What is Checklist?
Checklist is a service that manages your inspections saving you the hassle of saving, managing and maintaining inspections. Examples of checklist are:
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Hospitality Industry: A checklist for motel facilities and maintenance/upkeep.
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Real Estate: A site inspection checklist on managed property.
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Construction Industry: A compliance inspection for welds in a high rise structure.
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Engineering: An inspection a dam.
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Manufacturing: An assembly line walkthrough for OSHA compliance.
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Facilities: A compliance walkthrough for hazardous waste handling procedures.
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Telecom: A maintenance inspection form for cell towers.
What Question/Formats are supported?
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Single choice from many:
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Radio button list
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Dropdown selection
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Slider (for selecting from a range of numbers).
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Rating (such is in five star rating).
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Range (on a scale of 1 to 10 . . .).
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Multiple choice (Check box list).
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Short Text Response.
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Essay type response.
What is special about these formats?
There is nothing special about the formats that are supported. What is special is that Checklist is designed with mobile devices as the client. Checklist addresses two issues that have been a problem with inspections, the paper inspection form that must be copied to electronic format in the office and/or using laptops in the field for data entry, which simply doesn’t work. Checklist enables inspections to be performed using smart phone or tablets.
Are there other advantages?
Checklist supports the ability to capture images with each inspection item response as well as record a comment associated with the response. Later back in the office, the photos and comments are included in the inspection report.
In addition, all inspections are saved to a database. Over time, with the accumulation of inspections, metrics can be developed to track trends, inspectors, defects etc. These metrics are not possible without a centralized data store.
Why would we use the service rather than create our own?
Do you really want to be in the software development business? Do you really want to maintain IT Staffing to support you inspections forever?
What do the report look like?
Checklist supports a generic report for all inspections. The report is in standard HTML format and can easily be included in WORD Documents. As an add-on, Engenious Systems can create custom reports for your business.
What is Producer?
There are two sides to the Checklist application. The first side is the Producer. The producer module is used to author inspections. It is where questions are created and acceptable responses are defined and standardized.
What is Inspector?
The inspector module is the outward facing application that the clients use. Clients are the devices that are used to fill out the inspection, “Smart” mobile phone, tablets, laptop, desktops.
What are the requirements?
Checklist is a service, so the only requirement is an account and a supported client device. The client device must have internet access either through WIFI or telecom based connectivity.
How many photos can I attach to each response?
There isn’t a set limit, there are practical limits. On set-up you have the option of specifying that full resolution images are saved to the server or 1200x1200 images. If your connection is fast, full resolution probably isn’t a problem however, if the connection is slow, then performance will be affected. This is an issue that will become less of a factor as bandwidth speeds from client devices increase.
What are the practical limitations of the question types?
It is up to the user to understand the client form factor that is intended for use with each inspection. Generically, there are two formats, the “survey” format, where all the questions are listed in a single page. The second format is the single question, “one at a time” format, designed for smart phones where screen real estate is limited. In addition, although we support an essay type response, it has questionable utility when deployed to a smart phone. The chances of getting an inspector to “thumb” a detailed response probably would not happen. Instead, in cases where the question is open-ended we support an audio comment.
Other formats that might not be suitable for smart phones are “on a scale of 1 to x” type questions that have x radio buttons to select from. Better to use a slider or dropdown selector for smart phones.
What is the cost of the service?
The final price has not been set at this time. We are thinking in the range of $10-$20/user per month. Perhaps $10/user per month for a limited number of inspections and $20/user per month for unlimited numbers of inspections. At $20/month, it is essentially $1/day for unlimited inspections.