White papers field works monitoring

SmartCity--‐311
Field Works Monitoring / Inspection System for Government.
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A Complete Cloud base CRM & Mobile Application Suite for Field Work
Monitoring / Inspection System for Government

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Table of Content
Content ...................................................................................................................................2
The Current Scenario..........................................................................................................3
What is SmartCity311? ...................................................................................................4
Types of Inspections covered in SmartCity311........................................................6
Comprehensive Inspection:....................................................................................................................6
Partial / routine Inspection....................................................................................................................6
Type of Data captured while conducting a Field Inspection ...................................7
Date & Time of Inspection .....................................................................................................................7
Photos & (digital media) of Inspection ................................................................................................7
User Details / Credentials ......................................................................................................................8
GPS Location ............................................................................................................................................8
Categories / Work--‐type .......................................................................................................................10
Report ID ................................................................................................................................................10
Comments/ Remarks/ Feedbacks .......................................................................................................11
Additional Features of SmartCity311........................................................................13
Email Field Inspection Report..............................................................................................................12
GPS Driving Route.................................................................................................................................12
Viewed by...............................................................................................................................................13
Bookmarking a Field Inspection Report.............................................................................................14
Filtering, Sorting, and summarizing field inspection reports..........................................................14
Map view................................................................................................................................................15
GIS Integration with SmartCity311............................................................................16
Online / Offline mode supported by SmartCity311...............................................17

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The Current Scenario
Municipal operations, Private Sector are distributed around the city. Cities & Towns
spend a lot of time and resources developing help lines and community
management systems as their operations are distributed around the City/ Town.
In addition, these Municipal services are rendered through various field offices or
Civic centers, which are spread across various geographical locations, while the
basic services are provided for underground utilities like Water, Sewage & etc.
For efficient service delivery and better project implementation it is required that
the senior management ensures that the employees / field officers are present at
the right place and at the right time.
Traditional methods of record keeping / Paper Form’s/ unorganized & un-‐‐
linked excel sheets are not sufficient for the fast paced governance as expected by
the citizens of India.
With the advent of smartphones and various messaging apps like “Whatsapp” the
government employees started using new technology, to communicate to the higher
ups.

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What is SmartCity311?
Apps like “Whatsapp” are good for information exchange but they do not provide
flexibility, archiving, centralized storage and customization, which is required for
bringing it in to the main stream of administration process.
More over, every smartphone these days has a built in GPS System and a camera.
That’s how SmartCity‐‐311 was created, which has an as easy to use
“Whatsapp,” where sensors like GPS, Camera & Internet together report the location,
picture & category from the field. SmartCity‐‐311enables reverse Geo-‐‐fencing at two
levels
a) At Zonal & ward Level (this is as per voting wards / zones)
b) Geo-‐‐fencing for work type / Categories (for eg. water supply department can
have a separate ward boundary while drainage / Sewage department can
have there own different ward/ Geo-‐‐boundary)
All the field reports are automatically tagged to a particular Zone, Ward or Boundary
area while officers using the application do not have to worry about entering the
ward, zone, address etc.
The good thing about SmartCity‐‐311app is its robust backend cloud based system
which is hosted on Amazon Cloud (AWS).
All the data coming from the field is sorted and stored on central database
accordingly, providing a real time snap shot of the activities happening on the field
to the higher management.
SmartCity‐‐311is built based on a very unique workflow in mind which is a
complete mobile and cloud based Field Work Monitoring System. This system is
stable and widely used by several municipal corporations & several government
departments to monitor and track their field related activities in real time.
The purpose of SmartCity‐‐311 solution is to enable the officials to regulate
and ensure compliance, perform Inspection and enforce all their field related
activities.
As on date, all the field activities of the department are still mostly managed and
processed manually by the fieldworkers & the field officers, across different

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government departments. Hence there are delays in compiling the reports at state
level and the chances of duplication in the processing of data increases, which
sometimes gets processed in multiple offices.
There is a high demand from the Government to digitalize their day-‐‐to-‐‐day work as,
due to the lack of the availability of resources, there are high chances of delays &
mistakes. Also there is no real time information as to where the entire staff / field
officers are located on a given working day. Due to these reasons, at SmartCity‐‐311,
we have developed a very unique mobile & cloud based software solution.
SmartCity‐‐311enables the Municipal offices to regulate the monitoring mechanism
through Smartphone devices and modern web-‐‐browsers on Desktop computers.

