An Inspection Record System Information Management

Inspection record systems, used to be just that, a place to "record" data. Our industry has spent many millions of dollars collecting data to put into our "record" systems. The problem was trying to manage and utilize the millions of pieces of information (not being a computer type, a piece of information to me is a piece of information, not a Byte.) A statistician with my company recently compared our management of information with trying to get a drink of water from a firewater hose. The information is there, but good luck trying to use it.

In the 1980's we evolved from our manual record systems to computerized systems. We were then able to efficiently store much more information. But then we also had a bigger firewater hose to try to drink from. Fortunately, our evolution with computerized inspection record systems has begun to take us where we can actually use the information effectively and efficiently. Because of our frustration with our mainframe record system, we set out to find a good replacement. Our first task was trying to determine what we really needed in such a system.