Mobile Forms Shouldn’t Just Be Mobile Forms

In my marketing and technology course at Adelaide University, it was made crystal clear people buy solutions not products, or people buy holes not drill bits. So when it comes to the adoption of mobile forms, organisations have a problem that mobile form technology can solve. These problems include ‘not receiving field paperwork’, ‘loss of paperwork’, ‘paperwork not being completed properly’, increased costs associated with paper forms’, and the list goes on.

Recently I worked closely with a logistics organisation to embed mobile form technology into their business processes that included the way that they captured and communicated information from the field. This included transport operators completing forms and checklists on smart devices and submitting those forms and checklists in real time to those that needed them from the field. The project was a success and the mobile forms technology was implemented throughout the organisation.

While having a meeting with the organisation to finish the project up the operations manager was rushed, as he needed to get back to his desk and text each driver his or her daily tasks. This begged the question; our mobile forms communicate information from field back to the office, why can’t the office communicate information to the field workers through the mobile forms? Further, how can our mobile form application reduce the costs associated with communication to a mobile workforce and improve efficiencies? The answer is integrating push notifications to the app on a smart device.

Push notification are where messages pop up on a mobile device usually used by marketers via an app. In this case, a manager will send a message to an individual, or a workgroup, through our web-based application to the app with the required message. The driver’s smart device will alert the driver of the message through a beep and popup on the screen and also the message would be saved in the app for future reference. We are currently working on the push notifications for our mobile form application and should have this solution rolled out in a couple of weeks. Visit www.digiclip.io for an update on our push notifications project.