Safety App Of Week

March 10, 2014 No Comments

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Below is this week’s “Safety App of the Week“.  Every Monday we publish an article that reviews and rates a new workplace safety app.  Our testing is done on Apple iPads and Samsung Galaxy Tab 3s.  We rate each app from ♥ to ♥♥♥♥♥ (♥♥♥♥♥ is the best).  Prior app of the week articles are archived here.

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“iAuditor – Safety Audit and Checklist”

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Official Description  

“Safety Inspections are fast and easy with iAuditor from SafetyCulture.   Used to conduct over 25,000 safety inspections per day in 80 countries, iAuditor is the world’s most popular Inspection Checklist App.

Build your own forms in seconds, or browse through iAuditor’s shared Public Library of over 20,000 inspection forms that users have shared and collaborated with to find ways of working smarter, and faster.  That’s now the world’s largest online repository of Safety Inspection Checklists.

Everyone from Government Agencies, Fire Departments and International Airlines right through to one-man tradespeople are working smarter and more efficiently with iAuditor.  More than just a checklist… Smart fields allow you to create actions for responses and build intelligence into your templates.

Here are some of the main features:

– Easy Template Creator
– Smart and Dynamic Fields
– Exporting in more than one report type at once
– Scoring
– Weighting
– Branching and nesting of sub-categories
– Drag and Drop editing interface (iPad only)
– Multiple sections within an audit
– Image annotation / mark-up options
– Tick boxes
– Custom responses
– Pin locking of templates
– Administrator controls to lock down cloud uploading
– Custom heading fields and email subject lines
– Default email address can be setup for all audits
– Export dual format csv & pdf option
– Time stamps and date stamps for sections “¹

Thumbs Up

• the app is free, but registration is required
• email completed checklists in the “PDF” format for free
• for a one time charge of only $8.99 you can modify library checklists and email completed checklists as “MS Word” documents
• they really do have a safety inspection checklist library of over 20,000 checklists – you won’t believe what you’ll find, my brother runs a state park in Minnesota & I found for him a safety inspection checklist from Yosemite National Park
• search the library and save all of the checklists you like 
• library search results are organized by rating, with the highest rated checklists shown first
• each checklist calculates the overall “score” of that audit
• checklists auto-fill the date
• put your checklists in their “safety cloud” so others at your company can use them too
• you can actually sign your name at the end of each checklist
• completed checklists look professional
• can be used off-line

 

Thumbs Down

• very complex app – the “user manual” is 77 pages – it will take you days to master this app
• we didn’t care for the “template editor” that is used for creating your own checklists from scratch 
• the library search engine is atrocious – most of the hits you get are totally unrelated to the subject you are searching for (e.g. our “knife” search turned up “truck” checklist  –  “office” search turned up “hydrostatic pressure testing” checklist  –  “table saw” search turned up “restaurant” checklist  –  “shear” search turned up “first aid kit” checklist)
• Android version has a slightly different name (“iAuditor – Safety Checklists“)  –  Android  app is:  hard to read with tiny fonts, painfully slow, locks up, difficult to navigate, and awful to work with  – we never did figure out how to email a completed checklist from the Android app  –  Android version is an inferior copy of the wonderful Apple version

Overall Rating

• iPad/iPhone – ♥♥♥♥♥
• Android – ♥♥♥
• The iPad/iPhone version is the best safety inspection checklist app we’ve seen to date

¹ Descriptions courtesy of  iTunes

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