Workshop kiosk: a shared screen, a PIN and your own queue

The problem it solves

In most workshops the start and end of a job are written down in the evening, from memory, or not at all, because there is nothing to write on next to the machine. A shared terminal at the door or by the bench removes that friction — the start of a job is recorded when it happens, by the person doing it.

Who it is for

Anyone the administrator gives a PIN — usually mechanics without a work phone or a company email address — within a few rules:

• Starting and finishing jobs needs a mechanic’s, a manager’s or an administrator’s role; the kiosk applies the same role check as everywhere else.
• A PIN works only while the employee’s account is active: a deactivated account cannot sign in at the kiosk even if its PIN was never removed.
• Someone locked out of the ordinary sign-in is locked out of the kiosk as well.
• The employee record shows whether a person has a PIN, never the PIN itself — not even to the administrator.

Signing in with a PIN

The kiosk knows which company it belongs to from its own web address, so the PIN alone identifies the person within that company. PINs are therefore unique inside a company: when the administrator picks one that is already taken, the system says so without saying whose it is.

A PIN has at least six digits, and the obvious ones are refused when it is set — 000000, 123456, 654321, 890123, 121212, 123123, 112233 and other early guesses such as 696969. The PIN itself is never stored, only a one-way encoded form of it, so it cannot be recovered from the database or shown to anyone. A wrong PIN and the PIN of a deactivated account get the same refusal, so the kiosk never reveals which PINs exist.

What a mechanic can do at the kiosk

• See their queue. Only the work orders assigned to them — waiting and in progress — with the asset, the priority and the scheduled start. The list refreshes every minute, so a job assigned in the office appears without signing in again.
• Start work. The job moves to “in progress”, so the foreman can see what is being worked on without walking over to ask.
• Mark it complete. The same completion rules apply as everywhere else: while a mandatory checklist is unsigned or planned parts are unconfirmed, completion is refused, exactly as the maintenance module does. Signing the checklist and confirming the parts are not kiosk actions; they are done in the app or the browser, after which the job can be completed here.
• Find an asset. Part of a serial number, a VIN or a name is enough, in any letter case — useful when the number on the frame is the only thing at hand.
• Report a defect. Asset, severity and description; the entry lands in the same defect list the manager works from.

How it is kept safe

1. Sessions last fifteen minutes from sign-in and cannot be extended; an idle kiosk warns a minute before it locks.
2. A kiosk session only drives kiosk actions. It cannot reach the rest of the system, and an ordinary login cannot carry out kiosk actions — the boundary holds in both directions.
3. Guessing is limited: five attempts a minute from one device address, and after 30 wrong PINs in 15 minutes the company’s kiosk refuses every sign-in until that period passes — so working through PINs in sequence goes nowhere. A correct PIN never uses up that allowance, so a shift change is never blocked by it.
4. Sessions end for real. Signing out ends the session on the server, not only in the browser; removing a PIN ends that person's live kiosk sessions at once, and so does a change to their roles.

What the audit log records

Each company's data is isolated at the database level, and every action is recorded in an audit log. At the kiosk that means:

• every sign-in, successful or not, with the device address and browser details;
• every PIN issued and removed, with the administrator who did it, and every sign-out;
• every job started or completed, under the name of the mechanic who signed in — the same history the job shows in the browser and the app.

Where a kiosk fits, and where it does not

A kiosk suits a place where several people share one terminal: the workshop entrance, a repair bay, the stores window. For field work and remote sites the Android app is the better door, because it keeps working without a connection, and it is also where working time and engine-hour readings are entered. Everything done at the kiosk lands in the same repair history as work recorded anywhere else. Management figures live in the maintenance reports in a browser.