Guide

What happens when your business goes paper free?

Switching from paper based management is no easy task, but one that’s worthwhile to secure your business’s place in the future.

What will be included in the free guide:


This guide is for businesses who want to learn more about what is involved in removing their current paper process, why they should change from a paper based system and also how to implement a digital system.

What you’ll learn:

  • Why paper is an outdated process
  • The real cost of relying on paper
  • The journey to paper free
  • The worries of going paper free
  • Practical tips for going paper free
  • How long it takes to go paper free

Why paper is an outdated medium


The truth is, paper is past its sell by date for business purposes. It can no longer compete with digital data and automated processes as a way to share, track and store company information. These benefits are driving the shift from paper to digital processes in every aspect of society:

Government

From Making Tax Digital to the £10 billion invested in the NHS ‘Paperless 2020′ campaign, the UK Government is committed to phasing out paper processes. This push from above creates an admin framework in which paper processes are increasingly incompatible.

Banking

During 2018, 1,080 bank and building society branches were closed down across the I-JK as online banking continues to change the way we handle our personal finances and removes the banks reliance on physical infrastructure.

Retail

Around 14 UK shops are closing down each day as our high streets continue to be transformed by the move to online shopping. In 2018, the rate of closures increased by 40 percent with 2.481 stores having shut.

Person Holding White Ipad on Brown Wooden Table

The real costs of relying on paper


Yes, a switch to a digital system comes with costs, but have you ever considered just how much relying on a paper process costs your business?
It’s not just the physical cost of the paper, it’s the whole infrastructure that’s required to manage physical documentation. It’s the time and resources lost through inefficiencies and the risks posed by errors, customer complaints and compliance breaches.

Physical costs

A typical company has to have atleast one job sheet per job whether it’s on copy paper, or printed by the office, but it’s not just the cost of paper that’s the issue. It’s the cost in printer contracts, ink, stationery and storage of it all.

There’s also the person who has to process these ever piling bits of paper, someone whose job exists solely to process and re-key information into another system.

Mobile paper chase

When you’re managing mobile workers, relying on paper means more journeys. To get job information, your employees need to pick up the right pieces of paper, and once a job’s finished they need to drop those sheets and forms back off at an office or depot.

When you multiply these journeys across an organisation, you have a significant cost in terms of employee time and fuel.

Company reputation

It’s a cost you can’t put a figure on but it’s critically important for any business. It’s your reputation with customers and clients, something which can so easily be soured by mistakes, delays and shoddy service.

The chances of your reputation being damaged are much higher when you’re reliant on paper – forms can go missing, handwritten notes misread, and correspondence unanswered.

Storage problems

The problem with storing paper records goes beyond the physical space it takes up. It’s also time and trouble created when you want to access any of the stored information – whether it’s to deal with a customer complaint or to confirm safety compliance.

No matter how well documents are filed and categorised, finding information is a slow and painstaking process.

Compliance risks

One of the biggest threats faced by a business is the cost of fines or prosecution for non-compliance.

But making sure your fieldworkers follow all the guidelines is incredibly difficult when you’re doing it via bits of paper. When a safety policy is a written document, it’s easy to be forgotten about and ignored.

Counting the costs of paper


To understand how all of these elements combine to ratchet up costs, take the example of a mobile services company that prints off 400 paper job sheets each week.

Paper Cost Calculator

Paper Cost Calculator

ℹ
Enter the number of sheets of paper required for each job sheet.
ℹ
Enter the cost of ink used per sheet in GBP.
ℹ
Select the size of your office to determine storage and distribution costs.
ℹ
Enter the total number of jobs performed each week.
ℹ
Enter the cost of one sheet of paper in GBP.
ℹ
Enter the number of team members in the field team.
ℹ
Enter the time spent on filling out, printing, and compiling each job sheet in hours.
ℹ
Enter the annual salary of an employee in GBP.

Costs Summary

Sheets of Paper: 0

Cost of Printing per Week: £0.00

Admin Time Spent on Paper: 0 hours

Staff Costs: £0.00

Weekly Costs: £0.00

Yearly Costs: £0.00

The worries of going paper free

We have years of experience in helping businesses to move from paper to a more efficient digital system. The biggest barrier we help organisations to overcome is the fear and expectation of what could happen when they switch over. We see first-hand how these fears are in contrast to what actually happens.

