Site inspections done on a tablet — even with no signal.
At a construction firm running 14 active sites, safety inspections lived on clipboards — photos on personal phones, reports typed up two days later back at the office, and sometimes never. Whatever replaced that had to work where the work happens: on site, with no signal.
The inspection happened on site. The record happened two days later.
Safety inspections ran the way they had always run: an inspector walked the site with a clipboard, ticking a paper checklist. Photos of anything worth recording went onto whichever personal phone was in the nearest pocket — one person's evidence in one person's camera roll, on a device the company didn't control. By the end of the walk, a single inspection was already split across a sheet of paper and somebody's photo library.
The report came later — two days later, back at the office, typed up from the clipboard, from memory, and from photos that had to be matched to the right site and the right checklist item after the fact. When the week got busy, some reports never got typed up at all. A finding that never made it into a report was a finding nobody was chasing, on a site where the hazard was still standing.
Multiply that by 14 active sites and there was no single picture of inspection status anywhere — just clipboards in site cabins and photos scattered across phones. And the obvious fix had an obvious catch: much of the work happens in basements, behind concrete, and on plots where there is simply no mobile signal. An app that needed a connection to save an inspection would have failed on day one.
An offline-first canvas app, built for how sites actually work.
We built an offline-capable Power Apps canvas app that puts the whole inspection on a tablet — checklist, camera and sign-off in one place, working with or without a connection, on every one of the 14 sites.
The inspection is completed on the tablet whether or not there is any signal. Records are held on the device until they can be sent — the inspector works exactly the same way in a basement as in the site office.
Photos are taken inside the app and attached to the checklist item they evidence — no more hunting through a personal camera roll to work out which crack belonged to which site.
Every checklist is GPS-stamped, so each completed inspection carries the location where it was actually done — the record and the site are tied together automatically.
Sign-off happens on the tablet screen at the point of inspection, not on a paper form that still has to survive the trip back to the office.
Records sync on their own the moment the tablet finds a connection — at the site cabin, in the truck, wherever signal returns. Nobody types anything up afterwards, because the report already exists.
A failed checklist item opens a follow-up task automatically. A finding can no longer end its life on a clipboard — it becomes work that is assigned, visible and trackable.
What changed.
Three numbers, straight from the engagement — nothing else measured, nothing else claimed.
Still walking your sites with a clipboard?
Book a free 30-minute audit — we'll look at how your field teams capture work today and show you what an offline-first Power App on the Microsoft licenses you already pay for would take.