When a contractor hears that CrewKeeper is Apple-only, the next thing out of their mouth is always a question: “What about a supervisor who doesn’t have an iPhone?”
I’ve had that conversation enough times that it’s worth writing down how I handle it on my own operation. The honest answer is more involved than “buy them one,” and it starts with what the app is for.
CrewKeeper belongs in a pocket
I designed CrewKeeper for the phone on purpose. Not “it also runs on a phone.” The phone is the point.
Field records are only worth anything if they’re made at the time. The crew arrives, the foreman taps arrive. A machine gets inspected before it goes up — that’s a checklist, right there. A safety talk, a near-miss, a delivery: thirty seconds, standing where it happened, and it’s already in the office.
That is not a sit-down-and-do-your-paperwork process. It’s tap-tap-done, at any moment on site. And the only device that’s always there at that moment is the one in the foreman’s pocket.
So the small screen was never a compromise. It was the target. Most of my crew use CrewKeeper on an iPhone and never need anything else.
Who gets an iPad
On my operation, the company iPads go to the foremen and supervisors, and only for one of two reasons.
The first is simple: they don’t have an iPhone. Rather than fight the platform question, I hand them a device.
The second is that they’ll use it for more than CrewKeeper. A supervisor who’s going to pull up the drawings, read a spec, mark up a photo, and handle email from the site gets real use out of the bigger screen.
Why a mini
The higher-level people — the ones a step above a working foreman — generally carry a full-size iPad and a phone, and that’s the right setup for them. They live in the drawings and the email, and the big iPad has a truck or an office to live in.
For a working foreman, the device of choice is an iPad mini. A full-size iPad is unwieldy to carry around a job all day; you end up leaving it in the truck, which defeats the purpose — and it’s more delicate, so if they do tote it around it’s guaranteed to get destroyed. The mini goes where the foreman goes: in the truck door, under an arm, on a crossbody strap. One of mine shoves his in the back of his waistband. It’s fine one-handed, and it’s still enough screen to read a plan on comfortably. For the field, it’s the right tool.
Every company device is managed
This is the part that took me years to learn.
Every device the company hands out is a managed device. It gets its own company Apple ID — a company account, for company data — with the account and security settings locked down and a short list of company apps installed. That’s what it’s for.
Managing the devices saves a whole bunch of trouble:
- I can lock or unlock a device remotely. Someone leaves, and the device is locked before their truck is out of the yard.
- I can keep it from filling up with frivolous or unsecured apps. It’s a work tool.
- If one gets lost — and they do — I can find it, or wipe it.
Before I did any of this, I lost count of the devices that turned into paperweights because the user didn’t know the Apple ID password, or had changed it, or had signed the thing into a personal account. One company account per device, controlled by the company, and that whole category of problem went away.
If you want to set this up yourself, start with Apple’s own program. Apple Business is free to enroll in and is where you create company-owned accounts and manage the devices you hand out; the Apple Business Manager User Guide walks through it. For the deeper end — enrollment, restrictions, remote lock and wipe — the Apple Platform Deployment Guide covers all of it. A couple of evenings with those and a small crew’s devices are under control for good.
The opposite tool
YEStimator, for what it’s worth, is exactly the other way around. I would rarely build a full, complicated estimate on my phone. That’s an iPad-at-a-desk job — worksheets side by side, a keyboard if I’ve got one.
Where the phone shines with YEStimator is everything around the estimate: looking up a client or a past job on the way to a meeting, scratching out a quick number in the truck, sending the proposal from wherever I happen to be.
Same suite, opposite devices, both by design. Field work wants the thing in your pocket. Office work wants the screen. The mistake is forcing either one onto the other.
— Dean Davids, Tailgate Technology