Maintenance Surveys

Maintenance surveys are used by many companies to collect ad-hoc data and for process control purposes. A survey includes a set of questions that will be presented to the Maintenance or Service technician during work execution.

The surveys can be used in both Mobile Work Order and Technician Portals.

Defining a Survey

A survey is defined with an ID, Name, and a Description and can be made available for an appropriate period. Survey Introduction Text and Ending Text are mandatory to enter, but can be configured to display or hide when it is triggered using the toggles in the header.

If there are multiple surveys valid for the same workflow type, surveys are opened according to the Rank given. The survey with the lowest Rank is triggered first.

The Workflow Type specifies the event or the work process the survey should be triggered. Surveys are supported for the following workflow types.

• Work assignment statuses ( Accept / Travel / Waiting at Location / Work Start / Cancel / Pause / Pending Completion / Completed Before / Completed After / Incomplete ) : You can define a survey to be triggered on these state events.
  Completed Before and Completed After surveys are triggered before and after completing the work assignment respectively. It is necessary to complete the survey to proceed with status change.
• Work Assignment : These can be used for work assignment specific surveys that are not linked to any event and can be answered any time during work execution. These surveys are available under the list of work actions
• New Work / New Task : These surveys are triggered when new work (i.e., New Work Order, New Service Request, or New Task) is registered in mobile client.
• Person Resource : These surveys are used to collect information from each individual technician. The technicians can answer it at any time. These surveys are linked to the person resource and can be accessed from the eForms tile on the Home screen.
• Object Information : These surveys are connected to the given object and available from the object actions page.
• Configured workflow : These surveys can be linked to an Action in the Action Flow of a workflow configuration of type Configured Work Task. It can be set for eForms action and state events defined in the Actions Flow. These are only supported in MWO app.
• Child Survey : A child survey can be included in a survey and is triggered from its parent survey.
• Resource Start Shift / Resource End Shift : These surveys are triggered when a technician starts or finishes their shift respectively. These are only supported in MWO app.

Additionally, the following options can be used to configure the behavior of a survey.

• Always Start New : Select this option If you want the survey to start from the beginning when answering again.
• Answer Once: Select this option if you want the survey to be answered only once
• Temp Save: Select this option if you want to save the answers as they are being answered. Even if the survey is not completed fully, the answers will be retained, and the technician can continue to fill in the rest later.
  The Suspend button will be enabled in the survey and the technician can pause and continue later. This option is only available in MWO.
• Auto Save: Select this option if you want the answers entered already to be filled in automatically while running through the survey for the second time. The user is presented with a prompt to automatically continue.
  If Yes is selected, all previous answers for the survey are displayed automatically and stops at the last answered question. If No is selected, the survey starts from the beginning and saved answers are presented to the user.
  The technician can then make any necessary changes to the previous answers and move on with one question at a time. This option is only available in MWO.
• Loop Survey / Loop Text : Select Loop Survey option if you want the survey to be repeated more than once. The Loop Text defined is displayed before starting each loop and the user gets the option to decide if he wants to repeat the survey or to terminate it.
  This option is only available in MWO.

Defining Survey Questions

When defining a maintenance survey, it is possible to specify the type of the questions together with the order they should be posted and the dependencies that may exist between these questions.

The following types of questions are supported.

• Yes/No : The answer to this type of question would be either Yes and/or No. It is possible to request to enter a Remark if the answer is Yes or No. Based on the answer given, there is an option to convert this to a terminating question.
  If the answer given for the Termination Question field is matched, the survey will end after this question. Terminated Survey in this instance is considered as completed and if it is connected to a status change, it will go ahead as normal.
• Multi Choice : For this type of questions, the user gets a set of answers to choose from a predefined list of answers. These answer options are defined in Survey Basic Data\Answer Options with the number of alternatives to select.
• Open-ended : This allows entering a free text as the answer.
• Numerical : This allows entering a number as the answer.
• Statement : This type of question can be used to share some information to the user before or after presenting a certain question.
• Picture : This allows attaching an image to the answer.
• Signature : This allows entering an electronic signature as the answer.
• Survey : It is possible to link questions in another survey by using a question of type Survey. The child survey must be defined with Workflow Type - Child Survey and must be in published status.
  The child survey ID is defined in Connect Survey field.
• Date / Time / Date Time : This allows entering a date, time or a date and time as the answer respectively.

It is possible to suggest an answer for a particular question for questions of type Yes/No, Multi Choice, Open–ended and Numerical. If a question is not mandatory to answer, the Optional flag can be set on those questions.

Some questions can be triggered based on an answer given to a previous question. For such questions, questions of type Yes/No or Multi Choice can be given as the Qualifying Question with the Qualifying Answer.

To avoid user errors, the user can be forced to enter the same answer twice by selecting the Confirm Answer option. This option is available for Open-ended and Numerical type questions.

 It is possible to link an Input Mask for the questions of type Open-ended and Numerical. This forces the technician to enter the answer in the format that is defined in the mask. The input masks are defined in Survey Basic Data\Survey Input Masks page.

The questions are presented to the user according to the order given in the survey. The order of the questions can be changed using Move Up or Move Down buttons.

Once the survey is defined, it can be approved and published. If any modifications are needed, use the Replan button to make the required changes. Only published surveys can be used in a Workflow Configuration.

Integration with Workflow Configuration  

The Workflow type of surveys that can be connected to a Workflow Configuration is as follows.

Workflow Configuration Type	Workflow Type of the eForm
Person Resource	Person Resource / Resource Start Shift / Resource End Shift
New Or Additional Service Work/ New Or Additional Work	New Work / New Task
Object	Object Information
Work Task / Configured Work Task	Accept / Travel/Waiting at Location / Work Start / Cancel / Pause / Pending Completion / Completed-Before / Completed-After / Incomplete / Work Assignment Note : For Workflow Configuration Type Configured Work Task , only the surveys of workflow type Configured Workflow can be connected to an action in the Actions Flow tab. These must first be registered under eForms tab. It is possible to add multiple eForms for an action. Surveys connected to action EFORMS are listed in eForms page in mobile.

Survey answers

Survey Answers can be viewed in Mobile Maintenance\Maintenance Survey\Survey Answers page in IFS Cloud Web.

A Picture attached as an answer to a question can be viewed in the Attachment Panel on that question.

A thumbnail of a signature is displayed on the survey answer record. Use Show Signature option to view this signature.

If the same survey has been answered multiple times by the same person, each answer set is saved with a different Answer Set number.