Blog Post

Using a truck inspection app eliminates the tedious and time-consuming tasks of manual, paper-based processes.

Not only do manual processes make your truck inspection process inefficient, they also cause you to lose time and money. You need to go the paperless route.

A reliable truck inspection app can speed up your inspection process and save you and your staff tons of precious work hours and resources. 

This guide covers five benefits of using a truck inspection app and how it can improve conducting your vehicle assessments. 

1. Speed up your inspection process

The traditional way of conducting a truck inspection is often a headache with all the paperwork you must fill out, file, and organize.

It can also be a long and tedious process that wastes time and resources, particularly if you have a large fleet with over 50 trucks in and out daily. 

A truck inspection app provides a streamlined solution, allowing you to conduct paperless, electronic assessments seamlessly. 

The Record360 app provides an easy digital checklist and truck inspection form right from your mobile device. This cuts down significantly on the time and effort it usually takes to complete, send, and get signatures on paper-based inspections.

Must Read: Electronic DVIR for Truck Inspections: Improving Safety and Efficiency

The app lets you record all your data in a standard format. You can also modify your checklist and forms without the hassle of printing out tons of paper.

After filling out the digital commercial truck inspection forms, the app lets users send them directly to managers through email with a few taps. 

A dependable app can also secure your data stored on the cloud, giving you the peace of mind of knowing your inspection information is safe and only accessible to authorized users. 

2. Record vehicle condition anywhere

One of the advantages of using a truck inspection app is it lets users perform vehicle assessments, whether on-premise or on-site. 

It simplifies your commercial truck inspection process and conveniently allows anyone from your team, contractors, and even customers to assess your vehicles and capture your asset’s real condition anywhere and anytime. 

For instance, Record360 allows you to send drivers and contractors a direct link to Record360, allowing them to perform inspections wherever your trucks are deployed. This gives you instant access to remote inspection information, helping you detect damages promptly. 

You can set alerts to trigger when damages are detected during truck inspections, helping you act on damages in real time. 

With a truck inspection app, you can easily begin inspections from your desktop and send them to your team to complete in the field using their mobile devices.   

You can take high-definition photos and videos to capture your truck’s damages and actual condition and, in turn, make your inspections simple and easy. 

Must Read: Trucking Inspection Checklist: Importance, Components, and Benefits

3. Streamline getting signatures 

Getting managers and customers to sign off on paper inspection reports can be a long and tedious back-and-forth process. 

Save time and energy by using Record360 to obtain electronic signatures from the app. 

Instead of a paper truck inspection form, you can capture electronic signatures on your digital forms and auto-email them to customers, speeding up the process. 

Must Read: The importance of electronic signatures for equipment inspections

Once signed, you can store the reports in a secure dashboard for easy access and efficient record keeping. This also helps optimize your truck fleet management processes.  

4. Centralize your inspection data

Paper-based truck inspection records can be challenging to accomplish promptly and accurately, but they can also be a nightmare to file, keep track of, and access. 

A truck inspection app allows you to upload and store all vehicle assessment records in one central location. This provides quick and easy access, streamlining your workflows and truck fleet management tasks. 

With consolidated commercial truck inspection records, you can pull record histories, identify trends, and analyze your data. 

For instance, the Record360 web app offers a comprehensive dashboard to help you stay on top and gain insights from your truck inspection information. 

You’ll get instant views of your inspection history, the number of total damages, recent activities and inspections, and other valuable data. This can help you make better decisions and identify areas to reevaluate and improve. 

You’ll get real-time information with all your inspection records and other data on your transactions and units. You’ll have full access to everything you need to understand your fleet’s condition through damage analytics, past inspections, and employee usage (among others). 

As such, a truck inspection app that centralizes your data helps managers stay on top of your inspections and related processes and keeps everyone in the loop. 

5. Establish efficient inspection workflows

Conduct seamless truck inspections to streamline your workflows so you spend more time and resources on renting and, in turn, increasing your revenue. 

A truck inspection app frees you and your team from time-consuming paper-based processes, allowing you to perform vehicle assessments efficiently. 

