Improving Field Service with Mobile Forms and IOSA Field Service Report brought to you by ProntoForms and Field Service

This report is based on recommendations made by industry experts who participated in ProntoForms' July 2016 webinar, produced in cooperation with the Field Service Conference series

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Mobile technology provides a bridge between a central office and its employees in the field, drastically changing the dynamic in regards to collecting, delivering, and managing information. What would originally have been a manual, error-prone process, as custodianship of data goes from field to office worker, is now able to be greatly streamlined. The information input into mobile forms can be routed into a centralized database, making information almost instantly accessible to management as it is collected. As it is input into a mobile form, it can simultaneously be consolidated into a cloud based digital repository. A data collection and consolidation process that could have taken a full business week is able to be effectively condensed into less than an hour. The following report examines the functionality, and the future promise of mobile form solutions, as discussed by the two expert panelists who participated in Field Service’s latest webinar.

Liam OhUiginn Senior Enterprise Account Executive ProntoForms

Jeff Peel Chief Operations Officer Verde Services, LLC & Pesado Energy Services

Webinar Background Info

/2 Webinar Background Info

/2 Panelists

/3 Common pain points of manual data collection

/4 Are you mobile ready?

/5 Case Study: Making employee lives better through mobile form adoption

/8 Key Recommendations

/9 About ProntoForms

/9 About WBR Digital

/Contents

/Panelists

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Common pain points of manual data collection

Present around mobile forms, there is a lot of opportunity for both cost and time savings, and a scope for improving the quality of life for your employees. Paper forms are inflexible and error-prone, can get delayed and/or lost, and are slow to deliver back to the office.

Delays slow reaction time from the office. Repeat data entry provides the strongest return on investment when using a mobile application. With a traditional form, office staff have to manually enter the data into a back-end system, which is a time-consuming process.

Paper forms are inconsistent from one employee to another. We certainly hear about issues with chicken scratch or mistakes made or missing fields. If we can deliver a fast and easy-to-use app, we've essentially solved a lot of problems right off the bat.

/Lack of flexibility

/Slow speed

/Inconsistency

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/Are you mobile ready?

The field worker of today has an opportunity to seize. In the past, they would have relied on paper forms, heavy manuals, phone calls, and many daily emails just to try to gather information from the field. The field worker of yesterday was completely disconnected, with no way to get information to and from the office without physically delivering it. With mobile technology, we can now deliver the data in real time. The field worker of tomorrow and their managers, along with their administrative team at the office, will be completely connected in an efficient way that institutes productively collecting data as part of their day-to-day business.

In many cases, your field workers will already be familiar with smart phones and tablets, as in the consumer market, the adoption rate exceeds that of the workplace. For that reason, it’s easier than ever to deploy mobile applications to your employees because they are often already comfortable with newer operating systems.

Sometimes with mobile applications or mobile websites, it can be cumbersome to navigate a form and enter data, which can distract employees from focusing on their customer, their job, and being safe in the workplace. Making all of the forms they work with easily and quickly available to them will prevent them from cutting corners. If we can do all of this in a professional way, with the latest technology, we will be able to achieve a higher overall level of compliance.

"Making all of the

forms they work

with easily and

quickly available

to them will

prevent them

from cutting

corners."

Liam OhUiginn

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/ Case Study: Making employee lives better through mobile form adoption

Introducing mobile technology to a late-adopting workforceI came on board with Pesado about a year and a half ago. I had a little experience in the energy industry but I did have experience managing a large-scale retail business. What I found very quickly upon starting at Pesado was that we had a ton of paper processes that were very archaic in nature, and from the start of one process to the completion there was a lot of wasted time. To give you an example, we would have a job application start in the field on paper. It would then have to make its way from the field to our office, and then get processed into our payroll. That could take two to three days just to get to our office, and then from there, if there was chicken scratch or incomplete sections on the form, we would have to follow up to make sure we got the right information. All of this was wasted time, which is equivalent to wasted money. Using mobile forms has enabled us to turn managing these applications into an almost instant process. As the employee was filling out their job application, it was being simultaneously recorded, and as soon as they hit “send,” it went right to the inbox of our HR team, and they were able to get to work from there. A five-day process turned into a 30-minute process, and that’s a huge time and money saver for us.

Initially, technology was something that our team was not very accustomed to. We are located in a very rural part of the Southeastern United States. A lot of people have flip phones, and mobile forms were their first introduction to a tablet and smartphone operating system. When choosing which platforms to roll out, my experience with tablets and smartphones in the past led me directly to Apple and iOS devices. To me, there is no easier piece of technology to teach someone how to use than an Apple device. Implementing that technology was critical, as we needed a simple device that was easy to use.

Jeff Peel

"To me, there is

no easier piece

of technology to

teach someone

how to use than

an Apple device.

Implementing

that technology

was critical, as we

needed a simple

device that was

easy to use."

