Jamie: Hello and welcome! We would like to wish everyone a good morning, a good afternoon, or a good evening, depending on where you are in the world. My name is Jamie, and I am one of the co-founders of Safeopedia.
Before we get started, I’d like to run through just a few host-keeping items. Everyone on the webinar will be on mute for the duration of the presentation, but we really do want to hear from you. So we’d keep it interactive and ask that you just type your questions into the GoToWebinar console as we go, and we’ll do our best to answer as many of those questions as possible at the end of the presentation. Also, today’s webinar is being recorded, and we will be sending out a link to the recording and the slides to all participants.
Typically, one of the first questions that gets asked is “How do I get in touch with the presenters after the webinar?” So what we’ll do, is we’ll put up a slide at the end of the webinar that has their contact information. That way, if we don’t get to your question, or the webinar ends and you still have a question after that, you can follow up with them directly.
Today, we’re proud to present Tracking Compliance and Improving Safety in the Field. The webinar is hosted by Safeopedia and is being presented by ProntoForms. At Safeopedia, our goal is to support the EHS professionals, the operational folks, and really any safety-minded individuals through educational content and quality resources. We would really like to thank those dedicated professionals for the great work they do on a daily basis.
It is now my pleasure to introduce to you Liam OhUiginn and Natalie Griffith.
Liam has over ten years’ experience in supply chain logistics and spent that last five years with ProntoForms, transforming business processes with mobile technology. He has over 450 successful deployments of mobile field applications and specializes in construction, facility management in the energy sector.
Natalie draws on her business and teaching backgrounds to understand her clients’ needs and goals and to demonstrate how ProntoForms Solution is improving businesses today. Through her experience as a process mobilization expert, Natalie has become very knowledgeable in business processes that rely heavily on mobile data collection. She’s inspired by commerce and enjoys working with teams to see projects through to completion and success.
Liam, Natalie, take it away.
Liam: Hi guys! Thank you so much, Jamie, for the introduction and thank you to Safeopedia for hosting today’s webinar. We really appreciate it. We’re excited to speak to everybody. I see many attendees still logging in, so that’s great. Thank you everybody for your time today. Hi, Natalie, how are you?
Natalie: I’m good, thank you. And thanks everyone, again. Thanks Safeopedia. Thank you, Jamie. I’m very excited to present today and share what we’ve got.
Liam: Excellent! So we’re going to be going through a lot of topics today. Really, we’re going to be focusing around how mobile apps can assist in any safety objective that a company might have. What’s great is we work with a huge variety of industries. And really, the common thread amongst all of them is the need for safety forms and mobilizing business processes around that in the field. So we’re going to go through a lot of topics. I want to make sure everybody knows that if you have any issues hearing us or seeing the slides, please do put a message into the chat and we can assist you there. We’re going to leave lots of time at the end for questions. This webinar really is about you. We want to make sure that we leave enough time to answer everything. And if we don’t get to your question, we will respond by email at the end of the presentation.
So, without further ado, Natalie, why don’t you get things kicked off. Let’s talk about our customers. Are they mobile ready?
Natalie: Yes. And so, I’m just going to give you a little background about myself as well. So really, my job here at ProntoForms is to act as a point – first point of contact for new clients. So really, I get to know what their needs are, what their goals are for a new mobile strategy. And when we talk about “are you mobile ready?” the first thing – the first questions that I have are, what types of forms are you looking at? Is it forms around, you know, accident reports, personal protective equipment, what have you. Also, getting to know what types of devices the company is looking at if they already have some. Are there any requirements around the devices? Are you looking at an MDM? All that kind of good stuff. I also get to know what kinds of data destinations are they working with. What kinds of systems would they like ProntoForms or any mobile forms applications integrate with? Where are they housing some of their data analysis if we want to pull that data into the mobile forms? Do you have any training needs? Really, any concerns they have off the bat. That’s the first thing is, to get to know “are you mobile ready?”
Liam: Excellent! Thanks, Natalie. I mean really, that’s what we’re all about here is listening to our customers. We are really passionately curious about business processes and how companies operate in the field. Our specialty certainly is around any companies where employees are mobile. And I think the consumer market really has driven that to every type of industry. We’ve got all types of companies who use smart phones and tablets in the field for a huge variety of reasons. So, what we want to do is help you tackle some of the other issues around efficiency and productivity in the field using these handheld computers so that we can build an app that really is custom to you.
When we meet with customers, and Natalie has said, the first thing we do is we do a full assessment around what their current environment is and what are any of their particular pain points around safety data collection in the field, not just document control and handling, but also, you know, how do we collect this data; where does it go, and how do we take action on it. So we’re going to go through a little bit about the analytics, the user interface on the mobile app, and we’re going to discuss each point carefully in today’s call.
So again, if you have specific issues that you’re facing, please do contact us because really, you know, it stars with the field. We want to make an app that’s really easy to use, right?
Natalie: Yes.
Liam: And if the app is easy to use, the employees are going to be more likely to fill out their forms, right? A lot of safety forms are kind of filled out beside another business process, right? You’ve got guys in the field who really do want to just get started. They want to continue with their job, and a safety form is something that is really a must-complete option there. So, you know, we want to make sure it’s easy to use.
When I talk about the return on investment with certain companies, I found the biggest cost around these types of processes is at repeat data entry. Somebody at the office has got a whole stack of paper, and he’s keying that into another system. So, we’ve all been there. We’ve all tried to customize Excel sheets with crazy Mac Pros. I’ve got a lot of companies sending me paper forms that I can barely read, that have been photocopied several times, the old version is lost.
Natalie: Versions are in different areas and different hands, you know, not having the same copy.