Apps with custom-built truck workflows, for instance, simplify and streamline your inspection process. 

You can complete an entire truck inspection in minutes, whether for an incident report, service inspection, appraisal, lease inspection, prep for sale, or lease inspection. 

With the app, you can cover more ground with less effort than manual, paper-based methods, optimizing your truck inspections.

Efficient inspections and workflows also mean you can spot truck damages and act on them quickly. This helps you avoid potential issues, eliminate costly damage disputes, and protect your assets and business. 

Must Read: Streamlining Truck Inspection Checklists with Record360

Start leveraging the game-changing advantages of a truck inspection app

Preserve your fleet’s quality and protect it from costly damages by streamlining your truck inspection process.  

Take away the headaches that come with traditional methods. 

Equip your team with a dependable truck inspection app that provides easy-to-use and access digital forms, robust damage and data recording features, a central data hub, and in-app signature capturing (among others). 

If you want to leverage these powerful features to optimize your truck inspections, schedule a demonstration with Record360 today.

Using the right digital inspection tools will help protect your customers.

Consider the potential lawsuits or hefty penalties you might face if your equipment breaks down while on rent. You need to give due diligence to choosing an equipment inspection software for your company.

What’s more, a reliable inspection tool adds other value to your rental company: it also increases your team’s productivity and reduces your business expenses.

So the question becomes, how exactly do reliable digital inspection tools help you protect your clients?

1. Digital inspection tools prevent customer fraud

Although physical rental and inspection processes involve identity validation, they lack security. Manual methods are less robust and reliable compared to electronic ones.

For example, the Record360 equipment management app captures clients’ electronic signatures for equipment log sheets, inspection sign-off documents, and rental agreements. It also automatically emails these signed files to the signees for their reference.

The software even has license scanning functionality that efficiently validates customer identity and lets clients safely present confidential documents (especially during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic).

That way, your customers and staff can better verify that the business and transacting party are accurate and legitimate.

Record360 then places these digital signatures in secure cloud storage for quick, safe access when needed.

Digital inspection tools also store equipment and inspection records with details about rental usage and asset condition. In the Record360 dashboard, you can find rental inspection history, activity logs, user history, and date and time stamped evidence.

2. Digital inspection tools bolster customer safety while out on rent

Digital inspection tools help enhance your assets’ condition, equipment inventory management, and, consequently, your customers’ safety while renting out your machinery.

Electronic software allows you to scrutinize and record any defects more closely and accurately, apply necessary repairs promptly, and follow the right maintenance schedules.

Record360 has various functionalities suited for that. 

On the awareness side, it lets your staff perform inspections from any branch and fill in the digital equipment inspection checklists and forms to report the asset condition, especially if there’s any damage.

For reporting, Record360 then instantly disseminates information from the inspection form to you and the team via email and SMS.

You can also view the details about damages, needed repairs, and equipment maintenance schedules and activities for every asset on your Record360 dashboard.

During the inspection, your technicians and operators can take high-resolution equipment photos and videos of the asset’s defects and apply appropriate “damage tags” on them.

You can then monitor these equipment inspections and get real-time updates, location details, and activities to ensure the assets are being repaired and maintained — ready for the next customers’ safe use of them.

The Record360 dashboard shows an excellent top-level view of your inspections. You can see the number of ongoing and completed inspections and damages discovered within a given period.

If you have multiple branches, Record360’s location-related features are beneficial for coordination with your staff and monitoring. For example, you can view your inspections by location and get live updates on recent equipment evaluations.

These pieces of real-time information appear in Record360:

• The asset’s ID number;
• Name of the employee who updated the inspection;
• Whether or not damages were found;
• Status of the equipment examination;
• How long ago the updates occurred;
• And more.

You can also see your asset’s last location on a map.

All these actions and rich information enable your company to respond fast and keep your customers safe from accidents, injuries, and fatalities that can result from those defects.

3. Digital inspection tools protect customers against unfair accusations

Your technicians can perform more accurate and timely inspections electronically, compared to doing the inspections manually.

