Solution
Capture in the field
The site report written on paper ends up retyped in the evening, or not at all. A mobile app that demands a network solves nothing: in a basement or up a mountain there’s none.
The field, without paper or coverage
Offline behaviour is designed and tested
The selected journeys work offline, within agreed storage and duration limits. Sync, conflicts, failures and recovery get exercised.
Entry happens once
Validated data travels with its correction history. Reconciliation measures what passes on its own and what still needs rework.
Captured material remains attributable
Photograph, time, position or drawn signature attach to the record with their provenance. Evidential value comes from the process, the identity, the integrity and the legal context, not from the field alone.
Billing follows the field
Approved hours and materials feed the billing through a reconciled flow. The pilot measures how much the delay actually falls, and which exceptions remain.
In practice
- Priority journeys available offline, with a sync queue, visible state and controlled recovery
- Conflict resolution declared in advance, for two concurrent entries on the same object
- Photographs compressed on the device, with time stamp and position where useful
- Customer signature on screen, attached to the report
- Forms shaped to the trade, with the required fields the field will actually accept
- A native Android application, so battery and camera behave as they should
Systems involved
- ERP and site management software
- Billing and accounting, for hours and materials
- Scheduling and job dispatch
- File storage, for photographs and signed reports
- Mail, for sending the report to the customer
Service lineApplications and integration →
Which records
The same work, against each sector’s own constraints. Every card opens the full sector.
Energy and utilities
Records from remote sites
Jobs, readings and photographs captured on site and synced on the way back, where connectivity is a constraint rather than an assumption.
Manufacturing
Records captured at the workstation
Checks, stoppages and interventions captured on a device that works without a network, with the photograph and the time attached to the record.
How it runs
In the field
Observation with the people who capture the data, long enough to cover the workflow variants. Fields, corrections, expected evidence and exceptions get written down.
Form
Screens designed for one gloved hand, with the most frequent entry first.
Offline
Local storage, a sync queue, conflict rules. This is the invisible part, and the part that decides everything.
Back to the system
Records are written into the ERP and into billing, with a screen for anything that could not go through.
Dependencies and next steps
Test the fit: Capture in the field
Describe the context, constraints and decision you need to make. The first conversation qualifies scope, boundaries and the next useful step.
Describe the situation