Navigating the complexities of field operations, you’re acutely aware of the inefficiencies that plague productivity: delayed communications and the tedious nature of paper-based processes. These challenges not only hinder your team’s performance but also impact your bottom line in an industry that’s rapidly evolving. 

The field service management market is expected to grow from $4.94 billion in 2024 to $8.59 billion by 2029⁽¹⁾. In such a growing market, it is evident that the push for digital transformation is undeniable.

Enter the transformative power of mobile forms and custom workflow automation. These tools are more than mere enhancements; they’re your ticket to redefining operational efficiency. By adopting these technologies, you can eliminate common bottlenecks, ensuring accuracy and real-time data exchange across your field operations.

In this article, we’ll explore how leveraging mobile forms and workflow automation streamlines your processes while helping position your organization to lead in a highly competitive market. Let’s dive into how these solutions can turn your operational challenges into opportunities for growth and innovation.

Mobile Forms: The Foundation for Streamlined Workflows

A mobile form is a form that exists in a digital format, offering accessibility to the form on a mobile device such as a smartphone. However, a mobile form is only a part of the solution to an organized and efficient workflow. The key is to streamline and automate specific steps along a task workflow, from dispatch all the way to post-completion analysis.

To start, though, a mobile form for a simple process, such as pre-work hazard analysis, is a great way to encourage team members to start using a mobile form. It’s also a great form to get to know a mobile form management solution like 1st Reporting.

There are a number of benefits to using mobile forms as a part of a custom workflow that helps to drive efficiency between your teams in the field and management in the office. However, there are a number of specific benefits that include the following:

• Real-time data capture 
• Reduced errors
• Enhanced visibility into operations
• Accessibility in remote locations

Capturing Real-Time Data with Mobile Forms

Mobile forms are not all created equal. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Some mobile forms are customizable but only give you a text field and multiple choice field as your options. Some don’t give many options at all. However, a robust mobile form tool should include making use of the built-in technology of mobile devices, such as the camera and microphone. 

At 1st Reporting, our ISO-certified approach to cloud computing and storage ensures that your company’s site videos, photos, and data are uploaded and stored securely. Access to uploaded data is only a few clicks away, usually within seconds of a mobile field team uploading the data.

Improving Accuracy, Reducing Errors and Paperwork

Studies show that paper forms take approximately 51.85% longer to complete than the same form completed on a smartphone.

Let’s look at the numbers. According to a study about the efficacy, accuracy, and acceptability of smartphone-delivered data collection, there are some interesting points to consider when using mobile forms and smartphones⁽²⁾. Take a look at the chart below with the findings of the study:

	Smartphone	Pen/Paper
Time to complete a form (seconds)	297	451
Accuracy per form (%)	90.9	93.9
Completeness per form (%)	90.9	90.9

As you can see from the numbers, the paper form took significantly longer to complete than the smartphone’s mobile form did. There was a very slight drop in accuracy from paper to smartphone, and the form completeness for both cases resulted in the same value.

Using a mobile form and dynamic workflow tool like 1st Reporting could increase the smartphone form completeness to 100%. The application has a feature of custom form building, and while creating a form, you can choose fields as ‘required,’ stopping the user from moving forward with the form until they have added or selected a response.

Custom Form Customizer for Tailored Needs

The best solutions for enterprise-level management of field reporting processes should include a custom form builder. If you want to experience next-level form building, check out the custom form builder in 1st Reporting. It’s intuitive, easy to use, and gives you the power of dynamically linking forms, making entire workflows mobile documents automated, enabling your team to follow their procedures efficiently, documenting and completing forms on the go.

Custom Workflow Automation: The Power of Efficiency

I mentioned the dynamic linking feature in the last section. Here’s how dynamic form linking works: When you customize or create a new form in our custom form builder, you have multiple elements to select. One of your options is to add a dynamic link within the form that can connect the form to another form or document, creating a semi-automated workflow. 

The workflow automation features enable you to create custom forms to suit your mobile team’s specific use cases and connect those forms for an automated workflow. This dynamic form linking could do things like auto-generating a blank follow-up form or another custom form you created as a next step to the workflow.

Benefits of Custom Workflow Automation

• Real-time progress tracking and status updates
• Eliminating manual handoffs and delays
• Improved overall efficiency and decision-making

Enhancing Response Times with Automated Alerts

One feature of robust mobile workflow automation is automating communications. 1st Reporting is leading the way in this respect with its highly customizable mobile notification system built into the app as a standard feature. Here’s how it works:

1. Log in to the 1st Reporting app.
2. Click on the form designer icon at the bottom left of your screen (desktop) or in the menu (tablet/smartphone).
3. Click on Notifications.
4. Click on + Add Notification (just the plus symbol on tablet/smartphone).
5. Select email or Microsoft Teams notification.
6. Name your notification, and select the template, trigger, conditions, recipients, notification title, and notification message. You have total control, so making a highly effective system that works for your organization’s exacting needs is easy with 1st Reporting.

Using the customizable automated notification system in the 1st Reporting app is a fast and easy way to help set up the proper workflow notifications to ensure safety and compliance in field operations.

