Managing LOLER, PUWER and PAT inspections through one system isn’t how most businesses start out. Most are dealing with several regulations at once, often through separate systems, separate spreadsheets, or separate providers, with no single view of where compliance actually stands.
Why managing LOLER, PUWER and PAT inspections through separate systems causes problems
Separate systems for separate regulations means duplicated admin, inconsistent reporting formats, and no single view of compliance status across asset types. The underlying work (inspecting equipment, recording results, generating certificates) is fundamentally the same task repeated under different rules.
A business running lifting equipment, plant, and general electrical assets is typically managing LOLER, PUWER and PAT requirements simultaneously. Each regulation has its own scope and inspection intervals, but getting an engineer to the right place, with the right checklist, and a certificate back to the customer looks the same regardless. The only real difference is how many separate tools a business ends up using to manage it.
What’s the difference between LOLER, PUWER and PAT?
LOLER (Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations) covers equipment used for lifting, requiring thorough examination at set intervals depending on equipment type. PUWER (Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations) covers work equipment more broadly, requiring it to be suitable, maintained, and inspected where there’s a risk to safety. PAT (Portable Appliance Testing, now more accurately referred to as EET, Electrical Equipment Testing) covers the electrical safety of portable equipment. They’re separate regulations with separate scopes, but a single business, particularly in construction, plant hire, or facilities management, will often have obligations under all three at once.
The operational cost of running separate systems
When each regulation runs through its own process, the costs show up in places that don’t always get noticed until someone adds them up. Office staff re-enter the same kind of data into different formats depending on which regulation a job falls under. Reporting to customers or auditors means pulling records from multiple places rather than one. And nobody — not the engineer on site, not the office, not the customer — has a single view of compliance status across everything a business is responsible for inspecting.
Tomax Solutions felt this directly before switching. Adrian McCann, founder of Tomax, had spent his days on site visits inspecting lifting equipment and his evenings writing up the reports by hand, with no single system covering the different inspection types his growing client base needed.
“It has saved me so much time,” says Adrian. “Had I continued with the paperwork, I would have had to employ an extra member of staff.” Engineers now input inspection data on site, and certificates and reports are produced automatically, regardless of which inspection type the job falls under.
The same problem, at a larger scale: multiple jurisdictions
A business inspecting equipment across the UK and Ireland border, for example, is working under two distinct regulatory frameworks. In Northern Ireland, it’s LOLER and PUWER. In the Republic of Ireland, it’s GA1 and Use of Work Equipment provisions, under the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work (General Application) Regulations. But the inspection work itself is largely the same.
Tomax Solutions is a good example of both problems solved together. Based in Northern Ireland and inspecting equipment for customers on both sides of the border, Tomax needed a system that could handle UK and Irish standards without running two separate processes for two different countries, on top of already needing to cover LOLER, GA1, PUWER and PPE inspection types within each. One platform now covers all of it, regardless of which regulation or which side of the border a job falls on.
AMG Plant Testing faces a similar reality, inspecting lifting equipment across the UK and Ireland and handling LOLER, GA1 and PUWER requirements for customers in both jurisdictions through a single platform rather than separate national processes. “Some of these sites have so much equipment they struggle to keep an asset register,” says Michael Warnock, who runs AMG. “The inspections we carry out let them keep track.”
Further afield, Ranger, an Australian lifting house, moved to a digital inspection system designed to meet Australian Standards, incorporating both NATA and LEEA methodology. The result cut reporting time from several days down to under 12 hours in most cases.
Whether the variation is between regulations within one country or between regulatory frameworks across several, the underlying argument is the same: the inspection work doesn’t fundamentally change, so the system managing it shouldn’t need to either.
What to look for if your business spans multiple regulations or locations
If your operation is managing more than one type of statutory inspection, or running across more than one country, the platform should handle that without forcing separate processes for each. Configurable checklists per regulation, a single audit trail regardless of which standard applies, and reporting that gives a consolidated view across everything a business is responsible for, rather than a separate export per regulation or per site.
CheckedOK is built this way: LOLER, PUWER, PAT and other inspection standards run through the same platform, with the same data structure, certificate generation and audit trail, configured for each regulation’s specific requirements rather than bolted together from separate tools.