Media break-free through maintenance and service

Checklists and forms exist today in many forms in the service and maintenance processes of companies. They are used to document inspections and tests as well as verifiable services.

Drivers are external entities such as legislators or customers as well as internal departments such as service management, quality assurance or controlling.

Essentially, there are two types of forms: those that serve purely to provide evidence of an activity such as an audit, and those that trigger a follow-up process within the company.

Depending on the company and industry, there can be up to hundreds of manifestations of these two types in the service or maintenance area. These include, among others, maintenance checklists, condition assessments or functional tests of equipment or checklists for technical objects. The condition assessment of third-party equipment can also be completed in one form.

Advantages of digitization

Digitizing forms and checklists is an essential step in mapping the maintenance and service process electronically from end to end. The advantages of digitization are obvious:

For one thing, this ensures that the technician completes the right checklist at the right time and can only complete it when it is complete.

This is a significant advantage against the background of legally prescribed workflows or contractually agreed services. On the other hand, the office staff no longer has to manually transfer or scan the completed forms or checklists into the back-end system.

This avoids errors, improves data quality and saves time. In addition, by digitally transferring the data to the back-end systems, poor values in condition records can trigger earlier maintenance of a machine and thus avoid potential failure and downtime of a plant (predictive maintenance).

Digitized forms also make maintenance and service processes much more flexible and adaptable. Updated documents are loaded centrally from the server and updated in the background.

This allows updates to be rolled out cost-effectively and efficiently. A form can also generate a contract. If market requirements change, a company can adjust the contractual services in the form and thus react very quickly and without gaps.

Unlike paper forms, their digital counterparts draw data directly from the business process. That's why they offer many more options in terms of presentation and should be redesigned accordingly rather than being a mere replica of the paper versions.

Data directly from the business process

Some digital form solutions can use scripts to access the master data of the leading system, such as SAP ERP, in read-only mode. This has the advantage that a lot of data can be automatically transferred to the form and the technician no longer has to fill it in or select it manually.

These can be, for example, the name of the technician, the order details or the customer name with address. Input fields can also be generated dynamically, for example, on the basis of characteristics or measuring points on the technical object, measured value acquisition lists or code groups.

Values recorded via checklists can be stored both unstructured as a document or file (e.g. PDF) and structured as a data record (e.g. a measured value) in back-end systems (e.g. Microsoft Dynamics or other systems).

Structured feedback can be provided, for example, for the recording of measured values (as measurement documents at measuring points) or master data (as characteristics for devices).

Procedure for digitization projects

If a company wants to digitize its forms, it should first analyze the initial situation and take stock of the existing forms.

Then it should be investigated whether there are forms that are redundant and can be combined or that the company can even do without completely in the future.

The recipients of forms, for example customers, should also be included in this process in order to take their feedback and requirements into account. In a pilot project, the specialist department should then start with a selection of three to five forms and test them in operation.

If necessary, it also makes sense to make a division into pure verification documents without subsequent processes and "intelligent" forms that trigger a further process.

The second option will be significantly more rewarding in terms of time and cost savings through digitization, unless the volume of proof-only documents is significantly larger.

Which mobile devices are best suited for processing digital forms depends largely on the circumstances of the input. A service technician who needs to check a transmission tower is better off with a small, lightweight device than a laptop.

However, the more complex and extensive a company's checklists and forms are, the larger the mobile device should be to enable clear input.

Tablets as well as convertibles and laptops offer a higher user comfort here to create even longer free texts with an (additional) keyboard.

Checklists can be created either manually - for example, when creating an order for each asset individually - or by an automatism in the back-end system, i.e., using rules and data from the back-end (e.g., via a maintenance plan at SAP).

A maintenance plan contains recurring inspections with specific cycle information, such as an annual inspection, and automatically generates an inspection order when due.

The object to be inspected is listed in the order header as a functional location (or alternatively as equipment). An inspection lot is generated for this object, which can be displayed and edited as a mobile checklist or form.

In order to avoid the transfer and storage of incorrect data, an automatic validation of the values with rules from the ERP system should already take place during the input.

Since this check should also work in offline mode, it is necessary to store these rules in the form as well. For this purpose, the intelligent form should have a certain complexity in order to be able to implement extensive checking rules that go beyond a mere check of mandatory fields.

Creating simple, static checklists and forms requires basic knowledge of a markup language for representing hierarchically structured data in the form of text files, such as XML.

After training, this can be done by the business department. The representation of dynamic dependencies within more complex forms usually requires developer knowledge.

Therefore, the creation of these forms is more likely to be handled by the IT department than the business department, or both departments working together. When choosing a tool for creating digital forms, companies should keep in mind that they need a development environment for semi-automatically or fully automatically generated forms in which they can use test data to check the behavior of the forms and isolate error cases.

Layouts: Forms and PDFs

The digital form that the technician fills out usually differs from the layout of the final PDF form for the customer, which, depending on the industry and company, may be subject to legal requirements or must comply with CI guidelines.

The editing view is designed to enable user-friendly, clear and fast input, where the layout plays a subordinate role.

To create the layout of PDF forms, companies can usually use a standard design or design it individually. With a designer tool, text fields, graphics or tables can be placed using drag-and-drop and formatting can be applied.

Logos and other graphic elements can be easily integrated into the document to match a company's corporate design. For the creation, companies can also use a paper form as a template in the graphic tool.

International use

Forms and checklists should be treated like the mobile software used for order processing. They should be able to be created, maintained and distributed centrally.

When a software update is distributed by the administrator, the roll-out of updated forms should also work through a similarly automated, centralized process.

It is therefore advisable to think about how updates can be carried out efficiently and completely at an early stage so that they do not unnecessarily hinder the employee's work process on site.

Forms can be created in different languages and assigned to specific user groups. This ensures that the desired form is displayed depending on the local language.

Furthermore, there is the option of filling out the form in a different language (e.g., with defined text blocks) than the one ultimately provided to the customer. Therefore, at least the descriptive texts should not be "hard-coded" and should also be variable, depending on whether the technician fills out or prints the form.