If your company still uses mostly paper files, moving everything over into a digital environment may seem like a daunting task. And if your employees are hanging on by their fingernails to their pens and notepads, you probably feel overwhelmed at the idea of spearheading such a major change in the way of life for your company.

However, with a focused approach and a few handy tips from those who’ve gone before you, you can overcome these obstacles. Making the jump to all digital can help you increase efficiencies and scale at a rate you may not have been able to before, getting more done with the same number of people thanks to automation.

For example, a large HVAC business in California has served the area for almost 40 years, providing services in the HVAC, solar pool heating, solar electricity, and energy storage industries. The company recently migrated its mostly paper business to all digital and lived to tell the tale. This business had developed strong manual paper processes for their job life cycle that worked for them for years.

The owner said, “We started down the digital road using Successware’s software for our accounting and customer management departments, then added mobile for our technicians about five years ago. Our other paper processes worked well for us for a very long time, but we started to see places we needed to overhaul. With the COVID-19 pandemic, many things quickly came to a head. People were just not in the office to complete their functions on paper in the job process, and absenteeism and turnover took a toll on our productivity.”

They decided to leave the paper behind for good. If this is a change you’re evaluating, there are several steps to consider.

First, analyze the internal processes you have in place and figure out what kind of all-in-one business management platform could best fit your needs. You want to be very detailed here, thinking through the steps of a job from start to close.

Also consider how the communication between different departments during the job life cycle would work in your new software. In the case of the California HVAC business, they had paper job folders that would travel from desk to desk, alerting employees of the status of the job and that it was time to complete their part. Once the job was ready to be closed, an employee would manually enter the information into the correct software module. They spent time reviewing step by step what they were currently doing and figuring out the software features they needed to replicate it.

“Forms were a huge part of our digital conversion,” said the owner. “In the past, a technician would go to the job with a paper job folder, paper customer record, and paper forms. Now that we have customized digital forms and job and customer records, information automatically goes from our mobile platform to the back office after each job is completed. It’s eliminated the need to bring the paper back to the office at the end of the day, which is a game-changer for our technicians in the field.”

If separate spreadsheets are a part of your current work process, you know the time that can be wasted loading data into multiple spreadsheets, not to mention the potential for redundancy. Operations efficiency can accelerate dramatically by moving to a digital workflow. Learning and using online tools, like a job manager, eliminate moving a paper folder from bin to bin and allow project coordinators and each department to easily see the status of multiple jobs at the same time.

Tips for Implementing a Huge Business Change

Be prepared because, in many cases, a digital change must happen overnight. It’s difficult to have some steps in the job process as paper and some in the new digital format, so it’s best to make a swift, all-at-once transition.

Communication is crucial. Explain the changes that are going to happen and what the process will look like in the future. The HVAC business in California used their “daily huddle” time with employees to discuss what was going on with their digital transition and explain all the benefits of the new processes.

Be sure to also:

• Focus on communicating your vision and talk about what the new process will look like once it is implemented.
• Make sure your team sees what it will look like several times before it goes live; this will make it less overwhelming to everyone.
• Figure out the best time of year to make this change. Right after your busy season may be the best time to make a change of this magnitude since your team can have some time to learn the new system before they get swamped again.
• Recruit a few “champions” for the software within different departments. Ideal champions are employees who are very excited about the change and can’t wait to learn the new way of doing things. These team members can help others if they get stuck and need to figure out how to create a process within the new software platform. Champions are very helpful if you run into reluctance from your team, particularly from tenured office staff who are nervous about learning a new process or not having their usual paper documents to rely on.
• Champions can also be a huge help when departments or teams are slower to adopt to the new way of doing things. Assign a project coordinator to the busiest departments so they can focus on making the change and teaching the rest of the team.

Next Steps for the Future

The sooner you digitize and use a tool for business automation, the easier it is to grow. If you are a small company, you should do it right from the beginning. If you are a large company, do it before you continue growing. The best business management software platforms will provide training and resources to continue learning. Use these to their fullest, and talk with other companies that have digitized to find out how their processes work.

Automation and a streamlined workload are within your reach. The initial change may seem overwhelming, but just take each day as it comes, and, before you know it, you will have fully migrated and will start to see the benefits of the change come your way in terms of revenue, increased efficiencies, and scalability.