UK & Ireland Featured Project: NGN - Design Management

QEM Solutions are assisting NGN with Design Co-ordination activities, to ensure successful project initiation and design management of all current NGN projects.

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Overseas Featured Project: Capita Symonds - Valve Inspections

QEM Solutions were contracted to carry 3rd party inspection and witnessing activities on a series of valves fabricated in Germany for a series of SGN contracts throughout Scotland.

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14 Mar 2016

ePermit: the end of the Great British Queue

Writer George Mikes once said "An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one".

And, frankly, it’s not just true of the English: you’ll find orderly queues from Land’s End to John O’Groats and everywhere in between. In the UK we class queueing as a virtue, and despair of those cultures who lack what we view as our innate sense of ‘decorum’. Heck, we tolerate long waits for everything with only the mildest of grumbles; be it for stamps, for petrol, even our morning cup o’ Joe.

But queuing costs money. And in the construction industry, costs pots of money. On larger sites, it’s not unusual to see scores of workers queuing – albeit in a very civilised fashion – to be allowed access to their workplace and actually start their day. So, what’s the hold-up? Well, the bottle-neck is caused by processing each and every worker’s credentials before they are given a permit to work – credentials and permits written on paper in an otherwise digital world.

Time is money. It doesn’t take a degree to work out that this is where most sites haemorrhage money, daily. So how to get all these people going more quickly? We can’t skip the permit process: to run a safe, legal and professional site, every worker must be accounted for, audit trails must be robust, every 'i' must be dotted and every ‘t’ must be crossed. No. The secret’s in the paper: it’s time to ditch it. 

ePermit is an advanced, cloud-based permitry system that massively reduces costly downtime on large construction sites. It runs across the web, on phones and tablets, and can function in fully electronic mode to provide electronic permits for your workers – wherever they are in the world. In hazardous environments where mobile phones are forbidden, ePermit will also print permits to provide robust permit control. Need a bespoke permit type? On top of its six industry-standard general and electrical permits, it’s possible to produce virtually any permit needed by our clients for use within the system. Sorted.

What’s the result? By reducing the amount of time required to produce permits each day, ePermit quite simply increases productivity. At our reference site in north-east Scotland we reduced downtime by 20%. Increased permit accuracy freed up permit controllers to perform vital safety inspections too, making workers safer. Further, by consolidating all the dull but necessary admin into a single, slick, back office, there are savings to be made from economies of scale. Here’s a stat to close with: we’ve improved productivity by 30% at St Fergus with ePermit. Yes – that’s 30%. You read it right.

The numbers speak for themselves. Save some trees and ditch the paper. Get in the cloud. Cut your project times. Maximise your productivity. Keep your workers safe.

Oh, and queueing? It’s so last year.