Here's a look at some of the most common concerns we hear:

This is one of the biggest initial concerns companies have, it's also the area where the fears are furthest from reality. For a workforce management system to be effective, it has to be simple enough for even the biggest technophobe to get to grips with.

Thanks to constant refinement and feedback, that's exactly what MyMobileWorkers delivers. Running on consumer standard Android smartphones, the app requires no more technical ability than for a task such as sending a text. From our experience. even people who've never owned a smartphone are able to start using the system with the minimal need for training or instruction.

There's a big difference between your team not being able to use the software. and your team not wanting to use the software. Whether it is the "big brother" argument or the fact that your guys have fatter fingers than everyone else on the planet, we have heard it all.

There are two schools of thought to how to work this:

1. It's your job - tough

2. Get buy in from them and make them understand it is about their protection

The school of thought you choose depends on your business culture. Choose one and stick to it. if your team aren't able to use it this can be sorted through training. If your team don't want to use it. that is up to you to resolve - we can't force that!

When talking about a system that can reduce administration time, job losses are always a concern. The truth is: if you're using a paper system then your business is already wasting resource. Once the software is fully implemented some businesses recognise that there can be changes in the company structure.

The answer is. it's down to the business. You can either take the benefits of the software as reduced administration time and free up the resource, therefore reducing business costs, or, put them to work on other areas such as improving customer service or marketing the business.

What your business decides to do with the resource you're freeing up is up to you.

Compared to a paper system, most digital systems are secure. We often get asked "what if someone gets access to the data?' and we often respond with another question, asking what would happen to their paperwork if they had a break in or a natural disaster?

The short answer of course is yes, MyMobileWorkers is secure.

The long answer is that all our data is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and encrypted, meaning it's a suitable and secure environment for all types of data.

In MyMobileWorkers, one feature of the software is the ability for a person to get a signature from their customer and occasionally, questions are raised over how electronic signatures are treated from a legal point of view.

They are treated exactly the same.

If you want to take a peek at the legal nitty gritty then there are two pieces of legislation to look at. The first is from the European Parliament and has the catchy title of: 1999/93/EC. This was introduced in 1999 and the following year the UK Government gave it their own legal pat on the head with a few added revisions as the Electronic Communications Act 2000.

We're confident that if you follow all the steps that we set out. take your time and really get to know the software, it will work for your business.

We provide the tools to make your business more effective and it's then down to you to make sure that it is.

Read our case studies

The journey to paper free:

After over 10 years in the workforce management software game and speaking to thousands of businesses about going paper free, we've recognised 5 key stages that occur when deciding to go paperless:

This is the stage that everyone starts off in. It's the stage where you see just how good a workforce management system could be and the benefits your company could be seeing from gaining real time information from the field.

This stage usually occurs when you're first looking at the software and comparing it with your current, outdated, paper system.

It's that sickly feeling in your stomach, when you feel like something is way out of your control. You've had a demonstration of the system and have agreed internally that using a digital system instead of a paper one is the right way to go. Now you're thinking about the practicalities. Where do you even start?

It's here when you need someone to look at things with a clear head and have someone to run the project.

It's the “panic stations" phase where we get most of the questions from our prospects. We also get a lot of people dropping out here as they feel they're too busy to get a system in place. Too busy to get a system that will allow them to be less busy and chaotic.. Ironic, right?

Fear of the unknown is a natural human trait and employees are always liable to be resistant to any kind of organisational change. We call this the "initial period of resentment" stage, and it's just that -initial.

Whether this is the new design of Facebook, that awful new BBC ident (where are my dancing Hippos?) or the fact your car comes back from the garage with a new clutch and you don't like the new bite point, change happens.

And after an initial period of resentment, you typically get over it. Facebook has pretty colours. BBC ident is lovable, and that new clutch bite point is actually more comfortable.

This stage usually occurs when the software is being tested on a serious pilot, or the first time workers are made to use the system.

The bottom line is that we know our software works. We know that our implementation team are great and our support team are fantastic. We will be there for you, but, we can't make people use it and we can't get people over their initial period of resentment mentioned above.

All we can do is promise that it gets easier, and quickly. Typically we recommend people have an expectation of a difficult 4 week transition period. More often than not it is significantly less but we prefer to under promise and over deliver.

If there is any inkling that reverting back to paperwork is an option, the transition period increases and people can try to find reasons it won't work. So, expect a busy time and importantly make sure that there is someone internal whose job it is to make sure the project works.

