Paper Work Orders Slow You Down!

 If you could choose between your business travelling by horse or in a rocket ship, would you even stop to think about it? Of course not! So why is your business still working with slow manual processes?

Paper work orders is horse and buggy technology, and your competition is rocketing to the moon.  According to a survey in Field Technologies magazine, 82% of field service companies are already using a digital solution, or are adding one right now.  

Staying with paper work orders is putting your business behind your more agile competition.  Here’s why digital work orders are helping them win.

• Digital work orders provide more accurate information
• They can capture all the details of the job, including additional billable work
• Their dispatchers can see job progress in real time
• They don’t waste administrators time manually typing up messy work orders
• Their digital documents can be retrieved from anywhere
• They can be billing customers days sooner

Bring Your Business Into This Century

Companies still putting pen to paper are wasting countless hours waiting for significantly less accurate information.

We all know field technicians aren’t popping by the office after each job to drop off work orders. No, it’s more likely that they are attached to a clipboard that’s been tossed on the passenger side floor with old fast food bags and coffee cups.

Begging the question, if those work orders get lost or damaged, what are you getting at the end of the week when they do drop them off? Inaccurate records.

With digital work orders, your field service team can fill out all the information that would appear on a traditional paper work order on a smartphone or tablet. Workers can take pictures and make digital notes that are attached to the work order when it is sent in after the job.

Keeping all your job specific details together and reducing the need for administrative staff to chase down technicians to clarify the chicken scratch on a paper from last week.

Capture All The Work Your Team is Doing

Notes scratched down onto paper, sometimes hours after a job was actually completed, just don’t tell the whole story. Details are often  forgotten or neglected, labor hours are estimated, and the sloppy handwriting makes the documents hard to decipher.

Digital solutions capture job details seamlessly. Digital notes are easy to read, having spell check and voice to text dictation tools available to make having clear detailed documentation of jobs simple.

Automatically tracking time spent on site takes the guess work out of billable labor. Having accurate automated records makes it harder for customers dispute charges.

Keep your inventory records up to date in real time. When a part is used on a job, have that information automatically updated in your inventory management system through your work order solution. Your team will simply search for the parts they want to use and select them, the system then instantly updates your records.

These features make your team’s jobs simpler, produces higher quality work, and ultimately increasing your bottom line.

Move at the Speed of Light

Time is money and closing out work orders faster means that you are cashing cheques faster. So imagine if instead of waiting for your field workers to hand in their paper work orders, the minute they leave a job you have their work order handed in digitally. Well maybe you should stop imagining it and start living it.

Getting instant access to completed work orders is just one click away and so are your profits.

Keep Your Head in the Cloud

Paper work orders take up a lot of space. To keep accurate records requires file cabinets and hours of attention to keep your records straight.

With digital work orders, everything can be saved in Cloud Storage making it accessible from anywhere you have an internet connection. Meaning even if your office burns to ashes, is toppled over in an earthquake, or is robbed in the middle of the night, your digital documents will survive.

Lose Paper, Not Reception

Regardless of whether your team uses company smartphones or their own personal device, the value of the phone will be more obvious to your workers than that of paper.

Loss or damage of paper work orders can happen at any moment between the time it leaves the job site and is input into the computer at the office. However, people are generally more careful with mobile devices.

That said, even if they do destroy or lose the mobile device after the work order is submitted, it can be replaced and all the data will have been recorded and submitted so you can still accurately bill your customer.

Conclusion

Remember, 82% of your peers have already given up on paper. Now they are free of the frustrating manual processes and are growing with their new competitive advantage.

It is time for you to join the movement and start winning back your jobs.

Keep more accurate records that tell the whole story. That way your team is in sync from the field to the office and you are better equipped to dominate your industry.