Affinity is a fire safety engineering company with offices in the UK and Ireland. Before 2022, they were working primarily with marked-up PDFs. Although their surveys were always first-class, the old process was time-consuming and inefficient. They turned to PlanRadar for a solution. A year later Affinity is completing survey reports in just 5 days – a process that took 2 weeks previously, and team members are finding the platform easy to use. Read on for the whole story.

The challenge: Pen, Paper and PDFs

When Alistair Little joined Affinity, he immediately identified a lack of a digital platform for surveying. At the time, work was being done via pen, paper, photos, PDFs and markups, which, as you can imagine, which was time-consuming. Finding and marking up the right PDFs, and ensuring consistent formatting for hundreds of photographs took a significant amount of time. Alistair knew there was a better way – having worked with PlanRadar in a previous role he knew exactly what the platform could bring to the table.

The solution: Streamlining and simple onboarding with PlanRadar

Alistair brought PlanRadar into Affinity as a solution to streamline their reporting process – an easy decision considering he had previously worked with PlanRadar and had a positive experience with its support and functionality.

After a simple and painless implementation, the Affinity team were able to: capture real-time data on-site, incorporate photographs with their findings, customise templates to suit different survey types and generate reports more efficiently.

The result: Time savings and more.

A year on, Affinity are seeing a range of benefits from using PlanRadar.

• Time Savings: Alistair estimates a 50% reduction in time spent generating reports due to PlanRadar.
• User-friendly: New team members, with no prior experience with such platforms, found PlanRadar so easy to use that they essentially onboarded themselves.
• Customisation: The ability to customize templates as per the survey type was particularly beneficial. It allows for the capture of specific data points efficiently, which is important to Affinity.
• Client Engagement: Alistair highlighted that Affinity now show PlanRadar to potential clients as a selling point. It allows clients to have a say in how the report will look, fostering collaboration.
• Quick Turnaround: The time taken to deliver reports to clients was significantly reduced, from a two-week average to a five-day maximum.
• Audit Trail: The platform’s tamper-proof audit trail provided clients with reassurance about the compliance and accuracy of the reports.

With all this in mind, Affinity is confident that PlanRadar is set to be expanded to new teams in other countries, and be a part of the company’s ambitious growth plans.