Here’s what happens:
We’re a water utility, so all of our stuff is burried.
We provide the crew with a set of drawings. Since most of what we do is
repair, we try to locate old lines, other utilities, etc. as best as we
can. However, few utilities kept accurate records early on, so we often
do not know exactly what is in the ground.
The crew goes out into the field and starts digging and laying pipe. They
have to close up the excavation at the end of every day (we can’t keep
open holes in public streets overnight).
Very often the crew finds that the conditions differ from the drawings.
They keep pretty good notes but without pictures it’s hard to figure out
what they did where. So they take pictures.
When the project is done, we have to reconcile the materials inventory and
correct our drawings for the as-built conditions.
The tech who does that work starts with our engineering drawings and the
crew field notes. He would like to refer to the pictures when he has a
question. However, the pictures are all similar; a guy with a shovel
standing in a hole that has a pipe at the bottom. Without some commentary
it’s hard to pick the right picture for the aa-built condition we’re
trying to verify.
Often the as-built conditions can be difficult to tell apart without a
picture; we know the crew used an 11 degree bend and a 22 degree bend, but
in which order? how far apart? A picture can tell us those things.
We’d like to be able to go through the pictures and read the comments
quickly.On Tue, June 14, 2011 10:59 am, Kenneth Crocker wrote:
Yan,
What is that “one image” you want to see? How do you find it now? If there
is any way you can distinguish it from a list of stuff, then we can do
that
with code.
Kenn
LBNL
On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 10:32 AM, Yan Seiner yan@seiner.com wrote:
Right now we send each crew a ticket “stub”, essentially an empty
comment
to the ticket they’re working on. They then reply to that stub over and
over with pictures. We found that makes it easy on the field guys and
RT
keeps everything organized.
The problem is that we’re getting lots of pics - sometimes 5 or 10 a day
every day for a 3 week job. There’s no consistent naming scheme we can
enforce. These are construction guys. They want to point, click, send.
Thus the need on the office end for thumbnails.
I know we’re taking RT in a direction that’s not typical, but the
construction industry doesn’t really have an effective affordable
project
management tool and RT is a natural near-drop-in solution. The
construction PM tools that are out there are expensive and klunky.
On Tue, June 14, 2011 10:19 am, Kenneth Crocker wrote:
Yan,
Any correspondence to RT can have an attachment, so it doesn’t have to
be
a
comment and it will still be in your history. As to the pics, if there
is
a
way to label/title/name each pic in a manner that would enable easy
identification might work, as you can see the name of the attachment
in
the
Display page of a ticket.
Kenn
LBNL
On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 6:01 AM, Yan Seiner yan@seiner.com wrote:
We have field crews that send pictures into RT tickets from job
sites.
This is a great help as we get instant notification of issues and
also
for
as-builts. Typically the crews will send a picture and a text
description
of image as a comment to the ticket. As the crews send us more and
more
pictures, we’re finding that it’s hard to find that one image we need
quickly.
We’re looking for an enhancement to RT that would create a thumbnail
gallery from the image/jpeg attachments and display the comment text
on
mouseover. The thumbnail gallery would be displayed as part of the
ticket.
Anyone have any idea if something like this has been done?
A simpler solution but not as desirable would be to create a
thumbnail
of
jpegs in the history or in the attachment list.
–
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