Field audit software: ready-made or custom?

From a photo of a chair to a repair task

An employee inspects furniture at the branches and at one site finds a chair with torn upholstery. They pick the site and the item reference, add a note and take a photo attached to that entry. There is no internet in the room, so the entry waits on the phone, and once the connection is back the report reaches head office. The phone shows which entries are still waiting to be sent.

The coordinator goes from the entry received to a repair task with the same site, chair reference and photo, names the person responsible and follows the reply. The photo has to stay tied to a specific note: if a site has several similar chairs, a gallery from the visit tells the person going to repair one very little.

What it costs and when it pays back

The count covers the work around a case: searching, reading, writing and handing over. What remains is the time to check the result, 15% of today's work in the scenario. Before the quote, we measure both times on 20 to 100 cases the team has already handled, in a free test that takes 5 working days.

In this process the model is an extra, for example to suggest the defect category. Most of the saving comes from no longer retyping the report into tasks.

An offline form may already be enough

ODK Collect is a ready-made Android app for forms that work without internet, with text and photos, so collecting a description of a defect needs no program of your own. The ODK documentation tells forms waiting to be sent apart from sent ones. If the form works well in the field and the manual work starts at head office, an integration that passes the note with its photo to the task system is enough. Your own application is justified when the team needs one view of the visit, the equipment and the repairs. The completeness of notes is covered in the article on judging a field report.

Where to start

We judge the purchase on one defect: saving it with no network, sending it and ordering the repair without entering the data again. The first scope can cover furniture inspections and passing on defects. We build this kind of rollout as part of AI applications. For the free analysis, a description of one case from recent weeks and of the tools it passed through is enough. You do not need to send confidential documents, and you get a written plan within 2 working days.