Birmingham City Labs go live with Alpha Tracker

Birmingham City Labs are one of the UK's oldest and best established asbestos surveying and testing laboratories, and this week we've had the pleasure of training their asbestos surveyors and admin staff in the use of Alpha Tracker and Tracker Mobile.

Here are a selection of photos from the training sessions:

Floor plan software for Tracker Mobile customers

Do you want to draw your floor plan at the same time as recording the asbestos survey and sample data using Tracker Mobile?

Try Floor Plan Creator:

Floor Plan Creator working alongside Tracker Mobile

Search the Play Store (on Android devices) or the very similar "FloorPlans" on the App Store (on iPad and iPhones) and you can be using these apps in minutes.

Both of these packages (and the others available - we can work with any of the floor plan packages available on smartphone and tablet units) are fully compatible with Tracker, Alpha Tracker and Tracker Mobile giving your surveyors the widest possible options when creating and modifying floor plans whilst asbestos surveying.

Another Tracker asbestos admin training session complete

I'm writing this on the train on the way back from one of my favourite cities, Glasgow. I have been up visiting an old client, a multi-national asbestos and environmental consultancy, to do some Tracker refresher training and system updates.

Preparing for the Tracker asbestos admin training

Glasgow always strikes me as a city which has everything (architecture, night-life, culture, river) but doesn't realise how good it is!

Our client's staff are always really friendly and it was a pleasure to run through the administration side of Tracker with them today.  The surveyors are busy using Tracker Mobile to capture the asbestos survey data on their iPad Mini tablets but with new admin staff in place they needed to run through the Tracker processes for checking and producing the asbestos reports.

In a couple of hours this morning we were able to cover the basics in Project Tracker and Tracker 264.

• maintaining the client database
• booking in new projects and asbestos surveys
• checking asbestos records sent in by surveyors
• reviewing photos taken of asbestos locations
• entering the asbestos lab results, and
• automatically producing the asbestos reports.

We also covered invoicing from Tracker using Invoice Tracker and created a brand new link to the Microsoft Navision invoicing system.

Tracker Mobile training session at Monitor Environmental

Monitor Environmental are a specialist asbestos surveying consultancy based in the East Midlands.  Monitor Environmental have been a valued client of Start Software for some years and we always enjoy working with and for them.

Monitor have used Tracker for some time and have recently upgraded to use the very latest iPhone asbestos surveying module (Tracker Mobile) using Mobile Data Studio 7.2.

Yesterday we trained 8 of their staff in the latest surveying techniques using Tracker Mobile on their iPhones showing them how asbestos surveying data and photos collected on site could go straight into their Tracker system ready for lab results and report production.

Damon at Monitor Environmental with his iPhone running Tracker Mobile

If you want to contact Monitor, click here to go to their website or phone 0115 939 4535.

For more information about our range of asbestos surveying software, click here and follow the links to Tracker, Alpha Tracker and Tracker Mobile.

Open letter to all Tracker customers - Tracker 10 years on

The New Year is always a good time to reflect & plan and this year is especially important for us because it is the 10th anniversary of bringing Tracker to the market.

We’ve been at the top of the asbestos consultancy industry for a decade now and we intend to continue for another 10 years more (at least!).

2012 saw some huge changes to Tracker including:

- massive improvements to Tracker Mobile including mix-and-match support for iPhones, iPads, Android tablets & smartphones

- new features in Tracker Dashboard giving you the information you need to run your business delivered direct to your Inbox

- a brand new module – Tracker Filer – acting as an extra pair of hands, filing emails and attachments in your Tracker system

- new options and facilities within Tracker Web Server connecting you to your customers better than ever before

- the option to record lab data directly on iPads within Lab Tracker

- another new module – Resource Tracker Sync – to give you the option of synchronising your Resource Tracker diary to Google or Exchange calendars.

You can read all about the Tracker modules here http://start-software.com/tracker/modules/.

Our next plans include a fully “cloud” based version of Tracker (called “Alpha Tracker”) which we’ve been working on for 9 months now and launching this product into a number of foreign markets, starting with Australia.  There is some early information here: http://start-software.com/tracker/modules/alpha-tracker/.

We know we’re not perfect but we continue year on year to improve our service to you and we continue to improve our helpdesk (see http://start-software.com/support/performance-charts/).  At our last ISO9001 inspection we passed with flying colours again which was a testament to my team’s continued hard work.  We’ve also launched a brand new portal for you, our customers, which enables you to have direct access to the information about projects and problems we are working on for you.

For our business to continue to grow we need to keep our existing customer base and build upon it with new companies coming on line with Tracker.  This year has seen a number of new Tracker users including some of the industry’s biggest consultancies as well as some of the smallest too.  What is really satisfying is that surveyors leaving existing Tracker businesses and starting their own businesses often ask us for our Tracker Lo-Start system – Tracker genuinely is popular with directors, management and surveyors alike.

We are now working to complete Alpha Tracker whilst starting a new project in conjunction with the University of Wolverhampton to bring “smart tag” RFID technology to the asbestos consultancy market.  If you are interested in being the first consultancy to use this exciting new technology, get in touch and I can explain what it could mean to your business.

Thanks for reading.  Don’t forget to check our website regularly at www.start-software.com or – better still – follow the blog at http://blog.start-software.com so that you will see the weekly announcements about new Tracker developments.

Here’s to another 10 years.

Cheers,

SL Environmental are latest Tracker users

SL Environmental of Kent have just completed their Tracker installation and training and are already busy with their first Tracker surveys.

Surveyors Joe Cumming and Lucy Smith have used Tracker at previous employers and were keen to bring it to SL Environmental to increase efficiency and to enable capture and transmission of survey data from site on their Android smartphones.

With the installation complete in only 3 days, SL Environmental have proved to be the perfect Tracker Lo-Start customer.

Read more about their installation by clicking here.

Tracker iPad laboratory data capture - first lab live

We've been working with a new Tracker client on an iPad-based lab data entry system so that each lab analyst can record their asbestos fibre analysis results directly on their own iPad without the need for individual PCs.

The process is now working well and the first lab is running their checks through.  Looking good so far!

(PS the same software and process would also enable lab data entry on Android tablets such as the new Samsung Nexus)