Sustainable Land Development Today - April 2008 - (Page 39) met with the engineering firm and one of the general contractors. The meeting with the engineering firm revealed that the general contractor was required to notify the engineer of any changes to the SWPPP and to send copies of NPDES inspections to the engineer. countability of who captured the inspection data, what information was captured, when was it captured, and where was it captured. More important is who owns the data. Conclusion In the past few years the market has seen an influx of software that incorporate the answers to the who, what, when, and where of jobsite inspections and capture the information in real-time. With the expansion of cellular technologies, Internet-based applications are becoming the standard for mobilebased applications. In order to manage critical data across field operations the software solution-of-choice needs to be simple to use and provide management with a comprehensive view across the enterprise. When considering a solution it needs to be 100-percent Internet based and it should not allow information to be stored on any internal or external computer device in the field. The reason for this is simple. To reach a high level of The Engineer - The engineer was receiving some reports by fax, email and mail but the most frustrating thing was that the reports were in different formats, on different forms and most cases vague and incomplete. The General Contractor - The consultant met with the president of one of the general contracting firms that were building thirty-percent of the projects for the national chain and he assured the consultant that his site project managers hire a local third-party inspector or inspection company to perform the NPDES inspections and enter the documents into a field records book at the site. Here would be their exchange: Consultant: “How do you know for sure the inspections are being done?” General Contractor: “It is a job requirement of the site manager to make sure they get completed.” Consultant: “Do you have a quality control process in place to verify that the NPDES inspections are being done?” General Contractor: “Yes, our regional manager during a site visit will inspect the field records book. Consultant: “How many different inspection companies do you use to perform inspections?” General Contractor: “We have projects in 12 different states and in many different areas of each state and we use 14 different inspection companies.” control of information captured in the field, no one should be allowed to store information on a device that the primary permit holder does not control. NPDES inspection data is critical to your overall business process. Do not trust it to a company or individual that does not follow stringent technology and records management processes. The safest way to mitigate risk is to purchase an inspection and records management platform and require third-party inspectors and internal projects managers to input inspection data into your platform. By adopting this process you will be able to manage all of your data from any true Internet device from anywhere in the world. SLDT About the authors: Tony Middlebrooks and Jason Hand are with NEXT, LLC, a national software company that specializes in real-time records management for NPDES and industry specific applications. Middlebrooks is president & CEO and can be reached at tony@next-llc.com. Hand pioneered an NPDES Inspection division and works out of the Atlanta office. To learn more about NEXT, LLC, call 1-866-NEXTLLC or visit them on the web at www.next-llc.com. Now Available from SLDI Have you thought about starting your own business? Now there is A Business Management Handbook for Land Surveyors that is for surveyors by a land surveyor. A Solution - This scenario is common across the country. National chains, bigbox retailers, national builders and many others are relying on general contractors to hire local NPDES inspectors or, in some cases, they use their own project managers to perform inspections. This would not be a problem if the general contractor or national company had an Internet-based NPDES technology platform in place that provides ac- $ To order your copy 50 www.SLDTonline.com 39 visit www.SLDI.org or call 1.888.388.8787 Introductory price if you order by May 10th http://www.next-llc.com http://www.SLDI.org http://www.SLDTonline.com
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