Hi, I’m Hashimoto from the IT Division.
This time, Sugitec’s contractors who work hard on site were invited to a study session on SINQA, Sugitec’s proprietary exterior wall investigation and report writing system.
What is SINQA?
This “SINQA” system makes it easier than ever to take care of exterior wall deterioration surveys. From start to finish, you can do it all on a single tablet (iPad).
Up until now, the old-fashioned way of surveying the damage to a building’s exterior walls was to take printed paper drawings to the site and enter the data manually.
A lot of companies still do their surveys this way, but there are a few problems with that.
Problems with conventional work methods
１．There are differences in how people write.
The text on the drawings by the individuals surveyed was pretty illegible and the way they were put together made it difficult for a third party to decipher them.
２．Lots of baggage during survey work.
When doing a traditional survey, you’ve got all kinds of tools at your disposal, like paper drawings, writing utensils to fill them out, and digital cameras to record any deterioration. But, of course, these tools can fall when you’re working at heights.
３．A huge amount of information has to be cleaned up on a computer.
When you submit deterioration information from paper drawings as a report, it has to be compiled on a computer. It’s also expensive to input this information and check it because there’s a high chance of making mistakes.
The above are some of the issues that need to be addressed. In particular, the handwritten portion varies quite a bit from person to person, and the time and effort required to decipher and check it can be quite daunting.
SINQA Features
With SINQA, we use an app on a tablet to do the survey. All you have to do is start up the app and enter the deterioration info into the drawing you imported to the tablet via touch operation.
When you take a photo with the tablet’s camera, it’s automatically linked to the corresponding part of the drawing, so you can perform the survey on site with just one tablet. Once the survey is done, you can connect the tablet to a PC and the info will be output in a report format, so there’s no room for human error when it comes to inputting data.
New, renewed, or to further improve the efficiency of the survey
This time, we had a mix of newcomers to SINQA and workers from subcontractors who usually use SINQA on site.
SINQA is pretty efficient as it is, but there’s still room for improvement. By establishing some clear rules and streamlining the process, we can make it even more efficient.
This meetup was a great chance for everyone to get their questions answered and learn how to use the software more easily.
Summary
As for the SINQA study sessions for subcontractors, we sometimes invited them to our periodic seminars to share what we’ve learned.
Even if a system has been learned once, each person will have new discoveries and opinions on how to use it better, etc., while using it in the field. This regular exchange of ideas will not only improve quality, but it’ll also be really useful for future system updates.
