Visualogyx Empowers Leading Steel Supplier QA Team with Streamlined Inspection Processes

Introduction 

With over 25 years of experience, this leading steel supplier company offers a wide range of high-quality steel products, including pipes, plates, sheets, and coils, and customized fabrication services. The company has operations teams in the United States, Canada, South America, and Mexico. In their distribution model, they buy steel products and distribute them to different users and customers. The Visualogyx platform has enabled their QA team to conduct inspections efficiently and effectively, ensuring the high quality of their products and services.

Challenges faced by the team: 

1. Efficient Team Management:
   Company growth faced higher demand for product inspections but wanted to maintain the size of their inspections team. The direction was to leverage technology to increase team productivity by managing time and activities more efficiently.  

2. Risk of Missing Information:
   The team faced missing information issues while gathering inspection data using a notepad checklist.  

3. Data Storage:
   The team wanted to store and centralize data safely, which was a given drawback with the pen-paper checklist as it had a high risk of being lost and damaged.  

4. Inspection Records:
   The company needed help efficiently identifying and reporting the records of inspections performed historically, including time-sensitive production-related or condition-based inspection reports.  

5. Inspection Template Design:
   Creating new templates for specific inspection projects was time-consuming and costly.  

Solutions provided by Visualogyx 

• The Client had the opportunity to work closely with Visualogyx to develop their custom templates for product inspections. The inspection workflow involved receiving a call from the sales or commercial team, scheduling an inspection, and performing the inspection according to a predefined template. 
• Visualogyx’s drag-and-drop template builder facilitated the team in easily creating and editing templates and provided comprehensive support for all types of text and multimedia. This allowed the team to document all features related to the product, including but not limited to the product name, specifications, dimensions, volume metrics, and composition, ensuring that no important details were left out.
• The team used Visualogyx’s mobile application, a powerful tool for inspectors to conduct efficient and comprehensive inspections on the go. With the ability to follow a checklist, the app ensured that all necessary data was captured in a structured and organized manner. Moreover, the app-enabled inspectors to capture pictures and videos, providing a visual record of the inspection and facilitating communication with other stakeholders.
• The Visualogyx platform provided real-time visibility into the progress and status of inspections, allowing the team manager to stay informed of progress and make informed decisions. The platform automatically saves the inspection location, time, and all the information captured during the inspection, ensuring all data is accessible to team members, even if the report is incomplete. This feature enabled team members to collaborate and work on the inspection report simultaneously, enhancing productivity and speeding up the reporting process.
• Visualogyx’s platform is specifically designed to work in remote areas with limited network coverage, ensuring that the inspection team can conduct thorough inspections in the field, even in challenging environments. The platform offers offline capabilities, allowing team members to access and record inspection data without an internet connection. Once connectivity is restored, the platform automatically syncs the inspection data to the cloud, ensuring that all data is up-to-date and accessible to other team members.
• The platform enabled inspectors to generate professional and detailed reports with just a few clicks. The platform offers a user-friendly report generation interface that allows inspectors to easily create customized reports that include all relevant inspection data, such as pictures, videos, and notes, eliminating the need to download images or gather information from smartphone cameras or notepads. The completed reports were available to share with stakeholders, making it easy for the team or manager to draft an email with a PDF attachment based on the information provided by the inspection team.

Results 

The partnership with Visualogyx has brought significant changes to the team’s business. Streamlining their inspection and auditing process resulted in cost savings, increased productivity, and higher job satisfaction among the inspection team. Investing in an efficient system allowed inspectors to spend more time in the field, conduct more inspections, and complete their work more efficiently, contributing to a more motivated and productive team.

• Productivity:
  The app allowed the inspection team to quickly access the templates and projects in a centralized data platform. It enabled them to complete their inspection jobs effectively, save time, and perform more daily inspections and audits. 

• Job Satisfaction:
  With the app, the team could complete the final reports as soon as they finished capturing the data for an inspection, freeing them up to move on to the next task instead of having to work on the documentation during their downtime.  

• Data Integrity
  Using the app, the team reduced the risk of missing information that could be lost in a notepad or other paper-based checklists. The app’s validation features, such as determining if critical information is missing, ensured that the inspection was completed correctly.  While the risk of human error still exists, using the app reduced the risk of not having all the necessary information for an inspection.

• Workflow Optimization:
  The app greatly facilitated the improvement of operational procedures, providing a streamlined and efficient method to identify and report team activities. This enabled the tracking of trends and facilitated the optimization of workflows, resulting in a more efficient and effective team.

Conclusion 

By working with Visualogyx, the QA inspection team has been able to streamline its auditing and inspection processes and improve its efficiency. With the app’s wide range of features, the team can ensure that inspections are completed correctly and reduce the risk of missing critical information. As of the date of this case study, the team has used the Visualogyx platform to perform more than 45 inspections a month in the last two years in 25 countries. The team continues to use the platform to streamline its inspection process for higher productivity and increased customer satisfaction.