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Quickest access to PDF file

  • 10 January 2024
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Hi all

Has anyone been in a similar position to us & found a better solution ?

 

Scenario

All our raw material safety data sheets (SDS) are in IFS (APPS10 UPD18), stored in the db as PDF files.

If there was an incident, eg someone spills a potentially hazardous product, the first aiders will need quick & easy access to the relevant SDS.

 

Where are we now ?

We have a custom shortcut that launches the general search function, with DocumentContent pre-selected as a search domain 

This works fine. You can search for, say “acid” and IFS will provide sensible results.

 

the only snag is that when you click on a  result, you go to the document revision page.

There’s a further click required to actually get to the document itself.

While this works, the objective from the start was to make this process as easy and intuitive as possible. It feels like we haven’t achieved that goal.

 

Is there a trick we’ve missed ?

 

Thanks

 

 

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Best answer by Mathias Dahl 11 January 2024, 15:13

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Mathias Dahl
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Hi,

The process/steps you describe looks quite simple and fast, to me. But, obviously not to you 🙂 So we have different views on what is easy and what is ... not easy. There are others here, but for me to suggest another way of working, I think you need to describe what would be easy for you. Is it the number of steps? Is it the user having to type on the keyboard? Is it the time taken to open some screen? Does the user have IFS open, or not? How many of these documents do you have?

Without know what's "easy" for you, people might suggest ways of working that you don't think is easy.

I will spend, possibly waste 🙂, a few seconds to suggest this:

1. Create a document folder to which you connect all those documents you refer to
2. In the user's shortcut section in IEE, place a shortcut to a search for this folder in the Document Folder Navigator
3. Done. The user can now click the shortcut and immediately see all those documents, and then right click and view them,

A similar flow can be to open the Document Revisions screen with a saved query that finds all those documents. Then the user just selects and right clicks the one they one. This assumes they are not too many.

Okay, that took a few minutes, hope it's "easy" enough.. 🙂

If it's not, again, we need to understand what easy is, what the user is willing to do or not willing to do, etc.

/Mathias
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Hi Mathias

Sorry, I was perhaps unclear on the scenario / objective

Ours is a manufacturing environment. First aiders on the shop floor have limited exposure to IFS. Primarily they use only the Shop Floor Workbench

When I’ve piloted the search function as it’s currently implemented, they’ve found it unintuitive.

They’re fine with the shortcut, entering a search term and selecting the best result returned. However, they then - quite reasonably, I think - expect to see a PDF SDS when they click on the link.  When they get the document revision page, they’re thrown off track.

The immediate perception is that it hasn’t worked.

when I’ve explained that there is a View button, they’ve been ok, but it would be better if we could engineer a route that went straight to the PDF

Mathias Dahl
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This needs to be tested but one option might be to, for these users, strip the Document Revision screen to a bare minimum, and save that new layout in the profile of these users. You can probably hide all tabs and all fields a part from the document number and title perhaps so that there is very little to be confused about, and the View button would stand out more.

If that's not enough, I'm afraid you need to look for solutions that are built "outside" IFS. It could be as simple as starting a script that queries the database, based on user inputing some text. The script could then pick the first hit, or let the user select a hit by typing a number, and the script would launch IEE, open the document revision screen and execute the View Document command. This should work as long as you use ClickOnce (if you start IFS by clicking an URL on a web page you are using ClickOnce). The user could initiate the script by using a shortcut in IFS I think, or even as a shortcut in Windows, if they use Windows.

It should not be that hard to put something like that together.
 

/Mathias

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