Liam: Exactly! So, you know, even large enterprises are facing this problem with forms. You know, when we started, we wanted to go green and be paperless, certainly. But I find it’s that efficient transfer of data between different points in a controlled business process, that’s the big pain point we try to tackle.
Now, what we’ve seen, of course, is that companies who do implement and deploy mobile solutions really see about three different areas of improvement. The first one is profitability. If you can cut costs on your bottom line, keep your employees doing their job and not wasting time completing forms that take far too long, or travelling and delivering forms physically, that’s going to save a ton of time. So really, what we’re seeing here is an Aberdeen study that shows about 18% in profitability improvement by deploying a mobile solution.
The productivity of your field, certainly, you know, if they can be doing more forms, more inspections per day, they’re going to be more productive on the job. And I want a lot of people on this call to start to think about how ProntoForms can be the mobile platform that you deploy your safety services to. Okay, I work a lot with some of the best safety professionals out there. I’m more of a supply chain management guy myself – business processes in general. But in the last couple of years, I’ve been fortunate to work with some companies that, you know, they really use ProntoForms to deploy their products and services, right?
If anyone on this call is thinking, hey, maybe I should build my own app. I want you to stop right there because we have – we’ve met a lot of companies who’ve tried to build their own app from scratch. And really, what ProntoForms is all about is kind of taking that out of your hands, and you can outsource your mobile app to us so that we take care of the app side, and you can build and deploy your safety forms on that platform, and it’s ready to go and deployable tomorrow.
So, when we talk about, you know, forms and safety, what really does make a good safety form? And again, we can capture some of the best parts of what you already have in place with your current safety forms. There’s of course a lot of government and standardized forms, different agencies and companies. You might have a safety provider. So we can take all of those existing forms and build them into the app.
Okay, so we tackled four specific points, and we’re going to go through them briefly here with you. A form has to be thorough, right? We’ve all seen incomplete forms that get filled out, so really, we want to make sure it covers every single point that needs to be inspected. If it’s a hazard assessment, we want to make sure we’re considering everything to do with possible hazards on the jobsite. And this is very customizable. You can have a dropdown in the form that actually navigates you to a particular section based on the type of activity you’re doing. So we’re going to show you that in the demo. And that allows you to navigate really efficiently through the app.
Now, tell us, Natalie, I mean tell us some of the rich items that we have.
Natalie: Yeah, so we think that a good quality safety form should have rich data. And by rich data we mean things like photos. Okay, so you know that saying, they’re worth a thousand words. It’s really nice to have photos in a safety form, whatever kind of form it is – kind of as a backup. So if you ever want to go back and make sure that there wasn’t in fact a hazard there, or we did make note of that hazard. It kind of means you have more than one pair of eyes in the field. So having a supervisor be able to take a look at what the field agent saw. Another form of rich data would be an audio file. So, having the ability to record audios, whether it’s a piece of machinery that’s making a funny sound and shouldn’t be used, being able to record that and compare it against what it should be sounding like. That’s another example of rich data. Okay. Barcode scanning, GPS stamps, date and time stamps – we’re going to show you a lot more of that rich data once we get to the demo.
Liam: And thanks, Natalie, because really, all of those tools are already built in to the smartphone or tablet. So again, a big thank you to our partners at Apple, at Google, Blackberry, Windows. They’ve made some great devices and we deploy these using our channel partners like AT&T, Bell and Rogers in Canada, O2 in the UK, and our strategic partners around the world to deploy these solutions. But the technology is already in your hands. If you don’t have smartphones or tablets, do let us know. We’ve got programs that work with that. So, what we’re trying to do is enable you to use this technology at the fingertips of your employees. So really, it’s about making all of your forms accessible to all your employees.
And when you set up ProntoForms, you can quite easily decide which department gets which forms. So that based on your territory, your region, maybe your role or your title, even right down to the specific job sites – there could be custom forms just for that site. So enabling them to navigate quickly to the app, get to the form that they want, and be able to fill it out as many times as you want. We’ve got customers who send us, you know, binders full of forms, paper just coming out of the box. And really, if we can give your employees access all those forms, then we’ve done our job.
Natalie: Exactly. The last point there, auditable, good safety forms should be – have the same versions in different areas. We should be able to compare them, right? We should be able to look form compliance across different regions by having the same form version being submitted from these different areas. So that’s really what it comes down to is being able to compare, look for compliance across the different safety forms in your organization.
Liam: Excellent!
Natalie: Alright, what’s next?
Liam: Alright. So, Natalie, maybe tell me a little bit about, you meet with customers early on in the stages. They come to you with specific problems. Tell us about yesterday’s safety officer.
Natalie: Okay. So, looking at the screen there, you can see yesterday’s safety officer. I mean, he doesn’t have the challenge of looking very handsome, of course. But typically, I hear there’s still a lot of paper in the field – paper and pen. Some of the challenges there are illegible writing, missed sections, you know, for chasing people for information. I hear a lot of trips back and forth to the office, that manual data entry or scanning it in. Also, that safety officer, you may not see it there, but he can have a whole briefcase full of paper with him – something like a safety manual guidelines with him. So we’ve got a lot of [inaudible 00:18:46] around with him. It just doesn’t make it as easy and efficient for him to complete that form. But in terms of the safety officer tomorrow, I mean, this is where you come in and you kind of turn that whole game around.
Liam: Yeah. I mean, it’s really fun, isn’t it? I mean, when we were with safety officers, we look to really give them a lot of presence on the job site, right? Physical presence on the site is very important, and one thing that this technology allows us to do is communicate with the safety officer between the office, between his foreman, his jobsite supervisors. You know, he’s got himself a nice snazzy iPad or tablet. You know, this guy now has everything in his fingertips available. So he can communicate any issues that are happening, and that way we can take action.
