Hi all - we've encountered a new use-case in our organization, and I was hoping to get your input.
Bit of background first might help. In our Road Maintenance industry, we have hundreds of Activities that can be performed out on the road - everything from a temporary patch on a road, to installing a new cattle guard, to cleaning out culverts. Each Activity has a set of step-by-step instructions and best practices that go along with them - we call these Work Instructions. Our Quality and Operations teams have taken a lot of time and effort to build out this library of Work Instructions - currently each individually in a PDF document format - and now they want to make sure that these Work Instructions are available to our workers for them to use when they are out in the field. We do not want to print thick binders for each worker - we'd prefer to do this electronically.
Ideally, operators on the road would receive Work Instructions in the context of the task they are doing, i.e. get the right information at the right time to do their job efficiently. Because we use ProntoForms on iPads to track and enter all details of their work (which Activity, what equipment was used, any material used, quantities completed, hours worked, etc.), it would be ideal if we could make Work Instructions available in their ProntoForms form at the time they are filling it out.
So, that's the background. The question I have for the group is: how could we potentially use ProntoForms to do this? Again, the documents are in PDF format right now, and we would need different content to show, depending on what Activity was selected from a dropdown. We would also need all the information in the documents available offline.
A few thoughts that have come to mind:
- Could use Resource Images with a screenshot of the Work Instructions as a picture - however, we'd need hundreds of such pictures (Work Instructions per activity) and I'm not sure if Conditional Logic could dynamically display a different Image depending on which Activity was selected
- Could copy/paste the Work Instructions into text in a Data Source, and load the Instructions up in question text / label (perhaps in an expandable Section) - however, I think any document formatting and a lot of the readability of the Instructions would be lost if doing it this way
- We could host the Work Instructions PDFs in a SharePoint or OneDrive folder accessible to our workers via the internet, and then simply keep the URL to each individual Work Instruction document in a data source that can be displayed in a question text / label when an Activity is selected from a dropdown. However, this would really only work if a worker is online / connected to the internet (not outside of cell reception) and it would still force them to open a different application (browser?) to view the instructions on an iPad I believe.
Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions on how we could dynamically make these Work Instructions available in a form in the context of a selected Activity? Much appreciated for any input you might have. Ultimately, acknowledging that ProntoForms isn't really a document repository and may not be a great fit for what we're trying to, we might have to use a different offline document repository (we use a system for offline Safety documentation called SiteDocs), but I'd love to find a way in ProntoForms if possible.
Thanks!
Brian
------------------------------
Brian Eshpeter
Director, IT
The Dawson Group
BC
------------------------------