An instrumentation supplier's engineers on plant visits

The situation

Instruments are chosen by the plant’s own engineers. The supplier’s five sales engineers visit refineries, utilities and process plants, two or three a day. A visit means walking the unit and agreeing what to quote. In many plants the phone has to be left at the gate.

Before

Each engineer kept a notebook. On Thursday he wrote the week’s visits into a report, from memory. The manager knew which plants were visited, and little of what was said there.

Setting up

The admin sets up the instrument lines and connects Odoo. The company asks for Field Presence, the check-in add-on, which is off until then. Engineers are told plainly what it records: one location reading when they tap check-in and one when they tap check-out, and nothing in between.

On a visit

At the gate the engineer opens the lead and starts a visit. If the phone finds no location, the check-in still goes through and is marked No location for the manager.

Back in the car he ends the visit and records a voice note: tag numbers, the state of the old transmitters, who was in the room. The transcript is marked as made by AI. He adds it to the lead and sets Send quotation for Tuesday.

He scans a new contact’s card and chooses Site visit as how they met. With no signal between plants, everything is kept on the phone, encrypted, and sends itself later.

What the manager sees

The team view tells the manager who is on a visit, at which plant and since when. Each visit is on its lead’s history with its time on site, and reaches Odoo with Send quotation as a to-do. A hot lead with no follow-up after two days is reported to him.