If you manage a thermography team, you’ve probably seen this problem:
Five engineers, five different report styles.
- Different severity scales
- Different wording for the same fault
- Different layouts and tables
- Different levels of detail
The result? Confused maintenance teams, slower decision-making, and a constant need to “fix” reports before they go to clients or senior management.
Leading infrared inspection guides emphasise that thermal inspection reports should be clear, consistent and easy to read, because they are the main tool maintenance teams use to prioritise risk and plan work. When every report looks and reads differently, that consistency vanishes.
In this article, we’ll look at why thermography reporting consistency matters so much for facilities managers, thermography contractors and enterprise maintenance teams — and how SnapCor helps you standardise reports across every engineer and every site.
The Hidden Cost of Inconsistent Thermography Reports
Inconsistent reporting isn’t just an aesthetic issue. It creates real operational and commercial pain:
1. Confusing severity and prioritisation
If one engineer uses “High / Medium / Low” and another uses “1–4” or “A/B/C”, nobody is quite sure which issue is really critical.
By contrast, thermography methods that explicitly grade faults by temperature rise and risk — for example Minor, Important, Serious, Critical — give maintenance teams a clear prioritisation framework.
2. Extra review time for every report
Supervisors and clients waste time hunting for key information because:
- The summary tables move around
- Photos are labelled differently
- Root causes and recommendations are described in different ways
That slows down remedial work and undermines trust in the process.
3. Higher error risk
When each engineer maintains their own Word template and Excel calculator, you’re relying on:
- Manual copy-paste
- Home-grown formulas
- Individual discipline to include every required field
It only takes one missed ambient temperature or incorrect ΔT calculation to mis-grade a fault.
4. Difficult scaling and onboarding
As you add more thermographers or subcontractors, inconsistency multiplies. New joiners copy whatever template they last saw, and you end up with a patchwork of formats and methodologies that’s almost impossible to maintain.
For organisations inspecting data centres, industrial plants or large estates, this is simply not sustainable.
What “Standardised” Thermography Reporting Should Look Like
Before we talk about software, it’s worth defining the target state. A standardised thermography report should have:
- A fixed structure – the same sections, in the same order, on every job (overview, methodology, findings, fault tables, thermal images, recommendations).
- A common severity scale – e.g. Minor / Important / Serious / Critical, with clear rules for temperature rise and risk so everyone grades the same way.
- Standardised language – shared libraries for common fault descriptions (“loose termination”, “overload”, “phase imbalance”) and remedial actions (“re-make terminations”, “rebalance phases”, “schedule outage to replace component”).
- Consistent measurement practice – agreed approaches for ΔT calculations, BS 7671-aligned temperature limits, and load-correction methods for electrical surveys.
- Image-linked data – thermal and visual images linked directly to each asset and fault record, so nobody has to guess which board “IMG_1034.jpg” belonged to.
- Built-in quality checks – mandatory fields (e.g. ambient temperature, load, camera calibration date, thermographer credentials) to prevent incomplete reports.
You can try to enforce all this with a PDF template and a procedures manual. But in practice, humans drift, templates fork and Excel sheets proliferate.
This is exactly the problem Ti Thermal Imaging Ltd set out to solve when they built TICOR and, more recently, SnapCor.
SnapCor: Standardisation as a Built-In Feature, Not an Afterthought
SnapCor is a thermographic reporting platform built by engineers who spent years doing inspections and wrestling with messy reporting. It runs on tablets and mobiles, works with any thermal camera, and is powered by the same engine that underpins TICOR’s real-time thermal imaging software.
Where traditional software focuses on post-processing images, SnapCor focuses on standardising the entire workflow — from asset set-up to final PDF.
Here’s how it helps you create consistent thermography reports across your team.
1. Locked, Inspection-Led Templates
Instead of giving every engineer a blank document, SnapCor uses inspection-led templates:
- You define your standard report structure once.
- Engineers then follow the same step-by-step workflow on every job: clients → sites → boards → assets → faults → recommendations.
Because the template is embedded in the app, individual users can’t accidentally “improve” it by removing tables or changing headings. That keeps layout, branding and content structure identical across all reports.
Result: Facilities teams learn exactly where to look for each piece of information, no matter who carried out the survey.
2. Shared Fault Grading Rules (Minor → Critical)
SnapCor uses a shared fault grading system, the same one used by TICOR’s electrical thermography module: Minor, Important, Serious and Critical.