We try to tackle really six key areas. The first of course is paperless. Let’s give them access to all the forms. We can have him connected to the office where you can both resend and receive in structured workflows. We look to look for any kind of efficiencies around their day-to-day operations. And if we deploy this application properly, really, it should be a professional application deployed, and also a compliant set of data.
Natalie: One more thing around professional actually. Would you mind going back? I talk to a lot of customers, and it’s about their ability to make decisions on the spot in the field, right? So, having that information, the office data, at their fingertips – so you know, taking a master list of employees or parts, whatever it is and making it available in a dropdown menu within mobile form, and giving them auto-populated fields, whether it is cost, whether it’s [inaudible 00:20:36] serial number. Whatever it is, when there’s office data coming in from the field, they’re able to make some more decisions on the spot. And that’s part of being more professional and being more compliant – taking action a little bit faster.
Liam: Yeah, exactly. And everyone on the call should start to think about how they could use this technology to better improve their current processes, and also tackle maybe some new initiatives that they have in the future. So, start to think, okay, what if I could actually dispatch my forms to my users in the field? Rather than just have them accessible any time, we can actually push them out of this part of a daily or a weekly check. Maybe if they fill out one form, they receive another form as well. What if you had built right into the app the ability to ensure each piece of the form was filled out? So all of your required fields are validated before they can submit that form. It’s really about delivering that data as well.
So, a lot of people on the call may already have an existing system in place that could be just restoring documents; they could have safety management portal. And a lot of data that goes into safety forms also come from ERP and CRM systems as well. So, when we meet with customers, we want to figure out how we’re going to interact with their existing systems as well.
Now, if we do our job here again and we deploy an application, we should be able to track the compliance commitments that you have. You might have certain service level agreements already in place with your customers to keep your jobsites safe. A great example here as well is whenever any site is working with subcontractors, you may have people on your jobsite who are not your employees. So how do you ensure that they’re filling out the accurate forms? Well, this application is so scalable that you can easily give a username and password to another partner in your – on your jobsite, for them to fill out the form and submit it directly to you as well. And then really, I’m going to show you in a couple of slides here the analytics portal which is really important.
So, in a nutshell, if I have to spell this in one sentence, it is an app that emails you a PDF of your form. Let’s really simplify this, right? When I’m stuck in an elevator and I have to pitch this to somebody, really, it’s a simple and easy interface. We work with our channel partners like Apple and Google to look for ease of use efficiency on the device. It does capture signatures and photos and embed them directly into the pdf.
I recently did a webinar with a customer of ours, and really, they found that every single day, the last couple of hours of their day were spent just cutting and cropping and compressing images and putting them into an Excel file or a Word file so that they have a complete document. So as soon as you hit Send on the app, you’ll get a pdf generated. And we can build some really great looking pdf’s. We’ve got a customized portal that allows you to build your forms with a click and drag interface. And once they’re deployed, you can start going paperless right away.
Natalie: Yeah, and all after that, I mean, the way that I explained it to you is that we’ve developed an easy to use mobile platform for data collection, full stop. .. you can see it there. It doesn’t have a whole lot of bells and whistles. It’s pretty clean and simple. The questions are laid out – they’re linear, so it’s one after the other and you can design it so that it walks you through the process for the end user. So it’s very much designed with the end user in mind. The whole idea is that you should be able to hand them the app, whether it’s a BYOD on their own device, or on a company provided device. And they should be able to pick it out and figure out how to use it with little to no training. That’s the whole idea.
Liam: Right, right. The ease of adoption, absolutely. I mean, you know, change is a difficult thing to go through in any organization, and trying to push out compliant things like new forms, new ideas, and new technologies is difficult. So, absolutely, you know, that training process in getting to know the app is really important.
Natalie: It’s simple.
Liam: Exactly. Let’s talk a little bit more about what’s possible with the app.
Natalie: Sure. So, I like to head over to the try this with paper first. And it is a little rich data options that we’re talking about earlier. So, the first one Liam mentioned is dispatching. So you can dispatch, do a bulk dispatch if you like. So, pick a form, pre-fill out a few sections of it and send it out to a number of users. Capture photos. So the nice thing is, you don’t have to leave the app to do that – to capture a photo, to grab a photo from the device’s memory or take around the spot. And you can even sketch or annotate on top of photos to communicate what we’re looking at in that photo. We can also capture signatures. We’re going to show you that. Just sign with your finger or stylus. We’re going to show you the barcode scan as well. So it just uses the camera on the device. We’ll show you how, where you could have your logo in there, so it’s part of the licensing. You’ll see your logo in the app, in the admin portal where you create your forms, and also, on any of your outputs whether they be pdf or Word doc. We have a couple of controls for geolocating where the user was. So, we can have a geo stamp where it just pulls the coordinates of where they are. It’s locked; they can’t change it, but it will convert it to an address for you on your report if you like. Another one is where they can actually drop a pin on a map to communicate where in the jobsite or where the hazard, or whatever it is.
Skip logic, this is a fun one. This allows the forms to be a bit more dynamic. So what we can do is actually skip and hide sections or pages of a form if they’re not needed and then obviously pull them up when they are needed. So it’s based off of a response. Can you give us an example of a safety logic use case?
