How much does manual inspection review actually cost? A free ROI calculator

Ask most integrity teams what their inspection budget is, and they can tell you within a rounding error. Ask what the manual review and reporting step of that budget actually costs - separate from the flight, the equipment, and the field labour - and the answer is usually a shrug. That gap is worth closing, because for most programmes, evidence review is where the real hours go, not the flight itself.

We built a free Inspection Cost & ROI Calculator to make that number visible, without asking you to trust a vendor-supplied percentage.

Why review hours, not flight hours, are the real cost centre#

Capturing inspection evidence - by drone or any other method - is comparatively fast and cheap. What takes real engineering time is everything that happens after: reviewing hundreds of images or readings one by one, manually comparing this cycle against the last, relocating a defect across inspections to see if it moved, and drafting a report from scratch each time. That review-and-reporting step scales with network length or asset count, and it is almost entirely manual in a conventional workflow.

How the calculator works#

You enter five things: whether you're describing a pipeline/City Gas Distribution network or a refinery/industrial site, your rough network size, your inspection cycle length, how many engineer-hours a cycle currently takes to review and report on, and your fully-loaded hourly engineering cost. Then - deliberately - you also set the assumed review-effort reduction percentage yourself, rather than us asserting one.

That last step matters. We don't publish an unvalidated efficiency number as fact, because the real number depends on your data quality, your current process, and your network. The calculator's job is to make the arithmetic transparent and adjustable, not to hand you a number to trust blindly.

What you get#

Instantly, and entirely in your browser: engineer-hours saved per cycle and per year, and the equivalent cost saved per cycle and per year, based on your own inputs. Nothing you type is sent anywhere - it's a client-side calculation you can rerun with different assumptions as many times as you like.

What this tool is not#

It is not a validated performance claim about Sentrix specifically, and it is not a substitute for a real evaluation of your workflow. It is a planning aid - a way to put a rough, defensible shape around a cost that is usually invisible, so you can decide whether it's worth a closer look.

If the number surprises you, talk to us about what a defensible, evidence-backed answer would look like on your actual network or site.