Construction
Road maintenance and linear works
The work is not in one place: it is spread over a hundred kilometres, and each job lasts a morning.
A maintenance contract is nothing like a building site: there is no compound, no gate, no site manager who sees everything. There are crews that head out in the morning, carry out six jobs in different places and come back — and whatever is written about those six is all that will exist a year from now.
What is needed from each job
| Data | What it is for | When it is captured |
|---|---|---|
| Exactly where | It is what identifies the job | On site, not back at base |
| When, with the time | Orders the sequence and justifies the hours | At the moment |
| What was done and with what material | Justifies the certification | Right there |
| Before and after photos | What prevents most disputes | Both moments, or neither counts |
| Who did it | Closes the sheet | On finishing |
Important
The first row is what makes this sector different: **without the exact location, a job cannot be found again**. On a site «third floor» is enough; here «the A-road» is two hundred kilometres with several jobs in similar stretches the same month. When someone claims over a defect at a specific point, the question will be whether you were there and when — and a sheet without a chainage does not answer that, however well written.
How to capture it without slowing the crew
- 1
From a phone and on site, two fields and a photo
What is written back at base is written wrong.
- 2
Location taken from the device itself
Typing it by hand is where digit errors appear.
- 3
One sheet per job, not one per day
A sheet with six jobs cannot answer for one.
- 4
And incidents as separate jobs
What you found and did not touch counts too.
Watch out
What almost never gets recorded and is later needed: **what was spotted and not fixed**. A crew sees a fallen sign outside their stretch or a defect outside the contract, and moves on. If that is not written down, when there is an accident at that point nobody can show it was spotted, reported and out of scope. Recording it takes thirty seconds and is the difference between having warned and never having been there.
What whoever contracts you asks for
Worth knowing
What documentation each maintenance contract requires, in what format and with what reporting deadlines is set by the tender and the road authority. **The contract itself settles that**; here it is about the data existing at the only moment it can be captured.
›What if there is no signal at that point?
The app should store and send later: the data is still taken there.
›Do we need photos of everything?
Of anything that could be disputed later, always. That is nearly everything.
›How long to keep the sheets?
Longer than the contract: claims arrive later.
A real case
The situation
A maintenance firm receives a claim over a defect at a specific point.
What you do
- Captures location, time and photos per job from a phone, on site
What you get
It can show when it was there and how it was left, instead of reconstructing by hand.
The situation
Work happens in sections and records are written up later.
What you do
- Records at the moment, from a phone
What you get
The data is exact rather than reconstructed.
The situation
The client asks what was done at a specific chainage.
What you do
- Records the location alongside the intervention
What you get
You answer per point rather than per month.
The situation
Job sheets reach the office days later.
What you do
- Captures the sheet in the section itself
What you get
The month closes on what happened.
The situation
An incident is documented and lost among emails.
What you do
- Records it in the section's file
What you get
The incident lives where people look.
The situation
A review asks about work from a year ago.
What you do
- Keeps the history per section and date
What you get
You answer without reconstructing.
This article answers
- road maintenance job sheets
- documenting linear works
- controlling scattered jobs
- justifying a maintenance contract