Paper is inefficient, dirty and a downright drag. Who wants to cart paper around or dig through piles of it in a dingy, musty room filled with filing cabinets – just to get access to information?
Times are changing, and there are tools out there that can help you adapt. Accessing data could be just a click away. Shipping out a job card could be as simple as setting up a task on a digital system and hitting send.
Appenate is one such tool, and in this post, we’re diving into how Appenate could help you with business process automation.
What Is Business Process Automation?
Quite simply, business process automation is removing the human factor from processes within a business – where it makes sense, of course.
Let’s take an example from the field service industry for maximum clarity.
A technician gets tasked with a job. There’s usually a phone call before the technician has to pick up the job card at the office. He then goes to the stores and books out the equipment he’ll need for the job. Once done, he has to head out to the site and do the actual work.
Upon completion, they’ll get the client’s signature on this job card and transport it back to the office. Now someone has to capture the job card manually on the system.
Using business process automation, this workflow could look like this:
The job card is created in the office and delivered to the worker’s mobile phone. Once accepted, an email (stock request) is sent to the stores, and they can get the equipment ready proactively. The technician then swings by, collects, and heads to the site.
He completes the job, gets the client’s signature (right on his phone) and immediately sends all the job information straight back to the office.
The system automatically captures the data – no need to spend staff time on data entry. There are fewer hands involved and less chance for that job card to get lost.
You could even have the system generate an invoice and send it to the client automatically.
What Is Appenate?
Appenate is not a rigid process automation software. It’s a flexible drag-and-drop app builder and task management system. This means that you can automate much of your site admin services and certain other processes within your business.
Our core value is automating your data capture processes and making them mobile. We cut data entry from the equation – at surface level. The thing is, our platform can offer so much more.
Appenate Features That Drive Business Process Automation
It’s easy to start building simple apps with Appenate. It’s when you begin to dig deep and automate large-scale processes that things can get tricky.
This is why we offer free training for life – even on our free Consulting Partner accounts. It’s so that learning can happen and you can get maximum value from Appenate.
I digress. The following Appenate features help smooth out and mobilise business processes…
Task Management
Using our Task management system, you can cut most paper and unnecessary phone calls from your business. You can use Appenate’s web portal to create tasks and send them straight to a worker’s phone, complete with push notifications.
When they complete the task, the data comes straight back to Appenate. And if they don’t have cell reception? The data is then saved locally and uploaded as soon as a connection is available.
Straight from the desk to the field and back again – no paper, no additional fuel usage – just streamlined data.
Process Step
This feature lets you turn a form into a full, multi-level workflow. So, if you have a process that needs multiple departments’ involvement, you can automatically have Appenate drive the process forward.
Here’s an example. It all starts with a service request. It arrives in the office and is created as a task on Appenate. This can go to a sales manager or technician for a pre-inspection and a quote. Once ready, the client can sign and accept the quote right there in the field, on the employee’s phone (or by using our Contactless Signature Feature).
The quote then kicks off a new step, and the form goes to safety. Their pre-inspection gets done, which kicks off the job card (as another page on the form).
The technician then completes the task on site. This generates a task for quality control to do a post-inspection, and then a proforma invoice is generated and sent to the client for approval. And voila, the job is done, and there was no manual data transfer involved. No paper transport, no lost job cards – it’s all seamless.
What’s more, if any of these tasks get rejected, the form will revert to the previous step for corrective action.
Connectors
Appenate does mobile apps and tasks well. For everything else, there are our integrations. We connect to a multitude of platforms, cutting manual data transfer between your stack of digital tools.
Our integrations include Salesforce, Google Drive, Dropbox, Sharepoint, PowerBI, Egnyte, etc. We also have a REST-based Connector, configurable to connect to any web service that exposes a REST API.
So you can largely automate your workflows between solutions without risking manual entry errors.
Just Scratching The Surface
These are just a few of Appenate’s vast pool of features. Other notable mentions include an OCR Field for quick text capture, Contactless Signatures and offline capability.
We’re a powerful platform that’s been helping businesses succeed in digital endeavours since 2011, and we’d like to help you or your clients next.
Or, if you’d like to learn more about our Consulting Partner program, click here.