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Why Mobile Inspection Apps Are Vital for Improving Industrial Safety

Reducing accidents and improving workplace safety with mobile inspection apps.If you work in a white-collar profession, it’s easy to forget how dangerous workplaces can be.  The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) list of top 10 safety violations for 2018 make that clear.  

At the top of the list are violations of fall protection requirements, with 7,270 violations, followed by violations of hazard communications requirements (4,552), scaffolding requirements (3,336), and respiratory protection requirements (3,118). For the full list, read OSHA’s press release. Note that these violations are of federal law, and don’t include violations of state and local laws.

A more dire picture of dangerous workplaces comes from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. It reports that just in 2017 alone (the latest year for which statistics are available), there were more than 5,000 deaths and 2.8 million injuries on the job.

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Reduce Accidents and Improve Workplace Safety 

How to best reduce the number of accidents an improve workplace safety? Countless businesses and government agencies turn to mobile apps. A survey from Dodge Data & Analytics, for example, found that nearly half of contractors (42 percent) it surveyed use safety inspection checklist mobile apps in the construction industry. The survey concluded, “The documentation of site condition and work progress is fundamental to many safety efforts.”

The Air Force recently released the Airman Safety App, which lets service members and their families immediately report hazardous conditions to safety staff. Senior Master Sgt. Kevin Armstrong, 50th Space Wing occupational and weapons safety manager, explains, “The new app was designed to circumvent a lengthy, archaic process for a more streamlined approach…Additional eyes detecting hazards will likely result in decreased hazards, saving each installation immeasurable mishap and facility costs.”

Another example: the Sheet Metal Occupational Health Institute Trust (SMOHIT) has a long list of mobile safety apps designed for those who work with sheet metal — apps including one to measure sound levels and reduce dangerous noise exposure, another to calculate the heat levels being when working with sheet metal, another that provides information about chemical hazards, among others.

The Best Tool for Building Mobile Safety Apps

Because of Alpha Anywhere’s mobile optimized forms capabilities, it’s ideal for developing industrial safety apps. In only a few minutes, you’ll be able to build a form-based app to enhance worker safety. Because the forms include a robust offline forms capability, workers in any industry, including mining, oil and others that use remote field service workers, can use it without an Internet connection. In fact, developing safety apps is so important to us that we have included a Safety and Health app in our Sample App Gallery.

SafetyAG-Health-and-Safety-AppAlpha TransForm (for non-developers) and Alpha Anywhere (for developers) can work independently or together as a single platform, and are ideally suited for building mobile inspection apps. Alpha TransForm helps business users craft online or offline mobile apps in minutes that utilize the latest mobile features (camera, GPS, etc.) for fast, accurate data capture. Alpha Anywhere has the unique ability to rapidly create mobile-optimized forms and field apps that can easily access and integrate with any database or web service and can exploit built-in role-based security or robust offline functionality. Learn more about Alpha TransForm and try it free for 30 days.

For real-live examples, read how Alpha Software helped the Building Engineering Company digitally transform energy inspections. And check out how an offline equipment inspection app built with Alpha Anywhere helped a company increase worker safety and data accuracy.

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About Author

Amy Groden-Morrison
Amy Groden-Morrison

Amy Groden-Morrison has served more than 15 years in marketing communications leadership roles at companies such as TIBCO Software, RSA Security and Ziff-Davis. Most recently she was responsible for developing marketing programs that helped achieve 30%+ annual growth rate for analytics products at a $1Bil, NASDAQ-listed business integration Software Company. Her past accomplishments include establishing the first co-branded technology program with CNN, launching an events company on the NYSE, rebranding a NASDAQ-listed company amid a crisis, and positioning and marketing a Boston-area startup for successful acquisition. Amy currently serves as a Healthbox Accelerator Program Mentor, Marketing Committee Lead for the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge Launch Smart Clinics, and on the organizing team for Boston TechJam. She holds an MBA from Northeastern University.

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The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.

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