Incident management for regulated industries
Organizations in aviation, utilities, healthcare, and other regulated sectors share one obligation: when equipment fails, they must be able to show what condition it was in at the time, months or years later.
Requirements
- Available on: Orbit, Odyssey, Cosmos
- Roles: Owner, Admin, Manager, Employee can report incidents
Why the usual approach fails
Most asset systems let you look up an asset's current state. By the time a regulator asks, the asset has been repaired, re-certified, and reassigned. The record describes the tidied-up version, and there is no way back.
UniAsset's answer is the incident snapshot: at the moment an incident is reported, the asset's complete state — condition, assignment, maintenance history, document status — is captured into the incident and locked.
It cannot be edited afterwards, by anyone. Later changes to the asset do not alter what the incident says the asset looked like.
The one thing that determines everything
Report the incident before the asset is repaired.
The snapshot captures the asset as it is at the moment of reporting. Report late and the evidence you needed is already gone — and unlike almost every other mistake in UniAsset, this one cannot be corrected afterwards.
Build that into your procedure explicitly: report first, then repair.
A working pattern
1. Report immediately, with a severity and a factual description of what was observed.
2. Raise a corrective work order for the physical repair. The incident is the record; the work order is the fix, and it captures labour, materials, time, and cost.
3. Add threaded notes as the investigation develops — findings, decisions, who was consulted, what was ruled out. Notes accumulate and are preserved.
4. Move the status through Open, Investigating, Resolved, Closed.
5. Keep certification current as document assets with expiry dates, so the snapshot records a valid certification rather than a lapsed one.
Mapping severity consistently
Severity is Low, Medium, High, or Critical. Agree internally what each means for your sector and hold to it — inconsistent severity makes the incident list useless for trend analysis.
Severity describes the consequence of what happened. How fast you respond belongs on the work order priority, which on Odyssey and above drives the SLA deadline.
What you can produce for a regulator
| Asked for | Where |
|---|---|
| The asset's condition at the time of the failure | The incident snapshot |
| Certification validity at the time | The snapshot's document status |
| Maintenance history before the failure | The snapshot, plus service records |
| Who was responsible for the asset | The snapshot's assignment |
| Who physically had it | Checkout history |
| Proof the record was not altered afterwards | Snapshots and timelines are append-only |
That last row is what regulated industries need most, and it is a property of the system rather than a claim you have to substantiate.
Supporting practices
Set asset criticality honestly. On Odyssey and above it multiplies SLA response windows, so safety-critical equipment gets tighter deadlines automatically.
Use checklist templates for mandated inspections. A failed item raises a corrective work order automatically, which means an inspection finding produces a tracked repair without depending on anyone to remember.
Put PM rules on categories, so every new asset of a regulated class inherits its inspection schedule.
Watch document expiry through the compliance report and Upcoming. An expired certificate discovered during an inspection is a finding; discovered a month early it is a task.
What UniAsset does not do
It is not a regulatory submission system. It holds the evidence; filing with your regulator remains your process.
It does not encode any specific regulatory framework. You map your obligations onto its records — severity levels, document types, inspection checklists — rather than selecting a compliance mode.
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