Handover procedures in operations and maintenance are a key element of business continuity. As work in this field is usually organized in shifts, it is essential to keep track of any critical incidents, machine breakdowns, job ownership, completion, issues that are still open or unresolved and other related items. Such knowledge has a significant impact on a timely or even proactive response, for instance if issues re-surface. And of course, issues that still open need to be worked on by the incoming shift.

Companies striving for operational excellence work with paper (or sometimes digital) handover forms to protocol abnormalities, incidents and so on. Handover between shifts often also includes verbal communication or even half-hour meetings between incoming and outgoing team members, i.e. between the ending and the starting shift team. But this of course is an error-prone way of passing information due to a potential lack of completeness. It is simply human to forget things, to rush through paperwork or to avoid writing too much.

Here is a little example of using forms in IT on-call duty handover from Geekflare.

A digital handover procedure with SIGNL4

An elevated level of automation and digitization can significantly reduce human errors and provide for a greater accuracy and completeness of handover information. SIGNL4 provides a comprehensive set of features for an entire digital handover. Here is what it does for you:

Keeping track of all incidents and their resolution status

If you use SIGNL4 as your central notification hub, by connecting your IT monitoring, ITSM, MES, IoT or SCADA systems, it will notify, document and audit trail all incidents and issues for you. By supporting incident lifecycles including acknowledgement and closure, SIGNL4 documents incident ownership and resolution status. Annotations (integrated chat) provide for an even more comprehensive documentation of work steps. SIGNL4 will document time and date of each incident, responders and their response time as well as the time of closure, providing for a complete incident lifecycle journal.

A single pane of glass in your pocket

Through the intuitive mobile app (and the webapp), SIGNL4 provides a single pane of glass with full incident transparency and real-time updates of beforementioned information. This way, you have your operations dashboard in your pocket any time and any place. You can see what is happening right now in your infrastructure while at the same having access to what happened during the previous shift and during the last 24 hours. So, this replaces the paper form you’d have used before but with greater completeness and less erroneous information.

Audit trail of who was part of which shift or on-call duty

Through its integrated duty scheduler, SIGNL4 allows for planning and keeping track of team members’ shifts and duties. In the mobile app, you can see who is on duty at the time.

A digital post-shift report

After each shift, SIGNL4 sends an email post-shift report listing all incidents, their status, ownership, response, and resolution times. This report goes to all outgoing and incoming team members but can also additionally be sent to a distribution list, e.g. to inform stakeholders. You can configure this carbon copy email address for post shift reports in your scheduling settings.

The digital handover capabilities of SIGNL4 represent a big leap forward by eliminating paperwork, reducing errors, and streamlining your business and infrastructure operations. Sign up for a free 30 days anytime.