Managing Your Own Inspection Questions: Why & How?

I’m always talking to customers about the importance of managing their own fire inspection questions because I’ve seen firsthand just how important it is. When I was the Inspection Manager at Hampshire Fire Protection, it was my responsibility to ensure our inspection questions allowed us to serve our customers while protecting our business.

Prior to 2014, inspections at Hampshire Fire were conducted via pen and paper. By the time I joined the team in 2015, technicians were using iPads in the field with fillable PDFs. While PDFs provided more flexibility and efficiency than pen and paper, there were still key elements that made managing the forms difficult—often leading to countless hours spent updating or recreating documents and, ultimately, unprofessional reports for our customers.

Why Customize Inspection Questions?

But wait: Why did we need to remove, edit, or add inspection questions in the first place? Aren’t code-compliant templates enough? Sometimes, templated question sets can work, but they don’t always allow for the most efficient, effective, and protective process possible. Customizing your question set ensures you can meet the requirements set by your AHJ(s) and the needs of your customers and your company.

Compliance

Some jurisdictions require additional questions for systems or inspection frequencies that are different from what’s found in the national code. Or maybe they require a question to be asked in a specific way that differs from most standard question templates. Unlike California, where AES forms are mandated, and Canada, where UL-C forms are mandated, most jurisdictions in the U.S. don’t have required forms. That means it’s not always 100% clear what reporting is required. But you still need to remain compliant.

Templates from national—or even regional—organizations won’t necessarily address the specific requirements of your jurisdiction or your customers’ insurer. To comply with insurance companies like FM Global (who are technically AHJs according to the NFPA’s definition), we added many questions to our standard inspections. Ultimately, you need to take the time to make sure your question sets and reports are compliant with any and all relevant AHJs.

Liability

Sometimes, we’d make changes to our question set after identifying areas of risk. Following a sprinkler system failure at one of our customers’ facilities, the issue of liability became critical. While we were compliant with NFPA 25 and couldn’t be held liable for the failure, we wanted to add a question that addressed that particular problem in all future inspections. Some of our added questions would go beyond the national standard to ensure we were addressing our customers’ needs and protecting our business from time-consuming and costly litigation.

Efficiency

We would also edit questions to make them more or less specific, alter questions for different inspection frequencies, or remove repetitive questions. Essentially, we were editing questions for the ease and efficiency of our inspectors. For example, our PDF forms didn’t itemize system assets, meaning we couldn’t include details about specific valves or parts when conducting an inspection. Customizing the form to add an itemized list simplified the inspectors’ job.

I’ve also seen companies add questions to improve data and reporting. Systems may be of different makes or models that impact part and service needs. While you don’t need that information on a report for compliance, it does make the estimator’s job easier—and it allows inspectors to gather information about when systems typically need repairs so they can make better recommendations.

When a question set provides your inspectors with exactly what they need, they can complete their work faster and with more accuracy before moving on to the next job.

Customizing your question set ensures you can meet the requirements set by your AHJ(s) and the needs of your customers and your company.

Own Your Questions

Templates are great and can be helpful when developing your question sets. I certainly used templates as a jumping-off point during my time at Hampshire Fire. (Inspect Point’s built-in question sets, based on NFPA standards, are great to help you get started—more on that later.) But ultimately, it doesn’t matter how good your template is. At one time or another, you’ll need to edit, change, or remove questions for any number of reasons.

The name of the game is developing questions that allow you to serve your customers well while limiting your company’s liability. You own your inspection questions. Ensure compliance, protect your company from liability, and improve inspector efficiency by customizing and managing your inspection questions yourself.

This isn’t a day-to-day activity. Once you have your questions set up properly, you simply need to maintain them, making slight edits as things change. Set up your questions right, and making small edits down the line becomes simple.

Effectively Managing Inspection Questions

Prior to adopting Inspect Point, I was in charge of editing our PDF forms at Hampshire Fire. This was a tedious process that often meant I’d have to recreate the document entirely. Even when I did start from scratch (which took a lot of time), formatting was often off and resulted in scrunched up documents and unprofessional reports. But we had to have the questions right for our business and our customers.

Inspect Point’s Built-In Question Sets

To start off, Inspect Point has built-in question sets. Our goal is always to line our questions up with the NFPA standard as much as possible. But we still have to interpret the standard, just like you and your AHJ do. We—or anyone else providing an inspection question template—can’t guarantee the questions will protect you from liability. Ultimately, you’ll have to stand behind your questions, your reports, and your work. 

But that doesn’t mean you can’t have help—that’s what templates are really for. Inspect Point’s question sets are thorough and act as a great starting point with many key pieces already in place, but there are always other questions that could be asked. If you’re not sure where to start, consider:

• Does your AHJ have any additional requirements that you need to include in your inspection questions?
• Does your business have any different or additional requirements for liability or efficiency purposes?
• Do your customers have specific requests for their inspections due to insurance requirements or high-risk systems?

Managing & Editing Questions in Inspect Point

The ability to edit inspection questions was ultimately what led my team at Hampshire Fire to choose Inspect Point. Inspect Point empowers you to create question sets and reports you can stand behind: You have all the tools you need to easily and effectively manage your inspection questions. And best of all, the questions will automatically match the formatting of what’s already there, meaning your reports will always come out right, looking professional.

Within Inspect Point, you can easily add a brand new question, edit an existing question, or remove a question. The question edit screen allows you to change the question text and type, the question frequency, and the section where the question resides. All you need to do is make the edit (or add or remove the question) and save.

Not only does the feature save time, but it empowers you to effectively manage every aspect of your inspection operations while helping you serve your customers at the highest level.