Notes tagged
field
12 notes on field. All notes.
Why a lorry surprises the gate
The office knows a load is coming and the man at the barrier does not. What the gate needs before a vehicle arrives, and what goes wrong when it has nothing.
The site visit is the whole funnel
Almost nothing sells without a visit, so every stage before it exists to produce one and every stage after depends on what was recorded during it.
How to test a "works offline" claim in ten minutes
Every vendor says the app works offline, and the word means four different things. A cheap phone in flight mode settles it faster than any meeting.
One WhatsApp number, or one per person
Behind every WhatsApp integration is one decision nobody raises in the meeting: does the message come from the company, or from a person who knows them.
What a site engineer should record, and what they should not
The site engineer witnesses most of what happens on a project. Here is what of that must survive in writing, and what should never enter the record.
A gate register somebody will actually keep
The gate is the only place every lorry passes. Most gate registers fail for design reasons, not discipline ones — they were built for a desk, not a barrier.
WhatsApp is the interface, whether you designed for it or not
On Indian construction sites the real reporting system is a group chat. Fighting that costs years; reading it properly takes a few weeks and works immediately.
Attendance on a site with no signal
An attendance system that needs a network will be wrong on exactly the days it matters. Queueing punches is easy; the rules that keep the data honest are not.
A site photograph is a record, if anything reads it
Thousands of site photographs are taken every month and almost none become records. The bottleneck is not capture. It is that nothing ever looks at them.
The voice note is the report
A site engineer sends a voice note because his hands are dusty and the screen is in the sun. For years ours were stored as blobs that nobody ever opened.
Offline-first is a data decision, not a network one
Queueing requests is the easy part. Offline changes what a record means, because it was created by a device nobody was watching, at a time nobody can verify.
Name it what the site already calls it
Our software recognised a delivery photo only if the caption said one of four words. Against four hundred real captions, those four words matched exactly two.