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Alpha TransForm is a powerful mobile forms builder for offline apps.

There are 7 key reasons why Alpha Transform offers more power and control vs other mobile forms platforms. In this blog we have decided to show how some of these advantages translates into meaningful and practical benefits in real world applications

 



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Transcript of Video

Alpha TransForm is a platform that allows rapid building and deployment of custom mobile data capture apps combining a no code visual form builder

and low code scripting language that allows custom business logic inside the app.

Alpha TransForm is a compelling option that is orders of magnitude faster than traditional methods. 

Now let's look at some examples of custom apps built using TransForm and let's start with 5s audit shown on a tablet. 

So a 5s audit form is a form to measure efficiency in a workplace such as a factory or an office by marking answers to questions related to organization and methodology used in that workplace.

Every question has a score and then a final score is calculated at the end and shown at the initial screen of the app.

We mark the audit date with the date picker or just pick today and we sign with the auditors a signature.

This is an example of an equipment inspection form shown here running on a smartphone.

These are people who are visiting sites to perform inspections on a number of equipment inside the site.

So the first thing we log in this form is the site information details and we can fill those in manually, but we can also define lookups.

So based on a site code, once we pick that site code, then a lookup can be performed and bring down the information for that site. And this gives us additional capabilities such as checking the weather, for the coordinates that were logged for that site, or being able to do navigation, so that we can drive to the site and to the exact coordinates.

At we can drive to the site and to the exact coordinates, so having brought the information down we then simulate what would happen when we reach a site that has no network connection. So we take the device into airplane mode simulating the loss of signal and we will see that we can continue to work in this form as normal, so we can add the equipment types that we're inspecting. So we've inspected in this example a Generator on that site and we've also  inspected a Boiler.

Now if we go inside the details for each one, we'll see that the checklist of the generator is one type of checklist that corresponds to generator so checking running hours and fuel tank level, but when we go to the boiler we'll see that checklist obviously is different and corresponds to boilers. 

So it checks water gauges and boiler piping and corrosion.

So as we enter values we can also do validations, so if you enter something reasonable, it is it stays as is. 

But if we enter something exotic, then the system warns us that this value looks beyond limits and please confirm that entry now.

What we can additionally do, and remembering we're still offline, is that we can grab and log information about what equipment we're inspecting.

And a classic way to do that is to do a barcode scan.  So we scan the barcode of the device, the equipment that we're inspecting, and not only did we get the barcode but we performed the lookup on a local database on the device, and we cut back what that equipment corresponds to.

And not only that but we found a reference to a document that's also on the device, in this case a manual, and we can also go through the manual.

This could be wiring diagrams, this could be repair videos, any kind of media that we can store on the device, automatically looked up on the device even while we're offline.

So we complete the equipment inspection, we mark the date out time and the inspection is finished.

A health and safety audit form allows evaluation and assessing of compliance of site conditions. In this example of a construction site against owner and other requirements. so we start by logging information about the specific project, who the owner is, who the auditor is, and what are the locations that are being audited.

And there is a guide to show how compliance is marked and scored and what is the final rating calculated based on the form has 15 sections and each section, such as the one shown here, has a number of questions and three answers next to it regarding safe/unsafe was a photo taken and a score for that specific question. So filling in these answers for each of the questions and marking a score for each one of them.

So this is the final one and this now produces a calculation for the score. We've only filled in one section, but if we go to the audit score section we see that section six that we just filled in has one score and then the total audit score calculated obviously by just using that one section.  So we fill in the remaining sections in the same way, skipping ahead when we filled in all but one section.

So we go to the one or more notes next to it, so there was a text entry that we just did and there's a follow-up and for a piece of information that shows that there is some rust so we can take further photo and actually annotate on that photo to describe what we've logged in the node for that task.

So there's our punch list with the status information and now we add a second item, a second task which is a hinge, a door hinge, that needs repair.

We mark this task as being in progress. We describe it and we mark the start date and here on the on the main screen is an overview of our tasks and their status.

Later on as the work continues and tasks are completed we mark their completion status and date, so the main screen is updated to show this information.

 

 

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About Author

Richard Rabins
Richard Rabins

Co-founder of Alpha Software, Richard Rabins focuses on strategy, sales, and marketing. Richard also served as CEO of SoftQuad International from 1997 to 2001, when it owned Alpha. In addition to his 30 years with the company, Richard played a key role as co-founder, and served as president and chairman of the Massachusetts Software Council (now the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council), the largest technology trade organization in Massachusetts. Prior to founding Alpha, Richard was a project leader and consultant with Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), and a management consultant with Management Decision Systems, Inc. Richard holds a master's degree in system dynamics from the Sloan School at MIT, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and master's degree in control engineering from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has served on the boards of Silent Systems, Legacy Technology and O3B Networks, and is co-founder of Tubifi www.tubifi.com.

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The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.

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