The Inspection That Travels With the Equipment
The European work-equipment directive says that when equipment is used away from your premises it must be accompanied by evidence that its last inspection was carried out. Our hand-off record captures the custodian, the destination, the condition and the coordinates — and has nowhere to put the one fact that has to travel.
A generator leaves your yard on the back of a truck. Your system knows who signed for it, which site it went to, what condition it was in when it left, and where the phone was standing when the movement was confirmed. It does not know when the thing was last inspected, because there is nowhere on the asset to record that — and under European rules that is the one fact the equipment was supposed to take with it.
This is a post about a gap that is unusual in shape. The surrounding record is unusually complete. The missing field is small. And the missing field is the one the obligation is actually about, which is what makes this worth eight hundred words rather than a line in a feature matrix.
What the directive asks
The European directive on the use of work equipment sets out inspection in four short paragraphs, and they are worth reading as a sequence rather than as a rule.
First, where safety depends on how equipment was installed, there is an initial inspection after installation and before first use — and another one after assembly at a new site or in a new location.
Second, for equipment exposed to conditions that cause deterioration, there are periodic inspections and, where appropriate, testing — plus special inspections each time something exceptional has happened that could jeopardise safety. The directive names four examples: "modification work, accidents, natural phenomena or prolonged periods of inactivity."
Third, and this is the paragraph this post is about: "The results of inspections shall be recorded and kept at the disposal of the authorities concerned. They must be kept for a suitable period of time. When work equipment is used outside the undertaking it shall be accompanied by physical evidence that the last inspection has been carried out."
Fourth, member states determine the conditions under which the inspections are made. Which is the sentence that stops this from being a European standard: who counts as a competent person is defined by national law and practice, the intervals are national, and what your own equipment needs is a question for your safety adviser rather than for a software vendor. What travels across all of it is the shape — inspections happen, results are recorded, and the record follows the equipment.
The example everybody skips
"Prolonged periods of inactivity" sits in the same list as accidents and modification work, and it is the only trigger on that list that nothing happens to cause. An asset that sat in a store for eight months has had no event. Nobody filed anything. There is no incident to react to — and it may still need looking at before it is used again. It is also, of all four, the one an asset register is uniquely placed to notice, because idleness is the one thing a movement history can compute on its own.
What our own record holds, stated exactly
Our asset movements are more detailed than most, and it is worth listing what a single hand-off actually captures, because the list is what makes the omission conspicuous rather than forgivable.
- The custodian it came from and the custodian it went to, as records rather than as names typed in a box.
- The department, location and warehouse on both sides of the move.
- The condition before and the condition after, so a deterioration is visible across two records.
- An expected return date.
- Who performed it, who approved it, when they approved it — and, if it was refused, who refused it and why.
- Latitude and longitude, and a link to the scan event, so the confirmation is tied to a place.
- A polymorphic reference to whatever document the movement belongs to.
The asset itself carries a risk level, a flag for whether movements need approval, its current custodian and location, the date of its last movement, and a last verified date with the person who verified it.
So: a hand-off record with an approval, a condition assessment, a location and a coordinate. Everything you would want on a document proving that equipment changed hands — except the sentence the directive asks the equipment to carry.
We can prove who took it and where it went. We cannot say when it was last looked at.
Why "last verified" is not the answer
This is the trap, and it would be easy for us to walk into it in a sales conversation, so we would rather rule it out in writing.
The asset has a last-verified date and a person against it. That field exists for a stocktake: somebody confirmed this asset exists and is where the system says it is. It is a custody fact.
An inspection is a safety fact, and it carries at least four things that field cannot hold: who inspected it and on what authority, what kind of inspection it was, what the result was, and when the next one falls due. Reusing a verification date as an inspection date would produce a system that answers the question confidently and wrongly — the worst of the available outcomes, and worse than answering nothing, because a date on a screen gets believed.
| Last verified — what we have | An inspection record — what is asked | |
|---|---|---|
| The question it answers | Is this asset where we think it is? | Is this equipment safe to use? |
| Who does it | Anyone doing the count | A competent person, as national law defines that |
| What it produces | A date and a person | A result, a type, and a next-due date |
| Where it has to appear | A register | With the equipment, when it leaves |
How close this actually is
Closer than the section above suggests, and we would rather quantify it than let it read as a flat no.
Custom fields are already available on assets and on custodians. An organization can add a "last inspected" date today, with no engineering from us, and see it on the asset record. That is genuinely useful and it is genuinely not the thing — because a custom field is inert. Nothing computes an interval from it. Nothing refuses a movement because of it. Nothing prints it on the hand-off document. It is a date somebody can read if they think to look, which is the state the directive's third paragraph exists to improve on.