Liam: Yeah. I think a classic one is when we get bundles of forms from customers. We notice that a lot of them are quite similar, and we start to see that actually, this multiplying effect of forms has come from trying to customize it to fit a specific activity. So when we go paperless and digital, we’ve got, you know, unlimited number of pages we can build into a form, and all these different sections can be very dynamic. You mentioned the type of inspection you’re doing. You pick from a dropdown. So you’re doing a security survey; you’re going to see this in the demo. It could change the questions that show up. Another classic one is that if you click that something is not compliant, it could force a comment box to pop up – something very simple like that. And then when it comes to scoring and calculations, really, it’s about filtering down so that if the inspection results in a failed audit, there could subsequent sections of the form to fill out.
Natalie: Exactly. Thank you! Last two, certainly not the least. Embed your office data. So we’ve kind of touched on it. If you’re unsure where you’re getting that, what it really means is connecting your back up of systems to your forms. So, you know, whether it’s a master list of your employees, you can make that list available in a dropdown menu. And then, once a user makes the selection – so if I pick my name from the employee list, we could have my employee ID number auto-populated for me, my address, my phone number. Whatever it is, we can use that to auto-populate, and gives you guys some more accurate data, right? So that data is actually coming from your office wherever you have that stored. It’s not – not everything has to be manually entered by the end user. It’s going to save us some time as well.
Last but not least, work offline. So the ProntoForms app has an offline capability. It actually works offline the entire time that a user is completing a form. It only uses the connection once they hit Send. And if there’s no connection, it’s kind of like your mail app. You don’t really have to worry about it. It stores it temporarily, and it’ll automatically send it for you once a connection has been established.
Now the last point that I’ll make here before we move on is best practices. So the nice thing about our partnership with Apple and Google is they’ve shared some of their best practices with us in terms of user interface and user experience. We had a nice big upgrade to the app in 2015 after we started or became part of the Apple Mobility Partner Program. So they’ve really helped us improve the UX for our customers.
Liam: Excellent.
Natalie: Awesome. Okay, let’s make sure you guys understand how it works before we get to the demo. So there’s really three key elements. We’ll see two, or three there. The first one is the app that’s out in the field obviously for submitting forms. The second one is the Admin portal, and that’s really, I call it the brains of the operation. That’s really where you manage your forms and manage your users. You can create groups of users and give them access to different sets of forms. You might want to do that based on the region, or based on the types of activities that they do. So, all kinds of filtering that we can do to make sure that your end user only sees the forms that they should see and the information that they should see. There’s also some basic reporting you can do in there. You can set up some scheduled exports for yourself. So if you want to get weekly email with all of the, you know. Actually the reports that were filled out that week, you can do that. They will come in automatically. But there is some more reporting that you can do.
In the third part are analytics add-ons and Liam’s going to show you a very quick demo of that after we show you the app. But that’s the nice thing about our analytics is it’s cloud based, and it’s automatically integrated with your mobile form data. Okay, and if you make a change to your mobile forms inside the admin portal, those changes will automatically be reflected in our analytics platform for you. So in real time, you’re going to be able to see those changes and you’ll be able to get a quick snapshot of all of your data coming in – both the metadata and the responses to the forms, your safety forms.
So also with the analytics are cloud connections. So we can export most of your basic cloud services out of the box. So, Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Salesforce, SharePoint, OneDrive, right? All those are out of the box. We also have an open API which allows us to connect with any other backend systems. So we’ve got lots of customers using Oracle, SAP, any kind of SQL server, you know, really anything. We can send your data or connect two-way with any proprietary system.
Liam: Yeah, I think that is, you know, in summary guys, start to think about ProntoForms as the interface between people and systems, between your back office systems and your employees who need access to the data and need to send data through them. In essence, we handle that interface so that you can structure it, right? You can make sure that they only have access to the right set of data.
And also, this is the one-to-many with a lot of dynamic filtering available. When one person submits a form, different pieces of that form could be directed to different users. It could produce multiple different document outputs that are sent to different people via email. And even say a conditional setting like the severity of an incident could actually prompt an SMS message to be sent to the safety coordinator. We’ve also seen some companies deploying private twitter feeds, so that everybody in their company can gain access and see as different safety forms are coming in, both positive and negative. That’s one thing I love to promote as well is that, you want to deploy forms that allow your employees actually capture what is – what is going on in the field that is safe, you know. Promoting champions of safety within your company is important.
Natalie: Before we move on, I should mention you see there kind of in the middle of the screen the different formats that we can produce when a form has been submitted from the app. So, pdf, and we can do those customized pdfs and make it look like what you’re using now or if you prefer to design something new. You can have a pdf of the full report coming into somewhere that’s in the office, you know, whether it’s Google Drive or something. And then you have a different pdf being sent out to a customer if you like, you know, just pulling different responses, whatever you want them to see. Also, CSV, Word doc, JSON, XML, and as Liam was saying, one-to-many. You can have multiple different formats going to multiple different places all with the tap of Sent.
Liam: Excellent! And again, so really, if we’re collecting all this data, now what do we do with it, right? So, not only can we integrate with your existing system, but we do have an analytics portal available for you where you can log in and view all your forms. I’m going to show a live view of this, but you can actually see this is 67,608 QC inspections over the course of the year. And you can actually click and drill in to each of these points as you need. So really, not just collecting the data, but let’s produce a product; let’s produce a solution that allows people to take action, right? If they can spot a trend early and kind of uncover those nuggets and insights into their operations in the field, they’re going to be able to put controls in place, start initiatives that will actually try to reduce incidents in the field.
Natalie: To improve the process, yeah.
Liam: Uh-hum.
Natalie: I’ll just point out here. I talked about adding your logo. Here’s a visual of what I was saying. So, you’ll see it in the app; you’ll see it in the admin portal, and on all of your reports.
Liam: Excellent! Okay, so I think everyone is dying to see the app. I know I certainly am. I think it’s definitely time to show you the demo. So, I’m going to pull out my iPad on the screen here and then we’ll be able to go through a quick form.
