We have a few more weeks until Christmas, but who doesn’t like an early stocking filler! Earlier this week we pushed out a new release with three wonderful features that many of you had requested: The ability to manage multiple teams, additional features for automatic inspection or audit compliance calculation, and laptop access for field technicians.

Managing multiple teams:

If your business is organized into different teams, you may want to give each team the autonomy to manage their own work orders and inspections. You may also want to control access across teams. As you grow larger, you may simply want to assign items to team leads, who can then manage their own day to day operations- while you still retain visibility and control of all operations. This is what our new feature, “Teams”,  enables.

In ReachOut, teams are a subset of people in your account. When you add a new user,  you can now mark them as a team lead. Head to the team sections to create a new team by choosing the team lead and adding field techs in the team. You can now assign inspection tasks and work orders to team leads, who can in turn assign them to their own team.
This feature may also be useful for those of you who may not be organized into multiple teams at present. For example: Adding your sub-contracted staff to another team can provide a separation for easy management of contract staff by a different supervisor, Staff executing AMC inspections can be managed separately from technicians executing jobs and work orders, Staff with different skillsets or serving different areas could be managed separately by different team leaders.

Inspection baselines: Weighted compliance

When we first released the Inspections feature, you could add a baseline to a form. The baseline for a form determined the compliance percentage for each inspection conducted using that form. While creating a baseline, you could indicate whether a specific option was counted as compliant or non-compliant.
With this release, we are taking this a step further. Not only can you indicate whether an option is compliant or non-compliant, you can also provide the degree of compliance. For e.g.  Your Supplier compliance questionnaires may include questions like “ Does the supplier regularly execute audits for their own suppliers and vendors?” with options like:

1. Yes, all suppliers and vendors are audited

2. Yes, most suppliers and vendors are audited

3. Only key suppliers and vendors are audited, most aren't

4. Some suppliers and vendors are audited, but a few key suppliers are not.

5. No audits are performed

Option 1 indicates that the supplier is compliant while option 5 is clearly non-compliance. However options 2, 3 and 4 indicate varying degrees of compliance.

• Option 1 - 100%

• Option 2  - 75%

• Option 3 - 50%

• Option 4 - 25%

• Option 5 - 0%

These can now be added to ReachOut.

If you use a points based system, these can easily be converted to percentages and used in the new Baseline tool. Happy inspecting!

Web access for field technicians

A few of you wanted the ability to complete inspections on your laptops, instead of having to use a an Android or iOS smartphone. Well, with this release, you can work with both inspections and work orders from your laptops. You don’t need to download and install any new software. Simply access reachoutsuite.com and access the “Go to my App” button on the top right. You can use the same username and password ( which you use for your smartphone app) to log in to the web application. Inspections and Work orders can now be executed from your browser! This feature works on all modern browsers, including the latest versions of Chrome, Safari and Edge (Windows 10).
If you have already subscribed to ReachOut will receive this upgrade at no additional cost!
What’s next?
We are planning to release some exciting upgrades to the work orders /jobs feature. These include upgrades to both the web application and the mobile application. That’s right! More goodies coming your way before Christmas 🙂