App demo
Fairbank FieldFairbank Building Services, Fort Collins
Clear the queue
What you do before driving off: check that everything has gone out. Three entries are only waiting for signal, one was rejected — and only that one costs time later.
- In the hands of
- Field service engineer
- Shown on
- Android — title on the left, three system buttons below
- Replaces
- Replaces the printed day plan in the glovebox, the timesheet somebody types up on Friday and the batch of photos emailed at eight in the evening. Nobody at the office sorts anything out at night any more.
Everything in this demo is laid out and none of it acts: buttons only report that they have no effect in the demo, checkboxes are fixed, input fields lead nowhere. Nothing is stored, sent or fetched.
How Awelior would approach this project
Fairbank Building Services, Fort Collins is invented — the way it is built is not. None of this is work delivered for a client. It is the shape we would give such a project — with the same depth, but without a client who would have to answer for it.
Where it starts
At Fairbank Building Services the engineers get a printed day plan each morning. Hours go on a scrap of paper in the van, photographs get emailed to the office in the evening, and what was checked on the last visit is unknown to the colleague who comes next. The work happens where the phone has no reception — that is the requirement everything else hangs on.
Decisions
Offline is the baseline, not the exception
Everything is captured locally and reconciled later. An app that shows a spinner in a basement stops being used after the second week — and then the paper comes back.
Reconciliation gets a screen of its own
Whatever has not been transferred yet has to be visible. Silent background sync is comfortable until it fails; after that nobody knows which hours arrived — and hours are money.
A checklist, not a free-text report
Fixed points with done, open and blocked. A free-text field on a phone operated in work gloves produces three words; a checklist produces evidence.
Deliberately left outNo location tracking and no automatic time capture by position. Both would be technically obvious, and where a union contract applies they are something to be bargained rather than switched on — the engineer enters the times, and here that is a decision rather than an omission.
What is in it
- Screens
- 5
- Tabs
- 4
- Content blocks
- 16
- Languages
- 4
A tab bar plus a pushed job view with a way back, in all four languages, including the four states on the reconciliation screen. Navigation responds; tick boxes, photographs and forms are fixed and inert.
How it would go on
Merging after offline work
Two engineers, the same plant, different states. How that gets resolved is the most demanding part of the project — and not something you retrofit.
Photographs and storage
Site pictures are large, travel over mobile data and then sit somewhere for years. Resolution, transfer and retention belong settled before launch.
The route back to the office
Hours into payroll, materials into job costing, inspection records into the plant file. Without that route the app only replaces the paper.
An app like this for your business?
Fairbank Field is invented — the fit is not. Apps come about exactly this way: from the routes that already exist in a business, only without the paper in between.
Sample app by Awelior. Invented business, invented data, nothing stored.