Okay, so we talked about the ease of use, right? That’s a big thing we’re going to promote to you guys is that, this app, as soon as you download, you log in, you’re presented with a home screen. That really is four simple options to go through. And it kind of works like your email, whereby you click on the forms tab and you have access to all of the forms you need. And if you get sent a form as a dispatch or through a workflow, you may have a form waiting for you in the inbox. When you submit your form, you still have access to it in the Sent tab, so you can download it as a PDF directly from your device. And then let’s say you’ve got partway through a form, and you need to save it to drafts and open it up later, that’s available. And as Natalie mentioned, it does work offline. This is a fully native app that’s downloaded to the device and requires no connection in order to fill out the forms. It’s only the submission and receiving of forms that you need that connection.
Okay, so let’s go through it. And you can see here, you could have literally hundreds of forms listed here. But let’s just go through a very general inspection form here. When I click on it, I’m faced with a very simple interface. You can see on the left, I’ve got all the various sections of the form. And on the right, I have the questions, and I can scroll up and down very easily through the interface. I can also – let’s just focus in on this page by collapsing the Index page there.
So you can see, this is, you know, a fancy consumer application. This is really a powerful tool for you to deploy data collection apps in the field. So that’s why it’s a very simple interface. And all of your different forms look the exact same. This is really based on the SDK model and the UI experts at Apple. So, let’s go ahead and fill this out. Maybe instead of a store walkthrough, let’s go through and do our safety inspection.
The first thing is this dropdown. This is actually linked to column in a table in a back office system. In this case, we’re actually using Box, right? We have this as a simple Excel file saved in Box. And let’s pick our Ottawa location as where we’re calling from. And you can see, it’s now auto-filled the form. Everything else in that row that I ticked is now auto-filled. And I can even just go back and make that change to something else to see it auto-filled to another location.
Natalie: I should make notes here. So, the nice thing about having this master list stored in somewhere like Box or connecting with ERP or whatever it is, then when you make an update, you only have to make that update in one spot.
Liam: Yes.
Natalie: ProntoForms will fetch those updates from that other system on whatever intervals you’d like. So, if it’s daily, hourly, every 15 minutes, whatever.
Liam: That’s a great point. I mean, in essence, you could have a hundred forms linked to the exact same table, and when you make that change, all of your forms are updated. That’s a great point. I mean, it’s really about that version control and pushing updates to forms out so that you don’t have to send out constant emails saying “Hey, do you have your latest form?”
You could see at the bottom there, it actually collected the GPS location. And then when I proceed to the next section, I’m just – is this a very simple equipment, and security and safety audit. But I can easily just put in some comments here using the touch keyboard, right? And let’s say, maybe we do a pass on here, all of the scoring is taking place in the background of the app. So we’re actually going to get a 2 out of 3 score here.
For comments or concerns, I love showing this feature because it’s really something you can tell all your employees, look, if they need to make a lot of comments, they can just use the voice detect and speak into the iPad which will type out what you say, which is much faster than using the touch keyboard.
Natalie: Especially if you have fat fingers.
Liam: I got that. Great! Yeah, so anytime you need to put in some comments, that text-to-speech is great.
We did mention photos and sketches. So we have a couple of options. You can do a blank canvass sketch, that’s just to really do a schematic drawing of what you’re seeing from scratch. You can take a live photo, choose from the photo album on the device, or in this case, I’m just going to quickly grab a floor plan here.
So let’s say this is your entire jobsite plan. You could identify, you know, where the incident took place with a little square, or maybe we switch to, you know, a red free drawing here, and we can highlight where any issues are, and then just sort of draw on top of the picture, right? So once I’ve got that, I’ve got that embedded within the form, and now we can actually just take a live photo as well. Do a little selfie. Hi! Now that we used this photo, we’ve got it embedded directly into the app, and we can now annotate on top of it. So, I give myself some hair.
Natalie: You can add some text as well. We can even watermark the photos. So if you like to see the date and time or the geostamp, you know, somewhere on the top right or top left that’s always nice for extra back up as well.
Liam: Yeah. A nice feature is to actually force the user to take a brand new photo, too. So really, it’s very compliant. These photos have the data associated with them of when they were captured.
Now, one point that always gets into me is your toolbox meeting That’s a daily form from the jobsite, any kind of safety memo or seminar where you’re briefing your employees on a new safety initiative. One thing I love to embed in the form is actually an audio recording. So for example, if I’m telling Natalie here that actually she performed an unsafe act earlier today when she was mishandling her coffee…
Natalie: I would never.
Liam: You would never. But, I can embed right into this form the audio of me telling you that. So now, if there’s any issues, you know, really this is about risk mitigation and reducing any issues with claims, workplace accidents, you know. If you’ve got all this rich data that shows what safety controls were put in place, employees were notified of new initiatives, and we have all of their signatures right here on the form.
Let’s do a barcode scan. I like this one. You know, a common one is actually around the crane inspections. We have a lot of customers who are auditing, you know, heavy equipment inspections. You can actually put a barcode on your vehicles. Maybe it’s on a doorway. All of that can be embedded directly in, so to pull in the information about the form. Now if I try to go to the next page, here Natalie has added a nice little feature – the required fields.
Natalie: Yes. So, the nice thing is, you can make any question in your form a required field. So it won’t allow the user go to the next page until it’s completed that. So we just have to enter something in there.
Liam: Let’s put something.
Natalie: Okay, perfect. It’s got some things.
Liam: Yes!
Natalie: Nice.
