If you’ve been a subcontractor for a while, you would have almost certainly had a defect chalked up to your workmanship or supplied products when it wasn’t you at fault. If you haven’t yet….just wait, it’s coming.
How do you protect yourself and your business from this event occurring and taking up your precious time and retentions?
Take photos and document site conditions! Site conditions are just as important as photos of your finished work, especially when you walk on-site and just know from the site setup, someone is going to bump your formwork or knock your scaffold. You can feel it in your gut, don’t leave it to chance!
Now this sounds simple enough, but when you are under the pump usually one or both of these things happen:
- You forget to take photos of all the finished work
- You forget to file photos in a place where you can find them later
Now when you are trying to work through a defect on month-old project it’s easy enough, the photos are recent and you know where to find them, the completed work is still a fresh memory.
But what happens when you are dealing with a defect on a project that’s 11 months into DLP, and you finished your work 4 months before the project concluded? Now you are looking for photos 15 months old, and the project particulars are barely a distant memory.
Who worked on that job anyway?
What exactly did we do in that cavity before we closed it up?
It pays big dividends to take photos of every open cavity and finished piece of work, captured in a way you can refer back to easily, years down the track. Better yet, capture it in a system you can get to on your phone or iPad and you can deal with defects while you are on the road. Whether it’s your defect or not, having photos captured and filed will save you time and resources in the long-run!
How can Subbie Support help?
At Subbie Support Services we can:
- Help you get a photo/record filing system that suits the exact way your business works!
- Set you and your workers up to retrieve these records wherever they are, and send them to whoever they need to
- Plug it into your existing storage (OneDrive, Dropbox, Box etc..) so your business works seamlessly
- Save you the time, retention and hassle involved in dealing with defects that aren’t yours
When we work with you we don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to your business. Some subcontractors need their systems tailored to suit the type of work they do, and others only need specific features and not the whole box and dice! One size DOESN’T fit all, and the way we work takes this into account.
The commercial reality is; there are many ways to setup a system, it’s about picking the “right” way for your business. Click here to book a 15 min call and find out how can we change your documentation process from painful to easy and efficient.