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/ Case Study: Making employee lives better through mobile form adoption continued

Complementing the hardware, our interface in ProntoForms was very simple for our team to understand. We’ve spent some time working with employees and making sure that they know how to use each function on the screen, but usually after a couple of hours using the software, they got the hang of it. As we deploy more and more forms in different areas, the ease of use allows for employees to take ownership of their technology and start asking themselves how our processes can be improved. From a tech standpoint, success came down to adding simple-to-use devices and an easy interface that could allow someone (who was in their 50s or 60s that had never used a smartphone before) to learn the interface in a very short amount of time.

Managing integration of mobile forms on the back-endOn the reporting side, as we collect performance metrics to drive either spreadsheets or analytics, I found great success in connecting our apps to Google Sheets. This application integrates with our mobile forms and begins populating on an automated basis, as opposed to physical forms in the field where employees have to manually input captured data. With Google Sheets, employees are filling out a form and it’s populating the spreadsheet in real time. The real time ability allows us to record information in the field and gives our analytics engine the ability to transfer data from spreadsheets as often as every 15 minutes. To give you an example, when our team fills out a credit card expense in the field, they're reporting on who they are, which credit card they used, what the expense category was for, and if there was a specific job number that the expense needed to be assigned to. They would also take a picture of the receipt and then sign off for ownership purposes. Once they hit send, that data automatically populates in Google Sheets, and within 15 minutes, our employees and our executive team see that credit card expense. We know what job that credit card expense was billed to, and we can see an ongoing, real-time job cost, which from my experience in this industry is something that is almost impossible for most of our competitors and partners.

Jeff Peel

"With Google Sheets,

employees are filling

out a form and

it’s populating the

spreadsheet in real

time. The real time

ability allows us to

record information in

the field and gives our

analytics engine the

ability to transfer data

from spreadsheets

as often as every 15

minutes."

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/ Case Study: Making employee lives better through mobile form adoption continued

Gauging the aftermath of a transitionWhen rolling out new technology, you will always ask yourself, are my employees going to push back when I deploy something radically new? What we found was almost the inverse of what we had originally expected. Our employees started to realize that mobile form technology was saving them time. They now spend more time doing things that create ROI for the business. As they started to see how different forms saved them time, it started to get them thinking, “What other ways can we save time in the business and how could this solution collect other relevant information?"

Our mobile form solution has also done a lot for our executive team and the way that we operate as a management group. It has redefined the way that we look at our current business and what that business environment looks like. Most people consider a business to be four walls and a place that people come in and punch the clock. What we've been able to do with our mobile technology is create a mobile environment for our management group so that we meet maybe once a week in our office. The rest of the work is done from the comfort of a home, or remotely on an as needed basis. So long as management has a Wi-Fi connection, mobile forms are allowing them to get the information they need in real time and execute the same business steps and practices that they were doing before, in an environment that they want to be in. We’re able to collaborate more quickly, and core business processes happen faster. For the employee, the message is that technology is not something that’s going to create more work. It’s something that’s going to help automate and allow them to get more of their time back.

Jeff Peel

"Our mobile form

solution has also

done a lot for our

executive team

and the way that

we operate as

a management

group."

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The propensity for paper forms to be partially or illegibly filled out, lost, or damaged presents a risk that data gathered in the field can be significantly delayed on the way back to the office, or completely lost in a worst case scenario. This unreliability can be replaced with digital forms. Digital forms eliminate variances in handwriting, centralize collection, and remove the plurality of paper copies, replacing them with a single connected device.

The time required for manual data entry is not only not able to be used towards more productive and profitable tasks, it’s also demoralizingly repetitive, and significantly delays the ability of an executive team to act on new information. Adopt a solution that can integrate newly collected data on an automated basis as it is being gathered from the field.

When it comes to saving time and gaining information more quickly, the only way that programs designed to facilitate this will work is if your employees are comfortable with their new solutions. Identify platforms and mobile form solutions with the highest degree of ease of use, then encourage your employees to think of new ways that tech can be applied to business practices with an eye towards building new efficiencies.

/ Eliminate cumbersome paper forms from your field data collection process.

/ Proactively engage your workforce with new technology.

/ Automate the integration of field data into your existing databases.

Key Recommendations

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/About ProntoForms

/About WBR Digital

ProntoForms is a mobile workflow platform used by more than 3,500 businesses to collect and analyze field data with smartphones and tablets. Our product delivers an intuitive, secure and scalable solution for mobilizing business processes, with a very low total cost of ownership. Our customers harness the solution to increase productivity and reduce cost, improve quality of service and mitigate risks.

ProntoForms is the winner of the 2015 Frost & Sullivan Competitive Strategy Innovation and Leadership Award for the Mobile Forms Industry.

Learn more at www.ProntoForms.com

WBR Digital’s team of content specialists, marketers, and advisors believe in the power of demand generation with a creative twist. With senior executives from medium-sized businesses and Fortune 1,000 companies attending more than 100 WBR events each year, we are uniquely positioned to energize your organization’s marketing campaigns with a full array of marketing and bespoke content services.

Learn more at www.digital.wbresearch.com