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.
Input Mask : It is possible to link an Input Mask for the questions of type
Open-ended. 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. You can use the following
formats when defining Input Masks.
- % : Any Alphanumeric character
- _ (underscore) : Text
- # : Numbers
- Numbers 0 to 9 are considered as numbers. The same number is displayed in the Survey answer and cannot be
changed.
- Letters A to Z are considered as letters. The same letter is displayed in the Survey answer and cannot be
changed.
- Any character other than %, _ and # is considered as a symbol. The same character is displayed in the
Survey answer and cannot be changed.
Here are some examples of Input Masks.
- %_#
- AB%__##%10
- AB-%__##%25/VB-##
- 25%_%##%NC%24%##%10MN
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.