Paperless Efficiency
You’ve probably heard of the three R’s—reducing, reusing and recycling to minimise the amount of waste you produce. What many people don’t realise is that this mantra doesn’t just apply to physical waste. By reducing wasted effort, reusing successful processes, and recycling good habits, businesses can see real, measurable improvements to their bottom-line.
This has far-reaching implications. Implementing a paperless workflow has many benefits, from reducing physical paperwork to saving on resources and simplifying communication. But many mobile workforce and field service operations still have a considerable amount of waste in their day-to-day business.
The Benefits of Going Paperless
Saving Time
The amount of time spent organising and searching for paper documents is difficult to quantify for any business. Still, it’s safe to say that most people spend at least some of their working day on tasks related to physical paperwork. This is particularly prevalent in mobile workforce and field service management, where documents are rarely all in the same place—job sheets go to different sites, even on the same day.
Using a cloud-based paperless system centralises all your documentation. Powerful search and management functions mean essential documents are always in the right place and easily accessible for those who need them.
The result? People can use the time saved to focus on revenue-generating tasks.
Improving Efficiency
From unnecessary callouts to lost paperwork or duplicated processes, all businesses have areas where efficiency can be improved. A paperless workflow helps you identify and overcome those pinch points.
Let’s use an example: a tech heads to the office to get their schedule for the week. Their first task is to conduct a site survey for an upcoming job. They head to site and dig out their CSCS card ready to sign in. Once they’ve found out who the site manager is, they check the location and conduct the survey, filling in a carbon-copy form on a clipboard. The original goes in the van ready to return to the office, and the site manager takes the copy. Back at the office, the tech gets told they needed to have collected a confirmation signature from the site manager for SLA compliance. It’ll take an extra day to travel back to site to collect it. What a nightmare. The next day they head back to site, locate the site manager and obtain the signature. They return to the office with the form ready to be entered into the system. It’s taken two days to conduct a 30-minute survey.
Now the alternative scenario with a paperless workflow. The tech checks their schedule on their phone or tablet and heads straight to site from home. They get the site manager’s details from the app who double-checks the CSCS card attached to the job. The tech completes the survey form in the app and collects the site manager’s signature when prompted. They hit ‘send’, and it instantly uploads. The dispatcher gets a notification, checks the schedule and books in the work required to complete the job. The tech takes lunch and moves onto their next job.
The result? A paperless workflow increases efficiency by minimising duplicated processes.
Increasing Revenue
Through the time and efficiency savings of implementing a paperless workflow, you and your team are free to focus on what you do best—providing the best possible service to your customers.
Let’s dig a little deeper. Avoidable difficulties have an obvious and immediate effect on the progress of jobs, but what’s sometimes less appreciated is the detrimental effect they have on less quantifiable metrics. Things like job satisfaction, employee morale, and customer experience. Let’s look at the example above. Mobile workers having to revisit a site because they didn’t have all the information to complete the task the first time leads to frustration and, after a few similar experiences, they’ll begin to question the role and responsibilities of themselves and those around them. The result is a broader drop in job satisfaction across the entire workforce, which has a subsequent effect on customer experience.
By avoiding those pitfalls, staff will have the security of knowing they will be much more likely to complete a task at the first time of asking, they’ll be in the right mindset on arrival and be able to focus on what you employed them to do.
The result? Your customers will have a much-improved experience.
That’s not all.
By adopting a paperless workflow, you will see immediate benefits to the management of your mobile workforce and field service teams, paving the way to providing outstanding customer experience and growing your business.
In part two, we’ll dig a little deeper into some of the benefits of adopting a paperless workflow and look at the path to digitisation. In the meantime, to find out more about how Fieldfusion can help you on your journey to paperless efficiency, speak to one of our team today.