Never miss inspection, license or contract dates: a periodic reminder

If the license renewal date is on the third tab of an employee’s spreadsheet, the date goes on leave the day that employee does. Periodic inspection tracking software is software that tracks inspection, license, contract, maintenance and check dates with recurrence rules and gives staged advance warnings as a date approaches.

In this article we explain why critical dates get missed and how to prevent it, using the Reminder Module inside YazSis KurumsalPortal.

Why do critical dates get missed?

• The date sits in one person’s file or calendar; when the person changes, goes on leave or moves to another post, the information is lost.
• The renewal period is recalculated every time and there is no written recurrence rule, so the date of the previous period may be remembered wrongly.
• There is no alert; the date is noticed only on the last day, when a customer or an authority asks, and the work is done in a hurry.
• Whether the check was done, and if so when, is not recorded; when you need to look back, all you have is memories.

None of these is a negligence problem; they are a system problem. As long as remembering dates is left to people, every missed date foreshadows the next one. The Reminder takes tracking out of individual goodwill and builds it into the rule: the date, the recurrence rule and the alert are defined once, and the rest runs from the record.

How does the Reminder Module work in five steps?

1. Create the record. Open a record for an inspection, license, contract, maintenance or periodic check. Writing in plain language what is being tracked and who is responsible stops anyone from asking “what was this?” when the alert arrives.
2. Set the date. The critical date is entered in the record.
3. Choose the recurrence rule. If the check repeats at regular intervals, the rule is defined once and later periods are tracked according to it.
4. Leave notification to the system. The system sends staged advance warnings as the date approaches.
5. Record completion. When the check is done, the completion is entered in the record and the history of the check can be followed in one place.

Let us take a fictional example: at a facility, a piece of work equipment is inspected periodically. Administrative affairs opens the record, enters the inspection date and chooses the recurrence rule. 30 days before the date, the first alert arrives through the portal, e-mail and SMS; the appointment with the company that will do the inspection is planned at that point. At 7 days, someone checks whether the appointment has been made, and at 1 day the final alert arrives. When the inspection is done, the completion is entered in the record and the next period is tracked under the same rule.

The 30, 7 and 1 day logic

The module gives staged advance warnings 30, 7 and 1 days before the critical date. This way, an inspection, license or contract renewal can be planned before it gets to the last day. In practice you can read these three alerts as follows:

• 30 days to go: time to plan. Check who owns the job and whether the appointment or quotation process has started.
• 7 days to go: the job needs to have a place in the calendar. If no step has been taken yet, now is the time.
• 1 day to go: final check. If any work is unfinished, this is no longer a warning but an urgent job.

Where and how are alerts sent?

Alerts can be delivered as portal notifications, e-mail and SMS. E-mail is sent through the organization’s own SMTP account, and SMS through the organization’s own NetGSM account.

Which records should be entered?

The module tracks inspection, license, contract, maintenance and periodic check dates. Work-equipment check dates, license and document validity periods, and contract renewals are collected in a single list. Teams work on the same records, so there is no need to keep a separate spreadsheet for each category, and which date is held by whom stops being a matter of debate.

Every team tracks its own dates in the same place

• Administrative affairs: manages the organization’s general calendar, such as licenses, document validity periods and contract renewals.
• HR: tracks employee-related time-limited documents and renewal dates.
• Quality and maintenance teams: track periodic check, inspection and maintenance dates with recurrence rules, and log every completed check in its history.

To start, pick the five or six records that would cause the most trouble if their dates were missed. For each record, assign a responsible team; it must be clear from the start who acts when an alert arrives, otherwise the alert too becomes a message everyone expects someone else to handle. The list grows on its own as it is used. The expected outcome is critical dates that are not missed, less manual tracking and an arrangement that does not depend on people’s memory. Not missing dates is not a one-off effort but a habit that repeats every period; the module ties this habit to the record, not to people.

You can find the module’s details on the Reminder Module page and the rest of the platform on the KurumsalPortal page.