Most recently we have had conversations with users about their site inspection workflows. As a software development company, we spend much of our time sitting in an office working at a computer. Even if I can’t go out in the field with a customer, it is enlightening to hear about their realities – what forms they are carrying into the field, what is a part of the daily process and what kind of surprises do they regularly handle on-site.
Before this customer started using GeoJot+ Core (GPS-Photo Link+), their organization’s process was tedious. Every time they conducted an inspection, they had to create a report. They require geotagged photos for many aspects of the reports and before they found our products, they had to manually grab and manipulate each photo captured in the field to include it in the site inspection reports. Some site inspections required 10 photos, some required 100 or more. The customer estimated that his time savings is exponential on a log scale dependent on the number of photos he has. When you get the settings getting photos ready for reports using GeoJot+ Core it takes a minutes instead of hours for each report. They have thousands of inspectors across the country.
Then we talked about the parts of the process where they still use pen and paper, and why that is the case. Sometimes it is because of fears that technology will fail, although there are also times when field books are lost or ruined. With a willing partner, we can investigate ways to streamline the process with safeguards against losing data. We were excited to hear that our desktop product was providing him exponential time savings, now we are trying to see if there is lesser known functionality of our product that could offer some additional savings. We are also looking to see how much more of the field data can be collected digitally using GeoJot+ app instead of being written in field books or field forms and then transcribed. We will let you know that goes …….
