You are halfway through an inspection.
You’ve taken photographs, entered responses and worked your way through the property. The inspection is progressing normally.
Then you lose the phone, or you’ve left the tablet at the office. Perhaps it has been dropped, damaged or simply isn’t available when you need it.
What happens to the inspection?
The obvious worry is that the work is now trapped on the device.
That is a problem we’ve had to think about because inspections don’t happen in controlled environments. People work in properties, on building sites and in all sorts of places where things don’t always go according to plan.
BrightChecker is designed so that an unavailable device doesn’t automatically mean a lost inspection.
The inspection is already under way
Once you’ve started an inspection, you may already have recorded a substantial amount of information.
There could be dozens of photographs, written responses, notes and other survey data.
When you have connectivity, BrightChecker synchronises that information as you work.
If connectivity disappears, that’s a different problem. The device is still available, so you can continue working and the information can wait to synchronise when a connection returns.
But if you’ve actually lost the device, you need another way of getting at the work that has already made it back to the system.
Find the inspection that’s still in progress
BrightChecker keeps track of inspections that are currently being worked on but haven’t yet been submitted.
If the device you were using is no longer available, you can find those in-progress inspections in the main system.
You can open the survey and see the information that has already synchronised.
That includes the responses you’ve recorded and the photographs that have successfully reached the system.
So you’re not simply looking at a job that is locked to a missing phone. You can see the inspection and assess what has actually been recovered.
Check what you have before continuing
You can look through the survey before deciding what to do next.
See the responses.
Look at the photographs.
Check the information that has made it back to the system.
If you’ve got what you need, you can take over the available inspection information and continue the job.
That is particularly useful if the original device is not coming back.
Perhaps it was lost permanently. Perhaps it was stolen. Perhaps it was damaged beyond use.
You don’t have to abandon the inspection simply because the hardware has gone.
What has not synchronised is different
There is an important distinction here.
BrightChecker can recover information that has successfully synchronised with the system.
If something was entered on the device but was still waiting there when the device disappeared, that information isn’t available on the server.
There is no way around that.
This is one reason the way BrightChecker synchronises information as you work is important. You’re not relying on one large upload at the end of the inspection.
Information that has successfully reached the system is already there if something happens to the device.
And if you have been working without a connection, the offline queue will attempt to synchronise the information when connectivity returns.
It’s not just about photographs
The inspection recovery isn’t limited to media.
You can see the survey and the information that has already synchronised, including your recorded responses and photographs.
That gives you a practical view of what remains available and lets you decide whether you can continue from it.
You’re not being asked to assume that everything is there.
You can actually look at the inspection first.
Losing a device is different from losing a connection
These are two different problems.
You lose the connection
The phone or tablet is still working.
You carry on with the inspection. The information waits to synchronise until the connection returns.
You lose the device
The phone or tablet itself is no longer available.
You need to recover the information that has already reached the system and continue from there.
That’s why offline working and device recovery need to be considered separately.
Offline working allows the inspection to continue without a connection.
Device recovery gives you a route forward when the hardware itself is unavailable.
Real inspections don’t happen in perfect conditions
Software demonstrations tend to assume everything goes according to plan.
The device is charged.
The connection works.
The surveyor has the right equipment.
Nothing gets dropped.
Nobody leaves anything behind.
Real inspections aren’t like that.
You might be halfway through a property when the device you’re relying on suddenly becomes the problem.
We’ve seen enough of those practical situations to know that inspection software needs to deal with them.
A lost device shouldn’t automatically mean a lost day’s work.
Recover the work that has already reached the system
The point isn’t to pretend that a server can recover information that was never synchronised.
It can’t.
The point is to make sure that information that has reached the system isn’t unnecessarily trapped on the original device.
If the phone is lost, the tablet is broken or the device has simply been left somewhere else, you can find the in-progress inspection, see what has synchronised and continue with the information that is available.
For a surveyor who has already spent hours working on an inspection, that’s more than a convenience.
It can mean the difference between recovering the job and starting again.
A lost device shouldn’t mean a lost inspection.
Lost your phone? Use the synchronised survey data
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