Utility operator · Abu Dhabi
18 → 4 min per completed inspection
Inspectors were doing the job twice — once on the asset and once again at a desk that evening. The second pass is gone, and the data now arrives while the inspector is still standing in front of the thing they inspected.
The client
A utility operator maintaining distribution infrastructure across the emirate, with a field force of roughly two hundred and forty inspectors covering some eleven thousand assets on a rolling annual cycle.
The challenge
Inspections were recorded on paper and re-keyed into the asset system at the end of the day, so every reading was entered twice and the second entry was the one that counted. Around nine per cent of records carried a transcription discrepancy, photographs were filed separately from the readings they belonged to, and a defect raised in the field took an average of two days to reach the maintenance queue.
What we did
We built a native application for the field force that captures the inspection where it happens, works with no signal and syncs when it finds one, and writes straight into the asset system — with the photograph, the reading and the location attached to each other rather than to three different places.
How we ran it
-
Ride along first
Four weeks in the field with eleven inspectors before a line of code, because the paper form was not what they actually did.
-
Offline by default
The application assumes no signal and treats connectivity as the exception, which is the reverse of how it was first specified.
-
One integration, not four
A single write into the asset system carries reading, media and location together, so a record cannot arrive incomplete.
-
Roll out by depot
One depot at a time with the paper process still running behind it, until three consecutive weeks matched.
Results
-
18 → 4 min
per completed inspection
-
9% → 0.3%
records carrying a discrepancy
-
2 days → minutes
from defect raised to maintenance queue
-
11,000
assets on the same annual cycle, no extra headcount
“The inspectors stopped asking when they could go back to paper about a fortnight in. That was the whole review.”
