You might think that administrative overhead (including printing paper, clip boards, and binders) are quite small but make no mistake; they often go unnoticed but they can have a negative impact on your revenue and margins. Therefore, if you are looking for a more sustainable way of improving your bottom-line, you should try to reduce your administrative overhead instead of cutting spend across your operations.
Capturing data through input forms is an important practice in many industries like manufacturing and distribution. At present, when digital technology is taking over the world, many organizations are still employing paper forms. While there may be grounds to keep using paper for in-field data collection, the arguments for going digital are growing stronger.
Benefits of switching to digital forms
How can digital forms benefit tour business? Digitizing your data collection forms can positively impact your operation end-to-end. Here we will tell you how mobile forms can reduce your administrative costs:
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Getting rid of printing and storage costs
Digital forms are an effective way to go paperless. Therefore, by deploying them, you not only ousting the need for paper, but also eliminating those expensive printing and storage costs and the need for accessories to store manual documents (e.g. binders, clipboards, pens, staples, etc.).
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Eliminate manual data entry
A digital forms management solution helps you remove manual data entry from your information capture process. It also allows you to implement electronic signature capture in your web-based forms to speed up approval processes.
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Eliminating wasted resources
Manual data collection requires resources that are not usually associated with paperwork, like fuel and vehicle mileage. Field teams filling paper forms must hand-deliver these documents to the back-office for manual review and analysis. This costs to your business fuel and additional time and resources.
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Integration with other systems
Digital forms can also integrate with other systems allowing users to instantly upload their data, metadata and images, to the server or the cloud which allows you to interact and communicate with your office and field staff in real time. Therefore, this is a more efficient and productive way to gather and send information. By using digital forms, the data is captured immediately into the back-end business system. From there, it’s ready and waiting to be used when required.
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Simplify data input
By replacing paper forms with digital ones, you can get faster, easier, and greener processes. Digital forms management software can take the place of old fashion filing cabinet, speeding up data collection and optimizing data storage allowing you to get access to any type of digital documents such as work orders, purchase requests, contracts and more.
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Standardize data capture
By deploying digital forms, you can make sure that all your company forms are filled out the way you need them. facilitating analysis and storage. When you standardize data capture, you, automatically, improve efficiency, safe time and could guarantee that the information provides is right. Using paper-based forms makes it difficult to standardize the data capturing process. Bear in mind that the lack of standardization in data collection complicates the process of entering the data into the back-end system.
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Improve data accuracy
With digital forms management you can customize exactly how you want users to interact with your forms to ensure the data entered is reliable. As a result of this, you can pull data straight from your databases, obtaining highly accurate information and reducing time wasted
Digital forms can transform your field teams and back-office operation. Paper forms cause clutter, they cost money to store and print, and they are easily lost, stolen, or simply filled out incorrectly. And incorrectly entered form data can slow the growth of your business, creating blockage in your workflow damaging your levels of productivity.
Whether you’re a small-to-medium sized business or a large enterprise, if your current forms management practices are old fashion, inefficient or expensive, you’re missing out on the chance to grow your company and maximize productivity by going digital.
DataScope is a platform which allows various industries to streamline, organize and evaluate the work of their field staffs thanks to online forms which provide real time indicators 100% adaptable to any field.
