Table of Content
- Introduction
- Efficiency Improvement NDT
- Industries Efficiency Benchmarks
- Integration Benefits
- How Floodlight Works
- Configuring Floodlight to Work for Your Business
- Using Floodlight to Grow Your Success
- Final Remarks
- Learn More About Floodlight
Introduction
Industrial inspection companies are recognizing the essential role of digital software solutions in a climate where demand for inspection services is rapidly increasing.
These tools streamline operations, reduce administrative burdens, and unlock new business opportunities.
Embracing digital platforms enables companies to confidently secure contracts, deliver exceptional value to customers, and manage the intricacies of service growth.
By leveraging digital software, companies can revolutionize their operations, achieving greater efficiency and competitiveness without the need for additional resources.
Efficiency Improvement in NDT
Operational efficiency emerges as a critical challenge in Non-Destructive Testing (NDT), marked by manual data entry, fragmented communication channels, and complexities in real-time job tracking.
Recent industry studies reveal that a substantial percentage of NDT Companies struggle with these challenges, leading to increased costs, project delays, and decreased customer satisfaction.
Using a digital platform to manage NDT Inspections provides an opportunity to overcome these operational challenges.
Some digital platforms leverage cloud-based technologies and utilize a software-as-as-service (SaaS) model to streamline the entire inspection process, from initial planning to report generation.
This structure provides digitalised operational management to the NDT company without requiring in-house IT or software development expertise.
By acknowledging these industry-wide challenges and gaining a better understanding of how digital platforms improve operations, NDT Companies can make informed decisions regarding the adoption of such platforms.
This paves the way for enhanced efficiency and competitiveness within the industry, transforming the way inspections are conducted and managed.
Industry Efficiency Benchmarks
Anonymized industry benchmarks provide insights into the critical metrics for operational efficiency across sectors.
Companies prioritize efficiency by streamlining workflows, reducing manual processes, and enhancing real-time collaboration, driving the adoption of digital solutions.
Key benchmarks include metrics like labour hours per task, project completion times, and error rates, offering a comprehensive view of efficiency standards.
The trend of companies turning to digital solutions underscores a strategic response, particularly in streamlining workflows and improving collaboration.
Real-time collaboration is crucial, with digital tools facilitating seamless communication and project coordination, alongside revealed cost-reduction goals.
Integration Benefits
Integration capabilities within software solutions can offer significant advantages, given the variety of software tools that companies use to perform their work and manage operations, Choosing a digital platform with integration capabilities can provide a strategic edge.
Integration among software tools contributes to enhanced efficiency, accuracy, and collaboration within a business in the following ways:
Streamlined Workflows:
Integration enables the seamless flow of information between different processes, reducing manual interventions and improving workflow efficiency.
Data Connectivity:
Integrated systems ensure consistent and reliable data connectivity, eliminating silos and enabling real-time access to critical information for all stakeholders.
Improved Decision-Making:
A connected ecosystem enhances decision-making by providing insights derived from various data sources, leading to more informed and timely decisions.
Reduced Error Rates:
Integrating systems minimizes the risk of errors associated with manual data entry, improving the accuracy and reliability of data and reports.
Enhanced Collaboration:
Integrated systems facilitate smooth collaboration between team members, fostering improved communication and coordination.
Adaptability to Technological Advances:
Integration capabilities enable companies to adapt to evolving technological trends, ensuring they stay at the forefront of advancements.
By prioritizing integration capabilities in their digitalization journey, NDT Companies can strategically position themselves to leverage future beneficial software systems.
This approach ensures long-term operational excellence without being limited by current capabilities or requiring a major system overhaul in the future.
Here is where Floodlight Software comes in:
Under the leadership of Nasrin Azari, Floodlight empowers inspection companies worldwide to embrace this forward looking strategy.
With Nasrin's expertise and Floodlight's innovative solutions, organizations can seamlessly integrate advanced technologies, ensuring they stay ahead in the challenging landscape of digital business management.
Many NDT Companies struggle with reducing administrative overhead to become more efficient and competitive, and to effectively take on new business.
When opportunities arise, you want to be able to confidently acquire new contracts and deliver exceptional value to your customers without needing to hire additional resources or increase the error-prone administrative headaches that naturally go along with service growth.
Floodlight Software has been designed to address these challenges to encourage better, more, & safer inspections across the entire industrial inspection industry.
Read on to learn more about this innovative software platform and how you can up your game within a few short months. Running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Floodlight is a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) platform built specifically for managing NDT and other industrial inspection work.
You purchase Floodlight on an annual subscription and access your system via a web browser or Floodlight’s mobile app.
All the IT infrastructure required to host and run the product is managed by the software experts at Floodlight so that you do not need to purchase or manage any additional IT hardware.
What you receive is a dedicated instance of Floodlight with digital workflow to track your inspection jobs from quote to cash, and easily accessible modules to organize data about your customers, your technicians, your equipment, your billing rates, and your organization.
As a Floodlight user, you will gain visibility into job metrics such as labour hours, job costs and profitability.
How Floodlight Works
One of the key features of the Floodlight platform is its well-formed digital database.
This makes it easy to search for and quickly find information about your NDT Inspection jobs that are planned, in progress, or completed, giving you access to historical information for a specific client or asset in a matter of seconds.
