Sustainability & Risk / Compliance / Compliance Program Manager
Sustainability & Risk / Compliance / Contract Manager

Compliance Field Surveys: Overview

In addition to tracking compliance requirements and contract terms, it is important to verify that your site implements the requirements and contracts as stated. To verify that requirements and contracts are being executed as specified, field personnel can periodically visit rooms and equipment in your site and report on their condition by responding to a series of questions.

For example, for a compliance requirement in a healthcare setting you might want to do an inspection for Environment of Care and inspect such items as storage of needles, syringes and drugs; accessibility of exits and fire extinguishes; fire alarm operation; condition of code carts, and so on.

For a contract terms, you can inspect that the work outsourced to the contractor was done properly, meets the terms of the contract, and keeps your organization within compliance of regulations. Field surveys provide insight into when and how the work was done. This insight can be important when it comes time to renew the contract or provide feedback to the vendor.

You create inspection surveys using the Compliance application's extended questionnaire feature to develop a list of questions that the field personnel should answer when inspecting an area. The extended questionnaires can include a variety of response options, such as multiple choice, yes/no, free-form text, attached photos or documents, counts, look-ups, and measurements. They can also provide follow-up questions and actions based on initial response.

Field personnel conduct the inspection surveys using the Compliance Survey mobile app, or by using Web Central on a laptop and accessing the survey on the Questionnaire tab of the "Manage All Compliance Events" task of the Contract Manager and Compliance Program Manager processes. Field personnel are assigned the inspection surveys through inspection events that are associated with the contract term or program requirement and are assigned to the field inspector. See Assigning Questionnaires to Field Inspectors.

The Archibus Extended Questionnaire System

Maintenance checklists use the underlying extended questionnaire technology to hold questions and user responses. Review the Concept: Questionnaire Tables topic for an understanding of how the extended questionnaire system stores questions and responses.

The extended questionnaire technology is also used by the Compliance application's survey features. For users defining questionnaires, Archibus provides two views:

The two views operate very similarly, but there are some differences. For features that operate the same in both views, the online help provides one topic. In this case, the topic uses the generic "questionnaire" terminology rather than "checklist" or "compliance survey." For features that do not share the same user interface, the online help provides separate topics. Consult the Navigator paths at the top of a topic to see if the topic applies to both Compliance and Maintenance.

Concepts

Comparing Maintenance Checklists and Compliance Surveys

Use Compliance Surveys with Maintenance Workflow

Tables for the Extended Questionnaire System

Extended Questionnaires: Events and Status

Questionnaire Samples

General Procedure

Optional: The survey designer may want to review the Concept: Questionnaire Tables topic for an understanding of how the system stores questions and responses.

  1. Use the following tasks to create inspection surveys that field auditors can use to verify field conditions.
  2. Assign questionnaires to a compliance requirement or contract term using:

Note: For compliance surveys, the compliance requirement or contract term typically has locations assigned to it so that the field inspector will have specific locations to assess. If you need to make an asset-specific inspection that records properties for each distinct space or asset, you can set the "Create Scheduled Events for Each Location" option in the Save and Generate Events form to Yes; the application will not generate just one event per date, but generate one event per date and per location. Thus, when the field inspector uses the questionnaire, they can answer the questions in response to a specific location. You would take a similar approach for a survey of due dates or registrations that must separately be recorded for each item.

However, it’s possible to have a general survey, such as an Environment of Care, that pertains to all the spaces, but for which you don’t want to perform and submit separately for each space. For EoC tours, a team will typically walk a floor or department looking at a myriad of requirements across many kinds of specific locations and flag any violations they notice. They will record the specific location of the finding on their report, but they’ll submit their report as a whole for the floor, not once for each location or asset. In this case, you don't need locations for each compliance requirement or contract term.

  1. Define and generate events for compliance requirements and contract terms for which you have assigned questionnaires. Questionnaires are assigned to staff through staff's assignments to events. For information, see Assigning Questionnaires to Field Inspectors.

  1. For the events assigned to them, field staff go to the specified location, inspect it, and record the results in the questionnaires. The questionnaires appear in their queue based on events that are assigned to them.

  2. As Web Central and mobile users are working on the survey, they can partially complete it and later return to it if necessary. The event status remains in its current state until they complete it (step 6).
  3. When through, inspectors complete the survey, which sets the Event Status to Completed.
    • Mobile users tap Complete.
    • Web Central users select Submit.
  4. Mobile users sync to upload the survey responses to the database.
  5. If further changes to the survey responses are required once the Event Status is set to Completed, a Web Central user with proper permissions can reset the Event Status to In Process to reopen the survey using the Manage All Compliance Events task.
  6. Contract managers use the Compliance / Management Reports / Review Survey Results Summary by Requirement task to review completed results that were uploaded from mobile or entered on a laptop.