i have a friend who is a construction contractor, and one of the tasks they needed to do is inspection of a property, and take pictures of problematic areas with notes.
Currently, this is a manual process, paper driven with digital photos, and after wards, somebody back in the office would transcribe the hand written notes into an excel spreadsheet along with pics.
This process could be made easier with an automated app on the phone. I had thought about making such an app, but haven't yet.
I guess when you talk to someone, you naturally gravitate towards issues they have.
This is pretty much our bread and butter where I work. Our system lets you design the forms using rich widgets that let you take photos, sketch on them, record tolerance measurements, etc and we generate rich data dashboards and reports from it. The clients all work on mobile devices over poor, intermittent connections. Our users love it.
We work with a lot of clients in manufacturing and construction. Our system has a way to build and schedule regular inspections, notifications, etc. We're working on business process management and moving into regulated industries.
A friend of mine works in sewers for a big construction contractor. I want this company using our stuff so that his job is more safe. Right now they take readings from his sniffer and write them out onto a sheet in a log book and throw that data in the back of the van. It might be three months or so before someone enters that data into a spreadsheet. If there was an incident and my friend happens to not make it out of the hole that day -- he's just another statistic. I hope that by taking a reading with our software we can at least anticipate the environment he's diving into. His co-workers won't be able to scribble some non-sense on paper and throw it in the back of the van before he dives in -- they'll be accountable and people will be notified if they don't.
It's amazing how much our customers still use paper and spreadsheets despite having SAP, Oracle, SAS etc servicing them with solutions for that last couple of decades. Turns out having a small team that can move fast and listen to users on the ground floor is still a good strategy.
You shouldn't let the existence of a competitor stop you. The business model of Lyft/Gett/Juno is basically to carbon copy Uber and get piece of their pie. Just being a deliberate copycat isn't a terrible strategy. Trying to one-up something that already exists is also plausible, if not easier because their is already a trailblazer that has made the market and you can just piggyback. Facebook succeeded because of MySpace, not in spite of it.
That app is called Evernote / OneNote / Google Keep - incrementally improving their process using off the shelf software is likely to be more practical than a custom app.
Where is your contractor friend based? I am looking for a contractor, or some contacts, for a job now.
improving their process using off the shelf software is likely to be more practical than a custom app
That really depends on context. Very often something starts out sounding like "document with text and pictures" or "database with some tables in it and some forms for UI", making it an easy job with generic business software. However, often when you look at the details the actual requirements are more complicated and require some level of domain-specific functionality.
There are many applications that are aimed at a certain industry and provide some core function that seems quite generic but then some other more industry-specific functions on top. That certainly includes tracking, displaying and annotating specifications and inspection results in the construction industry, where there are multiple players in the market already.
Currently, this is a manual process, paper driven with digital photos, and after wards, somebody back in the office would transcribe the hand written notes into an excel spreadsheet along with pics.
This process could be made easier with an automated app on the phone. I had thought about making such an app, but haven't yet.
I guess when you talk to someone, you naturally gravitate towards issues they have.