You configure:
- Temperature-rise thresholds
- BS 7671-aligned limits for cables and terminations
- Rules for when a fault should escalate (e.g. critical infrastructure, repeated finding)
SnapCor then applies those rules consistently, suggesting a severity grade for each anomaly based on measured and corrected temperatures. Engineers can still override when context demands it, but they’re all starting from the same rulebook.
Result: A “Serious” fault on one report means the same thing on every other report, across every engineer.
3. Root Cause & Recommendation Libraries
Writing narrative text is one of the biggest sources of inconsistency (and time waste) in thermography reporting.
SnapCor solves this with root cause and remedial action libraries inspired by TICOR’s knowledge-based approach.
For each fault, engineers can:
- Select the anomaly type (loose termination, overload, phase imbalance, insulation defect, etc.).
- Choose standard root causes and recommended actions from pre-built lists.
- Add site-specific detail only where needed.
Because every engineer is pulling from the same phrase bank, you get uniform language and tone. And because those phrases are curated by experienced thermographers at Ti Thermal Imaging Ltd, you know they’re technically sound.
Result: Reports read like they were written by one expert voice – even when multiple engineers contributed.
4. Image-Linked, Field-First Data Capture
Standardisation starts at the point of capture, not at the keyboard later.
SnapCor is designed so that, in the field, engineers:
- Select the specific board or asset from a pre-built list.
- Capture thermal and visual images directly into that record.
- Enter temperatures, load and ambient values once.
There’s no separate download-and-rename step, no guessing which photo belongs where, and no risk that a fault page gets created without a matching image.
This image-linked approach mirrors best practice in thermographic inspection documentation, where images, comments and measurements are tightly coupled for later analysis.
Result: Clean, structured data that’s consistent from the moment it’s recorded.
5. Automatic Calculations and On-Site PDF Generation
Standardised reports also depend on standardised calculations.
Keeping this consistent via spreadsheets is hard; different engineers may implement slightly different formulas. By contrast, SnapCor:
- Handles ΔT and load-correction calculations in-app using centrally defined rules.
- Applies the same formulas to every inspection across the organisation.
- Assembles a complete, ISO-style PDF report on-site in under a minute, pulling together client details, inspection metadata, fault tables, images and recommendations.
That means no manual formatting, no re-keying of temperatures, and far fewer opportunities for human error.
Result: Faster reporting and more reliable numbers, every time.
Why Standardisation Matters for Different Stakeholders
For facilities & asset managers
- Easier to compare reports across multiple sites.
- Faster triage of issues thanks to unified severity grading.
- Stronger evidence trail for insurers, regulators and auditors.
For thermography contractors
- A recognisable, professional report style that differentiates your service.
- Less time spent fixing junior engineers’ reports.
- Easier to scale subcontractor work while keeping quality under control.
For enterprise maintenance & reliability teams
- Consistent thermography data feeding into CMMS or reliability programmes.
- Ability to trend issues across fleets, not just individual assets.
- A standard reporting framework you can mandate across in-house and external partners.
In all three cases, standardisation turns thermography reports into a strategic asset, not just a compliance checkbox.
How to Roll Out Standardised Reporting with SnapCor
If your organisation is ready to standardise thermography reports, here’s a practical rollout sequence:
- Define your “gold standard” report Use a recent high-quality report as a starting point. Decide on sections, severity bands, and the level of detail you want as your baseline.
- Configure SnapCor templates and libraries Work with your lead thermographer to set up a standard template, severity thresholds, and root-cause / remedial libraries inside SnapCor. This becomes the single source of truth every engineer uses.
- Pilot with a small group of engineers Run a few surveys using the new workflow. Compare the outputs to your old reports — you’ll see the improvement in consistency immediately.
- Roll out to the wider team Train the rest of the team on the SnapCor workflow, focusing on why certain fields and steps are mandatory. The app’s guided process will do most of the enforcement for you.
- Continuously refine the standard As you learn more, update your libraries and templates centrally – SnapCor propagates these changes to every device, so the standard evolves without fragmenting.
Conclusion: Consistency as a Competitive Advantage
In today’s maintenance and reliability world, thermography isn’t just about finding hot spots — it’s about communicating risk clearly and consistently.
Standardised reporting:
- Reduces errors
- Speeds up decision-making
- Makes your team look and operate like a single, unified expert
SnapCor was built specifically to deliver that consistency at scale. Backed by over a decade of thermographic reporting experience from Ti Thermal Imaging Ltd and the proven TICOR engine, it combines automation, accuracy and professional presentation in one platform.
If you’re tired of wrestling with mis-matched templates and manually fixing reports, it’s time to standardise the way your team works — and let SnapCor handle the heavy lifting.
👉 Explore SnapCor and request early access here: https://snapcor.app/