How Principle Fire Protection halved the time their team is spending on site
"It's been brilliant. We've been really, really impressed with it."
How Lewis Hunt at Principle Fire Protection halved the time his team is spending on site
It's as good as anything we've ever seen out there. For us, it's all positives.
Lewis Hunt is the Director of a growing business. Like many entrepreneurs, he's juggling a lot; hiring and training new staff, winning big tenders, peer-reviewing the work of colleagues, and still getting out there and doing a lot of the frontline work himself.
With a lot on his plate, Lewis knew he needed to get a system in place that could help him grow his business efficiently.
Customer: Principle Fire Protection Ltd
Interviewee: Lewis Hunt, Director
Previous system: Mitti (previously Safety Culture/iAuditor)
Headline results: Time on site roughly halved, a major national client won, and room to grow without a corresponding rise in headcount
What Principle Fire Protection did before
Most of the customers we work with spend more time writing up reports than they do on site. Lewis Hunt and his team had a different problem.
They were using one of the previous generation of risk assessment apps (Mitti, previously iAuditor). Their data capture was fully digitised and the bulk of the report was written while they were in the building. The problem was they had to spend a lot of time in the building to do that.
iAuditor was okay, but there was quite a lot of manual work and quite a lot of duplication.
The old app worked like one big form. Everything you observed on site had to be entered in a specific place in the form. Boxes ticked. Photos added in the right place. Opening, closing, and reopening the same parts of the form each time you saw a new instance of something worth noting.
On a larger site you had to go through the report in order or you ended up going backwards and forwards a lot on the forms while in the building.
As for the output, the reports seemed fine at the time until the team saw what else was possible. They loved the new design we created for them in FireCheckr - but Lewis also noticed that the detail and quality of his team's reports was improving too.
After seeing the difference with the FireCheckr report, I realised how basic what we were creating in iAuditor was. To get that level of depth with the old software was a lot more time-consuming.
That's something we hear a lot. When assessors are expected to type everything into a form on site, they understandably keep things brief or they'll be there all day. When you can simply talk into your phone as you walk the building - and you know the system will put all your observations into the right places in your report for you - you naturally end up providing the level of detail that BAFE and others industry bodies want to see.
How the Principle Fire Protection team works today
With FireCheckr, Lewis and his team capture notes as they see them, in whatever order things present themselves in the building. None of it has to be entered into a specific part of a form and they don't have to cover topics in a prescribed order.
Every site's different, but on average, before, we'd be on site for a few hours minimum to capture all that information in the app. We're halving the time on site with FireCheckr.
The ability to use voice notes is massive and saves untold time when you're on site. And the time we're saving afterwards finalising the reports is considerable as well.
It's clear Lewis is a big fan of FireCheckr's AI and how it types up the observations he makes on site. But we don't expect assessors to fill the whole report this way. FireCheckr allows you to drop in standard answers or actions from your phrase-bank whenever you need to.
When you're writing the report, being able to have preset answers and commentary that you can easily input and adjust is great.
Validation is also smoother with FireCheckr.
Before, it was all fairly manual. We were reading through a finished report and any changes were more difficult to make. That often meant having to call each other to tell each other what to change.
With FireCheckr, that review now happens inside the system. Lewis can review a colleague's work, make changes right away or send a report back with suggestions. Every keystroke of the validation process is tracked with a clear audit trail.
The business impact
Halving the time each assessment takes gives a team the capacity to say yes to more work, and to spend time on other parts of the business that need it.
Winning a major national client. Principle Fire Protection recently won a major national client. Taking on work of that scale can put real strain on a team's capacity. Reducing time per risk assessment helped them absorb it without hiring.
Time to focus elsewhere. The team has been able to spend more time growing other parts of the business, particularly fire alarm installation and maintenance.
It's allowed us to focus our time on other things that need doing as well. A lot of our time over the last three or four weeks has been taken up with hiring and integrating new engineers. We've got quite a few big projects on the go, but we are always busy with risk assessments.
Room to expand without as much hiring. Lewis expects to grow the risk assessment side in time, and sees FireCheckr as central to that.
There's a business saving for us in that we're not having to hire another assessor, because we've got the time to do it all. When we do expand that side of the business, having FireCheckr will definitely enable us to do it more smoothly.
Before and after
| Before (Mitti) | After (FireCheckr) | |
|---|---|---|
| On-site capture | Form completed in order, with a lot of going back and forth | Findings captured as they're seen with voice notes |
| Time on site | A few hours minimum | Around an hour |
| Report quality | Fairly basic | More depth in every report |
| Business | Capacity tied up in assessments | Major national client won, new engineers onboarded, risk assessment growth possible without as much hiring |
It's been brilliant. We've been really, really impressed with it.
Spending too long on site with form-based software? See how FireCheckr works by booking a demo.
