For thirty years, an inspection report has ended its life the same way: as a PDF attached to an email. Someone types it up, someone sends it, and it lands in an inbox where it gets forwarded, renamed, saved to a desktop, or lost. When an auditor or an end client asks for it a year later, the hunt starts again.
Email is now about as modern as the post, and a good deal less safe. Fake invoices and spoofed senders hit businesses in our industry every week. An attachment can be altered, an old version can be forwarded as if it were current, and nobody can be sure the report in front of them is the one that was issued.
So we have changed how reports are made and how you get them. Reports are now drafted with AI from the inspector's own photos, checked and signed by a qualified inspector, recorded permanently, and published straight into your client area. Here's what that means in practice.
Old school versus now
How a report used to be made
- Notes and measurements written up on site, photos on a phone.
- Typed up back at the office, often the next day, sometimes later.
- Saved as a PDF and emailed to whoever booked the job.
- From then on, the only copy you could rely on was whichever one was in your inbox.
How it's made now
- The inspector takes photos on site, as before, and adds a one-line note if they want to.
- AI reads the photos alongside the report's own fields and drafts the report in about 23 seconds. In our tests on real issued MT, PT and VT reports, 72% of the descriptive fields were drafted from the photos alone.
- The qualified inspector checks it, corrects it and signs it. The AI never decides a result: accept or reject, pass or fail, is always the inspector's call.
- The issued report is recorded permanently, and appears in your client area as soon as the job is complete.
A handful of photos now becomes a full, structured record: the item, its condition, every indication and where it sits, the standard it was assessed to, the inspector's qualification, the procedure and the calibrated equipment used. That is a lot more than fits in an email.
Right first time on radiography
Radiography goes wrong when the request is wrong: the wrong wall thickness, a film class that doesn't suit the standard, a source that can't give the sensitivity required. Find that out after the film has been shot and the job has to be done again.
Now, when you send us your radiography request, whether it's a PDF, a spreadsheet or a photo of a marked-up drawing, it's read automatically and turned into the job's sample list: welds, sizes, thicknesses, materials and the acceptance standard. That list is then checked in two ways before a single film is exposed:
- Against the rules: film class, radiation source and technique are checked against the ISO 17636-1 tables for the wall thickness and set-up. These are hard checks, not opinions.
- For everything else: AI looks for what the tables can't, such as a material that doesn't match the standard, an acceptance criterion that's missing, or an obvious slip in the data.
Anything that doesn't add up comes back to our team to resolve with you before the work is planned. Since May we have read 170 radiography requests this way and run 195 technique checks. Clients can upload their requests themselves when they book in the client area.
Your reports, in one place, without asking
Your client area at clients.testinspect.com is now where reports live. 66 client companies already use it. In it you can:
- See every report we have issued to your organisation, search them by report number, PO, drawing or description, and download the PDF.
- Open any job and see the evidence behind it: the report, the inspector's PCN qualification, the procedure used and the calibration of the equipment.
- Book a job, upload your requests and photos, sign off timesheets, and follow every job from booking to completion.
- Ask for a change to a report, which is handled as a formal amendment.
From this week, as soon as a job is complete and ready to invoice, every report on it appears in your client area automatically. Nobody needs to remember to email it. Reports are only held back if they still need a sign-off or a result is pending, so what you see has always been checked.
A permanent record of what was issued
Every time a report is issued, we keep a permanent record of exactly what was issued: the PDF itself, the data behind it, when, and to whom. Once issued, a report is locked. If it ever has to change, that is an amendment with a new revision number and a stated reason, and the new PDF says what it replaces and why. There is never any doubt about which version is current.
That is what ISO/IEC 17025 and 17020 ask of an accredited laboratory and inspection body, and it is what email could never give you.
What we've automated
- Reading radiography requests into the job, and checking the technique before work starts.
- Drafting reports from the inspector's photos, across more than 20 report types.
- Recording every issue of every report, and publishing it to your client area.
- Draft invoices, created as soon as a job is ready to invoice, with the job details and signed timesheets attached.
- Timesheet sign-off by link, joining instructions and certificates for training courses, and QR-verified NDT procedures.
What we haven't automated is judgement. Every result is decided, and every report signed, by a qualified person.
What you need to do
If you don't have a client area login yet, ask us: call 0800 640 4998 or email hello@testinspect.com and we'll set you up. If you already have one, sign in at clients.testinspect.com. Your reports are already there.
