Maintaining control over your fire safety seems like the most obvious measure to take when operating in any building, facility or workplace.



Many organisations underestimate what abiding by international regulations such as ISO 20338, recently published by the International Organization for Standards (ISO). Whilst there are many examples of organisations, individuals and communities that take fire safety for granted, it’s imperative for all businesses, organisations and individuals to regard fire safety with the upmost importance.

International standards such as ISO 20338 regulate things like the oxygen reduction systems used for fire prevention; specifying the minimum and maximum requirements for various machinery, equipment, assets and operating environments. ISO 20338 will help to specify the design, installation and maintenance of fixed oxygen reduction systems in particular, applying more to those systems that have nitrogen abundance in the air.

This can of course apply for business with workplace environments handling particular materials or chemicals, but also for most industrial size production plants.

ISO 20338 works hand in hand with paperless inspection and testing applications that today are becoming a mainstay of the inspection and testing industry. Mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones are proving to be a potent tool for recording data and transferring the data collected in the field to a database in near real time.

Paperless inspections can run specific compliance reports that are tailored to the relevant regulations such as ISO 20338, and other organisational specific checks and regulations such as AS 1851.



Running of a centralised platform, mobile device inspection makes full use of digital and paperless, providing automatically suggested corrective actions, business intelligence integration, lifecycle tracking of assets and many other features. Inspectors and technicians monitoring progress of assets or fire protection equipment can take pictures using the device’s’ camera and automatically attach these to online reports for easier visual analysis, as well as attaching them as reference material for future inspections and corrective actions.

New mobile devices also feature offline speech-to-text services and barcode or RFID (Radio-frequency identification) scanning. All data captured is of course fed back into the inspection software that is either cloud (SaaS) hosted or hosted via in-house servers.

This reduces the potential hazard of dusty, non-inspected warehouses and replaces the inspection procedure with paperless inspection software. Perhaps the top feature for fire equipment inspection and testing is the ability to share information quickly with all stakeholders.

Any necessary user can be notified of a failure, non-conformance or a defect to comply with a regulation such as ISO 20338, and necessary systems can therefore be shut down until issues are resolved with minimised risk to the workplace and other employees.

Whilst there are many benefits outlined above for bringing digital and paperless into your business be it for fire protection equipment inspection, general productivity raising or simply modernising; the real value is realised when it is applied to your specific needs and requirements.

For more information on the fire -preventing powers of digital, visit Pervidi.com.au

For more information on ISO 20338 visit: www.iso.org/news/ref2424.html

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