- Client
- Beckers Automação Industrial (Chapecó, Brazil)
- What we did
- Android field app + web dashboard: guided maintenance report with photos, configurable diagnostic catalogue, quote totalled by the catalogue and documents in PDF and DOCX
- Platform
- React Native (Android) · Next.js · NestJS · AWS (S3)
- 428 reports
- maintenance reports issued from the app since the system entered the workshop routine
- 278 quotes
- sent from the report itself, with the price totalled by engineering's own catalogue
- 17 months live
- of uninterrupted record — from April 2025 to the report issued this week
- 3 writings → 1
- the diagnosis is written once, at the workbench, and becomes PDF and DOCX without a scanner
The starting point
Beckers does electrical design, automation and industrial ventilation in Chapecó, and a large part of the business is technical service. Meat plants and cooperatives send in the fan or exhaust unit that stopped; the workshop receives it, opens it, diagnoses it and returns a report with a quote. These are units from 200 to 910 millimetres, from brands ranging from Ziehl-Abegg to Maer, and each one arrives with a work order, an inbound invoice and a different story.
All of that was recorded in a Word document. The technician printed the template, took it to the workbench, wrote down by hand what he found, photographed it with his own phone, scanned the filled-in sheet and sent it to the office. There, someone else read the technician's handwriting and retyped it to build the customer's quote. Between the equipment being opened in the workshop and the customer receiving a price, the same diagnosis was written three times.
- Handwritten, then retyped. The report was born on paper and died on paper, and whoever built the quote at the office had never seen the equipment.
- The photo stayed on the phone of whoever took it. There was no place where the picture of the defect met the report for that fan.
- The price came out of someone's head. What it costs to bush a shaft or rewind a motor was written nowhere in the process — it lived in one person's experience.
- Nothing could be looked up afterwards. Knowing how many Aurora units had passed through the workshop, or which models fail most, meant opening scanned files folder by folder.
The turning point
The decision that carries everything else was turning the report into structured data instead of free text. What used to be a blank field in Word became a catalogue Beckers maintains itself: customer, fan model (brand, code, external diameter, number of blades), structure type, power rating and — the heart of it — the diagnostic fields. Each field carries the list of defects it can have and the repair levels with their prices. Today there are 7 diagnostic fields, 46 models and 82 customers on file, and it is Beckers who adds a new model, without going through us.
With the catalogue in place, the report became a five-step flow on the phone, done at the workbench with the equipment open in front of you: customer, work order, model, diagnosis and summary. The technician marks the defects found in each field and picks the repair level; the quote total comes from the catalogue itself, with nobody doing arithmetic. The photo is taken in the same step and uploads straight to storage instead of sitting in someone's camera roll.
The third decision was separating what Beckers needs to know from what the customer needs to receive. The internal report is a document of its own, with a diagnosis and photos that stay in-house and do not travel with the delivery. At the end, the system generates the external report, the quote and the internal report, each to a different recipient — and who gets what is a setting on screen, not code.
He opens the app at the workbench, picks the customer, types the work order and the inbound invoice, selects the model, marks the defects field by field, takes the photos and checks the summary. Nothing is retyped afterwards. The quote is already totalled when he hits send, and the document lands in the configured mailbox — the diagnosis that used to be written three times is now written once.
What we delivered
01 · The field app, in five steps
Android, for the Beckers technical team. The report is a guided flow — customer · work order · model · diagnosis · summary — where each step validates before releasing the next: no customer, no advance; no defect marked, no closing the diagnosis. The home screen carries the shortcuts and the latest reports created, and search finds any report already filed. It is published on Google Play as a corporate app with no public sign-up: access comes from an email and password Beckers issues.
02 · The diagnostic catalogue Beckers maintains
What defines the report is data on file. Each diagnostic field — blade, rotor, structure, grille, junction box, shaft bushing, rewinding — carries its own list of defects and its own repair levels with prices. The technician picks from options engineering wrote, and the quote total falls out ready. When a new fan model comes in or a repair price changes, Beckers is the one who edits it: the catalogue today holds 46 models, 82 customers, 7 diagnostic fields and the power and structure-type tables.
03 · The internal report, which never leaves the house
Beyond the document that goes to the customer, the team records a second diagnosis with its own photos: the technical reading Beckers wants to keep and which does not enter the delivered report. It is a short three-step flow inside the same app, tied to the same report number, and it produces a document of its own.
04 · Documents ready to hand over
External report, quote and internal report come out as PDF straight from the system, with the equipment tables, the totalled diagnosis and the attached photos. In 2025 we added the .docx version of all three: when the team needs to adjust a sentence before sending, they edit it in Word instead of rebuilding the document from scratch. Email delivery is parameterised — who receives the report, who receives the quote, whether the customer gets a copy and whether the person in charge does too.
How we made it hold
A dashboard that answers the question
The web system is not only a registry: it is where Beckers reads its own movement. Reports by day, by user, by fan model and by customer, plus the totals of reports issued, internal reports and quotes sent. The question that used to mean opening scanned folders — which models concentrate defects, which customer concentrates work, who on the team is issuing the most reports — is now a chart on the first screen.
The same content in both formats
The .docx is not a second implementation of the document: it comes from the same content as the PDF, with the same structure and the same information, and is stored beside it under the same report. That is what avoids the classic dual-export defect — two files of the same report that disagree with each other.
Restricted access and separated roles
The app is corporate: no public sign-up in the store, access from credentials Beckers issues, and the system separates administrator from technician. Photo upload does not pass through our server — the app requests a signed URL and sends the image straight to storage, which keeps the heavy attachment out of the API path. And email routing is explicit on the settings screen instead of hidden in a code rule.
The result
The number that sums up the project is not the report total — it is three becoming one. The same diagnosis used to be written on the printed sheet, read again from the scanned paper and retyped at the office. Today it is written once, at the workbench, by the person with the fan open in front of them. Every hand-off removed is one transcription error removed from a document that sets the price of a service for a meat plant.
And what used to be dead archive became an answerable question: how many units from each customer passed through the workshop, which models concentrate defects, who on the team is issuing the most reports. The partnership began in September 2024 and did not stop at delivery — the editable .docx arrived in 2025 at the operation's own request, because the report was already so embedded in the routine that adjusting a sentence before sending had become a need.
The app was delivered with excellence, on time and with great professionalism. It automated manual steps, streamlined information flow between departments and made our technical support far more efficient.
Is your technical service still recording jobs on paper?
Epicora builds the system that takes the report off the printed sheet and the scanner: the technician records it at the workbench, the pricing rule stays with the people who know the service, and the document comes out ready for the customer.