Liam: Okay. I love this one because everybody on this call has probably tried to do this in Excel, but we do calculations really, really well. So whenever you’re filling out your, you know, jobsite risk assessment, any task that’s being deployed into the field, you need to do a risk assessment. There may be some severity probability calculations that you need to do. This one’s very, very simple, but it allows us to quickly slide and give a rating. Okay, maybe you know, Natalie not spilling her coffee is not too bad, so it’s very likely because of something maybe is just likely. And then the severity is pretty minor. You know, nothing too extreme. But as you can see here, we got 2 out of 3, and the calculation was scored automatically. So this could dynamically decide where the form is sent. Based on that input, it could actually deploy the form to a different location.
Now if you look over here in the last page, we’ve got our signature and our submission. But I love this. You can actually track – it took six minutes for us to fill out this form, which is the same as it did last week. So that’s cool. We’re right up on time. And let’s capture our signatures.
Liam.
Natalie: That’s your name. And Natalie.
Liam: Natalie. Here too. Is that Matalie or Natalie?
Natalie: Natalie.
Liam: I think it’s Matalie.
Okay, so what this is, is well now I can write on the slide, send this form to somebody. So if I’m looking at, say a contractor, a supplier, and I need to send a copy of this form, I could just type in their email. But really, what I hope everyone took from this demo is the fact that yes, we have a thorough inspection. We’ve gathered all of our rich data here, and we’ve enabled us to have access to all of our forms. Now what you’re going to see is when I send this form, it’s going to check, make sure we have everything filled out. Yes, we did. Success. And it’s now going to send in that form directly to the servers.
Now let’s take a quick peek over at the analytics portion of the demo. So what our promise was that, you know, you can see here, it actually were from when that slide was taken, you can see we’re up to 80,000 forms here. And I can quickly zoom in to this section that I have of this QC audit and actually look at, okay, which forms came in from which area. So it’s very important to make the data not just actionable, but you know, clickable and you can drill right down to see different pieces of it. And I will say that the Burst application has won a lot of awards and really is a top of the line application. It also shows that you can – you can drill right down into the comments, and you can do this all from your iPad as well. Burst has a great iPad app.
So let’s jump back to the slides here and carry on. Maybe, Natalie, do you want to talk to some of the success that we’ve had in the last couple of years and our partnerships as well?
Natalie: Absolutely. So, a little bit about ProntoForms Corporation. We’ve actually been around for – we’re going to reach our 15-year mark at some point this year. So if you want to do some research on us, we’re established in 2001 – actually under a different name, called TrueContext. We were publicly traded. We were based in Ottawa, Canada. So we’re Canucks as you can tell. If you want to look at what we’ve done over the last 15 years, we’ve really learned a lot about – as you talked about, process, mobilization, all kinds of different forms and the requirements for technology, and requirements for training. And just some stats here. So we’ve got over 3500 business customers that’s around the world. We mentioned that we’ve got a lot of resellers and we work with carriers around the world. Our biggest markets are in North America and South America, but we’re growing in the UK. We’ve got a big presence in Australia, and growing as well in the rest of Europe.
We’ve got over 55,000 mobile users. So that’s 55,000 people with their own login credentials for the app and using it on a daily or maybe weekly basis. And we do about 13.1 million forms per year. So that was the number for 2015 – 13.1. I think the average was 1.3 million a month – forms…
Liam: Amazing.
Natalie: Yeah, forms submitted on our platform. And you can see there’s some logos there. The whole idea of us putting them up there is really to show you how configurable the solution is. So, we’ve got some players in some different industries: AAA Roadside Assistance. They’re using us for daily tracking the inventory of batteries on their trucks, and their daily…
Liam: Invoices.
Natalie: Yeah, daily invoices. Kone Elevators – they’re using us for plant maintenance and some other health and safety when they’re doing some repairs. BP, I mean, that’s your…
Liam: Yeah. It’s great when we see BP as well as that Shell as well, two of our biggest customers, certainly. What I love to stress about this is how much you can decentralize or centralize your forms. So, as a safety coordinator, safety supervisor, you can give different groups access to different forms so that they can go and build any forms that they want, any type of data they need to collect from the field. You can give them their isolated form space, kind of like a Sandbox that they can play in without affecting kind of the global master templates that come from the headquarters. HP and Sodexo as well, certainly, facility management is a big one. We do any facility managers really are responsible, really responsible, for the safety of the people going through their facilities. So, we’ve got a ton of customers and a ton of forms there.
You want to talk about the PG&E Corporation one?
Natalie: Absolutely. So, PG&E is specific gas and electric in the United States. So they had an extreme need for helping safety sort of a revamping of their process. They had a big accident. Anyways, won’t get into it. So now, they’re using ProntoForms and I’ll just read this to you. It says “We collected field data from 1.2 million gas meters to determine which meters needed to be replaced and which meters could just be maintained. In 2015 alone, the ProntoForms Solutions saved us 1.5 million in atmospheric corrosion costs.” So, huge and we’ve got a whole case study on PG&E on the site. So if you want to read about it, they’re using our analytics as well. So it talks about that. We’ve got many other health and safety case studies and videos you can check out for more information. Certainly reach out to us if you want us to sort of guide you through that and produce an information for you that’s directed at your specific, you know, needs and use case.
