Silk Purse from a Sow’s Ear?

“Our existing office system is antiquated, but we don’t want to pay out to upgrade it.  How can we add a mobile capability to such an old dinosaur?”

That was the challenge presented to us by a client this month, and we wove our magic to do just that.  Here’s how…

The Old Scenario

The client is an IT company and the system in question logs their support calls and tracks them to completion.

Until now, the jobs have been printed out, or sometimes emailed to the engineer, who then had to ask the client if it was OK to print the job sheet on their printer.

lostformsOften the completed job sheets would not make it back to the office, getting lost en route.  This meant lots of calls staying open on the system for longer than they should.

When/if the paperwork made it back to the office, someone would then have the unenviable task of reading the scrawled notes and entering them into the main system again.

No Budget

Understandably, the client was looking to improve on this, but had no budget for a system upgrade.

Brave New World

If we could use FormsFly, then the job sheets could be sent to the engineers’ mobile devices (in this case, iPads and iPhones).  They would receive them pretty much instantaneously.

The job sheets could then be completed on the device, including getting job sign-off from the client.  The resulting form data could then be used to update the call in the office system.

Joining Things Up

The challenge was to get FormsFly talking with the office system.  And that’s where “FormsFly Connect”, our unique linkup tool, came into play.

FFC is an MS-Access database with all the FormsFly connectivity pre-built into it.  All we had to do was connect it to the office data, which turned out to be held in a “Pervasive SQL” database.  MS-Access can talk to this data format (and many others), so we were off and running.

FFCscreenshot

With a bit of investigation, we managed to get the correct data linked into FFC and, to paraphrase the old saying, we had taken a female pig’s auditory organ and produced a silken moneybag.

The client is very excited about it, as it means an end to missing job sheets and re-entering handwritten data.

Happy Finance Director

piggybankEven better, it involved hardly any up-front costs as the engineers already had iPhones and iPads (they could just as easily have been Andorid tablets or phones).  There’s just a fixed, low monthly fee per active user.

All of the above was achieved during the client’s free trial period on FormsFly, so there was no risk involved.

Why not take a free trial yourself and see how it could transform data collection at your business?

More info: http://www.FormsFly.com