to create free contractor accounts, allowing them to access the PlanRadar software and resolve tickets directly. This new style of real-time communication and collaboration has worked extremely well with clients.
The result
As of April 2020, CSI~QA have used PlanRadar on 72 projects and counting. The software has meant that they could move away from using Excel spreadsheets to report to their clients, instead offering a more thorough overview of a project by generating custom reports and statistics. It’s also opened a new avenue of collaboration via contractor accounts, giving clients a more immediate way to communicate with the CSI~QA team.
PlanRadar has proved to be an effective solution for logging information, documentation and communication, enabling the team to provide their clients with bespoke and comprehensive reports. Their clients can then use PlanRadar to highlight trends across their whole portfolio, not just a single project, arming them with data that can be used to influence change and begin a process of continuous improvement.
