Checklists: A Simple LIfesaver ✅
It seems surprising that a simple thing like a checklist has it’s own holiday, but October 30th is in fact National Checklist Day in the United States. 🎉 Boeing engineers introduced the checklist in response to a fatal B-17 crash in 1935, and it’s hard to imagine anyone who hasn’t used some version of a checklist at some point.
And for good reason: checklists have been shown in fields from aviation to medicine to increase quality and standardization, and to reduce mistakes — even to save lives in surgery.
With modern mobile technology like Magpi, we can take a step further with checklists and digitize them. This way we know that any worker — whether a solar panel installer, or a surgeon, or a mechanic — will always follow all the key steps in a process.
Increased quality and standardization, and reduced mistakes. Who doesn’t want that?
Pick a device, any device
Another great thing about going digital with Magpi is that your checklists can be deployed on basically any connected device. This is especially important in these days of work-from-home and/or bring-your-own-device:
use the Magpi mobile app on Android or iOS devices
use Magpi Chat in any browser on any phone, laptop, or desktop
use Magpi SMS using any mobile device’s SMS function
Sample digital solar installation checklist
Common Checklists: Installation and Inspection
Installation checklists make it much easier for installers of equipment like solar panels to make sure to follow all the steps required.
Inspection checklists make certain that every aspect of the inspection happens — or if not, that fact is recorded.
When you use Magpi to digitize your checklists, it means you can give them superpowers compared to old-fashioned paper versions. 🦸🏻♀️
You can make sure that each checkbox is addressed by making them required: Magpi won’t allow a form with required questions to be submitted without an answer.
You can ask an installer to take one or more photos of some part of the completed installation. Or have the inspector photograph some problem they’ve found with the equipment. Definitely worth a thousand words — and probably more if it helps your team understand the problem better.
One Step Beyond: Building workflows
Add images to your forms and checklists.
The examples above are really only some of the basic examples, and with just a little effort you can move way beyond them by creating automated workflows and integrations.
Some examples:
If an inspection form is submitted with any items marked as “fail”, automatically send a text message (or email) to a supervisor complete with specific information from the checklist
Add information collected from the field to your Salesforce setup
When an installation checklist is submitted with full passing marks, automatically notify the customer of the progress
You can Do this (and we can help)
All these examples are easy to put into action in Magpi, and with no programming at all: just some basic menu choices and point-and-click. You can do this!
And if you have too much on your plate to think about, our team of professionals is always standing by, ready to assist — or to set everything up for you and hand it over.