Three Considerations for Choosing a Third-Party Inspection Partner
When selecting a third-party inspection partner, it’s important to ensure that it’s a great fit for your company’s needs. During the selection process for third-party inspectors, you’ll review safety records and company information, have several meetings, review proposal documents, and organize a variety of decision-making factors. It can be difficult to sift through to what really matters the most. Below, we’ve identified three criteria that, while incredibly important, are often overlooked in the decision-making process.
The Quality of Inspectors Provided
One of the top priorities of an inspection company should be to employ high-quality, experienced inspectors in their workforce. Being able to determine whether someone is a high performer before they begin working for you can prevent turnover, improve safety and quality performance, and prevent issues on your projects. When choosing inspection firms, it’s important to understand their turnover performance and ask how many of their inspectors stay on the project the entire time without needing replacement.
At Joe Knows Energy, we pride ourselves on our ability to source not only a large quantity of inspectors fast, but also high-quality inspectors. In 2021, after speaking at the AGA conference, we had a natural gas and utility client approach us with concerns on being able to quickly ramp up their inspector force with those quality inspectors. They needed better tools and resources to select the proper candidates for their needs.
Luckily, we at Joe Knows Energy have those tools and resources the client was lacking. So, we were able to launch a pilot with this client, where we went through our High-Performance Process, and screened over 2000 applicants for the position to find the perfect candidates. We initially ended up providing the client with 6 inspectors who were exactly what they needed. This led to us proving our value and expanding our program, continuing to provide them with inspectors on a regular basis.
Learn all about our pilot by reading the full case study Here.
Ability to Prevent Safety Incidents
Safety incidents are more than just a risk to your business. These incidents are a risk to morale, long-term team performance, physical health, the environment, and – most importantly – human life. It’s important to understand your inspection firm’s safety approach – from safety training to proactive management and OSHA records to hiring requirements. This information can help you prevent incidents and issues that can be costly over time.
That’s why, at Joe Knows Energy, we mean it when we say safety is our priority and we’re committed to making work environments safer in every step of our process. In 2019, one of our customers came to us seeking support in improving their safety culture. We collaborated with the client, applied our High-Performance Program processes, and supported their team regularly. This helped our customer create drastic reductions in the number of safety incidents, spills and spending in just one year!
Check out this case study to get the full background and learn more about how improving safety culture can help you meet critical key performance indicators while protecting the assets that matter most – people.
Culture Alignment and Fit
While it might not be as obvious as quality inspectors or safety, the culture of the third-party company you choose to employ is just as important. When speaking with a potential inspection partner, it’s critical to gain an understanding of their culture and processes to get an idea of how well these will integrate with your company culture. Doing a core values comparison to understand any existing gaps between the companies is just one way of doing this.
At Joe Knows Energy, we are committed to employing a workforce of diverse inspectors, so it’s important that we conduct work with inspection companies that share this same ideology. We have several exercises and workshops that we can conduct with you to help further understand the importance of culture fit.
Clearly there are many other factors to take into consideration when choosing a third-party inspection partner, but we hope this list of our top three resonated with you. If you’d like to discuss one of these factors in further detail or have any questions, please reach out to us at [email protected] or schedule a time on our calendar for an introductory consultation Here.