Inspection Evidence
What is inspection evidence?
Inspection evidence is the recorded material that shows an inspection took place and supports what it found: timestamps, photographs and thermal images, meter readings, asset or location identifiers, and the identity of the person who performed it. A completed checklist is an assertion. Evidence is what allows someone who was not there to confirm it.
Two layers, often confused
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Evidence of occurrence: who performed it, when, and at which asset. This establishes that the examination happened.
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Evidence of condition: the image, the reading, the observation. This supports the finding.
Most facility records are reasonable at the second and thin on the first. A folder of thermal images with no asset tags and no reliable timestamps documents conditions somewhere. It does not document an inspection.
What makes evidence hold up
Regulated industries converge on the same attributes: a record should be attributable to the person who made it, legible, contemporaneous, original and accurate, and complete, meaning it also records what was not done.
Contemporaneous does most of the work. A round walked at 02:00 and written up at 06:00 is a record of what someone remembers, which is a materially weaker thing than a record of what they saw.
Two things it is not
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Evidence is not a compliance determination. It supports a judgement; it is not the judgement.
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And more captures is not better evidence: a photograph with no asset identifier and no link to a required checkpoint adds storage cost and nothing else.
How FacilityOps fits
FacilityOps AI builds every finding into the same record structure, whatever the room or the requirement: identity and chain of custody, operating context, condition evidence, the exception decision, corrective action, and closure. The structure does not change when the capture device does, and it runs alongside an existing BMS, DCIM or CMMS rather than replacing them.
Sources / References
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MHRA, GXP Data Integrity Guidance and Definitions, Revision 1, March 2018. UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. The source of the record attributes described above. It is guidance for regulated life sciences, cited here as an example of how a regulated sector defines record integrity, not as a facility-maintenance standard.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-on-gxp-data-integrity