The mechanism for the refusal already exists too, and this is the part that makes the build small. Assets carry a flag that makes a movement require approval, and movements already have an approval, a rejection, a rejecting user and a rejection reason. The gate is built and wired; there is simply nothing pointing a date at it.
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An inspection as a record, not a field
A date, a type, a result, the person, and the next due date. It has to be a row rather than a column because the history is the point — an inspection regime is a sequence, and the third paragraph of the directive asks for results kept for a period, in the plural.
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A due date that reaches the existing gate
The approval requirement on an asset is already a flag that stops a movement. Making an overdue inspection set it is a small piece of work, and it is the difference between a report somebody reads and a hand-off that does not happen. This is the same build we describe for certification stops elsewhere, and here it has a specific reason to exist.
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The evidence on the movement document
The paragraph says the equipment is accompanied by physical evidence of the last inspection. Our hand-off already produces a document with custodians, condition and a signature path. Printing the last inspection on it is a template change once the record above exists — and it is the actual requirement, rather than a proxy for it.
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Idleness as a trigger
The last-movement date is already stored and already indexed. Deriving "this has not moved in eight months" is a query, not a feature, and it is the one inspection trigger on the directive's list that nobody will otherwise remember, because nothing happened.
Questions worth asking any asset system
Show me the inspection history of one asset — not its last inspection, its history.
What you will hear
A list of rows with dates, types, results and inspectors.
How to read it
If the answer is a single field, the system models the most recent inspection rather than the regime. Ours does not model either.
Print the document that goes out with the equipment. Is the last inspection on it?
What you will hear
Yes, on the document, not on a screen somebody could have checked.
How to read it
This is the specific thing the directive's third paragraph asks for and it is the least commonly built.
Make an inspection overdue and then try to issue the asset.
What you will hear
A refusal, with a reason recorded.
How to read it
Ask to watch it. "It appears in a report" is a different answer and should be heard as one.
Which assets have not moved in six months?
What you will hear
A query anyone can run.
How to read it
Prolonged inactivity is an inspection trigger that generates no event. If the register cannot surface idleness, nothing will.
Who is allowed to record an inspection, and does the record say on what authority?
What you will hear
A named person and a competence or certificate reference against the record.
How to read it
The directive defers to national law on who is competent. A record that does not say who inspected cannot be checked against whatever that country requires.
What AWRA OpsHub does today
- Asset movements with from and to custodians, departments, locations and warehouses, condition before and after, expected return, approval and rejection with a reason, timestamp, coordinates and a scan link.
- A risk level and an approval requirement on the asset, with the approval and rejection path already implemented.
- Current custodian, current location, last movement date and a last-verified date with the verifying person.
- Custom fields on assets and on custodians, so extra dates can be added without engineering.
- A warranty expiry date.
What it does not do
- Any inspection record at all — no date, no type, no result, no inspector, no next-due.
- Any interval or schedule computed from an inspection, and therefore no overdue state.
- Any block on issuing an asset because of a safety date. The gate exists; nothing sets it.
- The last inspection on the hand-off document, which is the specific thing the directive asks to travel with the equipment.
- Any idleness trigger, although the last-movement date needed to compute one is stored and indexed.
Not ours, by choice
- Nothing here is safety or legal advice. Which equipment is caught, how often it must be inspected and who may inspect it are national questions and are yours and your adviser's.
- A record of an inspection is not an inspection. Software can hold the result and produce the evidence; it cannot make the assessment.
- We have no reference customer in Europe.
Inspections as records against an asset — a date, a type, a result, the inspector and a next-due — which is the one piece with real design in it and the one worth arguing about before it is built. Then an overdue inspection setting the approval flag that already exists, so a hand-off is refused rather than reported; the last inspection printed on the movement document, which is the specific thing the directive asks to travel; and an idleness query against the last-movement date already stored and indexed. The last three are small because the gate, the document and the date all exist already — what is missing is the record they would read from. Scoped and priced on the usual terms: a written specification, a timeline and a price agreed before anything starts. The precedent that we finish work of this kind is Kenya, where a live authority integration puts a receipt number, a signature and a machine-readable code on a document today.
Custody and safety look like the same subject in a demo and are not. We would rather draw that line ourselves than have it drawn for us in month two.
Our take
Our asset module is strong on custody and silent on safety, and those are different subjects that look similar in a demo. If your equipment leaves your premises and somebody may ask what state it was certified to be in when it did, this is a gap you would meet in month two rather than in week one — and the honest answer today is that a custom field will hold the date and nothing in the system will act on it. The build to change that is small, specific, and described above rather than promised.
If your equipment leaves the yard
Tell us what has to be inspected and how often, and we will tell you what that costs to build properly. If the answer is that you need it before you could go live, that is a scoping conversation rather than a sales one.
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