Inspecticon & MacAllister

Objective: Replace the clipboard at the machine

Equipment inspections - before a sale, at a rental return, during service - were done on paper forms, with photos on someone’s phone and the report typed up later. Inspecticon’s founder wanted a better way: build any inspection form on the web, fill it out on a phone or tablet at the machine, and have a finished, photo-rich report the moment the inspector hits upload.

Web Ascender built the product, then extended it for one of its largest users, MacAllister, a heavy-equipment dealer whose service technicians inspect machines every day.

What Web Ascender Did

Inspecticon, the platform

• A form builder - sections and questions with rating, yes/no, drop-down, text, and photo fields; drag-and-drop ordering, hint text, collapsible sections, and form cloning
• iOS and Android apps - inspectors download forms, complete them at the machine, attach photos, and upload; every upload carries device details for troubleshooting
• Machines and history - inspections organized under each machine, with customers, tags, search, an audit trail, and printer-friendly reports
• A subscription product - accounts, users and roles, plans, a free trial, and online billing, so the founder could sell it to other companies

MacInspect, a branded version for MacAllister

• Barcode scanning - scan a machine’s serial number, even long industrial barcodes, and capture GPS coordinates with it
• Normal, Monitor, Action - each item is marked by condition, and reports call out the items that need attention so the service team can quote the repair
• Photo annotation - technicians circle and label the problem right on the photo, with front and rear camera controls and inline help images
• Automatic scoring of each inspection, form-level permissions and administrators, and a one-click download of every photo on an inspection
• A JSON API so MacAllister’s other systems can use inspection data
• Planning a machine-lifecycle app - concepts for custom fields, components, and trackable values across a machine’s life

Keeping it running

• Kept both apps current through new iPhones, iPads, and Android versions, including Android 9 and 10 updates for rugged field devices
• Moved years of inspection photos to Amazon S3 with automatic archiving, migrated servers, and scaled them as usage grew

The Outcome

Inspections that used to take a clipboard, a camera, and an afternoon of typing became a single upload from the field, with the photos, the problem areas, and the machine history in one place. We built and supported the platform for nearly fifteen years.

Some images on this page are representative, not photos of the actual apps in use.