Not only that, documentation details are often more precise and up-to-date. They can also provide solid evidence for any dispute or accusation that can arise about damage or unlawful asset usage.

Manual inspection methods and records cannot track or pinpoint exactly who was at fault for the undesirable incidences. Is it your client, staff, a third party, or a natural circumstance?

Customers who receive unfair blame and charges for something they didn’t do can feel upset because they will feel you don’t trust them. Their budget will also be impacted negatively from the extra expense of covering for the damage. Both of these jeopardize your relationship.

That’s why digital inspection tools can better protect your clients’ feelings, sense of value and trustworthiness, and incomes compared with manual inspection methods.

For instance, an electronic sign-off and daily equipment inspection form can show the asset’s condition before and after being rented out. Customers can also electronically sign to validate the observation, especially for the pre-rental state.

On the other hand, suppose disagreements happen, and your digital inspections (through the photos and videos) reveal that your customers were proven liable for the damage. 

In that case, they can check and concur with the findings, acknowledge their responsibility, and compensate appropriately. This helps build their integrity, trust in your company, and a solid foundation for your lessor-customer relationship.

Pioneer Equipment Rental shares a noteworthy story of how they were able to preserve their customer relationships despite charging them for the discovered post-rental damages:

We have a customer that is doing quite a bit of demolition and basically started demolishing our excavator, the bucket starting to come apart. Cracks, damage on the body, things like that, and  we had clear pictures of that bucket before it went out with a new bucket versus how it came back.

And that was like probably a $4,000 claim in itself, and you know what, and it went smoothly. We still have a customer. He understands his people did the damage, and he’s responsible, and we still have a good customer relationship.

Michael Allan, president of Pioneer Equipment Company, even adds,

We don’t want to file insurance claims, so if we can settle damage issues with our customers in a diplomatic way, that is a good form of insurance itself.

Protect your customers with robust digital inspection tools

Maximize today’s digital inspection tools to protect your equipment and customers.

When you can effectively examine your equipment and guarantee its best working condition, you can better ensure your customers’ safety.

Need more help with exploring digital inspection tools? Schedule a demonstration today and we’ll show how Record360 can support your company’s inspections and other operations.

Your commercial truck inspection is crucial to the longevity of your vehicles.

Frequent, careful inspections safeguard your clients, fleet, and even your bottom line.

Sadly, because many truck rental businesses aren’t religious about their inspections, they miss out on the benefits of having well-maintained trucks.

Even small compromises in a truck inspection over time can lead to catastrophic repercussions, such as accidents, financial, and client losses, etc.

Prevent these from happening to your truck rental company. Learn the commercial truck inspection mistakes you should avoid and the right steps you should do instead.

1. Superficially checking truck parts

A truck inspection often becomes so habitual that technicians can perform it mindlessly. However, this results in careless assessments of vehicle parts’ conditions that don’t guarantee safe, optimal operation.

For example, testing the braking systems requires exhaustive scrutiny. It involves checking the slack adjuster with the brakes, hunching under the trailer or over the wheels, ensuring air lines are not leaking, etc.

If your technicians carry pens and clipboards, the steps become extra tedious, wearying technicians and tempting them to dismiss careful inspection.

To avoid that mistake, use a digital truck inspection form. For example, our Record360 app has an electronic inspection checklist customizable according to your operations.

It even lets you capture all needed inspection data in one standard format. This makes checklists and later reports look clean and easy to read.

By loading inspection checklists onto mobile devices, technicians can painlessly carry them around while comprehensively examining your truck’s parts.

The result is a precise inspection, leading to optimally running vehicles, plus client safety.

2. Inaccurate documentation of truck conditions

Another truck inspection mistake to avoid is using inefficient methods to record your vehicle’s pre- and post-rental conditions — especially when defects are present.

Manual methods (e.g., narrative descriptions, hand-drawn illustrations) fail to capture the extent of any damage accurately, even for visible ones.

Once you discover any defect emerging or worsening and argue with your clients about it, you’re likely to lose the dispute.