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Types of Inspections covered in SmartCity311
The purpose of field inspection is to determine whether facilities or sites that are
inspected are meeting their obligations & to see whether the field officers are
actually present on the site that they are suppose to be on. With these measures, the
duplication of work can be avoided and all the necessary data can be captured on
site, using mobile devices. Digital forms need to be provided to the field officers to
assist them in ensuring that there is a uniform process for conducting inspections
performed to meet the department’s responsibilities, for providing information and
technical assistance to other stakeholders, conciliation and persuasion and
achieving regulatory compliance.
Inspection reports are either programmed (requires forms, legal compliances etc)
or un-‐‐programmed (ad-‐‐hoc inspections, field visits.) Any inspection falls into one of
the two categories, depending on the scope of the inspection:
Comprehensive Inspection:
A substantially complete inspection of sites looks like one of the following:
construction permit site visit, road paving, laying of drainage/ water line,
engineering, inspections of potentially high hazard areas of a establishment
etc.
Partial / routine Inspection:
An inspection whose focus is limited for an officer to being present on site so
that he can ensure that the work is carried out as instructed, to a certain
potential area or work type (eg. cleaning of roads, cleaning of public toilets),
operations (eg. checking of all grocery stores located around schools
whether they are selling tobacco products etc), Flying Squad duty,
conditions or practices. A partial inspection report may be a regular field
duty expanded based on information gathered by the officer during the
inspection process. Such inspections are also called ‘walk-‐‐around inspection.’

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Type of Data captured while conducting a Field Inspection
Date & Time of Inspection:
Municipal officers, Private Sector Executive working across various
departments have different working hours and at times even one single
department have different working hours, no matter what timings are
assigned for the duty. Smartcity-‐‐311 can be configured to capture real time
date & time of Inspections and map it with the duty slot automatically.
While SmartCity‐‐311 works both in Online & offline mode we capture
the date & time on the smartphone, while we also storing the date & time of
data saved on server database. This helps us to keep track of any falsified
reports and exceptions.
Photos (digital media) of Inspection:
A photo speaks louder than words. In SmartCity‐‐311’s field
inspection module, we allow officers to capture one or more photographs or
videos, which becomes a visual proof of the inspection done and it also
provides additional information about the task completed on the given site.
In the most recent updates, we added 2 extra features:
(i) "Draw," which is commonly known as redlining a picture, gives you
the ability to draw a line, a circle or an arrow easily, just by using your
finger as pen you can draw & highlight areas on the pictures. We have
added many draw tools such as different types of brushes/ pen sizes,
erasers, color picker etc.
(ii) "Zoom" is a feature that helps the inspectors, while taking a photo of
an inspection site. Sometimes you are standing at a potion which does
not allow you to capture the actual details about the site or there may
be a big obstacle in between that you cannot cross over to get near to
that site for which you want to take the picture. The Zoom feature

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allows you to click a clear enough picture even by standing at a certain
distance from the object.
User Details / Credentials:
Based on the users logged on SmartCity‐‐311, the system automatically
tags officers’ information to the inspection report, such as his first and last
name, department, designation, telephone number / cell phone number,
Ward, Zone etc. Incase if an officer is promoted or transferred to a different
department or assigned a different role all the new field reports filled by that
officers can adopt the new changes while not affecting his previously filled
reports.
Since SmartCity‐‐311 offers a flexible permission based reporting system,
implementing a hierarchy reporting is easy to implement, based on the
credentials such as Area/District Office, the officer he reports to, Assistant
Area Director, Legal name of the establishment an officer is associated with,
the address including City, State and County; that needs to be printed on
reports.
GPS Location:
One of the key elements that SmartCity‐‐311 captures apart from visual
confirmation like photograph / media is the GPS location (latitude and
longitude) where the inspection is carried out; thus ensuring that inspections
were done on-‐‐site and are not falsified.
GPS tag inspection reports ensures smart reporting, also known as Geo-‐‐
spatial reports (meaning: denoting data that is associated with a particular
location,) or Geo-‐‐enabled reports or location enabled reporting system. GPS
coordinates captured along with the field inspection reports enables us to
generate meaningful & very powerful visual map reports in both formats i.e.
Latitude/Longitude and Decimal degrees (Lat Long / DMS) over Google earth
applications.
Since the GPS data stored in our system is a subset of Open GIS standard, it
also enables SmartCity‐‐311 to generate reports that calculate (a)
Distance

