Intelligence in Pirform

Pirform's Intelligence feature is unique to Pirform and helps fill in the certificate as you enter values. It keeps an eye on regulations from BS 7671 such as cable sizing, earthing conductor selection, RCD operation, ring continuity and many more. As you enter values, Pirform's Intelligence can:

• Add a observations and limitations.
• Set values in the certificate - either where you are working or in other areas.
• Set the value of a schedule item.

Pirform's Intelligence applies to the Electrical Installation Certificate, Electrical Installation Condition Report and Minor Works certificates.

Benefits of Pirform's Intelligence

The Intelligence feature brings to main benefits:

• Improved consistency in reporting as areas that should be filled in are not missed out by mistake or left in when they should be removed.
• Saves time and effort when creating certificates and reports.

How does Pirform's Intelligence work?

Let's take the simple example of marking one of the schedule items in Section 1 as a C1. When you do this, Pirform will do two things:

• It will record an observation saying that there is a Code 1 item in the schedule.
• It will add another observation noting that the appropriate authorities should be notified.

You can see Schedule in the From column for the first observation, showing that it has been created as a result of a value you entered in the schedule. The observation will be removed when you remove the coding against the schedule item (or changed if you change it to a C2 or C3). See Inspection Schedule to read more.

You can see Intelligence in the From column for the second observation, showing that is has been created by Pirform's Intelligence. You cannot remove this observation, but you can change it and use the Intelligence Manager to adjust the way Pirform's Intelligence works for this rule.

Intelligence notifications as you work

As you are working, you will notice that Pirform shows you a pop-up at the lower right whenever intelligence is added or removed:

Intelligence Manager

You can use the Intelligence Manager to see what Pirform has added for you. This area allows you to:

• See what intelligence Pirform has applied to the certificate.
• See what values in the certificate relate to each intelligence rule.
• Suppress individual intelligence statements.

Suppressing intelligence

Once a value has been set, Pirform will prevent you from changing it until the intelligence is suppressed or reverted (see later). However, you can change a value to be more significant that Piform has set it, such as changing a coding from C2 to C1.

However, engineering judgement is always respected by Pirform and the engineer can easily override any changes it has made if they disagree with Pirform in a particular circumstance. The Intelligence Manager allows you to to suppress one or more intelligence statements simply by placing a tick in the Suppressed column for the intelligence you want to suppress:

When you suppress an intelligence statement then any changes that were made by that statement will be removed. You can see below that the observation from the intelligence has been removed:

There is also an setting to automatically suppress all intelligence if you want to do that:

Reverting intelligence

When you suppress an intelligence statement then it remains in the certificate. When you changing a value that caused the intelligence to be applied then the statement is removed from the certificate (whether you suppressed it or not!).

Types of intelligence in Pirform

As well as the BS 7671 intelligence that fills in the certificate as you enter values, Pirform also has:

• Schedule intelligence that adds observations and limitations according to values in the schedule.
• Maz Zs intelligence that will calculate and enter max Zs values for a circuit.

These other types do not appear in the Intelligence Manager.

Intelligence calling other intelligence

If Pirform 's Intelligence changes a value, then this can cause other intelligence to be applied. We saw that with the first example, but another is when setting the earthing conductor to FAIL then intelligence will fire that sets an item in the schedule to a C2 which itself causes an observation to be added to the certificate.