Innovative Inspection Forms User Guide

November 9 , 2009

The instructions in this guide provide all that is needed to move your inspection data collection and management process to an efficient paperless inspection system.

The Aridhio Technologies' Innovative Inspection Forms approach is based on functions carried out by three different roles:

  1. Form designers: these are your organization's compliance engineers who decide what information should be collected on a form; they design the templates that define inspection forms
  2. Information providers / inspectors: collect and submit the inspection data
  3. Analysts: produce reports and analyze the inspection data. Also manage which form templates should be used and authorize inspectors.

Each of these three roles perform specific scenarios:

1. Form Designers

  1. Manage groups of collaborating designers
  2. Create and modify forms

2. The analyst

  1. Manage the end-to-end inpection process. One analyst will register an organization account as a one-time event. The analyst who creates the first account for the organization is by default granted administrative privileges. An analyst with administrative privileges, can grant administrative privileges to other analysts.

  2. Manage information providers (with administrative privileges)

  3. Manage which templates are available for use by the Information Providers (with administrative privileges)

  4. Manage Analysts (with administrative privileges)

  5. Generate reports of submitted Form Instances

3. The inspectors or information providers.

Information Providers (inspectors) may work in areas where there may not be good wireless reception. The Innovative Inspection Forms solution does not require connectivity to collect inspection data. For the client device used by the Information Providers, internet connectivity is only needed to initially download the device software (or updates), download new Form Templates to collect data on, and to submit collected data (Form Instances).

  1. download and install the device software (internet connection required)
  2. configure the device software for first use
  3. download available Form Templates
  4. open a downloaded template and collect the inspection data in the field
  5. save the particular Form Instance to the device
  6. submit the saved Form Instance (internet connection required)

 

1. Form Designers

1.1 Check Your Browser

The first step is to ensure that your browser is appropriately configured to support "Innovative Inspection Forms" as a web-based application. When running the browser check, you should see something similar to the figure below. If not you will have to follow the steps to enable the technology that is not enabld. See "why do I need to enable Javascript, cookies and popups" if you are unsure why you need to do this in order for the application to work.

Figure 1a

1.2 Signup to Start Viewing and Designing Forms

Your email address will be used to login. Confirm email address and select a password to signup.

Figure 1b

Upon successfully signing up, you will be taken to a page where you can login a Forms Design Application or a Report Generation application. A this point we will start with Forms Design

Figure 1c

1.3 Forms Designer Account

Your browser should now be appropriately configured. If you have not already done so, you may want to kick the tires for a few minutes to get the hang of creating textfields, drop down lists, etc, and moving these items around on the design canvas. None of you what you create or modify will be saved until you create a Forms Designer account and login, so you don't need to spend too much time making elaborate forms at this particular point. That will come in just a few more steps.

The goal of Forms Designer is to make it easy to quickly get up and running with out having to spend weeks or months writing custom code.

With your browser configured and a few minutes of getting familiar with the design canvas, we are now ready to register in the Forms Designer part of the application. This will setup an account for you to design and save your forms. You can allow access for your colleagues to collaborate with you if you like, by making them members of one or more groups that you will create.

Figure 1d

1.4 Setting Up a Forms Designer Group

Next step is to setup a group. You can setup as many groups as you like. When you design a form, you will associate that form with the group that select to work in. You can invite colleagues to work in a particular group. So as an example, you could create an "official" group for creating forms that should be used today and an "experimental" group for projects that you are working on, on the side. Then for example, you invite your work colleagues to collaborate with you in the "official" group and a university researcher collaborates with you in the "experimental" group. When you allow someone else into a group, as the group's creator, you can grant them read-only or read-write permissions.

A group name has to be universally unique so it is recommended that you use something like:

MyOrganization SomeGroup

or

MyOrganization MyDivision SomeGroup

for your GroupName

Figure 1e

1.5 Subsequent Logins to Forms Designer

Once you have one or more groups created, just find the group that you want to work with from the dropdown list then click on "Select Group Choice"

Figure 1f

1.6 Designing Forms

We are ready to start designing our first form. Select CREATE OR MODIFY FORM, Figure 1e.

Figure 1g

 

1.6.1 Starting a New Form

You will start with an empty Design Canvas. From here you could load a design that you or a colleague had previously started or one from the publicly available list.

Here we will be start a new form, which do clicking on the "Start a New Form" image on the left-hand side of the screen.

Figure 1h

1.6.2 Selecting Controls

From the palette on the left-hand side of the screen, you can select between drop down lists, textfields, labels, radio group boxes and checkboxes.

When a dropdown list or a textfield is selected, a label is automatically created as well.

A popup window is displayed when a dropdown list or a radiobutton group box is selected. A variable number of options can be entered into the popup window.