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between 2 points (Euclidean geometry) is good example or use case of such
inspection is the Road Checking / paving work inspection, (b) Determine if
the point is inside a polygon, a good use case of this is finding the Ward/
Zone /boundary of a given GPS location, with the use of latest database
technology like object shapes rather than the Minimum Bounding Rectangle
(MBR.) We also calculate spatial relationships for field inspections.
Since all modern Cellular-‐‐enabled Smartphones and tablets (Android & iOS)
include an integrated GPS chip-‐‐sets which support GNSS (Global Navigation
Satellite System) simplifies the GPS capturing process along with Field
Inspection. No difficult setup or additional hardware configuration required.
Inside SmartCity‐‐311we have made it so easy to empower you with modern
GPS technology.
Use of GPS data as part of Field Reports; provide access to:
a. Using Geo-‐‐spatial data – Once the data is captured accurately, it can be
used many times. A good use case is Manhole Inspector reports;
imagine if you have captured all the field inspection related data as
the Manhole Inspector, for this year, before it rains, the same data can
be used next year to smartly come up with a proper plan and
deployment of proper resources.
b. Connected workforce – Field officers in any Department keep
changing; either they are promoted or transferred and hence at times
there are new people taking the job of field inspection. The Smartcity-‐‐
311 app would make it easy for the new joinee to learn everything
that has already been done in the concerned case and would help him
in continuing the inspection/reporting forward. A good use case is
giving location data to a new health officer about all the public toilets
that needs regular inspection in his ward/ zone.
c. Efficient workflows – A good example of efficient workflow is field
based assets tracking. Lets say 2 different field officers from the
engineering department have filled their own Road Paving inspection
report from 2 different wards, based on that information the
engineering department can now track the locations of its field assets
(like paving machinery etc.) and deploy / monitor next assignments of
the same machinery.

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Categories / Work-type:
Think of SmartCity‐‐311 as a smart filling system. Instead of organizing and
stacking paper and placing them in organized folder,
SmartCity‐‐311automatically stacks and organizes field inspection reports in
appropriate folders. This is done by selecting an item from a Category list
while filling a field inspection report. Below is the list of examples of such
primary and secondary categories that you can define via the
SmartCity‐‐311’s web-‐‐based CRM:
Primary Secondary Categories (Sub-Category)
Engineering Water, Sewer, Road, Footpath, Steel Furniture
Health Mosquito Control, Public Health, Food Adulteration
Conservancy Public Toilet, Solid Waste
Electricity No Current/Supply, Street Light Not Working, Voltage
Fluctuation, CCTV Not Working
You can also define Task Specific Categories; like the most recent "Swine Flu
inspections" using the backend system that has time-‐‐bound visibility because
the inspections are carried out within the season.
The best use of these categories is that it allows you to navigate, sort and re-‐‐
order work based on the category you are looking for. You can also set filter
to Primary category and generate reports for all the secondary categories or
you can set filter to only the Secondary category. Reports can also be
generated based on Date range with breakout by request category and sub-‐‐
category.
In the upcoming version, we are planning to add the ability for admin to add
customized secondary questions for each category, which means if you need
to capture more specific data for a particular category, it will also be possible.
A simple use case for Heath Category -‐‐> Mosquito Control with this new
secondary question feature in place you can also add questions like "Fogging
Done (Yes/No)” and "Inspected Water Storage Areas (Yes/No)" etc. This new
feature can also come very handy when you want to implement Custom

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service-‐‐level agreements (SLA) or steps one needs to perform during field
inspection.
Inside SmartCity‐‐311 we allow admins to define primary and
Secondary categories via the web based CRM module, then all these
categories and category codes are dynamically cached and updated on
mobile devices so you don't have to query the server API over and over
again. Hence, it saves a lot of bandwidth and time required to generate a field
report, in other words we make these categories available to users offline by
downloading them once and storing them in the local memory of the
smartphone. Each time an officer launches the SmartCity‐‐311 mobile
application and if the device has internet connectivity it will send a small
query request to the server to see if any new categories were added or
updated. If any changes have been done on the server, then the local list of
categories gets automatically updated.
Report ID:
All the field Inspection reports that are generated via
SmartCity‐‐311application are assigned a unique ID which is a 12-‐‐byte
BSON type. To ensure they are not falsified the Id is constructed using:
• a 4-‐‐byte value, representing the seconds since the Unix epoch
• a 3-‐‐byte machine identifier
• a 2-‐‐byte process id
• a 3-‐‐byte counter, starting with a random value
an example of Report ID is something like this:
• 4cdfb11e1f3c000000007822 or
• 507f191e810c19729de860ea
Comments/ Remarks/ Feedbacks:
Quick and to the point communication is the key to success in any system.
Taking the example of Facebook or Twitter, which are successful social
networking applications, the ability for a person to comment or provide
feedback on a post is user engagement.