Critical Considerations for Field Operations Success

• Ease of Use: Intuitive interfaces following clean design principles benefit your team by lowering the bar to entry for app use, requiring minimal or much less training. Decreased need for training makes integration more manageable, especially at scale.
• Customization: The importance of tailoring forms and workflows to specific needs is invaluable. With complete customization control, you enable your teams to have specific forms for their inspections, incidents, and more that comply with local regulations.
• Integration: Seamless integration with existing management systems like Microsoft Teams® and data visualization tools like Microsoft BI® make managing mobile report data more straightforward than ever. That’s why both integrations are standard with 1st Reporting, ensuring seamless integration with some of the world’s most powerful digital tools for enterprise organizations.
• Security: The need for robust data security to protect company and customer information is absolutely crucial. Ensure that you consider the security of any software before you use it in the field. That’s why 1st Reporting is an ISO-certified company – to ensure we keep your data secure by holding ourselves to the highest standards.

Getting Started with Mobile Forms and Custom Workflow Automation

Generally speaking, implementing any new technology, whether it’s smartphones or software, can pose challenges. However, with a short assessment and a little planning, that challenge can turn into an opportunity to address issues with previous operations and processes.

Assessing Your Current Workflow

In my experience managing mobile service teams, the best way to digitize and automate the workflows is to create segmented plans and ensure there are clearly defined stages and steps for each. 

For example, I would create a general SOP to cover the basic steps each day (such as initial site safety inspection or hazard analysis, daily vehicle inspections, and similar day-to-day standard operations). Next, I would take the most common scenarios in which teams require strict processes and create steps that include checklists, forms, or other event-specific document needs.

However you decide to segment your field team’s operating procedures, assessing the procedures with a methodical, segmented approach can be highly useful during the workflow assessment process.

Planning and Deploying Custom Mobile Forms and Workflows

Over the years, I’ve used various methods to implement or integrate new technologies at work. However, with regard to field operations, I don’t mind saying that this is my go-to implementation method. It’s high-level, so it is adaptable to multiple industries or scenarios. Let me know what you think in the comments.

1. Assess Your Needs

Start by pinpointing the unique needs of your field operations. What information do your teams need to capture? Which processes could benefit from automation?

2. Choose the Right Platform

Opt for a mobile forms and workflow automation platform that offers flexibility, customization, and scalability to meet your evolving needs.

3. Design Your Forms and Workflows

Design forms and workflows that are intuitive and straightforward. Ensure they align with your field crews’ tasks to streamline data collection and reporting. Set automation, like notifications, to further advance the workflow of auto-completed tasks.

4. Pilot the Implementation

Before a full rollout, conduct a pilot with a select group of field workers. Gather feedback on usability and effectiveness to make necessary adjustments. Remember, the input at this stage is vital to further rollout success, so don’t neglect it.

5. Train Your Team

Organize training sessions to familiarize your field crews with the new system. Cover the basics of using mobile forms, submitting reports, and understanding automated workflows. It would be best to create quick reference guides, FAQs, and video tutorials to assist in learning.

6. Roll Out Gradually

Launch the new system in phases to manage the transition smoothly. Start with teams or regions that are most adaptable to change. Remember to continue collecting feedback along the way. Feedback will help you fine-tune your rollout and optimization as your teams go along the implementation journey.

7. Offer Ongoing Support

Set up a dedicated support channel for field crews to address queries and technical issues promptly. Encourage ongoing feedback to refine and improve the system over time and establish management protocols to handle the scaling teams better.

8. Monitor and Optimize

Analyze data and user feedback to assess the impact on productivity and efficiency. Use these feedback channel insights to optimize forms and workflows continually.

Try 1st Reporting

If you’re in the market for an advanced mobile app that includes GPS features, custom automated notifications, customizable and dynamic form building, and more, then jump into a test run of 1st Reporting – One of the best things to ever happen to field reporting management.

Advanced Features of 1st Reporting

Dynamically link reports to chain together workflows and associate documents. Set custom notifications with custom triggers and conditions. Create custom templates, or start with one of our many templates for industry, pre-loaded into the app for your convenience. Assign forms to teams to keep them working with the forms they need the most to streamline their workflows in their field operations.

Empowering Your Field Operations: A Leap into the Future

As we’ve navigated through the transformative potential of mobile forms and custom workflow automation, it’s clear that these are some serious tools acting as catalysts for change. By embracing these innovations and streamlining workflows, you’re rewriting the playbook on efficiency, accuracy, and responsiveness in your field operations.

Remember, the journey to integrating these technologies is as much about the technology itself as it is about the people who use it. With a little careful planning, some comprehensive training, and ongoing support, your teams can excel in this new digital landscape.

Article Sources

1. Mordor Intelligence. 2024. “Field Service Management Market – Size, Growth, Industry Statistics & Share.” Mordorintelligence.com. 2024. https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/field-service-management-market.
2. Raza, Awais, Ibrahim Raza, Thomas M Drake, Ahmed Bani Sadar, Muhammad Adil, Fatima Baluch, Ahmad Uzair Qureshi, and Ewen M Harrison. 2017. “The Efficiency, Accuracy and Acceptability of Smartphone-Delivered Data Collection in a Low-Resource Setting – a Prospective Study.” International Journal of Surgery 44 (August): 252–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijsu.2017.06.081.