Big Inspection Updates
In the spirit of Christmas, and a farewell to 2020, we’ve decided to launch some exciting new updates to PASS Tools. Many of these changes are behind the scenes updates meant to improve performance but there are a few significant changes we wanted to make you aware of before they show up.
Inspection Flow Updates and Improvements
A lot of the focus of this update has been on areas that effect performing and managing inspections, so let’s take a look at what’s happening.
Navigation One area of the inspection flow that we’ll be updating is the navigation. Before the main way inspections were navigated was by a pop-up modal window, that was organized in a “Section > Equipment > Pages” hierarchy. While this structure made sense in theory, it could also be confusing and off-putting to new users.
With that in mind we’ve changed the navigation to a simple dropdown field that’s located at the top of every page. It’s still ordered in the same hierarchy but is more clearly laid out, making it easier to jump to exactly where you want to go. We’ve also added back the “Backward” and “Forward” buttons 🎉
User Interface
We’ve also added some UI elements to help indicate your progress including a progress bar, completion icons in the navigation, and easier ways to document and resolve action items during an inspection.
Data Collection
We’ve improved and expanded our ability to defining testing thresholds and collect readings/measurements of them. We can now define thresholds that require the reading to be:
Equal to
Less than
Greater than
Within a range
Outside of range
The types of data that can be collected and evaluated as a reading include:
Integers
Decimal/floating point numbers
Dates
Thresholds can be defined on a per-equipment/component basis as well as defined as a constant value.
Equipment Management
Equipment can be comprised of one or many components, and when applicable equipment can have multiples of the same components. This isn’t much of a departure from the way the system worked previously, we’ve just more clearly defined this relationship and now also allow for components to be retired when necessary.
Facility Metadata
PASS Tools has always allowed us to define and collect custom metadata about facilities, but with this update we can now use that metadata to dynamically drive inspection content and generate action items!
Scheduled Release & Downtime
All of these updates are expected to be deployed on the weekend after Christmas, but given the significance of some of the changes it may require some downtime. With that in mind we expect PASS Tools to be unavailable for most of the day Friday, December 25th, Christmas Day, as well as a significant portion of the following day, Saturday, December 26th.
For a more details on the exact timing and length of this downtime you can subscribe to status updates on our status site.