Hi
I am Ali Iqbal, an Electronics Engineer by education, from Pakistan. I work for a Solar Energy Solution provider company. We undertake public sector projects and install Solar Energy Systems in Buildings, Solar Street Lights and Solar Water Pumping Machinery. For our work on sites, we used to:
- Use paper forms to fill data in on site.
- Physically send in those forms to the head office
- A data entry guy would fill in the excel sheet
- Take pictures from mobile phones on site
- Send in those pictures via google drive or whatsapp
- transfer those pictures to computer and make a folder for that particular site
- Make Pdf reports using that excel sheet and the relevant pictures.
Managing all that was fine when the workload and our manpower numbers were low and our operations weren't that extensive. I was expecting need for offline data collection in the company i work for a couple of years ago. I inquired about a software developer to make a system in house and did a survey of available commercial applications. A friend recommended ODK. At the time my skill set wasn't up to the mark to understand what how ODK worked as i am not a software engineer.
A couple of years down the road, in the present, the push for Solar Energy System installations has surged owing to increased public spending by the Government here. We have received projects that requires installation of these systems in thousands of establishments throughout the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. To manage data collection (site surveys and final installation reports) from far flung remote areas by our site engineers, I have been successfully using ODK central server deployed on a digital ocean instance. The easy to use API allowed me to write scripts that selectively downloads media from the server for further processing.
The headache of managing data has been reduced and our staff can focus of the installations while the data sorting and reporting gets taken care of digitally. ODK has allowed us to streamline our data collection process and automate site reports generation for our clients for which i am really thankful for this community.
Since this is the first project in which we've been using ODK, I have noticed a few shortcomings that would be great if addressed.
- Sometimes a form is incorrectly filled and submitted. It'd be great if an option of editing/deleting submissions was available from the API as managing that on the downloaded data is a hassle.
- A few of our field staff use iPhones (Second hand iPhones are as affordable as low end android phones here). An ODK collect like app for ios that works with central will be great.
I intend to learn the ODK system further for my software development journey and help with my work here.
Best Wishes to all those involved in this amazing project that has impacted us so positively.
Ali