Every year, thousands of fires occur on college campuses, and most of them are preventable. Smoking, electrical issues, and faulty smoke detecting and fire prevention equipment are among the top causes for fatal campus fires. Preventive measures for fire protection, like annual fire safety inspections, can help colleges reduce the chances of a campus fire.
How Does Your Campus Keep Up with Fire Protection?
Overall, there are plenty of practical ways to maintain fire safety protocol and distribute useful information to students.
A few examples of this may be:
- Fire safety pamphlets
- Informative posters
- Trained dorm staff
- Well-maintained sprinkler systems
- Regularly checked smoke detectors
- Student meetings on fire safety
- New fire extinguishers
Of all these methods, regular fire safety inspections cover almost all the bases. Some college campuses will reach out to third-party inspection companies, but some do their own in-house, NFPA (National Fire Protection Association) inspections. For those campuses who conduct their own annual inspections, fire inspection software is perfect for a quick and easy workflow.
Fire safety inspections are an integral part of fire protection and campus safety and should be treated as such.
Decrease Time Spent
NFPA inspections are usually conducted by printing out the inspection papers, attaching them to a clipboard, and checking everything off by hand, then scanning it in and saving it to a computer for future use. Today, modern inspection software allows campuses to use iPads to efficiently conduct the inspection, making the process user-friendly. No more wasting time printing paper, writing results by hand, and scanning physical documents. Photos can be taken as a part of a report, which saves time; you’ll no longer have to upload the picture to the inspection file after the fact.
Cost Reduction
By cutting time on the fire inspection process, the cost of inspection is drastically reduced. With software, inspections are optimized to become highly efficient and require a smaller workforce to execute them. In addition to the money saved from efficiency, the cost of printing documents is completely erased with the use of digital records. Lastly, there is a cost when hiring a third-party inspection company to execute the inspections. By using fire inspection software to do it yourself, campuses can eliminate the additional cost of a third-party company.
Increase Organization
It can be easy to forget about routine inspections in the busy-ness of the school year. With inspection software installed on iPads, campuses will receive notifications, updates on the status of the inspection review, and reminders for upcoming inspections. Using these organization tools, campus inspection teams stay on the same page and can effectively make fire protection inspections a routine, streamlined process.
Branded Inspections
Another perk of fire safety software is the ability to uniformly brand documents to match your school’s colors, font, and logo. While not necessary, it is good when sending inspection documents to a contractor who may find it useful for organization purposes. Inter-departmental file sharing may also find branding documents useful to discern internal and external inspection documents.
Never Lose Another Inspection Report
Lastly, and one of the most important benefits of fire safety inspection software, is eliminating the possibility of losing essential inspection documents. Often, records are lost in between the inspection and the paper going into the scanner. By using a digital inspection, the chance of losing the inspection report is slim to none. Executing regular checks is a lot of work, and there’s nothing worse than losing all that work and starting over from scratch.
Fire safety inspections are an integral part of fire protection and campus safety and should be treated as such. Inspections reduce the risk of on-campus disaster from faulty extinguishers, sprinklers, and alarms. By handling inquiries internally, campuses save money and take control of the inspection process. By choosing fire safety inspection software, campuses save money, time, and resources; increase organization across the board; and decrease the chance of lost documents with digital copies. Streamlining routine tasks keeps all campus staff up to date on essential status updates and reviews.
