It's A Kind of Magic!
Behind the apparent magic of filling out your inspection forms on a mobile device, then having your completed report emailed to you in seconds, is the engine room of Clarinspect - The Hub.
It is not something that is going to be used in the field - Clarinspect, after all, is easily used offline when you are on site - but The Hub is available to you to do some of the following:
Set up your users - Assessors and Inspectors, Administrators
Allocate work to the Assessors and Inspectors
Set up a “Work Package” which can be a campaign, a work site or a contract
Export and archive data
Download reports and monitor progress
The Hub is the centre of the Clarinspect workflow. It allocates work to staff, gathers their data and sends out their reports.
Work Package
You might have a contract to make a series of bridge inspections on a regular basis. Setting up the work package lets you assign the relevant mobile templates for the inspections (including Health and Safety), assign the correct reports for the project and set up the team who are going to be doing the work.
Site or job specific data can be pre-loaded saving on re-keying the information for each new inspection.
A commencement date can be set in advance and the whole package can be duplicated if, for instance, the contract is done regularly.
So far so good but the real magic is in the reports.
Reporting
While a lot of assessment data is logged into a database we find most Clarinspect users are presenting the data as reports to their clients. It might be on a standardised form, it might be in the consultancy's preferred style or it might be as a spreadsheet. Clarinspect handles all of these formats with ease giving our users complete control over the formatting and appearance of their reports.
So here is how it works. When you have set up the Work Package you have assigned mobile templates and report formats to the work. Once the onsite inspection has been completed the finished data including photos is "synced" with The Hub. Recognising new work, The Hub springs into action combining the data and the report and emailing it to you immediately.
Your finished report can arrive as a PDF, .xlsx or .docx but the devilish detail makes it even better:
Automatic Indexing means that no matter how many images or defect reports you have recorded they are all numbered correctly
If you have annotated your photos during the inspection they will be perfectly matched in the report
Compliance or legislative information can be added as context based text based on the inspectors notes - eg if asbestos is suspected relevant information can be automatically inserted into the report
You can even enter costs for a particular activity and have those costs totalled with GST added automatically in the final report
Suffice it to say that your company logo, font, header/footer details and other styling will be present.
The report can be emailed directly to the client, sent immediately for peer review or edited by the inspector once they get back into the office.
( 1 ) Complete Inspection (2) Annotate images (3) Report emailed (4) Download report (5) Print report.
This "magic" of an automated report being created seconds after the inspection data is "synced" with The Hub saves Clarinspect users several hours every report. The hours saved are in
tedious re-keying of written information,
laborious saving and pasting of images (have you ever arrived back at the office, taken a look at your photos and not known where or why you even took them?), and
interminable re-formatting the document to meet the corporate standard
In other words the time you save with Clarinspect is the time you spend not Engineering, not doing what you are trained for. It is dead time. One of our users saves 4.5 hours per report!
Another thanks us for giving him back his family time.