Digitizing and connecting your forms opens up possibilities that paper just couldn’t. With mobile forms software you can easily update procedures across all locations from anywhere, and all at once.
For example, if you manage convenience stores that start carrying a new brand of breakfast sandwiches, updating the daily store opening checklist to ensure that two of each new sandwich is on display will roll that out to every location immediately.
Mobile forms software also allows you to do away with duplicate checklists. Whereas with other solutions you might need multiple versions to account for every permutation of each location, the right software can do the leg work for you. If you have a chain of grocery stores and not all of them have a fresh fish section, use skip logic to omit items related to that department for locations that don’t have one. This allows you to maintain one master procedural checklist so you can still roll out updates that apply to all locations in a single place.
1. Help meet business goals
With a solid auditing system in place to measure compliance, you are able to hold employees accountable and improve how you work together to meet business goals. This can be anything from monitoring if processes are being followed, be they weekly, monthly or yearly tasks.
With an audit app at your disposal, you'll get real-time results of your audits and checks, so you can immediately manage issues that arise. With the ability to flag issues for follow-up, as well as a powerful reporting system, you can get a complete picture of what parts of your business aren't up to par. This allows you to prioritize issues based on what will help you better achieve your business goals.
2. Get insights into business performance
Completing audits and checks using an audit app, gives you the benefit of having all of your results rolled up into a robust reporting system. This means you'll always have access to an overall business performance report, a list of top and trending issues and all audit results. This gives you valuable insights into your business' performance, so you can make data-driven decisions on where you need to improve.
Automate the easy to focus on the rest
One of the best aspects of mobile forms software is automation. This means you can define specific parameters that, when met, trigger an action without any manual work. This feature can be used in a multitude of ways depending on your needs. Automation can be a great tool for team management through using alerts. Set up recurring alerts to let your supervisors know when it is time to begin a recurring audit or send an alert to a regional manager that a field report is submitted or is overdue.
You can also trigger actions based on conditions within a form. For example, a health and safety checklist could include checking the expiration date on the store’s fire extinguishers. You can set your form so that if a fire extinguisher's expiration date is nearing or passed a follow-up will be automatically created and assigned to the relevant supervisor to replace it.
Building out workflows takes triggers to the next level. Whereas a trigger relates to a single data point, such as one question in a form or one action by a team member, workflows take into account aggregate data. For example, if recurring field reports are showing one location’s bathroom cleanliness scoring below a certain threshold over a defined time period, a case is created to follow-up on that location's sanitation process.
Picture This: Data visualizations that scale with your business
Because the data your team collects via mobile forms software is saved to a central database, many solutions feature standard dashboards to help you organize and interpret the information you’ve collected.
Choosing a solution with robust and visual dashboards will help you and your team focused and drive actionable insights. Keeping key metrics such as how many audits have been completed, the average audit score or how many follow-up actions have been created based on those audits allows you to check the health of your operations at a glance. A graph of audit scores over time means you can easily visualize trends and take action to ensure your programs are headed in the right direction.
