Major concepts, strategies and workflows

To get the most out of Rebel, first you'll want to understand the major concepts and workflows.

First, create an inspection template in the app designer. A template defines the various parts of future inspection documents.

Next, build an inspection document from a template in the document builder. Every time a technician conducts an inspection, that’s one document. You can create any number of documents from a single template. You can duplicate template sections any number of times within the document. For example, you might have a template for smoke alarm inspections that defines one section for Type A smoke alarms and another section for Type B. Then when you create a document for Building One you would duplicate the Type A template section for every Type A smoke alarm in that building, and the same for Type B.

Then conduct an inspection on-site on your phone or tablet.

Once your inspection is done, you’ll want to produce a report from it. A report is a PDF file suitable for sending to your client.

Before you can produce a report, you need to design it in the report designer. However, the report designer is currently in testing and isn’t available yet, so we’ll do this step for you. We expect that the designer will be available at the end of 2019.

Document management

Documents are arranged in folders. Every folder belongs to exactly one client. And this obviously means that every document belongs to one client; but a template is not specific to any client.

How you arrange your templates and documents is up to you, and it depends on how your business works. The key relationships are these: you create any number of documents from a template, and you produce any number of reports from a document. So start by considering what reports you want.

For example, do you want a single report covering all assets in a single building? If so, you’ll need a single template.

Or maybe you want one report for all smoke alarms across all buildings in a site, and a separate report for all fire doors? In that case you have a choice: you can create a single template and produce two different reports from it, or you can create two templates. The difference is in how your technicians will work. Do you want one technician to see only smoke alarms in his document, and another technician to see only fire doors? Or do you want them both to cooperate on the same document, one filling in the smoke alarm parts and the other filling in the fire door parts?

You can use the same template for different buildings for different clients, or you can create separate templates. For example, if all your clients’ smoke alarm inspections follow the same checklist then you only need a single template for smoke alarms. But if you have two smoke alarm types then you may need two templates. Alternatively you can create a single template that covers both smoke alarm types, and then when you create a document for a specific building from the template you can delete the parts you don’t need for this building.

This will all become clearer after you’ve played with the system for a short while.

Reports

Note that you can produce many different reports from a single document. That is, after your technician conducts an inspection, you can produce separate reports based on it. For example, a smoke alarm report and a separate fire door report. Or a formal compliance report for your customer, a detailed defect report for your service team, and a high-level overview report for management team.