Your entire inventory at a glance with Risk Memo's Search Tag System

In my role as Operations Director for a small, multi-location zipline tour company, health and safety compliance included frequently assessing our inventory status, ensuring regular maintenance checks and documentation, scheduling external inspections, and subsequently assigning appropriate actions to team members. 

Like most small businesses, we conducted such tasks on paper forms and Excel spreadsheets. To answer the question “How many harnesses need to be retired next quarter?” I needed to review multiple tabs across multiple spreadsheets. Furthermore, with many people editing these spreadsheets, mistakes were commonplace, introducing incorrect serial numbers or duplicates, for example. This is just one of many operational questions that had to be answered for compliance, but each answer had to be traced in numerous documents. 

The inefficiency of this system frustrated me.

It was clear that part of the solution was digital. But not isolated Excel spreadsheets. An app would be better. 

We found ourselves using two different apps: one to log our PPE checks, Papertrail, and another, iAuditor by SafetyCulture, to log our operational checks, such as instructor assessments and daily course inspections, etc.

Why two apps? 

Because Papertrail is not flexible enough to manage non-equipment-related procedures and iAuditor is not designed for managing inventories or the specifics of PPE management.

iAuditor cannot be blamed for not being designed for PPE management, but I found Papertrail lacking as well, particularly as this app is very expensive. Papertrail organises equipment into folders, which immediately require you to create, and subsequently stick with a folder structure. Once committed, restructuring would have been a very time-consuming job, but it did limit how I could query my PPE data. This stuck with me when I was designing Risk Memo, and the outcome was the app’s search tag system. 

Here’s how it works:

When uploading any piece of equipment onto Risk Memo*, it requires a unique ID that cannot be duplicated and can later be searched (or scanned as a QR code). In addition, along with the item name and location tags which are added automatically,  add as many tags as you need to help you group and identify it. 

Say it's a harness - you could add the following tags: ‘harness’, ‘petzl’, ‘in use’, ‘Isle of Skye’. Do this for all your harnesses, and now, at any point, you can search for any required combination of tags: ‘harness’ and ‘in use’, for example, to see all the harnesses currently in use.

Need to move a harness from your Isle of Skye location to another? Just update the item’s location and we’ll update the tag. Have you taken a spare harness from the store? Scan the QR code and update the tag from ‘spare’ to ‘in use’.

The search tag system is also available for checklists on Risk Memo. Just as you would want to search in-use harnesses, you can search checklists by the automatically generated location, checklist name or author tag. You can also add custom tags, such as ‘failed’ to filter all your instructor assessments by that tag.

Some of the advantages of this system that our clients have highlighted include the ease of reordering data as people and equipment move between company locations, the ability to perform super fast searches of equipment and employees, and the app’s capability to segment checklists by tags.

For me, another huge relief has been to never have to think about folder structures again!

If you’d like to try the Risk Memo app, you can find pricing details and a link to sign up for the free 14-day trial here: https://www.riskmemo.com/pricing 

Until next time,

Alistair