After all, you don’t have solid evidence showing they caused it.

That is why, to avoid making this mistake, you must use photo and video documentation for your pre- and post-rental commercial truck inspections.

Our Record360 app demonstrates that with its high-resolution photo and video capture functionalities. It also lets you add tags indicating exactly the damage type and area in your truck.

Here’s another benefit to the Record360 app for recording inspections. You can create digital pre- and post-inspection forms and reports, attach photos and videos of your truck’s condition, and request clients to verify them with their digital signatures.

All this streamlines and bolsters your documentation workflow and enables you to resolve any arising customer disputes peacefully.

3. Failing to alert the team of recorded damages

It’s not enough to document your truck’s condition properly. You should also report the damages and notify your team promptly for corrective action.

When this happens, don’t put handwritten reports on tables and risk losing them or delaying the needed repairs.

Use more efficient methods such as instant email and SMS alerts.

The Record360 app offers those features when you discover truck defects and inspections fail. 

It schedules the automatic delivery of these messages, shortening the communication process from technicians to maintenance officers.

Plus, remember the photos and videos with damage tags?

Our app lets you upload them to the cloud for your team’s ready access. This enables them to view the defects even remotely and determine and schedule the correct repairs fast.

There is no need to transfer media files via USB cords and email long threads, resulting in more working time consumed and communication disarray.

4. Segregated monitoring of inspection activities

Trucking companies with multiple branches usually struggle with efficiently monitoring inspection activities from other locations. This is typical, especially if they use manual systems.

If that’s your case, you make the mistake of segregating your inspection monitoring.

This leads to inaccurate overviews of your fleet’s real situation, low responsiveness to issues, etc. Eventually, these will hurt your business performance.

The solution? Harmonize your inspection activities from various locations with truck fleet management apps.

Record360 software can help you with streamlining and centralizing your inspections.

It has a user-friendly dashboard that reports your inspections by location, their history, total damages found, recent real-time activities (including vehicle checks), and more.

Moreover, if you need specific inspection data from technicians in remote locations, you can send them a direct link to our Record360 app.

You can then get instant access to that dataset and respond immediately to damage or any other issue. This feature lets you perform truck inspections from any place.

5. Inefficient truck inspection implementation

Conventional inspection systems are often inefficient, whether using hand-drawn and narrative condition descriptions, relaying printed damage reports on office tables and bulletins, or others.

All this internal inefficiency in your truck inspection workflows could result in fewer rentals deployed, delayed service delivery, lagging rental and inspection schedules, etc.

Streamline your inspection workflow management by digitizing related processes, forms, and assignments for your team. Our Record360 truck inspection app can help with that.

For one, it allows you to start an inspection with your customized in-app checklist, then send it to your team. This enables technicians to complete a request immediately in the field, saving plenty of working time.

Record360 also makes it quicker for you and your team to begin inspections and document your vehicle’s condition. 

Under the “New Inspection” functionality, Record360 displays various task choices. Clicking on any one of them leads you to the right forms, checklists, etc., suited to the type of inspection you need to perform. This simplifies and accelerates your team’s work.

When you can perform and finish inspections fast and correctly, you boost your internal productivity, service delivery, and customer experience.

6. Disregard a roadway safety mindset

The ultimate reason you conduct truck inspections is to promote roadway safety, which involves your clients’ lives, vehicles, and even national properties, among others.

Which is why you should always keep that in mind when inspecting your fleet. The goal of guaranteeing safety motivates you to examine trucks extensively — even beyond what’s in the checklist, routine, or other minimum requirements. 

Inculcate this roadway safety mindset and culture among your team, so they can also give their best during truck inspections. 

Stop committing these commercial truck inspection mistakes.

As a truck rental company, you c-a-n-n-o-t afford to compromise on your vehicle inspections.

Doing so endangers your clients, fleet assets, and eventually, your business.

Avoid making these and other truck inspection mistakes — and you’ll reap the benefits of managing a safety-first rental business.

Interested in learning more about Record360? Schedule a demonstration today.