Challenge
- Tracking job orders (labor dockets) was challenging for Caledonia Group.
- Many dockets returned in poor condition or not at all, causing administrative inefficiencies.
- Poorly filled or missing dockets led to financial losses and unpaid invoices.
- Lost dockets caused worker frustration and reduced productivity.
- Time spent looking for misplaced dockets hindered the ability to take on new jobs.
Solution
- Caledonia Group digitized labor dockets with FastField.
- The company was able to offer their employees training on the new solution and rapidly onboarded it.
- Field workers used FastField to send job details to the office, expediting invoice creation and delivery.
Benefits
- Saved up to 20 hours a week normally spent scanning and manually entering in labor dockets
- Prevented paper labor dockets being lost or not initially sent to the jobsite
- Safety audits became streamlined and easier to manage
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Assists in the process of bidding on new jobs
- Competitive edge over competitors still relying on slow, manual processes
Background
As a specialist in the construction industry, Caledonia Group provides scaffolding services for clients, as well as insulation, cladding, and sheet metal work. This type of work requires tight coordination with field workers, as well as strict adherence to safety regulations.
Caledonia Group operates out of Australia and specializes in creating managed temporary access and support structures. They aim to hold an advantage over their competitors by offering custom-built solutions for clients, using their in-house engineering team. Caledonia Group was the first scaffolding company in Australia to simultaneously hold both ISO 9001 and AS/NZS 4801 and OHSAS 18001 certifications and has retained these since 2009.
Jobs in this industry are complex, and Caledonia Group needed a solution that would help streamline communication between field workers and the office. Relying on slow, manual processes, like handwritten carbon-copy forms, proved unsuitable for them, and slowed down their progress towards being an innovator in the industry. To solve these challenges, they turned to FastField for safety, job tracking, and streamlining compliance.
Challenges
Tracking the status of a job order, referred to as a labor docket, was challenging. Workers on a jobsite would complete a job, then the customer would sign the labor docket. These dockets were carbon-copy paper forms. One page stays with the customer, the other would go back to the office to file the data from the form.
Labor dockets carry many essential elements, such as the hours worked, type of labor involved, and overall customer satisfaction. Once back at the office, administrative workers would manually enter the claim and then develop an invoice to send to the customer.
One of Caledonia Group’s main challenges was that the forms were not coming back in good order. If you’ve signed a carbon-copy form, you know the signer must write hard enough to push through both pages to capture the information properly.
Oftentimes the dockets would come back muddy, ripped, missing information, or sometimes they simply would not come back at all.
With the amount of labor dockets lost or in poor form, Caledonia Group couldn’t scale and move at the pace they hoped. Without a docket in good order, they stood to lose money on jobs that weren’t being reported on properly – some customers wouldn’t pay their invoice if the form was missing. A lost docket once caused a discrepancy between the company and the customer, with the customer withholding a $50k invoice payment because the docket was not filled in properly.
Beyond losing money, Caledonia Group found that workers were getting frustrated. Time was being lost looking for misplaced dockets in trucks or desks. This ate away at productivity, and meant that the company would need more time closing out existing jobs rather than advancing to new client requests.
Leveraging FastField
Deciding that this slow, manual way of getting work done was unsustainable, Caledonia Group sought a technological solution to the labor docket problem. After reviewing the market, they came upon FastField as their solution of choice.
In this industry, there has been pushback on using technology, specifically using devices and cell phones to communicate and get things done. Overcoming that pushback, Caledonia Group used FastField to digitize labor dockets in a simple, user-friendly way. They set up their first form in FastField, learned how it worked, and trained their employees on how to use it.
The initial return from users was the quick turnaround. Field workers could enter in the relevant details of the job and immediately send that information to the office, where an invoice could easily be drafted and delivered to clients. Richardson notes that this gave the docket process a more polished, professional feel, as opposed to using the standard carbon copy forms.
Caledonia Group saw tremendous impact from the use of FastField’s conditional forms and automatic delivery functionality. Automated delivery meant that the right person was getting the right form at the right time, rather than spending precious hours hunting it down. It also streamlined workflows. If a form is not completed or submitted, the team knows that the work hasn’t been completed yet.
The employees in the field have it so much easier. Everything’s on their phones now, and with FastField, the work flows so much easier.
Caledonia Group saw many benefits from a safety perspective as well. By leveraging the diverse number of forms offered by FastField, workers could easily spin up an incident notification if a safety event occurred. Witness statements and incident recaps could easily be collected and automatically delivered to management to review. Additionally, the centralization of this data enabled them to have a clear picture of safety requirements in their morning meetings before heading out for jobs.
By keeping their procedures and documentation readily accessible, the company was also able to limit their liability when safety incidents occurred. For example, the company was able to use their centralized safety data and information to prove they were not at fault when an incident occurred on a job. The company was able to limit potentially hundreds of thousands in costs associated with liability when safety incidents occurred.
Through FastField, all of Caledonia’s safety processes and documentation are digitized and accessible at the press of a button. The ability to capture this data and have it readily available enabled Caledonia to achieve their ISO27001 certification.
Having the right accreditation gives you an edge on the competition. Our clients are always blown away by FastField and are impressed from a safety and quality perspective.
The Results
Caledonia Group’s use of FastField means that their workflows are dynamic, and able to keep pace with the changing nature of how work is done today.
Beyond just helping with safety issues and labor dockets, FastField helps streamline the handover form process. When scaffolding work is completed and construction crews are ready to use it, these documents provide key information on the setup and design of the structure. FastField automated this process, meaning that end users can quickly hand a project over to the client to begin their work.
We have high priorities at Caledonia and one of them is gaining advantage through innovation, and we’ve done that with FastField.
