Every mobile inspection app demos well. The screen is clean, the wifi is strong, and the sample vessel has three tidy findings. The differences that matter only show up on a unit with no coverage, gloves, glare, and a work pack of four hundred items. This checklist is for evaluating past the demo.
Offline is the whole exam
Most field environments are dead zones: congested steel, remote sites, vessel internals. Offline capability is not a feature, it is the operating condition.
- Full function offline, not read-only. Capture readings, findings, photos, and signatures with zero connectivity, for days if needed. Ask the vendor to put the device in airplane mode at the start of the demo, not the end.
- Deterministic sync with conflict handling. When two technicians touch the same record offline, what happens at sync? "Last write wins" is a data-loss policy with a friendly name. You want field-level merge and a visible conflict queue.
- Sync you can verify. The technician must be able to see, on the device, what has synced and what has not. Silent sync failure is how three days of readings vanish.
- Reference data on the device. Prior readings, drawings, and procedures available offline. A technician at the CML needs the last survey, not a spinner.
The data model underneath
An app is a veneer over a data model, and the model determines what your records are worth in ten years.
- Equipment identity, not job folders. Data lands against durable equipment and CML identities, so history accumulates. If everything files under the job, you are buying a report generator.
- Structured findings. Severity, classification, location, and status as fields, not prose, so triage and metrics are queries rather than reading assignments.
- Attachment context. Photos bound to the component and finding at capture time, with timestamp and author, not a camera roll to be sorted later.
- Exportability. Your data, complete and in a documented format, on demand. The vendor relationship should be renewable on merit, not on hostage terms.
Field capture ergonomics
- Glove and glare reality. Big touch targets, high contrast, workable in sunlight and in a dark drum with a headlamp.
- Voice capture where hands are busy. On a rope or in a confined space, dictating a finding beats typing one. Voice notes that become structured records, not orphaned audio files.
- Instrument and imaging pathways. UT gauge data in without retyping. If you run digital radiography, DICONDE imaging support so RT images live with the record rather than on a workstation nobody can find.
- Minimal taps to the common action. Count the taps from opening the work pack to logging a routine reading. Field crews notice every one of them, and friction is why apps get abandoned for paper.
Trust and administration
- Individual identity and real signatures. Authenticated users, signatures that freeze the record, amendments tracked. A shared login voids the audit trail.
- Audit trail by default. Who changed what, when, from which device, without configuration heroics.
- Work assignment. Packs assigned to crews and individuals, with visible completion state, so the office view matches the field frontier.
- CMMS integration. Findings become work orders with hard references both ways, and completion status flows back.
How to run the evaluation
Do not evaluate in a conference room. Take the app to your worst unit with two of your most skeptical technicians and a real work pack, offline, for a full shift. The skeptics are the point: if it survives them, it will survive rollout.
This checklist doubles as a description of what intelliSPEC's field capture was built to do, offline sync and voice capture included. The fastest way to test that claim is to bring your worst unit's work pack to a demo.
