Web Portal Development
Diversified Laboratory Repair
DLR Improves Inspection Forms
Increasing efficiency and functionality of inspection forms to go 100% paperless
Diversified Laboratory Repair pledges to provide distinctive quality and unparalleled customer service as they strive to gain the respect and trust of their customers, suppliers and partner vendors.
Diversified Laboratory Repair focuses on high quality services that are cost effective to you, our customers. With over ninety years of service to the scientific industry, their factory trained service technicians specialize in the repair and maintenance of laboratory equipment.
They are determined to become successful by operating as a unified team. Every job is essential to fulfilling their mission to provide distinctive quality and unparalleled customer service every day. They achieve this through dedicated hard work and commitment from every employee. It is the desire of Diversified Laboratory Repair management, from top to bottom, to have every employee succeed in their job, and assist in achieving their goals.
Client
Diversified Laboratory Repair
Project Name
DLR Wizard — Automating PM Forms
The Challenge
Converting paper forms to digital processes
Information from the client’s dispatching system was being mail merged into the header section of inspections forms. These forms were then printed and collated into binders that technicians would work out of throughout the month.
Paper forms had to be picked up from and submitted to the office in person by technicians, then physically moved through an office review process and QA review process. Technicians would have to come back to the office to sign off on any edits to the forms that arose during these reviews.
Completed forms were mailed and scanned/emailed to clients. A scanned copy was also saved on in-house servers in DLR’s office. DLR wanted to go digital, but many areas they work in throughout the day have no access to Wi-Fi or cellular data. Inspection forms were tightly version controlled.
Solution
Modernizing the electronic inspection forms
Built a dynamic form builder with customized yet reusable form fields to allow non-developers to set up inspection form templates. These templates then generate one version of the form for the technicians’ mobile app, one version for office and QA review, and the final, version-controlled version for print.
The system Orases built consists of a web portal and a technician mobile app. The web portal syncs with DRL’s contract and scheduling system where inspection assignments are initially made. Forms assigned to the technicians are available each day in the technician’s mobile app. Once a form is completed, it is signed and submitted electronically to the web portal where it is reviewed by office and QA personnel. Any revisions can be completed and initialed through the mobile app.
The mobile app is a PWA and has offline capabilities. This allows technicians to do one sync in the morning to get all of their forms for the day. They can then work in a building without data or Wi-Fi all day. Then at the end of the day they can reconnect to data or Wi-Fi to submit their inspections back to the office.
When changes need to be made to an inspection form template, the system tracks the version number and effective date for the new version while enabling already completed inspections to still be displayed in the version that was current at their time of completion.
Development Environment Utilized
How the inspection forms were programmed and developed
An application using the CakePHP framework imports data from a SQL Server DB and stores it in a MySql DB. Imported data identifies which users should complete dynamically generated forms in a PWA and when.
A PWA written in the Ionic Framework on top of the Angular Framework uses a service worker to allow users to complete dynamically generated forms when offline. Users will synchronize which forms they would like to work on by what options the non-PWA app exposes and users are also able to save data back to the non-PWA app. This happens when the user has internet connection.
Additional users may then audit the saved forms and ensure they are good. Once the audit process is completed, a user will mark a collection of completed forms as complete. PDFs of the dynamic forms may then be generated and a ZIP file of all PDFs will be generated at time of collection completion. Both stand alone PDFs and the ZIP file are capable of added security measures being included which will prevent users from viewing, editing, and printing forms without a proper password.
