Manufacturer’s report courtesy of Successware

You probably see and hear a lot these days about digitizing your business, but what does making the move from paper to digital really mean for your bottom line? At its very core, digitizing your company is about optimizing your business strategy. Successful digitizing can help track and accomplish tasks that move you toward the goals you set when you first developed your business plan. It is efficient, reliable, and will create a permanent record of what has been done to achieve those goals, which is invaluable information as you develop future strategic plans and monitor the ongoing performance of your business.

Optimizing your business strategy is an important long-term achievement, but there are also more immediate benefits you’ll begin seeing when you digitize. Two significant improvements are the cost savings involved and an increase in employee productivity. 

COST SAVINGS

By spending less on creating, maintaining, and storing paper products, you’ll be saving money and doing something great for the environment in the process. If your company relies heavily on paper, you know that duplicate copies and multiple forms are often needed on each job. When printing, there are many costs associated with supplies like ink, paper, and printers. 

Paper forms also take up space in storage rooms, which can cause a cluttered workplace or require you to pay for an offsite storage facility. Tracking down lost forms, deciphering handwriting, and logging information into your system equates to the cost of many employee hours that could be better spent gaining new clients or building better relationships with current clients.

Your business can reinvest all the money it saved by digitizing into other areas that will help you grow your customer base and increase revenue, such as sales and marketing. Direct mail, radio ads, emails, and more are great ways to communicate with your current customers and draw in new ones by keeping your business name fresh on their radar.

EMPLOYEE PRODUCTIVITY

Implementing digital forms can help technicians with productivity. They will no longer need to worry about driving back to the office if they forgot a form or to drop them off at the end of the day, and the back-office staff doesn’t have to wait for the technician to return with the forms, decipher them, and enter the information into their system. With digital forms, the technician enters the information directly from the jobsite and the back office receives the information in real time.

Opportunities are great revenue generators, and a digital platform and mobile application will help technicians enter in potential job opportunities for customers while on the jobsite. Your technicians already have an open line of communication to the customer because they are right in front of them, and they are familiar with your company. When technicians identify and discuss a potential opportunity with the customer before they leave the jobsite, the customer knows a follow-up call from the sales team is coming. That hopefully paves the way for a sale and more revenue for your company.

If the technician identifies a potential opportunity while on a job, they can quickly and conveniently enter it into the customer record, eliminating the need to remember to call the opportunity into the back office once the job is complete. The opportunity will sync with the back-office platform and go directly into the queue for your sales team, allowing them to follow up on the opportunity.

DIGITIZING SUCCESS STORY

Sierra Pacific Home and Comfort is a Solar & HVAC provider serving over 35,000 customers in the Northern California and Sacramento area. The company had utilized highly effective paper-driven processes for business management for decades, but the advent of COVID-19 posed significant challenges to business as usual. Specifically, absenteeism and turnover made these manual processes difficult to maintain. Concerned that these challenges would have an impact on customers and the bottom line, Sierra Pacific’s management team began looking for ways they could digitize their processes that would allow them to continue operating the business at a high level. Their goal was to cover all the necessary processes from sales through completed jobs and accounting in a digital solution. 

They took an “all in” approach and digitized all their paper processes, which included communicating from sales to operations, sending information from installers to the main office and sharing data between accounting and service. One major area of improvement was replacing paper forms and physical customer record folders with mobile forms and digital customer data. 

Since the company’s transition to digital with Successware, the Sierra Pacific team has been able to accomplish more work with fewer personnel hours, delivering even more value to the bottom line.

Jason Hanson, president of Sierra Pacific shared that “It took a lot of communication internally to transition to a paperless platform, but once our team learned it, they were very effective. They became internal champions of the platform and began to unlock the capabilities of the software.” 

With digital transformation, your business can lower the overall cost to operate and allot those funds to additional resources to help your business grow. Digital transformation provides a chance to create value for not only your company, but customers as well.