According to a recent report from research firm Fact.MR, the global bridge inspection market is predicted to grow 400 percent over the next decade to a total capitalization of $6.3 billon.

The report said this massive growth is the result of an aging infrastructure, damaging environmental factors, and an increase in the amount of total traffic. All of these factors are contributing to the increased decay of concrete and steel over time, creating potential safety problems for the general public but does produce a financial opportunity for steel, concrete and specialized NDT inspection service providers to take advantage of the money that will be pouring into this market over the next 10 years.

Routine bridge inspections, which prevent more costly and potentially hazardous repairs and reconstruction later on, are expected to comprise 83 percent of the total market. Specialized NDT inspection testing and services will make up the rest.

According to a memo from the U.S. Dept. of Transportion’s Federal Highway Administration titled Risk-Based Interval Determination for Routine Bridge Inspections, bridge inspections include the following damage modes:

• For steel elements: section loss, fatigue, and fracture.
• For concrete elements: flexural cracking, shear cracking, and reinforcing steel corrosion.
• For superstructure elements: seismic, overload, and vehicle/vessel impact
• For substructure elements: seismic, scour, and settlement.

New technologies will play a role in creating new opportunities and new, faster, and more accurate bridge inspections, especially for NDT inspection service providers. The use of drones, specially-built inspection robots, virtual reality, advanced NDT techniques, and cloud-based software platforms will make bridge inspections safer and quicker, allowing companies to provide better bridge inspections at a higher profit margin.

According to the Fact.MR report, developing countries are especially in need of both routine and specialized bridge inspection services. In Japan for example, 48 percent of the bridges are more than half a century old. The report stated: “Developing economies such as China, India, South Africa, and Brazil have witnessed a spike in spending on the inspection and maintenance of existing infrastructure. The necessity to prevent bridge accidents is foreseen to support the growth of transportation over bridge inspection services. China has doubled the volume of infrastructure projects to stave off economic slowdown amid the trade war. India on the other hand has invested about $1.1 trillion on infrastructure for building new roads and rail links.”

Learn more about how cloud-based software be a digital platform for connecting various bridge inspection technologies and streamline NDT business processes.

Imagine if you could design your own software solution that could digitally transform the operational management of your inspection business.

A solution that takes all of your paper forms, your customer documents, your technician details, your equipment and consumable information including costs and rates and bundles them into an easy to use, task driven system. A solution that would allow you to connect with your customers to share project status and information. A solution that let’s you quote and create jobs, automatically dispatch the jobs with all required forms and reports directly to your technician’s laptop or mobile device. A solution where your technicians no longer need to capture their work on paper and waste time transferring the information to an Excel or Word form.

Would having a simple, easy to use and cost effect tool like this help take your business to the next level?

You don’t have to imagine such a solution any longer. It is available from Floodlight Software. Come by Booth 4 next week at the Nondestructive Testing Management Association Conference expo and see how our software was designed by NDT Operations Managers and Level III technicians to help you automate your inspection business.

We are looking forward to this great event put on by the NDTMA.

We are only a few short weeks away from the ASNT Annual Conference in Las Vegas. It’s a great forum for exchanging knowledge and learning about the latest advances in the NDT industry.

In addition to topics on test methodologies, techniques, and equipment, the idea of “digital transformation” will certainly be top of mind for companies looking to stay a step ahead of the competition.

Floodlight Software, formerly the Mobile Reach Inspections Management Platform, was recently featured in the Greater Houston ASNT Chapter Newsletter. In an article in the NDT Trends section titled “The True Disruptor: Software,” Floodlight was covered as being an innovative NDT industry disruptor.

As the NDT inspection market becomes an increasingly critical element of the global economy, the way industrial inspections companies deploy software needs to evolve. With a wide range of software available to the inspections and NDT markets, it is common for an organization to use disparate systems that don’t integrate, compromising productivity, customer service and competitive advantage. All too often, an industrial inspections service provider is unable to grow their business because they do not have the appropriate systems in place to manage their customers across the entire lifecycle.

For NDT inspections companies, performing safe, accurate industrial inspections is a complex endeavor. Business operations can be difficult to keep in synch when you factor in quoting, scheduling, change order management, customer reporting and billing.

Depending on a company’s size and the inspections it performs, many NDT inspections firms have several enterprise applications deployed. These are generally applications that process, store and visualize data, and they are often specialized and lack integration capabilities. This often results in a lack of visibility into what’s occurring at the job site — how long a job took to complete, what equipment was used, who performed the work, and more.

Non-destructive testing companies operate in extremely specialized business landscapes, often making it difficult to differentiate their service offerings from those of their competitors.

Their end customers — be they in industries like aerospace, manufacturing, oil and gas, or renewable energy — all need similar tests and inspections performed for compliance and to keep their assets and equipment environmentally safe and operating at optimal capacity.