Manual readings: what paper rounds cost you.
A paper round is often done with a large A3 logbook, awkward to handle between two pressure gauges. The value written down is correct. It will be keyed in again that evening, the next day, or never. Entered on a phone right at the equipment, the same value joins the history straight away, with its time and the name of the person who took it.
On legacy equipment, some values will always be read by eye. A dial pressure gauge, a sight glass, a mechanical meter, a smell of something running hot or a noise that wasn’t there yesterday: the round is still the site’s first sensor. No monitoring project will do away with it, and that isn’t the aim.
Some readings are even mandatory. For a boiler of more than 400 kW and less than 20 MW, the French Environmental Code1 requires the characteristic efficiency to be calculated at every restart, and at least every three months while in operation (Article R. 224-28). The results go into the boiler room logbook (Article R. 224-29), which an accredited body checks during the periodic inspection. Before you change the way it is kept, agree with that body the format it expects.
What the round sheet costs you.
Time. Between the reading and the re-keying, the value exists only in the logbook. An abnormal pressure noted at 10 am may wait until the next day to be seen from the office.
Context. The exact time, the person’s name, the remark scribbled in the margin (“noise on start-up”, “slight leak”) are lost in the re-keying, if they were legible in the first place.
The trend. A pressure that drops a little each week only shows if someone lays the sheets side by side.
Proof. A binder in a damp plant room remains a fragile archive, yet some of these readings will be inspected.
What the old hands know.
The French Directorate General for Enterprise2 expects around one million retirements in industry by 2030. Some of what leaves with them has never been written down anywhere. The technician who knows that a certain gauge always reads a little high, or that a certain genset smokes on start-up and it’s nothing serious, takes that knowledge with them when they go.
The same round, on a phone.
In Mobapi, the round follows a route prepared in advance, which can take the logbook’s checkpoints in the same order. Each checkpoint expects text, a value with its unit, a yes or a no, a choice from a list, or a photo when the needle or the leak says more than a figure. After the readings, an Observations block collects what the old hands know and the sheet never asked for. Once validated, the round joins the history with its date and the operator’s name, and its readings can be viewed on the same screens as sensor measurements.
No network is needed to enter a reading: the app works offline, even inside a building that acts as a Faraday cage, and syncs by itself once the network is back.
Where to start.
At a thermal power plant operator we equip, shift logs went digital before rounds. Whatever the order, a digital round gets adopted when, to begin with, it changes nothing but the medium: no extra checkpoint, no extra field. A tool that does away with re-keying is quickly taken up. A tool that adds some will be worked around. And the history doesn’t start from scratch: readings already kept in a spreadsheet can be imported into Mobapi from a CSV or Excel file.
Sources.
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Code de l’environnement, Articles R. 224-21 to R. 224-35, consolidated version on AIDA (INERIS).
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Direction générale des entreprises, “Le gouvernement présente la feuille de route nationale pour l’attractivité et l’emploi”, 21 April 2026.