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Inspired from the above examples, we have attempted to enable the officers
to comment on their own post, which can be on any ongoing project. The
senior officers can also keep track of the progress by constantly checking this
post and commenting, if necessary. When another officer makes a comment
to the post a notification alert is also sent to all the stakeholders of that
particular inspection report, so that the officer can tap on the notification and
he/she gets taken straight to that report.
All the comments can be easily feed in and maintained with the inspection
report. Inspection Data, Inspection site photo, location details and comments
are also listed in the inspector’s log and are displayed in the Inspection
report / PDF, as generated by system.
With the ability to take multiple pictures along with adding comments, we
have made our comment / feedback mechanism smarter, hence we call it
Smart Comments.
All the comments and pictures associated with an inspection report are also
included as the content in the email report generated. This comes very handy
if a higher authority needs to give approval or digitally sign an inspection
report. All they do is to provide an approval comment.
On the listing screen of field reports, we display all the inspection reports
vertically. For a field inspection report that has comments inside the report,
we visually indicate the same with a small Chat like Icon to make it easy for
the user to know if there is a comment on any of his reports.

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Additional Features of SmartCity311
Below are additional features that available inside Field Inspection reports:
Email Field Inspection Report:
Since most of the reporting is done in field over smartphone, emailing field
reports is a very handy features of SmartCity‐‐311. We implemented it in
a simple way and all you need to do is click a button, our system generates a
detailed field inspection report as a PDF and emails you on your desired
email address.
Cities like Ahmedabad have now brought the field inspection report to their
mainstream process of approval of bills. What this means is that each invoice
/ bill submitted by the engineering department, for payments have to be
attached with Field Inspection reports generated from
SmartCity‐‐311application. With this system now in place there is evidence
that no invoices submitted have been manipulated with and that the officer
responsible for the work has inspected the site and is also responsible &
accountable. As the payment of invoices is now tied up with the inspection
report, all the inspections are carried out in timely and authoritative manner,
ensuring proper audit is also conducted during inspections.
These inspection reports have also made their way to be a part of the Legal
evidence; Whenever there is a reasonable need for records, documents,
testimony and/or other supporting evidence as a part of investigation of any
matter or ill-‐‐legal activity, these field inspection reports ensures that all the
information is captured in unique and standard formats.
In the backend System, the admin can also track how many emails each field
officers have requested providing you with analytics which allow you to test,
optimize and measure as what data each officers think is important to them.
GPS Driving Route:
Finding and reaching the exact spot of report, where earlier inspection was
carried out sometimes is big challenge. Imagine your colleague Mr. X had

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filed a Public Toilet Inspection report a month back and now because he is on
leave you are replacing him and you are assigned to perform the inspection.
Since Urban and slum areas are so densely populated its very challenging to
drive / sprawl to the exact location. Inside the Android app of
SmartCity‐‐311the GPS data of the inspection, done by your colleague has
been saved and using that it is easy for you to find that place and get the
inspection going.
While viewing any of the old / existing field report data we added a small
icon with "car" over the map that we display. Thanks to the Google Maps API
and the smartphone technology that we can provide you with routes to
navigate to the pinned landscape. Routes & directions are established upon
the inspector’s current location and travelpreference.
This also includes providing turn-‐‐by-‐‐turn driving directions from your
current location to the target location. It automatically recalculates route
when you make wrong turns or change course, it can offers walking and
public transit directions in addition to driving directions as its natively
available on android devices.
Viewed by:
Field Officers who take the time to report every field reports and see that the
work is noticed by the senior officers are likely to get more engaged in their
job. It's called a self-‐‐reinforcing loop. Its a psychological human behavior
which makes people happy and the entire system benefits from that.
The way "Viewed By" feature works in SmartCity‐‐311is designed to increase
the user engagement. To explain it in simple words, let me give you an
example; lets Say Mr. A is Assist. Engineer at a Municipal corporation and Mr.
B is the Commissioner. Mr. A creates and submits a field inspection report
which Mr. B views on his device. SmartCity‐‐311sends a notification to Mr. A
that Mr. B has just viewed his report and can also see his comments, if any.
During the surveys we conducted with several officers in different
municipalities, we found that the common complaint they did was for their
work to never get noticed or appreciated by the seniors. However, after the
introduction of the “Viewed By” feature, these field officers feel that their

