Australian businesses will continue to use remote engineering virtual site visits to manage risk exposure even once the acute risk of COVID passes, FM Global says.

The insurer says its business model is built around sending engineers out to conduct rigorous risk assessments of client sites.

When strict travel restrictions came into force, the commercial property insurer ramped up its long-standing remote servicing capability, which was formerly only used when a client location posed a health or safety risk.

FM Global engineers conducted 15,000 remote site visits last year around the world, compared with only around 30 a year prior to the pandemic.

In Australia, FM Global has about 50 engineers across the country and VP Operations Engineering Manager Paul May estimates that reducing the time his team spends travelling could equal increasing headcount by one full-time engineer.

“If COVID disappeared tomorrow, we’ve already learned that virtual engineering works really well for some clients and certain types of site visit,” Mr May said. “Routine visits at sites with a lower risk profile could easily be done remotely.”

Mr May says the remote visits lower costs, reduce environmental impact and allow engineers to be onsite almost immediately when time is a critical factor.

“That’s not to say this will replace ‘boots on the ground’ engineering – especially when you think about complex, high-risk sites like mines or power stations,” he said.

FM Global says it has “written new business during the pandemic without one of its engineers ever setting foot onsite”.

It held a dozen meetings spread out over a month with representatives from a glass furnace and says that breaking the process down made it “more palatable for the client”.

Each meeting clearly focused on a specific topic, such as maintenance, and engineers reported being able to be more in depth as they had more time to pore over test reports, inspection records and other information supplied by the client.