In the world of mobile reporting, the last thing anyone wants is a lost inspection form or incident report. Furthermore, no one wants to deal with incomplete forms, missing critical information, or redundantly wasting time completing them. However, what exactly do we mean by intelligent forms?

What are smart forms in the context of field or mobile reporting? Smart forms are forms that incorporate ‘intelligent design and functionality.’ These forms could, like in the case of the 1st Reporting application, provide dynamic links to other forms for complete workflow automation, reducing tasks through innovative digital workflow management. 

These intelligent forms could include dynamically generated content like GPS time and location data. They might also include time-saving features such as custom notifications to speed up incident or inspection result communications critical to event response.

In this guide, we’ll explore how smart forms can save your organization time on incident and inspection reporting, that is, time during the incident or inspection documentation process, as well as related processes. We’ll share some great strategies you can use to enhance how your team operates, making your organization more efficient and, frankly, easier to manage. Let’s jump right into it.

The Importance of Efficient Reporting in Field Operations

Any field operations where team members traverse to different work locations need efficient documentation practices. In my decades of experience managing a multidisciplinary trade, I found that teams would lose significant time working in their service trucks to complete paperwork that was constantly redundant. Of course, this was back in the day of triplicate work orders that used carbon backing to transfer onto a total of three copies of the work order. 

My point about the paperwork orders was that they were a time-consuming mess. Every job could take the teams as much as a half hour to complete their paperwork. Now consider trying to schedule 4-5 service calls in a day, and we’re talking about losing as much as a quarter of the day just doing paperwork.

I don’t mind saying those days are long gone, and thank goodness for that. Efficient reporting is crucial in any industry or service where personnel are mobile and work at various locations. However, I think it’s just as crucial for in-house operations. After all, whether team members are doing paperwork at a remote location or in the office, it’s still time-consuming.

As a percentage of sales, companies should strive for a labor cost of no more than 30% of gross sales.

In other words, if your company did $1M in sales in 2024, your company’s labor costs should not exceed $300K. ⁽¹⁾

As you can see, the more efficient you can make labor-intensive tasks, the lower your company’s labor costs will be. That’s why smart forms like those built using Template Genie and the custom form-building features of the 1st Reporting app are making such a difference to incident and inspection reporting processes.

What Are Smart Forms and How Do They Work?

I mentioned earlier that smart forms implement intelligent design and features. However, with applications like the 1st Reporting app, smart forms are taken to the next level. Intelligent forms are dynamic, interactive digital forms designed to collect, process, and analyze data effectively and efficiently. Unlike traditional paper forms (shudder at the thought), they adapt based on user input, guiding respondents with conditional logic, auto-filling fields, and real-time validations to reduce errors and enhance usability.

Using dynamic fields, smart forms can be built into intelligent workflows. These workflows bind multiple automated forms together to create comprehensive semi-autonomous workflows.

Role in Modern Reporting and Features Worthy of Recognition

• Streamlining Data Collection: Smart forms eliminate some of the manual data entry, enabling faster, more accurate information gathering. Included features like GPS and automated user information inputs intelligent forms like those in 1st Reporting are reshaping how mobile data solutions work in an organizational framework.
• Improving Data Quality: Features like dropdown menus and mandatory fields ensure consistent and reliable data. No more personnel skipping fields while documenting critical processes means you get the information you need every time.
• Integration with Systems: The top modern mobile reporting applications will connect seamlessly with other platforms, databases, and analytics tools, enabling real-time data flow and centralized reporting. For example, the 1st Reporting application works seamlessly with Microsoft Teams® and Microsoft Power BI®, so users can easily integrate it into their existing communication, collaboration, and data visualization applications.
• Enhancing Accessibility: Optimized for mobile and desktop, intelligent forms in leading software like 1st Reporting help support remote submissions, increasing participation and efficiency. Real-time documentation management enables you to share training, SOPs, and other documents with your team in real-time using the company Handbook feature. Furthermore, when you customize a template, you can choose which of your teams has access. Once granted, access is instant, even if your team is halfway around the world. Collaborative access is only as long as it takes for communication to travel through the World Wide Web.
• Driving Automation: By automating workflows, such as generating reports or triggering alerts, intelligent forms save time and reduce operational overhead.
• Optical Character Recognition: Top mobile reporting providers also enable OCR, so adding clearly written or typed text from another source is not a challenge as long as you or your team member has a smartphone with a working camera.

In modern reporting, smart forms are indispensable for organizations that aim to optimize processes, make data-driven decisions, and respond quickly to real-time incidents or events. Let’s examine some of the other ways intelligent reporting systems are saving time and money in the field.

Saving Time with Smart Forms in Incident Reporting

In the United States, the total number of recordable occupational injuries and illnesses in private industry dropped from 2809 in 2014 to 2369 in 2023. That’s a drop that happened gradually, but overall, it’s a 15.66% decrease. ⁽²⁾ 

Now, consider that the workforce in private industry was 156.3M in the fourth quarter of 2014. ⁽³⁾

Furthermore, in 2023 the workforce in private industry was approaching 168.5M in 2023. ⁽⁴⁾

So, despite a workforce growth of 7.81%, the number of injuries reported dropped by 15.66%. Now, imagine if every one of the reported incidents saved on time during the reporting process, mitigating some of the lost time due to incident documentation. Time is money, as they say, and incidents do nothing but cost time and money. So, any recuperation of the time lost due to an incident will help an organization and the bottom line positively. 

