Can you help us get off paper work orders?

Going paperless in a field business is worth doing. Work orders that are legible, photos attached to the job, signatures captured on site, and invoices going out the same day rather than when the paperwork comes back to the office on Friday. The cash flow improvement alone usually justifies it.

What we do and what we do not:

We do: help you evaluate options against what you actually need, get the tablets or phones specified and set up, make sure the office side of the system runs properly, handle the connectivity and the mobile device management, secure the devices so a truck break-in is not a data breach, and sort out the integration with your accounting where one exists.

We do not: tell you which field service platform is right for your trade. We have opinions and we will share them, but the people who should drive that choice are you and whoever runs your dispatch, because the differences that matter are workflow differences rather than technical ones.

Three things that decide whether this succeeds, learned from watching it go both ways:

• It has to work with no signal. Your techs will be in crawl spaces, mechanical rooms and rural areas. If the app cannot capture a job offline and sync later, it will be abandoned within a month.
• Pick your least enthusiastic tech and test with them. Not your most capable one. If it works for the person who does not want it, it will work.
• Do not run paper and digital in parallel for long. A short overlap is sensible. A long one means everyone keeps using paper and you pay for both.

Budget for real training time on the truck, not a demo in the office. That is where it sticks or does not.