Field safety assessments moved onto offline iPads

The Challenge

The client's inspectors needed to assess welding sets and oxygen and fuel-gas equipment at customer sites, often with no reliable signal, against a large, branching rule set tied to Australian Standards. Their browser-based web application stopped working wherever the signal dropped.

Our Approach

An offline iPad app that holds the whole assessment on the device: every question, branching path, hazard and control measure. Answers are saved as they're entered, so a crash or a flat battery loses nothing. Photos upload first, and a failed send waits in a queue and retries on its own when signal returns, with no duplicate assessments. When an assessment is sent, the backend produces the finished report and emails it to the customer. The Job Safety Analysis is signed and turned into a PDF on the iPad itself, offline, ready to show or AirDrop on site.

Underneath: a cloud database of customer sites, their QR-coded equipment, assessments and users; a question bank that updates over the air while each job stays on the version it started with; a short-lived, add-only photo upload permission for each iPad; and 152 automated tests before every release.

The Results

The client's inspectors can run a complete safety assessment on the iPad even with no connection: 304 questions covering 9 equipment types across 13 assessment sections (ARC, MIG, TIG and plasma welders, plus oxygen-fuel, reticulated gas and regulators), drawing on 556 hazard definitions and 1,581 control measures. Every "No" answer opens a risk assessment on a 5x5 likelihood-and-consequence matrix. The hazard content cites 11 Australian Standards, including AS 4839 and AS 4332, plus the Australian Dangerous Goods Code. Once an assessment is finished and sent, the report typically lands in the customer's inbox in under a minute, with the hazard photos taken on the iPad inside it.