Costs of Not Going Digital
“Going Digital” you hear it all the time and we see it in the world around us. The mechanical dials that used to be on your oven or washing machine have been replaced with soft touch buttons and digital displays and the traditional vehicle dashboard with dials and gauges are being replaced with iPad’esque touch screens and monitors.
Apart from the tangible “sleek & fancy” consumer product examples listed above, what does “going digital” actually mean in a business context? And closer to home, what does “digital” look like when it comes to traditional field tickets? What are the benefits, or alternatively the costs of not going digital?
To start, perhaps digital is the wrong word. Based on our experience and the clients we’ve worked with let’s simplify things and replace the word “digital” with “electronic” – as in electronic field tickets.
As business and industry grow, mature and evolve the reasons for moving to an electronic field ticket system are as varied as there are companies who use tickets (and that could be a whole separate topic altogether) but with thousands of users, hundreds of meetings and dozens upon dozens of implementations we’ve come to identify a few of the biggest “costs” of not using electronic tickets that have helped companies realize the value in making the switch.
The most common issues, or “costs” that we routinely hear are:
No more lost, messy, incomplete paper tickets:
Yes, good old duplicate or triplicate paper tickets had a good run as the default system in industry, but we now have the tools and technology to create a better way. With electronic tickets there is no more risk of tickets lost under the seat, dropped on the floor and covered in mud and snow (or ketchup!). No more tickets with illegible writing, wrong codes, or incomplete entries. Correcting all these common, legacy issues often results in getting paid the correct amount, sooner and with less disputes.
Less duplicate effort:
For all the examples listed above, we see companies dedicating significant hours every month re-writing, correcting or chasing down lost or messy tickets. Go electronic and let your people do something more valuable than re-writing field tickets that fell onto a muddy, snow covered floor mat.
A digital workflow allows accurate data to be captured once and automatically flow through to people and systems that need it.
Inventory control & tracking:
Depending on your exact business operation a properly designed and configured system can include equipment and inventory tracking as part of the ticketing software. That means no more multiple independent systems for invoicing and inventory. If inventory or equipment was used on a job you know exactly where it is or in real-time know when you need to order more!
Ease & speed of reporting:
You can’t run reports from a physical stack of paper on a desk (or truck seat) until the information from those papers is entered into a system. Why make it that difficult? Go electronic and have all the information already in a system ready for real-time download, analysis and reporting?
Data Integrity:
No more messy printing, no more notes and comments on the back of tickets. Through simple controls and easy to use menus you can rest assured you have all the right data and standardized information collected for future use.
The internet never forgets:
Celebrity (or Prime Minister) social media scandals aside once your data has been electronically entered it is instantly synced and saved for your future use. No more boxes to save, or file folders to risk leaving behind in the coffee shop.
Evolution not revolution:
The world continues to evolve. Perhaps you’re a vendor to other clients who is, or will be moving to an electronic or paperless system, perhaps you or the client is tired of constantly rejecting or returning invoices or tickets to you, perhaps it’s time.
Features like digital stamps and signatures provide more than just a convenient way for your customer to approve your tickets. They automatically flow through to your invoices, ensuring that what you bill matches what was approved.
Some producers already require that service companies do tickets electronically for this very reason and that trend will continue. Just like we aren’t going back to records or cassettes, we aren’t going back to paper tickets either.
Frustration via administration:
Based on client stories in paper-based or clumsy systems it goes without fail that messes and mistakes are often only cleaned up as a result of significant administrative effort. This is often in the form of phone calls, emails, text, searching, transcribing, sending authorizations, signoffs, change orders etc. It’s a safe bet your people have better things to do than making 8 phone calls to 3 different departments trying to figure out the correct P.O number of a job you want to invoice time to that a field worker forgot to enter.
Not an exhaustive list by any means, those are by far the most common “costs” that clients and companies are able to avoid when considering implementing a paper-less electronic ticket solution.
Surely a few of these have resonated with you. If so, let’s chat, we’re all about making things easy, you have enough other things to worry about, stuffing your hand under your seat looking for a ticket shouldn’t be one of them.
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Learn how going digital can lower your costs faster and easier than you think.