Liam: Yeah, and I just wanted too, we’ve got about 15 minutes left in the call. So I want to take this opportunity to ask that if you have any questions at all, please do post them into the webinar, and we’ll be glad to answer them as we go. We can discuss any specific safety issues, or safety strategies you might have and how you think a mobile app might work because it really is a blank slate of an app. This thing is ready to go today. You can sign up, but it’s kind of like the Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel of apps. It’s only as good as you make it. So if you have certainly current regulatory forms that you know, have a particular set of questions already embedded in them, send that to us and we can get that built for you. It is a do-it-yourself app. So the only required price of what you’re seeing here is the $24.95 per user per month. So it’s software to service a license for any employee that needs access to the app. So I always position it as a, you know, as a head count, really however many people need access to this app. You can build everything yourself, but you can also just go ahead and contact us. We have implementation services where you can send us all your paper forms and we’ll give you a quote to get it all built and integrated for you.
Natalie: This team is really their forms experts. I mean, they spend their days building forms, looking at forms, and converting them to mobile. So, that’s really their area of expertise. And they do all the data destination and data source that integration setup for you. They can do training as well – typically web based. We can do onsite training upon request. We can always record the web calls of training if you’d like to learn to sort of fly solo as a solution. And that’s really what that team is for.
And then we have the analytics add-on. So there’s two packages. The first one there, the Performance Pack at $14.95 per month. It gives access for 5 different users, admin users, to go in and they can do all of those, you know, creating their own reports. And you can distribute these reports via email to an unlimited number of people. You can create those your own custom dashboards and maps and things like that. And the second pack, the Compliance Pack, that’s actually an add-on to the first one. It’s to take you to the next level and we’ve got a whole team of BI experts to help you get set up with the analytics platform, and you know, make changes as you go.
Liam: Yeah, really. We find that it takes an average of a couple of days to months to deploy, but I often encourage you to look at tackling one specific form that may be a simple enough to get it out into the field quickly, get that feedback from the users and make some iterative changes to that form to get something ready. I do encourage you to contact our partners AT&T if you’re in the United States, or any of your carriers as we do have a lot of carriers that sell ProntoForms directly to their customers. And we do work with the Apple team and IBM to work with enterprise level accounts on deploying any kind of safety initiatives. So, you get in touch with us if you’re working with someone as well. We’ve got a lot of third party integrators and vendors out there that use Pronto as the front end to a much bigger safety backend system as well.
Natalie: Alright, I think it’s time for questions. We’ve got about 13 minutes. So, that should be good. Let’s go. What’s coming through in here?
Liam: Excellent. Let’s go ahead through here. Yeah. So, “The first thing we want to know is can one app fill out another app?” That’s a great point. We do have some issues right now where we’re going to be able to send data from our app into, say a GIS platform, another for geolocation servicing. I do recommend certainly deploying ProntoForms on an MDM solution as far as putting it on that app store. What I hope, I’m wondering if you’re asking is can you send data from one form to another form as well in a structured workflow. So, absolutely. Where you have a form that you fill out and bits and pieces of that form need to be dispatched to another user to review, maybe approve and carry on from there.
We have another question about our partnership with Google. So, do… We can send all the details about our partnership with Google, but what you will see is a Google for Work in the App Store. There you’ll see the ProntoForms app is ready to download through our Partner Program with Google. And we do set up a lot of our customers with packages of forms. So when you sign up, you’re not starting necessarily with nothing. We’ve got a lot of, a large library of sample forms that can help you get ready.
Natalie: Part of the Google integration is once you’ve set up, set that up, it automatically grabs all of your, like, destinations like Google Drive, Google Sheets, and it integrates them automatically, so it’s that connections made already for you. And then you just pick and choose which, you know, is it Google Sheets that master list of employees, which piece of which form you connect it to. I hope that makes sense. But the connection is done for you.
Liam: Yeah, and I think ultimately, I love just use Google spreadsheets as a solution there as well. You know, if anyone is using Excel and having to do uploads and downloads and modifications manually in Excel, I typically position Google Sheets because in essence, every time you submit a form, it can automatically create a row in one or even many different spreadsheets. You can send different values to different spreadsheets so that really, the form is building a database for you. And then, in the other direction, you can have ProntoForms actually pull data from that spreadsheet so that information that was submitted even just last week or the other day on another form from another user, is now available to everybody in the group there.
We have a question about the analytics. “Is it free or paid?” Yeah, so it certainly is a paid add-on. You saw the slide there a moment ago about the Compliance Pack as well. So it’s between about $1000 to $2500 a month. You can certainly build and design your own dashboards yourself. It is a click-and-drag interface, uses a star schema display of all your data, so you can start to build your cubes and display your tables and charts and graphs as you want. But we have a great team of professional services on that front as well. So if you’ve already got an idea of that pie chart that your boss really needs to receive every week, send us your ideas and we can put together quotes to build everything for you.
And again, there’s just a general question of what is Burst. Certainly, you can go ahead and just search for Burst on Google there. We are a channel partner of theirs, essentially an embedded reseller. All of your data that you submit on your forms automatically get transferred into the Burst app.
Natalie: So essentially, Pronto Analytics is powered by Burst. We shopped around for the best cloud based analytics platform and partnered with Burst. And you can check, they won Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for BI and analytics in 2015. So, they are the best in terms of cloud.
What do we have as well?
Liam: Yeah. Spanish, language support. A quick one about that is just like I said, it’s kind of like the Microsoft Word of apps that you can build a form in any language you want so that the content within the form is of course in any international language as you choose. The interface of the app does take on the language settings of the device itself, so whatever location you’re in around the world, the interface within the settings of the app will take on that language. We do have the app fully deployed in French and Spanish as well. So both the form building application as well as the mobile app is fully supported in English, French, and Spanish. And if anyone has any issues with 32 bit characters, for example, Chinese characters, Mandarin texts, Hebrew texts, right to left. We’ve done a lot of international deployment of forms. So, do get in touch with us if you have any issues with that.
Okay, so the next question that we have.
