Great news! Today we’re announcing a new file attachment feature that will save inspectors, data collectors, and administrators a ton of work when they need to manage document-based information. Documents are now just another data type: You can add them to any section of your Fulcrum app.
If your inspectors or data collectors need to keep track of documents related to an inspection, they can now attach those documents to an inspection record just like they would collect photos, video, audio, or signatures. Bills of materials, permits, schematics, and diagrams can be attached in PDF, Microsoft Word™, Excel™ or proprietary file formats to ensure that all related materials are in the same place as the inspection data, auditable, and available to everyone who needs them.
Better than paper or separately managing digital documents
This long-awaited feature will save a huge amount of time compared to paper documents, on one hand, and electronic documents that you’d manage outside of Fulcrum – say, capturing and storing them independently on a mobile device, and connecting the dots later between those independently managed documents and Fulcrum records – on the other.
Attachments add no bulk for inspectors to carry and have none of the potential issues with person-to-person contact or physical document handling that paper has.
Attachments synchronize automatically to the cloud storage for easy sharing. Independently managed electronic documents, on the other hand, need to be sent by someone to an accessible place (such as Dropbox or Sharepoint) and shared by providing URLs to the people who need them.
And attachments prevent awkward workarounds, like taking lots of photos or screen captures of a multi-page document.
In short, Fulcrum record-level attachments cut process complexity and dramatically improve auditability when documents are part of your inspection or data collection process.
Continuing Fulcrum improvements
This new feature comes hot on the heels of our release of Reference Files, which puts important reference materials into the hands of inspectors, without paper and even when there’s no data connection. Reference Files improve the consistency and quality of safety, quality, and other critical field inspections.
Available now!
Best of all, attachments are available right now, on all plans. To get started, open an app in the App Builder, drag the File Attachments field type onto your canvas, and hit save. Once your mobile users sync their devices, they’ll see the new field and will be able to start collecting documents right away. (Caveat: They might need to update to the latest version of the mobile app in their mobile device’s app store first.)
If you want more details, check out the help documentation or the API reference.
And if you’re not yet a Fulcrum customer, you can get started with a 30-day free trial to see why our customers rely on us for features that streamline mobile inspections, provide intelligent automation of workflows, and deliver unique data-driven insights for inspection, field operations, and other mobile teams.