Tables, Formulas, & Field Data Collection? Check!
When your organization creates tens of thousands of reports every year and has a 99.9% on-time delivery rate, there’s no room for inefficiencies, errors, or delays.
Bureau Veritas, a global testing, inspection, and certification company, requires a technical report management platform that supports its promise to deliver an unparalleled real estate experience on time, every time. For almost a decade, Quire has been the partner Bureau Veritas trusts to help them deliver this industry-leading commitment.
Here’s what Bureau Veritas needs to be efficient without errors or delays:
Without these capabilities, it would be impossible for Bureau Veritas to produce its huge volume of Reports efficiently, productively, and profitably.
After requesting a Quire Demo in 2014, Bureau Veritas never looked back. Since making the move, Bureau Veritas has embraced the platform’s full functionality, completely transforming how it creates technical reports.
Like many testing and consulting firms, Bureau Veritas struggled with reports that were heavy on the narrative. Not the easiest to write, and definitely not reader-friendly.
“Now we can create SmartTables that replace maybe five paragraphs with one table, so our clients get right to the data they’re looking for,” Matt says. Delivering data in a more tabular format means the information is easier for the reader to understand—plus the work gets done faster, saving report writing and assembly time. In Matt’s estimation, “Using SmartTables might cut our report writing time in half.”
What makes Quire’s SmartTable Functionality even more useful is the ability to use Formulas for calculations.
“We’ve started with basic formulas like the parking ratio for an office building or apartment complex or the number of total units vs. vacant units reviewed,” he notes. Now, rather than relying on error-prone manual calculations, Bureau Veritas lets Quire do the work.
The key to all those handy Formulas is the Reference Tags that auto-populate the same calculated values wherever they appear throughout the Report.
“We try to minimize typing in the same information more than once, for better consistency and to cut review time,” Matt says. “The Quire Reference Tags allow us to trust that the same information is being presented correctly in multiple places.”
Bureau Veritas was eager to adopt a digital, streamlined approach to collecting field data, but never had the right combination of hardware and software. Enter Quire! Now Bureau Veritas is revamping its Report Templates to leverage the Quire Mobile Field Data Collector App, so field staff can input data and photos directly into the right section of the Report while in the field.
“Our goal was to eliminate the hassles of taking notes with paper and pen, then use those notes to write the Report later or hand it off to someone else,” Matt explains. “Once we started using the Quire Mobile App, it helped us save a lot of time and improved the accuracy of our information.”
Quire also provides all the Features that make report writing faster, more efficient, and more accurate for Bureau Veritas, including
Quire has delivered the very benefits Bureau Veritas was looking for when it changed report-writing platforms.
Time savings. “The Report Tags alone save about half a dozen steps,” Matt says. SmartTables slash total report writing time. And as for generating the final Report? “One click, and it’s ready to go.”
Better user experience. “It’s easy to set up customized templates and move sections around ourselves, and that gives us a lot of flexibility,” he says. Field data collection is simpler too, thanks to the robust Quire Mobile App.
Errors, be gone. Automatic calculations give the report writer (and reviewer) confidence that the numbers will be right every time, in every place.
Bureau Veritas has a set of complex, interrelated cost data spreadsheets that are cumbersome to convert into one tidy PDF. It’s a perfect job for Quire, and one of the next tasks on the list for this testing company.
No matter where Bureau Veritas is headed next, the company is confident it has a partner that’s committed to continually improving the report-writing function.
“As hardware keeps improving, we like that Quire keeps taking advantage of those changes by advancing the platform,” Matt says. Whether it’s aerial map views, parcel boundaries on photos, or Automatic Report Pinning, every upgrade delivers bottom-line benefits. “Every five minutes we save here and there adds up over the many Reports we do every year,” he notes.
Matt especially appreciates that Quire takes Client feedback seriously. “We meet with Quire regularly about things we want to see, and they add those ideas into their roadmap or implement a custom Feature,” he says. Add in Quire’s responsive support team, and it makes for a trusted partner that Bureau Veritas can count on.
“Our goal is to write better Reports, faster and more efficiently,” Matt says. “We’re always pushing the boundaries, and we like that Quire is too, continually incorporating our feedback into their plans.”