Login
For any job that helps the public, inspections are the final step to ensure safety and protocols have been met. Whether this is for checking scaffolding on the side of a building, the quality of food in a restaurant, or looking at a car before you buy it, inspections are put in place to insure safety not only for the user, but for the people around them.
While the industries themselves have found ways to continue advancing their technologies to suit their business (like restaurants sending phone notifications for reservations), the inspection of many of these industries is still done in the same way it was done over 50 years ago – with pen and paper. For a good reason too – it’s cheap and effective. Forms haven’t changed much since the past, and changing them was never that big of a deal in the first place. However, there’s a lot of drawbacks to using paper, some of which can only be remedied with the help of an app.
For example, paper is extremely cumbersome. Most inspectors can tell you stories about dragging around multiple binders filled to the brim with forms that they didn’t need. I’ve even seen inspectors in convenience stores walking around hunch-backed from the amount of binders they had in their backpack. For a job that takes place while the business is doing it’s daily routine, carrying around trolleys full of papers that you may not even use is asking for trouble. And what if one of the finished forms get damaged? You’d have to go back to the facility and repeat the process all over again, wasting everyone’s time, including yours.
The perfect solution to the paper problem has always been the digital world. With handheld devices that can fill out the forms that an individual needs, there’s no need to carry around carts filled with papers. Because these forms are digital right from the get-go, the quality of data is significantly better, and every form is automatically saved after it’s sent. The issue has always been the cost of such technology. Purchasing computers specifically made to do mobile forms were expensive, and really only available to the top-tier of the industry.
But now this technology can be found in our pockets. Smartphones are strong enough to perform the exact same function, with the help of some software (or apps, in the mobile world). We already use apps for our everyday routines – checking our emails and social media, text messages, GPS – so why not harness the power of those technologies to help us with our work situations? Smartphones come with enough memory to store millions of forms. Cloud services ensure that we have enough data to never have to worry about data.
Snappii does just that. We’re an app company. And our secret weapon is our Snappii platform, which allows us to construct and sculpt any app you could need for your business. If you want to check out our catalog of apps we’ve made, click here.
Tip #1 – All your forms in one place
Hard-drive storage is a beautiful thing. What used to take entire libraries can now can be found at the end of a key-chain in the form of an usb stick. The same goes for smartphones, with even the lower end phones having enough memory to store every form you could possibly need.
Once a form is completed, it gets sent out to an email of choice. However, the app will also save the report so that it can be brought up later. As soon as the submit button is pressed, the data that was created is backed up and saved. You wouldn’t be able to lose your data if you tried.
Tip #2 – Dropdowns and Radio Buttons
Creating high quality data is a subtle art. A lot of times, forms capture information that is redundant, or can be slimmed down at least slightly to be more efficient for their workers to complete. Dropdown menus and radio buttons accomplish this by creating pre-disposed answers to questions. When a worker is operating the device, they can simply click on the answer rather than having to type out an entire sentence. You can easily cut a huge portion of the work by doing it before-hand.
Tip #3 – GPS Capture
It may seem redundant, but data that gets captured with paper forms is often incorrect. These discrepancies can cost your company big-time, especially when dealing with bigger clients. Features like the GPS capture ensure that all the information that is entered into the mobile device is the correct information.
For more about the other features Snappii has, click here.
