Planning and carrying out annual asset/infrastructure inspection cycles and work programmes are a major of your estate management. We use the term furniture as a general term for items of outdoor infrastructure, for example:

  • estate/farm furniture: gates, fences, signs, water taps, water meters, water troughs, stiles, kissing gates, etc.
  • park furniture: benches, signs, notice boards, playground equipement, water taps, stiles, kissing gates, gates, fences, etc.
  • street furniture: signs, lamp posts, litter bins, post boxes, etc.

Inspection Cycles

  • Many landowners carry out a complete asset/infrastructure survey every few years. Your staff or appointed agents will inspect each item, note its condition, make recommendations of work to be carried out and, will assign a priority or time scale to each one.
  • The manager can then create a multi-year maintenance programme. This plan will be driven by the recommendations, but will also be influenced by a range of other factors including; budget constraints, development plans for the property; the opinions/concerns of neighbours, etc. These plans are essential when managing external contractors and also your own staff time.
  • A preplanned rolling programme of inspection cycles should result in a higher standard of maintenance and more predictable repair/replacement budgets.

Day to day management…

  • Between these inspection cycles, the furntiure may suffer from damage, vandalism, wear and tear, etc. Your staff (groundsmen, caretaker, facilities manager, etc.) may require further maintenance work or inspections to be carried out individual items.
  • The Estate Survey Android™ application makes it very convenient for staff to use their mobile phone to create new inspection records and work items – especially when they are on-site and notice something that needs attending to.

Furniture Surveys

An OTISS ‘survey’ is created to plan and carry out an inspection cycle on a selected set of furniture. If outside agents are being used, then they can be assigned to the survey so that the have online access to the required maps, location and history. This ‘survey‘ record contains general information about aims, restrictions, weather on the day, overall findings, etc. Whereas an ‘inspection‘ record is stored for each item of furniture; this includes inspection date, inspector’s name, measurements, overall condition, detailed survey notes, inspection cycle, recommendations and time scales. See the full listing of furniture survey data stored by OTISS for each inspection.

  • Inspections are carried out using your mobile phone or tablet (only Android at present). With the Estate Survey app, you can view, update and create new furniture inspections. The maps and data are synchronised between OTISS and your phone.
  • The survey form can be customised to suit each your needs, with pre-configured fields and picklists.

All new inspections are linked to the current active/open survey for that site. When this survey is set to the ‘closed’ state. then these records are effectively frozen. Over the years, the survey records provide an audit trail and history of your estate management. A new survey is then created for the next inspection cycle, or as a basis for any ad-hoc inspections/work.

Building Reports

OTISS provides a set of pre-defined PDF reports and Excel spreadsheets to provide summary charts and detailed information about the surveyed trees.

In addition, you can create a set of Excel Report Templates to layout your own style, fonts, colours, column widths, border, formatting, etc. Select which data columns to include and which summary tables to provide some key statistics: e.g. condition, species, etc. Upload your prepared template to OTISS and the spreadsheet is immediately returned to you with the requested data and photos. More about Excel Report Templates...

Reports can be created for individual sites or for the entire estate. You can also select what to include in a report, you can search and sort your data using multiple criteria. For example:

  • “include those assets on a particular site that need work doing on them this year”,
  • “include all assets that are due for inspection within the next 6 months”,

The Summary reports are ideal for management committees, boards of directors and governors. The detailed reports for day-to-day management. Here are some of the pre-defined PDF reports as examples of what you could achieve.

The audit trail, photos and history of each item can be viewed. This provides a complete audit trail of all the inspections (including dates, surveyor name, etc.) and any works carried out.

Maintenance Programmes

When all the data has been collected from the surveys, it can be used to plan your maintenance programme and next inspection cycles.

TreeSafety excel chart 1
  • OTISS provides pre-defined PDF reports and Excel spreadsheets to list the survey recommendations. In addition, you can set up your own Excel Report Templates (styles, columns, charts, etc) and OTISS will fill in the data. More about Excel Report Templates...
  • The spreadsheet page allows you to search and sort your data using multiple criteria.
  • The map page allows you see which items have been inspected as part of a particular survey.
  • If required, specialised data processing can be carried out by downloading the raw data into an Excel spreadsheet.