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work has been noticed and appreciated. This has increased accountability at
both ends.
Bookmarking a Field Inspection Report:
Sometimes, it just seems like there are not enough hours in a day to get all
your work done. This can especially seem true when you have many field
officers filling in field reports, where one needs more details about a
particular report Or sometimes you want to tag a particular report so that
you can talk about it during your one-‐‐to-‐‐one meeting, just to follow-‐‐up etc.
Thankfully, there’s is an easy way to do so using SmartCity‐‐311 as this
app allows one to “Bookmark” any report that may need to be referred to
later on. One tap and you are good to go.
For example, if you find yourself pulling the same engineering reports that’s
not done as per expectations, just click and bookmark the report. Within your
"My Stuff" section of SmartCity‐‐311, you will find a list of all
such Bookmarked reports that you want to go to immediately. In other
words, using this feature lets you save a report for future reference so that
you don’t have to go back and start searching it from the scratch, each time.
This saves a lot of time and effort. The next time you go to a meeting all you
do is open the app, go to My Bookmark section and on one click you will find
all the field report data you want and you’ll be set!
Filtering, Sorting, and summarizing field inspection reports:
So far, the field inspection reports you have created or your staff have
submitted are in big numbers and when you open Field Inspection report,
you see that the system shows you all the reports from your database.
Sometimes this is appropriate, but often these field reports need to filter the
data based on specified criteria.
This is most relevant when you're working with large volume of field reports
across the entire month. For example, in a city like Ahmedabad, over 15000+
monthly field inspection reports are filed by over 500+ officers. With the
features in SmartCity‐‐311, there are multiple ways to filter data:

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Using the filter tab, one can easily divide and filter the reports and other data
into sections and groups that can be sorted in 4 ways.
Map view:
While working with field inspection a lot of data is being captured and
creating meaningful reports of those data is very important for the decision
making process, for the allocation of resources and for the creation of
presentation. Inside SmartCity‐‐311, we allow Displaying maps and
data points on the maps.
Map View is available for the individual inspection report; you can have Map
View for specific data category or date range or one particular zone.
We provide two types of map view; (a) Pin & (b) Heat Maps. Map based
reports can be generated or viewed on mobile devices and also from our Web
based CRM.
While using a pin map, if you need additional details about that particular
pin, all you need to do is just single click on that pin and it shows you a
bubble with basic details. When you click on that bubble it actually takes you
to the field inspectionreport.
By using the map view feature for field inspection reports, field inspectors
are able to get a holistic picture of all the inspection task done. For example
Manhole Cleaning staff needs to perform scheduled or ad hoc inspections of
all the manholes in a specific ward or zone. Using the SmartCity‐‐311,
they can capture the locations of all the manholes inspected and while
looking on a map you can pin point which are the ones that are missed and
which ones need re-‐‐inspection.
Heat Maps: This new feature of the Android version of SmartCity‐‐311
app now allows you to view your Field inspection reports on a heat map. A
user can also create Heat Maps using the browser on their PCs. Heat map is a
graphic representation of the field inspection data, where the individual
values contained in a matrix are represented as colors.
Areas shaded red, contain the highest density of field inspections carried out,
while yellow indicates a medium amount of calls and green indicates the
least.

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With the ability to export these maps, one can use them in their
presentations and reports thus allowing everyone on board with rapid visual
insight.
GIS Integration with SmartCity311
A GIS is a database management system for spatially distributed features and the
associated attributes. SmartCity‐‐311 allows you to export data in XML
and KML('Keyhole Markup Language') allowing you to integrate all the field
inspection data which has GPS information with your existing GIS Systems.
If your existing GIS application software has capabilities to accept data via web-‐‐
service API (JSON/ REST), inside SmartCity‐‐311 we also have private API keys
for data exchange & collaboration between different systems.
Online / Offline mode supported by SmartCity311
SmartCity‐‐311mobile app can work on both Online and Offline mode to capture the
field inspection data, which means that the Field Inspector can work in a wired /
Internet enabled network or wireless environment.
While working into a wired network or having Connectivity, we take advantage of
the mobile network capabilities; including Wi-‐‐Fi, Cellular 2G/ 3G/ 4G / LET,
Bluetooth and USB.
Some of the field work includes inspection of remote sites such as forest areas or
remote villages, where there is very limited or no internet connectivity; we call this
offline mode.
While working on offline mode we use local storage & caching mechanism to
capture the field inspection data and when the device gets internet connectivity, it
syncs / uploads the offline data to the live server database. We also call this "Save as
Draft" feature, as it is very similar to saving emails in Draft on Gmail.
Inspectors can now login on their mobile devices, 24/7, without having to worry
about Internet service on their mobile devices.

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