Guide for Winter Maintenance for Construction Testing Laboratories

Winter time is prep time! During the winter months, field work tends to slow down for construction testing laboratories due to weather conditions and seasonal changes. Many regions experience reduced testing volumes, while some teams take well-deserved time off for vacations.

However, winter is the ideal time to ensure your construction testing laboratory is ready for the next busy season. If you happen to be working in cold regions, take a look at our blog on cold weather concrete best practices. Here's what your winter maintenance checklist should look like.

Keep Your Inventory Up to Date

Omnant tracks your inventory in general accordance with AASHTO R-18, and it's important to keep it current. During the winter months, equipment can be cleaned, verified, and the inventory list updated. This helps you plan ahead for the next season.

By updating the inventory list, you'll gather valuable information on what's broken (there's always something broken and nobody knows anything!) or in need of replacement. Reviewing the inventory will also show where equipment is stored and if it needs to be moved.

Pro tip: Update the Q-bar codes on your equipment and track it with Omnant. When equipment goes into the field, sometimes the Q-bar stickers get damaged and need replacement. Make sure they all work properly so equipment can be signed in and out effectively.

Get Everything Calibrated & Verified

The heading says it all. Winter is when everything needs to get calibrated and verified in your construction testing laboratory. Ensure that the calibrating vendor is fully certified to perform the work and recognized by the agencies or institutions accrediting your lab.

Understand the calibration requirements for state-specific agencies and make sure to follow their procedures and complete their paperwork.

Perform any maintenance on equipment before calibrating. If you're fixing or doing general maintenance on your compression machine, gyros, triaxials, consolidometers, or other construction materials testing equipment, any maintenance will require recalibration. Plan accordingly and do the repairs before calibrating.

Don't forget the nukes! Nuclear density gauges are their own thing, but don't forget about them. Ensure proper maintenance is performed, order leak tests, keep them on file, and perform the necessary calibrations. Take a look at your state-specific regulations to make sure the proper calibration is performed (3-blocks or 5-blocks).

Give Your Vehicles Some Winter Love

Our trusty workhorses, the unseen heroes of our daily grind. The vehicles also need some love, and winter is the time to do it. Nobody wants to come back from winter break and find their assigned truck in worse shape.

Take time to clean the vehicles, perform any needed maintenance, and make them ready for the next season. By checking the trucks, you'll likely discover you need to update the inventory of cylinder molds and air meter parts.

Clean & Declutter Your Lab Space

Well, there's no easy way of saying this: there are too many things in the lab. During the busy season, there's no time to go behind every piece of equipment and clean. It's also hard to decide what needs to stay and what belongs in the dumpster.

Winter is the time to tackle this! Make room for growth and prosperity. Start cleaning out all those reserve cylinders, the random cores that "the client wants" but never picked up, and that strange looking asphalt cores castle in the back by the saw. Cleaning and decluttering your construction testing laboratory opens the space for new work and growth.

Review & Renew Team Certifications

As professional service providers, most of our work depends on being able to do it properly. Use Omnant's certification tracking system to review the status of your team's certifications. Check who expired or who might be expired by the time the next season starts. Reach out to your colleagues to start the recertification process before the season begins.

Pro tip: Include driver's licenses as a certification in Omnant. This way, when they're about to expire, technicians will receive a notification. Some technicians forget to renew their driver's licenses, and when they go to an airport project, they're not able to get inside. (True story!)

Update Your Quality Manual

During the busy season, work doesn't stop. In the grind, you hired more people, others got promotions. Your team developed a new area of expertise, added new tests and inspections, got additional certifications, and more.

All those changes need to be tracked and included as part of the quality manual. Update the organization charts, personnel certifications, forms, internal processes, and other areas of the quality manual that might have been impacted by changes during the season.

Plan for Business Growth

testing laboratory. Look at how the year went and what your path forward looks like. As discussed before, things changed in many aspects during the last season. It's important to look at those changes and determine if they can be handled better next time.

Recognize and applaud the challenges you overcame together. Also, identify what challenges you want to tackle together next season.

Omnant is more than scheduling software. We exist to help you be more efficient, structured, and more importantly, to help you grow. During your business planning meeting, use our data metrics section. There, you'll find data and statistics on basically everything: the most popular work orders, which tasks are most common versus which are not, how long it takes to send reports to clients, number of dispatches, number of cylinders broken, and much more.

This data can be filtered as needed on the top right. The benefit to you is an accurate picture of your business performance and needs, right at your fingertips.

The winter months are critical for construction testing laboratory performance. This is the time to tune everything up and prepare for the next season.

Ready to simplify your lab management and start next season stronger? See how Omnant can help you track inventory, manage certifications, and access the data you need to grow your business. Schedule a demo today and discover why construction testing laboratories trust Omnant to keep them organized and efficient all year long.

Anything else we should add to the list? Send us an email at info@omnant.com.