A lot has to happen on your site, all the time. Setting up a WhatsApp group to communicate with your technicians is one way to manage that, but it's not very structured. Try tracking how much work your team managed to do over the past year or what types of issues are popping up most often. You need digitalisation for that!
🗂 Digital punch lists
One of the key tools to efficiently manage on-site issues is a digital punch list. It collects field work as a collection of items with a geographical location. This way you can easily locate the work on site. Furthermore, these items can be linked to elements from your digital twin. Examples are items to resolve a thermal anomaly, or items that have to address a specific module, structure or pile.
Learn more about managing punch lists.
We'll assume you know how to work with punch lists for the rest of this article.
📸 Capturing issues in the field
A punch list is great, but you can't tackle issues without knowing what they are. One of the main sources for that information is on-site personnel. They're actively working on site and can thus easily spot a range of problems. There are typically two things that can happen when they identify an issue:
They know exactly what the issue is and can solve it immediately.
The issue can't be solved immediately and has to be scheduled for a later date.
In both cases it's valuable to digitalise the issue. Even if you solve an issue immediately, it's useful to log what the issue was and what was done to fix it. This way you can analyse which issues pop up most often and what might be causing that.
Whenever you're in the field and you spot an issue, you can easily create a new punch list item in the Field Link by using the Create Punch List Item button on the bottom left of the screen. Add a clear description to explain what the issue is, then accurately position it on the map by dragging the map underneath the crosshairs.
Once you've created the item, you can add additional information, like images, videos, comments, etc. to highlight what the issue is all about and what you might have done to fix it.
🔍 Spotting issues from in the office
Even though the field itself is an important source of information, drone imagery allows you to spot issues that can't be seen from the ground.
During the construction phase for example, you can easily spot deviations from design by comparing the latest state of the project with CAD overlays.
Here's an example of a site in the early phase of construction. Trenches were dug before piling happened. A comparison with the CAD overlay indicates that some of the piles would end up in the trench, which will result in cutting the cables further down the line. Note that you can perform similar comparisons in the field with the Field Link, as overlays are also available there.
During the O&M phase, you can spot issues through thermal inspections. They can require on-site repairs or further investigation.
Learn more about tackling thermal anomalies in the field.
💻 Managing work from in the office
The great thing about a digital punch list is that you can oversee the work your entire team is doing from your office. You can see what issues have popped up, schedule open items and perform in-depth analysis to reduce future issues.
To view the punch list items of a site, just open whatever operation on that site. You'll see the layer manager on the right contains a Punch List Items layer. They're represented as pins on the map, where the colours indicate the status of the item.
When you open up an item, you'll find exactly the same information as you'll find in the Field Link.