Planning and carrying out annual inspection cycles and work programmes are a major of your estate management.

• Many landowners carry out a complete furniture survey every few years. Staff or appointed agents will inspect each item, will 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 Tree 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 and Inspections

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/inspection data stored by OTISS for each item.

• Traditionally, inspections have been carried out using pen and paper. Using OTISS, previous reports can be printed before the survey and then amended on-site. Data collected in this way can be entered directly into OTISS via any Web browser.
• Inspections can also be carried out using your mobile phone or tablet (only Android at present). With the Tree Survey (Android) application, you can view, update and create new furniture inspections. The maps and data are synchronised between OTISS and your phone.

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.

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. If required, further data processing can be carried out by downloading the data into an Excel spreadsheet.

• PDF reports for the survey and maintenance schedules can be created containing coloured charts, graphs and tables.
• The spreadsheet page allows you to search and sort your data using multiple criteria. For example:
  • “show those items on a particular site that need work doing on them this year”,
  • “show all furniture that are due for inspection within the next 6 months”,
• The map page allows you see which items have been inspected as part of a particular survey.