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3 Reasons for your Mobile Workforce to go Geospatial
Everywhere you look these days, geospatial is the new requirement
Finding the correct asset can be like finding a needle in a haystack
Think about how many apps on your smart phone rely on your coordinates to give you directions to the cheapest gas station, tell you how far you’ve hiked, find the nearest Starbucks, or help you get back to your car in the airport parking lot. Even more and more social media sites are adding geospatial components to help users connect. It’s inevitable: geospatial is here to stay (and for good reason). It allows us to more easily navigate our lives and to do all the things we want to get done on a day to day basis. Fortunately, the same technology also helps mobile workforces more successfully navigate their work day, getting more done in less time. Here are 3 benefits to giving your field workers the geospatial advantage.
1. Faster Asset Location
How much time do your workers spend in a given day just searching for the assets they’re supposed to be inspecting, auditing, repairing or managing? Wouldn’t it be nice if they could use that time doing more work instead? Geospatial inspection and data collection software allows users to locate assets in less time than it takes to unfold a paper map. This means they can spend more time working, and less guessing at where your assets are.
2. More Accurate Asset Verification
How does a worker know that the asset they’re standing in front of is really the one they’re supposed to be collecting data on? Some assets might be visually distinct, but others all look the same (even to the trained eye). Combine that with sheer number of assets you have and you’re essentially sending your workers out to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. Geospatial software gives them the ability to accurately identify individual assets by location, ensuring that they’re actually working on the needle they think they are. Combine that capability with photos and identifying data, and your solution is fool proof. Never again will time be wasted just to be sure the asset you are standing in front of is the one you need to be managing!
3. Higher Worker Accountability
Couching /ˈkaʊtʃɪŋ/ • noun 1. The act of remaining at one’s residence or other place of leisure while claiming to be conducting work in the field (often accompanied by falsified documentation as an alibi)
Synonyms: Pencil Whipping (military idiom)
Even if something as extreme as “couching” isn’t actively happening in your organization, worker accountability remains an important issue. Software that uses geospatial technology to record where and when specific questions in a form were answered not only eliminates the possibility of couching, but also gives you a better sense of how your workflows are being carried out in the field. Here at Mobile Epiphany, we call this “work-crumbing”. Traditional bread-crumbing only tells you where the device was throughout the day. But work-crumbing tells you where and when work was done. Work-crumbing gives you a bird’s eye view of your workflows in action, allowing you to more effectively monitor efficiency and take accountability to a new level.
No matter your industry, empowering your mobile workforce with geospatially-intelligent software increases efficiency, accuracy, and accountability, all of which combine to give you a better return on investment.
