BIO

News

Bureau Veritas calls on businesses to simplify property compliance during lockdown with a digital audit trail

Feb. 3 2021

With the recent round of coronavirus lockdowns worldwide continuing to disrupt business operations, Bureau Veritas is advising firms to simplify their property compliance processes by utilising the latest digital platforms.

It comes as recent study of 500 workers1 shows that 71% of the UK workforce does not feel completely safe working in their employer’s buildings. What’s more, surveyed workers said they were most worried that building management is not reliably enforcing health and safety guidelines (43%), followed by worry that businesses are not consistently investing in new technology to make working in-person safer (28%).

Hence, at a time where even essential in-person inspections are delayed, Bureau Veritas has said it’s essential for firms to create a digital audit trail of compliance, making use of remoting auditing where possible.

Ishar Patwalia, Digital Service Delivery Manager at Bureau Veritas, comments: “As the UK and many nations worldwide face a fresh round of coronavirus lockdowns, health and safety has never been more important especially for employees. Yet many firms are grappling with the dilemma of having to cancel or delay critical inspections, despite the fact that they are still liable for demonstrating that all premises have the correct documentation when it comes to compliance.

“As experts in creating COVID-secure workplaces, our advice is to make the most of the increasingly virtual innovations such as remote audit inspections and combine this with a digital audit trail, which collates, tracks and stores all compliance documents in one secure and easy to access location.”

According to Bureau Veritas, the compliance industry has innovated in recent years to provide this service, recognising the need for a digital audit trail even before the coronavirus pandemic hit.

This includes solutions such as Building in One, Bureau Veritas’s web-based system for simple, step-by-step property portfolio compliance, which has been designed to streamline compliance data and achieve significant savings for organisations with multi-site property portfolios.

Ishar adds: “With the ability to create, alter and store digital records of all assets and compliance activities on one easily-manageable platform, Building in One is a software package designed to make the whole process of managing a property and asset portfolio much easier and less time-consuming.

“Recognising the need for a holistic and flexible approach at this crucial time, and with the compliance process only set to become more difficult, those firms that use the lockdown to reimagine their compliance process adopting a more digital workflow are likely to far better once their premise reopens permanently.”