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Electronic, not paper, test reports

Electronic, not paper, test reports

Electronic, not paper, test reports

(OP)
We are coming under pressure from a number of our customers to supply chemical and mechanical test reports for our castings in an electronic fashion rather than good old paper copies. We have a number of possible options:
1) Scan existing paper copies and e-mail them in jpg format
2) Create a pdf document and email it
3) Make the information downloadable from our website to specific customers, accessible only by password.

Given the security implications, both on the website and the possibility of somebody altering a test report, what do people out there think? Does anybody have experience of this already? Are there any other options we have not yet considered? Please bear in mind that we may wish to include heat treatment and other test details to the reports.

Your thoughts will be appreciated.

       Bruv

RE: Electronic, not paper, test reports

bruv,

Until the world sets a standard whereby an electronic documents can be authenticated, there will be risk of altered copies of electronic documents.

Off the soap box now, PDF formated documents are probably the best way to go as the reader is stable and free.  the writer on the other hand, is not.  for your application, PDF files are easier to download (smaller than JPG's), generaly.  I would follow up with a paper copy, or, at the very least, keep an archive copy of the document and have the last line on the electronic document read something like:  "An archive copy of this document is on file for comparison..."

RE: Electronic, not paper, test reports

one way to reduce the chance of tampering is to embed a sublte wateramrk into the paperwork, making it large enough to cover the page. thus if people try to tamper with the results then they have a  harder job marrying up the watermarks. Bear in mind i think there is no responibility on you that that the test cert you provide in whatever format, will not be tampered with.

RE: Electronic, not paper, test reports

(OP)
Gents

Thanks for the input.

Our customer is saying that he wants everything in jpg format. I have not yet managed to find out why, but we will be pushing the advantages of pdf, for us as well as him. If we are to provide jpg's, some poor soul (not me) is going to be doing a lot of scanning, e-mailing and recording information.

What we think we will do, if pdf's are acceptable, is create the documents from Word or Excel, and save as pdf. If this isn't going to be the way, does anybody know of a quicker way to convert Word, Excel or pdf files to jpg format without having to scan or take screen-shots?

   Bruv

RE: Electronic, not paper, test reports

But I think scanner is also not necessary if jpg file is required.  Because in  Adobe Arcrobat, you can save the pdf file as jpg file

RE: Electronic, not paper, test reports

Ghostscript will: Open, Print (and with a little extra work - Create) PDF files.  It will also Convert PDF files to a jpg format (among others).  See my Apr 17, 2002 post in Thread555-20980 for information on downloading.  Did I mention it's free?  It's worth a look.

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