Outsourcing tree inspections: keep sight of the round

The situation: the round is running, and you do not know how far it is

You have outsourced the BVC (boomveiligheidscontrole, the Dutch tree safety inspection). The arboricultural consultancy or the grounds maintenance contractor has the assignment, the inspectors have started, and then it goes quiet. You know work is being done. You do not know where, how many trees are finished, or whether the round is on schedule.

The answer comes when you phone, or when an interim file arrives, sometimes weeks later and in a format of its own. In the meantime the alderman asks how things stand, a resident reports a branch over the cycle path, and a colleague wants to know whether their district has been done yet. You say you will ask.

That is not down to the contractor. It is down to the form: they work in their system, you in yours, and in between there is a delivery at the end. In IDA Bomen your contractor's inspectors work in your tree inventory, and you see every inspected tree at the moment it is recorded.

Outsourcing the tree inspection: what goes and what stays

A tree safety inspection, in practice still often called a VTA inspection (after Visual Tree Assessment) or a boominspectie (tree inspection), is work a specialised firm does well. The inspectors are trained, they walk rounds all year, and your own team keeps time for management.

You do not outsource the responsibility with it. The municipality remains the owner of the trees, and the duty of care stays with the owner. That means you have to know what was found, and that you have to act on it. A risk tree that was identified in March and reaches you in June has stood for three months without anyone in charge of it knowing.

There is more on the specification, supervision and settlement in the article on working with your contractor.

The inspection round as a project in IDA

1. Choose the trees

   Select on the map what is inspected this year: a district, the trees along main roads, or everything whose previous inspection was longer than a certain time ago.

2. Turn it into a BVC project

   The project comes with the BVC form, with the classes and terms your inspectors know: Veiligheidsklasse (safety class), condition, defects, urgency, management advice.

3. Give the contractor access

   You give access per project, to one inspector or to the contractor's whole organisation. They see their own projects and nothing else of your inventory.

4. The inspectors work on their phones

   The field app is a web app, without installation. The inspector sees the trees of the project on the map with their own position, taps a tree and opens the form. The values of the previous inspection are already filled in, photos come straight from the camera.

The form thinks along. You see the questions that belong to this tree, and what is mandatory cannot be skipped. That saves the inspector time and saves you a round of questions afterwards.

Seeing progress without phoning

Every record is in the project at once. The project map shows the progress with it: how many trees have been inspected, how many are still to go. The charts show how the pace develops, how much each inspector records and how many days the round still takes if it carries on like this.

If the alderman asks how things stand, you open the project. North is done, the centre is running, south starts next week. If several rounds and projects run at the same time, they sit together in the planning, with per project the expected and the actual dates and the organisation working on it.

A tree the inspector cannot assess, gets a status, such as "Tijdelijk niet bereikbaar" (temporarily out of reach) or "Nader onderzoek nodig" (closer examination needed). So it does not silently disappear from the list, and you see which trees still need a follow-up.

Acting at once on what is found

The greatest difference is not in the progress, but in the outcome. A risk tree with a high urgency is in your inventory on the day it is identified, with photos. You do not have to wait for the final report to plan a measure for it. You filter on the Veiligheidsklasse and the urgency, and turn those trees into a pruning or felling project, while the round is still running elsewhere.

If the inspector sees something outside that differs from what the inventory says, a different species or a different height class, they report it as a deviation, with a photo. A tree that is no longer there is recorded as not found. That report arrives in your queue. You review it, and what you approve goes into the inventory. That way your tree inventory gets better with every round, and you keep the final say over what is in it.

What you have in hand after the round

At the end there is no delivery left that you have to import, compare and correct. The round is already there: per tree the inspection, with date, inspector, outcome and photos, in the tree's timeline. That is also your proof if a question about one tree comes later, as in the practice scenario on the tree dossier for a damage claim.

The data is yours and stays yours, also when the contract ends and another firm does the next round. The new inspectors start with the outcomes of the previous round already in their form. And if you want to use the results somewhere else, you export the project to the common GIS and Excel formats.

It is simpler for the contractor too. Their work is their report: what has been recorded has demonstrably been done, with date and photo. No interim files, no discussion afterwards about which trees have been done.

See an inspection round in a demo