This growing dataset of job data also gives you full audit capability for all jobs you are responsible for, & also enables you to analyze your work in meaningful ways to advance the effectiveness of your business.
Your data will improve over time as you perform more jobs within the platform and can more easily see operational results, trends, & opportunities for improvement.
Another benefit of digitalization with Floodlight is creating consistent job processes.
This consistency across the field techs and jobs lets you more easily measure your work and make process improvements. An added benefit of this consistency is creating a predictable customer experience and deliverables for your clients.
Floodlight maps out the general workflow of an inspection project, moving work from start to finish in an organized, but customizable way. There are three phases to this workflow:
Sales and Job Planning.
This phase involves collecting information from customers who need your services, creating proposals & quotes for the work you plan to perform, & building Jobs to track the work as it progresses.
It is here that you set the stage for a successful project with thorough communication not only with your client but amongst your own employees.
Your planning information is captured in digital Request and Proposal modules that are immediately accessible to anyone involved.
This keeps everyone on the same page and allows you to provide a responsive and professional experience for your clients.
Active Job Management.
This phase involves dispatching jobs to specific NDT technicians, tracking labor time and expenses on jobs, performing job tasks and recording data associated with those tasks.
Field NDT technicians have the option of using Floodlight’s offline-capable mobile app on tablets or smartphones to collect Task data in the field.
Ideally, Field techs would collect information directly into their Floodlight app instead of using pen and paper and then having to transcribe the information later.
This helps to reduce data collection errors and undesirable administrative overhead. While Field Techs are actively working jobs and collecting data, operational managers can easily keep track of progress and results by accessing Job records from their own Floodlight console.
Job reports can be generated at any time, allowing you to inform your client of a critical issue as soon as it is discovered, instead of waiting until the Job is complete, or even until the day is over.
Completed Jobs.
This phase involves reviewing completed job reports and invoices and delivering them to your customers.
When your field NDT technicians have completed their work, all their data is automatically formatted into your pre-designed job reports. You can review these reports, add information, or make changes, and then very quickly deliver your final report to your customer.
Similarly, all labor hours and job expenses that have been tracked by the field techs working the job are automatically formatted into an invoice that you can review, update as needed, and deliver to your customer in a timely fashion, enabling you to get paid for your work as quickly as possible.
Configuring Floodlight to Work for Your Business
Floodlight allows you to customize this workflow to meet the needs of your organization. For example, if you perform internal NDT Inspections, you may not need to track expenses or create proposals, quotes, or invoices.
But you may, instead, need more robust data in your Job module or internal Task checklists. You may perform long-term projects where you need to provide weekly progress reports and invoices.
You may be a small organization where every field NDT technician manages his or her own work. Or, conversely, you may have a large, highly structured workforce with separate responsibilities.
Floodlight’s flexibility allows you to build out a system that is as unique as your company while retaining the best practices of digitalization.
This flexibility makes Floodlight suitable for handling a variety of NDT Inspections including Callout work, Recurring Inspections, and large, scheduled shutdowns.
Various inspection methods and other inspection tasks are supported through pre-designed Task Templates so that when it is time to perform work, the operational processes are fast and easy.
Some Floodlight users may also desire or require integration into other companion software products. You can use Floodlight’s REST API to build your own integrations, or Floodlight’s team can work with you to build these out for you.
Floodlight’s integration engine is designed to support connections to everything from accounting and financial applications to digital testing tools or analytical software.
You also always have the option of importing and exporting data in and out of Floodlight. Another key feature of Floodlight’s platform is its Customer Portal.
You have the ability to invite your customers to this Portal, where you can share documents in real time without needing to use email.
The Portal also allows your customers to easily and quickly request work from you, and for you to propose and quote projects to them, increasing your ability to improve and expand your relationship with them.
Using Floodlight to Grow Your Success
Although learning how to use the Floodlight platform and configuring it to align with your business processes is no difficult, changing how you work and getting used to new processes takes some time.
As with any business process improvement, success and speed of adoption depend heavily on the amount of time and dedication you bring to the transition.
Once you have the system rolled out in your environment, you will almost certainly see some immediate benefits and the impact of digitalization on your business will continue to add more & more value over time.
Some of the immediate benefits that you should expect to realize relatively quickly are improved operational efficiency and reduced administrative overhead.
You will be able to deliver well-designed, professional reports to your customers quickly and easily and have access to a complete audit trail of all activity within the system, if and when it is ever required.
After building out your first few Task Templates, adding new tasks or making tweaks to your existing processes becomes fast, easy, and fun!
Final Remarks
As the NDT landscape becomes more digital and the industry begins to adopt NDE 4.0 concepts and smart inspection tools and software, we will see a major transformation in the efficiency and effectiveness of industrial inspections.
More NDT Inspections will be possible at the same or lowered cost. Inspection processes will become safer and humans will be focusing on critical issues versus rote tasks.
If you are ready to learn more about how you can take a step towards becoming part of this movement to ensure safe, reliable infrastructure across the globe, we are standing by to show you how Floodlight can help you get there!
Learn More About Floodlight
Come visit us at the 2024 NDTMA Conference in Las Vegas this week. We will be tucked away in the back of the exhibition hall at Table #4. We’d love to meet you in person and answer any questions you have about Floodlight. Or – if you won’t be in attendance and/or would like to see a product demo or learn more @Floodlight Software.