Streamlining Data Collection

Data collection is streamlined and much more efficient with applications like the 1st Reporting app available to your team. A solution like 1st helps drive streamlined data collection initiatives by providing pre-built templates tailored for specific incident and inspection types. As soon as you sign up, you can use any of these forms.

Speaking of forms and their customization, building new custom forms is highly time-consuming, as you know. That’s why features like 1st Reporting’s AI-powered Template Genie make a measurable and significant improvement in custom form creation time. 

Real-time data entry on mobile devices improves response times. Applications like 1st Reporting, which use highly secure cloud data storage, enable your team to review completed team member forms in real-time. In fact, by further automating the inspection or incident process with fully customizable notifications, your team is even more empowered to cut response times and fully utilize real-time data availability for the ultimate in data-backed, real-time decision-making.

Reducing Follow-Up Time

In my years of experience, the 1st Reporting application has two highly valuable features that are worth mentioning: dynamic linking elements in the form builder and custom notifications.

Dynamic Linking

In the 1st Reporting form customizer, you can add an element to link one form to another dynamically. This feature can help you build dynamically created workflows, such as adding a follow-up report to an incident or adding a work order to an equipment inspection. You can create customized digital workflows in all sorts of scenarios to standardize workflow tasks and operations for your team.

Custom Notifications

Instant notifications help reduce response time. However, let me be clear: not all custom notifications are created equal. Let’s look at the first Reporting application to set a benchmark for the best type of custom notification.

In the 1st Reporting application, one of the features is setting custom notifications. Now, when you think of custom notifications, you can adjust who receives the notification and what said notification includes in terms of text. That is, by definition, a custom notification. However, in the 1st Reporting application, you have much more customization at your fingertips.

The 1st Reporting application’s custom notification features let you control the following:

1. Notification recipient(s).
2. Notification title.
3. Notification message.
4. Notification trigger.
5. Notification trigger conditions.
6. Digital template connected to the notification.

All of these customizable aspects of the 1st Reporting notification system help you generate customized and automated notifications to enhance your mobile reporting processes and streamline the mobile reporting communication process.

Accelerating Inspection Reporting with Smart and Intuitive Digital Forms

Using smart forms like those in the 1st Reporting application ensures you accelerate your efficiencies related to incident reporting. However, these efficiencies don’t stop there. They also extend into any inspection reporting processes you use the same system to manage.

Simplifying Repetitive Tasks

One of the points I found was slowing down paperwork in the field was having service personnel have to complete the same fields repeatedly, like adding their name, position, date, time, customer name, and other information that should, in a perfect world, be pre-completed. With custom forms in solutions like the 1st Reporting app, you can automate these sorts of beginner-level data entry tasks. You can accomplish this task using the GPS and dynamic user information features in the custom form builder to ensure these repetitive and redundant entries are taken care of by the application and not your service personnel.

Custom forms also enable your team to provide standardized forms for custom situations. These forms allow pre-recorded information and data to be dynamically inputted, ensuring service or field personnel do not have to enter repetitive data repeatedly for custom application documentation.

Enhancing Collaboration and Access

It’s worth noting that instant access via a secure cloud environment can enhance team collaboration and access to incident and inspection reporting. The 1st Reporting application utilizes best practices (see our ISO certification information) to ensure that you have enhanced and secure access to your information in real-time. This ultra-fast information sharing enables efficient collaboration and accelerated response capacity.

Maximizing ROI with Smart Digital Forms in Your Business

One of our clients recently shared with us that within the first week of using the 1st Reporting app with a custom form, their team dramatically improved data collection and reporting. In fact, response and inspection reporting times improved by as much as 75%. Read more about this improvement in response and thus maximizing mobile reporting ROI in our case studies section.

See the Difference Automated Forms Can Make

Automated forms like those you’ll find in the 1st Reporting application are effective, efficient, labor-saving solutions to the paper-based reporting methods of the past. Intelligent forms that utilize dynamic linking to provide semi-automated workflows for your field personnel can help organizations like yours to reduce both incident and inspection reporting labor. 

In some cases, these improvements in incident and inspection documentation are so great that they dramatically alter how companies evaluate their existing processes, making them even more semi-autonomous for even greater operational efficiency.

If you’d like to learn more about incident and inspection field reporting, check out our other resources, all of which are on our Field Reporting Resources page.

Want to learn more about how the 1st Reporting app can streamline your organization’s operations? Book a demonstration with our team or try the app yourself first: 1st Reporting on Google Play and 1st Reporting on the Apple App Store. 1st Reporting works on all devices, including laptops and desktop computers. Try it today and see the difference that a truly smart form can make.

Article Sources

1. “What You Need to Know about Labor Cost Percentages.” 2024. Indeed.com. 2024. https://www.indeed.com/hire/c/info/labor-cost-percentages.
2. “Work-Related Injury and Illness Incident Rate Trends – Injury Facts.” 2024. Injury Facts. November 14, 2024. https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/work/industry-incidence-rates/work-related-incident-rate-trends/.
3. Sherman, Eleni Theodossiou; Kang, Janie-Lynn. 2015. “Continued Improvement in U.S. Labor Market in 2014.” Bureau of Labor Statistics. April 23, 2015. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/continued-improvement-in-u-s-labor-market-in-2014.htm#:~:text=The%20civilian%20labor%20force%E2%80%94the,the%20fourth%20quarter%20of%202014..
4. “Civilian Labor Force Seasonally Adjusted U.S. 2024 | Statista.” 2024. Statista. 2024. https://www.statista.com/statistics/193953/seasonally-adjusted-monthly-civilian-labor-force-in-the-us/.

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