Keen tech adopters, but also savvy enough to know first to market is rarely best in class, Carpenter Surveyors had GoReport on their radar for 18 months before they made it an essential part of their reporting process.
Managing Director at the established practice that covers the West Midlands, Ian Bullock explained their rationale.
“We’re always keen to explore new technologies that promise greater efficiency, and consistency. When we first looked at the various reporting platforms in 2015, GoReport among them, we weren’t convinced that they delivered exactly what we wanted. But we kept a close eye on how the technology developed and earlier this year decided that GoReport met our requirements. The recent changes they made to their version 2.0 tipped the scales in their favour and we’ve never looked back.
We now enjoy three key benefits, delivered solely as a result of making GoReport part of our on-site data capture and back-end report writing process.
Accuracy – in the past, we found that transcribing hand-written reports into typewritten documents led to a catalogue of spelling mistakes. The resulting ‘back and forth’ exchange between the surveyors and typists took up valuable time. Now, because the surveyor completes their report as they go, mistakes are greatly reduced. As are instances of incorrectly filed or attributed photos and measurements. Needless to say, this all helps with compliance issues too.
Efficiency – on-site data capture streamlines the process at the beginning of the survey, while standard phrases and features make final report creation much faster and 100% consistent.
Collaboration – and because all the data is saved in a central cloud server, it makes cross-team working much easier, as everyone has visibility of each individual project. We are also impressed by GoReport’s willingness to tweak and develop the platform to perfectly suit our needs. That partnership approach has helped us to create something differentiating and ownable – a welcome business edge in an increasingly competitive market.
On reflection, I think we made the right decision to wait for GoReport’s capabilities to reach the level we needed. Perhaps jumping in too soon would have put us off completely, with the result that we’d now be missing out on the features that have sharpened our process. Not to mention the on-going working partnership we’ve built with the GoReport customer team.”
Ian Bullock MRICS
Managing Director
Carpenter Surveyors