Remote Sampler is a highly configurable system that can be used to replicate a wide variety of paper-based on-site workflows. The most difficult part of replicating your existing sample collection workflow in Remote Sampler is actually in planning what data you actually want to collect and the order in which various steps occur. This page provides some useful tips and examples to help you begin to put together a description of your process so that it can be recreated in Remote Sampler.

Sample Types 

The first step in the process is to think about how many distinct types of sample you want to process using Remote Sampler.

In the case of clean water sampling, one simple example is found in the difference between customer address samples and reservoir samples. The process undertaken on-site is different if the technician is at a customer property to that performed at a service reservoir. As such, different data fields will need to be configured and these fields will need to be set to appear conditionally based on some indicator that signifies the type of a given sample.

Drawing a Flowchart

The best way to outline the workflow for a given sample type is to draw a flowchart that contains each of the data fields that are needed. When drawing a flowchart, consider the following elements:

• Mandatory data fields that need to be collected. These fields may be required by an external system e.g. a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS). 
• Additional information that may be beneficial from an operational perspective, yet may not be mandatory. 
• Consider the order in which the fields should appear.
• Include the type of data that the given field will take i.e. is it text, or a list or a number etc.
• For numerical fields, include the style of rounding (e.g. 2 decimal places 0.00). 
• Include numerical limits where appropriate e.g. value must be less than 10.5.
• Include conditional behaviour e.g. if 'Yes' then go to field A, if 'No' then go to field B.
• For list fields, include a complete list of all available options. Consider whether one or multiple items can be selected.
• Specify messages that will be shown to the user e.g. if numerical limit value > 0.05 is broken then show message "value is outside the configured limit".
• Specify any calculations that should be applied to data as it is entered.
• Consider if a field should be read-only.
• Include instructions for countdown or count-up timers to appear where appropriate.

Examples

An example flowchart for a clean water reservoir sample is shown below.