The Customer Database

An Aspect customer database contains all of the information about a customer, and is contained in this hierarchy:


Customer: The database contains exactly one customer entry that has information about that customer such as contact information, address, a photograph (logo) and other related information.  For example, we'll use the fictional company Industrial Enterprises as our customer.

Sites: A customer contains one or many sites, which are locations where inspections take place.  For example, Industrial Enterprises might have five factories which are all different buildings with their own sets of equipment and inspections, but they all belong to the same customer.

Inspections: Sites contain inspections, where your company is at the site taking readings, documenting problems, and ultimately generating an inspection report.  In the above example, we might create a new inspection for the site "Building A" at Industrial Enterprises.  Ultimately, the report you deliver is based on everything you do during this inspection, and for trending data the reports will include data from previous inspections at that site.

       Locations and Equipment: A site contains locations, which are essentially "rooms" or areas in a site that contain equipment.  Having locations acts as a means to organize all of the equipment you need to inspect.  The important point with locations and equipment is that they owned by a site, not an inspection.  If you create a new location or piece of equipment in an inspection, it will be visible in every inspection at that site.

Components: Equipment is broken down into components, which is where the inspection data gathering takes place.  Most of the time, a piece of equipment only contains one component, which Aspect names the Primary Inspection Point by default.  However, equipment can have an unlimited number of components.

Readings: During an inspection, you take readings of the components of the equipment, which are temperature measurements and any notes on the equipment for that inspection.

Problems: During an inspection, you also document any problems that exist.  Problems are either associated with a location, or a component of a piece of equipment.

Note that it's not necessary to create just one customer database that contains every site a customer has.  If you want, you can create separate customer databases for each site.  The only downside to this method is that you'll have to enter the customer data for each separate database.