Electronic Service Signature Solutions? 22
LilJC asks: "I work at a company that does service work nationwide for a major chain. Our vendor requires a signature for every visit to every store. We have been running thus far from ICR on faxes and linking to the faxed signature image on our web site, but are having numerous problems trying to depend on a thousand+ faxes a month coming through perfectly. We are looking for an economical alternative that would allow a contractor in the field to get a signature and transmit it to us in an system I can idiot-proof. Something along the lines of the UPS guy's digital clipboard, but without the pricetag of a Telxon. Brainstorming myself, I wonder if there must be a cheap PDA/modem combo or the like that would allow a contractor to enter required visit information, get a store signature, go home, plug it into their phone line (without needing a computer), and hit send. I can code and am not afraid of doing some custom work for an app on a handheld. Does the Slashdot community know of any projects along these lines, or have ideas about a wise choice for hardware to homegrow the software on?"
Can you afford it? (Score:2)
a) lose un-uploaded PDA
b) have the battery run low
c) other catastropes...
If you can , then it is ia good idea. Make sure to GPL it, pleeez?
Re:Can you afford it? (Score:3, Interesting)
You can have the field contractors dial the server's fax number plus the order number, and the server would store it accordingly.
This would utilize already technology that is present everywhere (ie fax machine) and would not put any burden onto your field contractors (in regards to carrying/learning/purchasing new equipment/software
Re:Can you afford it? (Score:1)
90% might seem good for most applications, but when you've got say a 15% margin a
surprisingly easy to do. (Score:2)
Some basic thoughts (Score:1)
The things to evaluate your platform choice by (OS in general, specific device in particular) would seem to be cost, dependability, battery life, ease-of-development, etc., I suspect B&W Palm devices are going to hit it best with the possible exception of development. There are probably Palm-licenses that sell the hardware combo you need.
You really want to look at getting devices with some sort of wireless internet provider. Write your custom code to every so of
Simple... (Score:1)
Example: with a pocketPC based system, just log the data in a excell spreadsheet and save the sig as an image...
or
Code something yourself, the tools are free from MS, either vb or C...
And for the backup issues, just give them a media card that they can backup and make it mandatory that the card be removed in the program, once the data is updated, then one copy will be relativ
A possible solution... (Score:4, Insightful)
One possibility would be to issue each vendor and each employee that requires tracking a unique bar-code ID. Then a simple scan tool, one carried by the employee and one at the vendor could be used. The vendor could scan the employees ID and the employee could scan both the vendor and his own ID and that info could then be easily uploaded and visualized in a large number of ways. That would give you verification in both directions, as well as a timestamp of exactly when the employee visited.
Royal Linea (Score:3, Informative)
Visual Studios.Net and the compact framework (Score:1)
It would be an interesting project to try and get the application to use a (compact flash) modem such that the end-user just plugs it in. It's probably possible to automate the modem connection with the PocketPC SDK (then wrapped with com interop).
Anyway, neat project. If you need any help
Re:Visual Studios.Net and the compact framework (Score:1)
Security guard tags (Score:2)
Pick two: (Score:3, Insightful)
Pick two:
In other words: this may take a while.
My dumb suggestion... (Score:1)
Presumably there's something similar to the Sony Ericsson P800 available in the US.
That and a bit of custom software should do the trick. It'll be pricey to get someone else to write it, but if you're able, all the dev software you need is freely available.
If some of your customer's stores are out of mobile range, fallback to fax.
D.
Why go electronic? (Score:2)
Re:Why go electronic? (Score:2)
They are using faxes. But keeping track of 1000+ faxes and hoping that they all come through clearly is a problem.
Re:Why go electronic? (Score:3, Insightful)
Improving the fax backend would be infinitely cheaper and more reliable in the end than moving the problem to the field.
Custom solutions (Score:2)
Here's the idea:
Capture the pendown event, ie every time a styles hits a specific area of the screen
Record the x-y co-ordinates of the event
Record the co-ordinates to a file
Write a simple routine to redraw the co-ordinates at a later date
Simple, and yes I have used this technique numerous times, it is much better than the Handwriting API as it records the actual points and you can do co-ordinate doubling for a faster response to the pen down eve
We're doing this... (Score:2, Informative)
Anyway, point is, it can be done, and relatively easily.
Open Source J2ME + Palm solution (Score:1)
We captured signatures using J2ME and off-the-shelf Palm devices. We persisted the sigs as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics, an XML dialect -- http://www.svg.org/) in a local datastore. Later, we used a custom JSync Conduit to slurp the data off the devices and upload it to a waiting server during the HotSync process. The server (Tomcat -- http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat) ran Apache Batik (http://xml.apache.org/batik) to convert the SVG into JPEG for
very last post (Score:1)