Becoming paperless or moving your processes to a mobile business app can seem difficult and intimidating. When you’ve always used paper to keep everything organised, switching to using digital tools might seem like a daunting prospect.
Perhaps you’ve been avoiding the implementation of more digital processes because it seems like a lot of work. Building internal business apps may appear to be too complex, beyond your team’s IT skills or extremely time-consuming.
At Rugged Data, we’ve tried to make the process of implementing an internal business app as simple as possible. We strive to minimise the amount of your time required to set everything up, and take the worry and stress out of everything. How do we do this? With our Faster Fieldwork 28 Day Sprint.
Here’s how we roll out your mobile forms and reporting app without disrupting your business:
1. Initial Discovery Call (Day 1)
When you approach our team for a custom business app, we assign you a Rugged Data coach. These coaches are Lean-trained and will work alongside your team for as long as you’re with us. The first step is to schedule a video call to determine your needs.
Our Rugged Data coaches have diverse backgrounds and are experienced in helping businesses through change. They won’t baffle you with technical jargon! They’ll do their best to understand where you are now and what your goals are, moving forward.
Generally, this takes about an hour, and during that time they’ll help you find a place to start. This might include: asking you for information, seeing copies of your existing forms and paperwork, or maybe a walk-through of one of your processes.
2. Early Business App Build (Days 2-8)
After our discussion, we’ll build an initial app for you to look at. This won’t be the final product, but it will give you an idea of the look and feel of your app. It gives us a starting point so that you can see how a business app can help you. We’ll use it as a point of discussion and to help stimulate ideas for developing your app further.
Think of this as us painting the broad strokes on the canvas. You’ve told us the portrait you want painted, and this is us getting to work getting the rough shape together. Don’t worry, though, it’ll be transformed into a masterpiece by the end of those 28 days.
3. Iteration (Days 9-12)
In these steps, we’ll start to refine your app and offer not one, but two review calls for your app. We’ll work through the app with you to listen to your feedback and make changes in response. We do all we can to make things easier for you and your team.
We can populate your form with drop-down choices, checkbox selections of standard choices, or with intelligent form fields that change, based on previous answers. Not only do these sorts of changes save time, they reduce the risk of error because they minimise the need for typing. The goal? Make your life easier, whilst at the same time improving accuracy.
Don’t worry – we’re very experienced. Our Rugged Data coaches will walk you through the process to make sure your app is perfect. We’re aware that your team might be working at night, or your staff might not have English as their first language. Along the way, we’ll try to make helpful suggestions to make work as simple as possible.
Where appropriate, we can help you integrate photography. Before and after pictures can add huge value to clients in your reports. Having geolocation and time/date stamps on these pictures helps to improve both accuracy and reliability, and enables companies to better meet potential compliance requirements.
To carry on our painting metaphor, this is where the portrait is really starting to come together; those little tweaks and adjustments that really bring the picture to life. But this painting? It can still look even better.
4. Output Refinement
Next we take a look at the output of your business apps – such as professional reports, forms or invoices. We'll refine it and make sure it looks fantastic. This is where we apply your branding so that your forms look brilliant and impress your clients. By adding your branding and ensuring it’s consistently present on your forms, you maximise the value of your output with your customers.
Every time you send someone a form, an invoice or a report, it’s a repetition of your brand, what it stands for, and the value you offer in every aspect of your work. Consistent presentation of your brand could improve your revenue by 23%. We deliver reports that match your professionalism.
Now, our painting is pretty much ready to be revealed. Those final few brushstrokes have been made, the lighting is just right and the essence of your reporting process has been captured and digitised in a beautiful, easy-to-use app package. Let’s take it for a spin, shall we?
5. Field Trial (Days 15-22)
Testing out your app in the real world is the next step. We always suggest trialling your business apps with a single user, a front runner who might be your most experienced employee, or perhaps the most technically literate. We will have a call with them on Day 15 to run through the app, so they are ready to take it out for a test-drive.
Getting feedback from your staff helps to get them to buy into a culture of continuous improvement (CI). It helps you to build a stronger team that embraces changes, and puts your team in a position to train each other.
It can be difficult to get everyone on board, especially when you might be pushing against a fear of technology. Trying to adopt new technology in a non-tech environment is challenging. But by starting with a single user, you can ease everyone in, get that person to buy into the tech and have them help to iron out any final changes.
By utilising a front runner to test your new app, we can truly finetune performance so that the time it’s rolled out and used in the field, it’s absolutely perfect. The team members out in the field are going to be the ones using the app, so it needs to be perfect for them. They know best, and that’s a key element of Continuous Improvement.
6. Team Training (if Needed)
Many of our clients have found their app so easy and intuitive to use that there hasn’t been any need for training. All they do is pick it up and go! If you do wish to have some training, however, then that’s absolutely something we can provide for you.
Your key team members can have a video call with a Rugged Data coach, who will be happy to take you through using the app, and answer any questions you might have. Once you’re happy with the app, it’s then ready to be rolled out and go live across your teams. In other words – once it’s good to go, it’s ready when you are!
7. Innovate the Way You Innovate
Your mobile app will help you to innovate faster and more efficiently. Throughout your relationship with us, your Rugged Data coach will be on hand to manage your app for you. All it takes is an email for us to update your app and roll out changes.
This means you avoid the cost and training required to have someone in your team make the changes to your forms that you want. You can relax, knowing that you have a professional making sure that your app is supporting the very best processes that you can deliver.
Your app is a mechanism for improvement. With the Faster Fieldwork 28 Day Sprint, you’ll focus on one core process to be rolled out initially, but it’s easy to keep bringing in new ones later. You won’t be using standard software like your competitors. Your unique app allows you to continually refine your business processes and keep offering more value to your clients.
8. Integration
When a user submits a form through the app, that report is generated as a PDF and kept in the Rugged Data central Hub web app. You can either have them emailed directly to your (or your customers’) inbox, or you can download them from the Hub at any point.
If you’re looking for more complete integrations with other applications or an existing database, we also have an API (application programming interface) that helps you do this. You can extend the capability of your existing systems and tools with your app from Rugged Data.
As Eisenhower said, what counts isn’t necessarily the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog. Your business can elevate itself with a competitive advantage from a business app that’s designed to meet your needs and those of your customers.
Final Thoughts on the Faster Fieldwork 28 Day Sprint
Digitising your processes isn’t just recommended for the modern world, we’d go as far as saying it’s crucial. But we know what you might be thinking – doesn’t an overhaul like this require a huge amount of time? And the answer is no, just those 28 days. In fact, we’re so confident that we’ll get your mobile app up and running within those four weeks, that if we don’t, we’ll refund your setup fee and build your mobile app entirely for free. That’s our promise.
So, what are you waiting for?