For managers, this is something that they've had all along. They are confident that the new system works and can see that the grass is greener on the other side. For mobile workers, it does happen, it just takes a little longer to do it.

The way to get to this stage is to educate them on why you're making this change and explain the benefits for them.

Rather than being some Orwellian system to clamp down on employees, the day-to-day reality is that it helps to reduce hassle, improve safety, and allow for a much better boss/worker relationship

This stage typically happens after the whole business has been using the software to its full potential, be this days, weeks or even months after signing up to the software.

It's the stage where you look back at your old paper system and think, "how did we cope?"

This is the stage that we, of course, want to get you into as fast as possible, but doing so early could potentially hinder your chances at a successful roll out, which is in neither ours or your best interest.

Practical tips for going Paper Free

In order to make the switch over as pain free as possible, review your processes before you start to trial or sign up with software.

Decide what information you absolutely need from a job, and what information you'd like to have and work it into your current process. If you try and change your process entirely, you're likely to get some resistance from your staff.
Also, assess how heavily you rely on paper and decide what information you'd like on your digital system. Typically, the companies we talk to want their customers' contact details, site addresses and contacts, so you would need to make sure they are in a digital format to be able to be uploaded into your system.

You're moving away from familiar methods into something brand new (for most, anyway), so how do you decide what software is best for your business when there's so many out there?

Good questions to ask include:

1) Contract length - How long does the contract ask for? Does the price change based on the length of the contract?
2) Implementation - Most software companies charge for the initial setup of the software in order to make it as specific to your business as possible. How much is this likely to be?

3) Price - How much is the software? Is it all up front or is it a monthly charge?
4) Flexibility - Are you able to contact the developers when you need to, or is it an online form to fill in? How easily can you make changes to the software?

Most workforce management systems have two sides: a mobile app and a portal side. Before switching to a paper free system, you need to check if you have the right technology to handle it.

Given that the app has more specifications typically than the portal, you should ask for advice from your software provider when it comes to choosing the right technology for your mobile team.

In case your company is the type that has to jump through hoops in order to get sign off for a project, then building a business case would help sell your point. It doesn't have to be anything formal, it's more about being clear about your reasons for wanting to make the switch from paper. Keep in mind:

1) The time to complete a paper job sheet
2) The travel time to and from the office to drop paperwork off
3) The time it takes to rekey the job sheet onto a computer
4) The time it takes to get the information to accounts
5) The cost of printing and storing the job sheets

It's important that the people who will be using the software are involved from the start of the project, but we understand it's not practical to get every member of staff on a demonstration.

Identify the 'key players' in your organisation. These tend to be Managing Directors, General Managers, Operations Managers and your most capable mobile workers.

We recommend giving one member of your staff the responsibility of getting the software up and running. This is who we call the 'Project Manager' - the person who people can go to with questions of the software, and be the main contact for the software company to follow up with.

The role of the Project Manager doesn't have to have a certain job title, they just need to be someone influential towards both the mobile workers and also management.

Companies who have a Project Manager heading up the switch to a digital process tend to be up and running using the software a lot quicker than those who don't.

You may want to use the software to its full potential, but don't try and rush things. Think again about the reasons why you're going ahead and what you're using the software for.

Switching to a workforce management system should be a phased approach, so focus on the more important things and once you've proved the return of investment of the system, then you can branch out into other aspects of the software.

It may be an obvious one, but a successfully rolled out system is one that is well planned out. Trying to rush the implementation process can result in backlash in the long run.

Block some time out in the diary where you won't be disturbed and that time you invest will save you a lot of time further down the line.

How long does it take to make a switch?

This is largely down to your business. and can be quite a 'how long is a piece of string' question. Speaking for MyMobileWorkers, we've demonstrated, set up and got companies using our system within a week with no problems. We've also had companies that have taken months to set up.

We recommend having a trial of the software for at least a week for your live jobs, as an actual pilot. Usually, companies know within the first couple of days if the software is right for them or not.

Upon signing up with the system, MyMobileWorkers will invest time to completely understand your business, in order to give you the most effective system. This stage varies with how many of jobs your company has. Typically, a company will in implementation from anywhere from a week to 2 months.

Most companies will see the benefits from switching from a paper process to a digital system upon signing up.

See how MyMobileWorkers can help your business:

MyMobileWorkers is the only mobile workforce management platform that can be fully adapted to ensure job processes are followed and provides ongoing, real-time updates for you and your clients.

Book a demo