Figure 1i

1.6.3 Editing Controls

Once a control has been created, it can be edited by right-clicking on its border and making the desired changes in an edit box that comes up.

By default, two columns are created and each created control (drop down list, checkbox, etc), will cover half of a row on the canvas. Any control can be modified to fit in 1/4th the width of a row, 1/2 the width of a row, 3/4th the width of a row or a full row (editing is covered in the next section).

Figure 1j

1.6.4 Adding Radio Groupboxes Controls

Radio group boxes works fine for selecting one of a few choices where each option is visible. For this control, you will be presented with a popup window to enter in the desired values.

Figure 1k

1.6.5 Adding Dropdown List Controls

Dropdown list controls are a good way to conserve screen real estate especially when many options are provided. For this control, you will be presented with a popup window to enter in the desired values.

Figure 1l

1.6.6 Finishing Your Design

Once you finish a design session, be sure and select "Save Form". You can load the form and continue to work on it at a later time.

Once you are completely done designing your form, you will need to select "Done (Generate Form and Report Templates)". Depending on the settings for your browser size, you may have scroll down on the frame in the window or readjust the size of the windw/frames in order to see the button.

This is were a quite bit happens to make an end-to-end system possible. This step will generate a software version of the form that can be downloaded to a laptop or Tablet PC, allowing inspectors to work even if they are disconnected. This also generates the reporting template that analyst will use when viewing the results of submitted form instances.

Figure 1m

2. Analyst

The roles of Analyst vary depending on whether the particular Analyst also has administrative privileges or not.

  1. Organization account registration. The analyst who creates the first account for the organization is by default granted administrative privileges. An analyst with administrative privileges, can grant administrative privileges to other analysts.

  2. Manage information providers (with administrative privileges)

  3. Manage which templates are available for use by the Information Providers (with administrative privileges)

  4. Manage Analysts (with administrative privileges)

  5. Generate reports of submitted Form Instances

2.1 Creating an Organization Account

 

In order for an organization to use inspection forms, an organization account will have to be created. If you are wondering why you have to create one account for Forms Designers and a separate account for the Analysts, you can take a look at "Why do I need to create separate accounts?" .

Figure 2a

2.2 Assign Form Templates For Use By The Organization
To allow your organization's inspectors to download an inspection form to their laptop or Tablet PCs, the form template must first be assigned for use by the organization. You pick from forms that you have designed or from the publicly available forms.

Figure 2b

2.3 Manage Inspectors / Information Providers
In order for inspectors to download Form Templates and submit Form Instances, they must first be added to the organization's list of "information providers". Minimally, you will add a username, for each inspector and an account ID will be generated. At the time of that the organization was created, an organization code or "OrgCode" was generated. You will need to provide to each inspector, their username (you can just use their internal email address), the OrgCode, and their AccountID. The inspectors will need this information to configure their devices. You can see also of these values if you bring up the "Manage Information Providers / Inspectors" screen.

Figure 2c

2.4 Add Inspectors (Information Providers)

From the screen to manage information providers, selecting the button to "Add New Information Provider" will display a box to add in the details for the inspector / information provider.

Figure 2d

2.5 Report Generation Criteria

Reports can be generated from submitted Form Instances. Reports are generated for one Form Template at a time. The Report can be filtered for which submissions of Form Instances are included in the output.

Figure 2e

2.6 Report Generation Format

A number of different formats are available for generating reports: PDF, rich text format (RTF), plain text, Excel, and comma separated values (CSV).

Figure 2f

3 Inspector/Information Provider

The inspectors or information providers.

Information providers (inspectors) may work in areas where there is not good wireless reception. The Innovative Inspection Forms solution does not require connectivity to collect inspection data. For the client device used by the Information Providers, internet connectivity is only needed to download the initial client software (or updates), new templates to collect data on, and to submit collected data.

  1. download and install the device client software (internet connection required)
  2. configure the client software for first use
  3. download available form templates
  4. open a downloaded template and collect the inspection data (save the particular form instance to the device)
  5. submit the saved form instance (internet connection required)
  6. collect the inspection data in the field

3.1 Installing the Device Application

The device application can be downloaded from the Aridhio Technologies website. Security Warnings during the installation of the client software running on the device can be safely ignored.

Figure 3a

3.2 Device Application Installation

Once the installation is complete, the AridhioForms device application can be accessed on your Windows XP or Vista device by selecting START -> PROGRAMS -> ARIDHIO.

Figure 3b

3.3 Device Configuration

The analyst that configured the inspector should have recorded the username that they entered. An accountid would have been automatically created. Both of these pieces of information along with the OrgCode.

Figure 3c

3.4 Manage Form Templates and Form Instances on the Device

Form templates are downloaded to the device. The form instances are the specific inspection results recorded by the inspector.

Figure 3d