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Leeds Beckett University embrace digital surveying as they prepare for expansion

About

Leeds Beckett University (LBU) is a public University in Leeds, with campuses in the city centre and Headingley. With a population of 28,000 students and 3,200 staff they are one of the biggest employers in Leeds and playing a vital role in transforming the lives and prospects of thousands of individuals and organisations every year.

Customer

Leeds Beckett

Industry

University

We wanted to partner with the right digital surveying solution from the beginning and conducted thorough due diligence to ensure a successful transition. Fire doors are a critical component in containing a fire to a single compartment of a building and GoReport solution gave us 100% confidence that digitising our Fire Door Inspections would provide us with the comprehensive assessment we were looking for.

The clear and concise reporting of actionable issues allows us to quickly and easily identify what needs to be repaired, ensuring our campuses remain Fire Risk and Fire Safety compliant.

Alex Dobson, Principal Building Surveyor

Customer Need

Leeds Beckett University is split between two campuses and plan even more expansion over the next five years. With a population of 28,000 students and 3,200 staff, Fire Risk and Fire Safety compliance is important to the University. There are 3,000 fire doors to inspect on an annual basis in order to comply with fire safety law.

Inspections had been carried out using pen and paper. Notes taken during the survey were then passed to Admin staff to type into an excel spreadsheet or scanned onto the system to keep a record. The surveying team identified this was no longer a sustainable workflow given the volume of information.

Heavy use of fire doors can be an issue for many buildings and therefore assessing the specific condition and risks are an important part of complying with legislation. Knowing this Leeds Beckett required a more efficient, reliable, and accurate system in place for such a vital survey.

Benefits of using GoReport

One of the most essential features for Leeds Beckett was the ability to pre-populate tables, maximising the surveyors time spent in each campus allowing them to focus their expertise on recording the findings, such as fire door condition, defects, capturing photos as required etc.

Alex commented: “Pre-populating asset information not only saves us a considerable amount of time, but it also gives a checklist of items that needs inspecting, for example door frame, smoke seals, hinges, glazing etc helping to ensure all required information is captured for every single fire door.”

Fire door inspections are risk assessed and carried out on annual, 6 monthly and quarterly frequencies to make sure the University remains compliant with the most up to date regulations. Leeds Beckett use GoReport’s unique report cloning capability to fast track the re-evaluation of fire doors by quickly and easily copying just part or the whole of an existing survey ready for amending whilst preserving original content. The ability to clone saves them time, effort, and money.

Both campuses include many buildings with a large number fire doors in lecture theatres, corridors, etc. GoReport SmartPins functionality allow surveyors to tie together layout plans with the inspections, to provide accurate location information. When they issue a report, complete with a SmartPins layout in the appendix, the reader knows exactly where in the building you are describing.

“The ability to colour code SmartPins to group them together in categories makes the final report visually appealing with the added benefit of being able to click on a SmartPin to display all the key data and even click straight through to the relevant entry in your report.

We plan to attach QR or Barcodes on our fire doors in the near future to help us easily identify each door, further increasing the accuracy of our data and helping to eliminate errors when it comes to re-inspections.” Alex Dobson

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