Natalie: Oh, I like this one. How long will it take to get started? I love that question. So we talked about some of our implementation services and our team of BI experts, so the analytics side. The whole idea there is that we can help you get going in a matter of weeks, not months. So we’re the experts in terms of the form building. We can turn your form around in a day or two typically and then do some testing with you, and you know, within two weeks, have it in the hands of your field team. The analytics might take a little bit longer depending on how complex you want to get, how many key performance indicators you want to be tracking. But typically, we quote somewhere between 3-4 weeks to get a couple of different forms in the hands of your users.
Liam: Yeah. I mean it can literally hours or days. I mean, it’s something that we have a lot of resources available but also we have a lot of templates already built. So, if you do send us your forms, we’ll certainly let you know if we already have it. For example, the OSHA compliance forms. You know, a lot of templates already have been built. So before you start from scratch, do get in touch with us, send us your form. We may have a version of it already built and can help get you started.
Natalie: Yeah.
Liam: So we have a question about integration with IBM Tririga. Absolutely. We have integrated with IBM Tririga in the past through a variety of means. First and foremost, with the REST API as a general statement. Practically no limitation to integrating the data you collect on ProntoForms with any backend system. It really comes down to where is the data going. So if there’s an SQL database running in the backend to store the data and you’re displaying that on any ERP or CRM system, we can send the data directly into that. Now when we work with integration partners, often there might be some middleware in between. But what I want to push for simple integration is that you can customize the data labels that come out of ProntoForms to match the data labels in your existing system. So there should be, you know, as little as possible around, you know, translating the data from one system to another.
Natalie: There’s one about do we… We need to build the forms for you or can you build your own? In that admin portal, we didn’t get to show it to you today, but that’s where you can go in and create your own forms. Now it’s a click to add and drag. It’s a very easy interface to build forms. You certainly don’t have to have programming or script shredding background. I don’t and I build forms every day. So, let us know if you want to get hands-on and we’ll help you get set up and show you how you can build forms yourself.
Liam: Yeah, absolutely. And then there’s a general question about, you know, the compatibility of the solution smaller or non-enterprise customers. Thank you for that question, certainly. You know, we have everything from a restaurant that does quality inspections on their pizza. There’s a Jets Pizza video. I encourage you to watch that one. It’s cute. It’s great. I mean, in the sense that, you know, Jets Pizza said “Okay, look, the quality of our pizzas is important to us, and the photos was the main deliverable out of that.” Just the ability to have the iPad on the floor at the restaurant and take pictures. So we do work with a huge variety of industries, both small and large enterprises. It is a great solution for, you know, small business that needs to scale. I would say that one of the biggest benefits is the ability to continuously add forms and add users without having to scale up your administration of that, right? So it’s very deployable, very scalable, and if you don’t have a lot of admin resources, IT resources, certainly, rather than trying to build your own app, again, we’re an alternative to that.
And then, when it comes to enterprise level accounts, you know, we’ve seen everything from, you know, centralized safety initiatives from the top-down, where we need to deploy just a handful of forms to many, many users in the field and get everybody set up right away; to a mix of decentralized safety initiatives. So, each region has their own sub accounts within that where they can control and build their own forms. And it really just depends on if you need to do it all yourself, or you need to come to us to give you help with that.
Alright, so it looks like we’ve come through most of the questions there. There’s a general question about compatibility with devices. So I mentioned it early on in the call, but in essence, you can download the app from the App Store, from your Apple iOS App Store or your android device. We also have Windows 10. We’re very proud of this. We have essentially a desktop application now, too. If you’re on Windows 10, you can fill out all your forms on the Windows app. And we do even support Legacy Blackberry 10 devices, so there’s really a platform out there for you if you need it.
Natalie: And we should make it clear that you only have to build one form and it works the same way on each of the platforms.
Liam: Okay, we have another question about “where else can we store the Excel spreadsheets.” So, in making Google Sheets, certainly, Box.com as well. And you can also just save the Excel file in your Dropbox. For direct connection to your backend system, we use things like HTTP POST and any other web service calls where you’re going to need to pull in the data. Alright…
Natalie: Smaller businesses as well, QuickBooks. Remember that one.
Liam: Yes, QuickBooks Online. That’s a great one because it’s – in both directions, right?
Natalie: Yes.
Liam: You can pull your customer list from QuickBooks, but also, you can have a form that triggers an invoice to be sent out in QuickBooks. So that’s a great point. We’ve had a lot of great Salesforce.com integrations as well. Imagine any Salesforce users that are on the call right now. Certainly, you can both pull in data, but also, change accounts and update opportunities, convert leads and things like that.
So I think we’ll leave it open for a little bit of time here for any questions. Oh, we have another one come in. “Is there standard forms for construction or basic forms for example carpentry framing contractor.” You know, it sounds like you might have a form you’re using today, but also, we have some existing customers that we can refer you to that have forms already built. So if you get in touch with us, thank you for that question.
Natalie: Okay, Jamie, I think we’ll pass it over to you to wrap up.
Jamie: Alright, thanks everyone. Thank you Liam and thank you Natalie. So, we really want to thank everybody for attending again. Great turn out. Just another reminder. We will be sending out a link to the recorded version of the webinar, along with a link to the presentation slides. So, hey, Liam and Natalie, so if people do want to get a hold of you after the webinar and follow up directly, you guys do have a slide on there with your contact information. So, leave that up for a couple of…
Natalie: Here we go.
Liam: There it is.
Jamie: Now they can get hold of you day and night. That’s great! So, really want to thank everyone again for attending, and yeah, we’ll finish up the webinar with that. And everybody have a great evening, a great morning, or a great night. Take care!
Liam: Thank you!
Natalie: Thank you!