Digitizing Manual Operations with TrackVia
A large utility construction company in the Northeast provides services for the utility, power, gas distribution, water, and communications industries. For example, within one region, this company lays fiber optics to hundreds of private homes on a weekly business.
Heavy Paper Processes Slow Productivity and Business
Before TrackVia, the company’s process for hundreds of projects every week relied on piles of paper forms, hand drawings, spreadsheets, and phone calls. To complete a single installation, the supervisor, surveyor, foreman, and installation crew would pass a single paper form between each other multiple times over many days for each phase of the implementation. Part of the process also involved the surveyor hand drawing the work-site for the installation crew.
Once an installation was complete, the paper form would be handed off to a project manager who would hand type the information into a billing system to send to customers. The billing process for a single installation took an average of six days.
The company used these laborious, time-consuming, and error-prone processes for hundreds of projects per week. Concerned about overall productivity and project visibility, the company sought a solution to digitize their many manual processes and integrate with their other systems.
Improving Business Operations, Productivity, and Billing Cycle Time
With a very small IT team, this large utility construction company needed a mobile workflow platform that could be deployed quickly with minimal IT effort. The platform also needed to be flexible enough to be owned and maintained by individual business departments. After considering several solutions, the company selected TrackVia for its mobile capabilities, flexible workflow automation, integrated reporting tools, and intuitive user interface.
With its TrackVia app, the company digitized their installation process — freeing up employees to do more on-site work rather than push paper in the office. Surveyors used to hand draw the work-site environment. Now, they capture work-site details with geo-location, pictures, and notes in the mobile app. Notations, diagrams, and other information can also be captured directly in the mobile app to illustrate potential obstacles, such as gas lines, sidewalk crossings, or fencing. Additionally, when there’s a problem, workers use their TrackVia app to send alerts directly to the supervisor. They also document safety risks or incidents — allowing office staff to track and pull a variety of safety analytics and reports.
Additionally, the data collected throughout an installation is immediately available to the payroll, invoicing, and project management teams — eliminating late nights of data entry and allowing for better communication with their customer.
To track progress and productivity, the company also built a reporting dashboard within TrackVia to show metrics such as the average days from the start of an installation to its invoicing, the average price of each install per day, as well as employee performance metrics. Further, the company built another app for billing that has reduced invoicing time from six days to just hours — an 80% improvement.
Overall, TrackVia has enabled the company to increase their productivity, improve their billing cycle, and gain visibility resulting in more efficient, responsive, and decisive business operations.
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Industry
Construction & Utilities
TrackVia, the leading workflow platform for operations, helps companies build applications that improve on-time performance and reduce costs. TrackVia offers operations leaders the fastest and easiest way to build powerful applications that are business led and IT approved. Hundreds of companies, like Honeywell, Leidos, KS Industries, rely on TrackVia to digitize their operations. Learn more at: trackvia.com.