ADMINISTRATIVE STREAMLINING
Paperwork can be quite the drain for many companies, but when DOC Cleaning switched from paper to electronic forms with Templa CMS, they saved a lot more than just paper.
The administrative burden facing cleaning contractors is amongst the heaviest of any industry. Much of it is due to staff numbers and turnover, but not far behind is the volume of documentation required to set up and run new clients and sites, including contact details, equipment to be purchased, invoicing arrangements, subcontractor frequencies, cleaning specifications, health and safety manuals and so forth.
This information is often needed urgently at the start of a new contract, placing short term pressure on field management, payroll and admin. Yet cleaning is the type of industry where nothing stands still. Repeated tasks such as processing new starters and leavers, updating training records, submitting holiday requests and reviewing risk assessments guarantee an ongoing requirement for forms to be created or reviewed and updated. A great deal of this paperwork is completed by hand in the field, before being checked at the office and keyed into multiple spreadsheets or software applications.
So how can you streamline this process to make it easier, faster and more accurate?
INTELLIGENT, INTEGRATED ELECTRONIC
FORMS IN ACTION DOC Cleaning of Bishops Stortford is living proof of how to reduce the
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torrent of paperwork to a trickle. A good example is how they mobilise a new contract using the Advanced Forms and Workflow modules of their TemplaCMS integrated business software.
For DOC, a new contract can typically bring with it 30 new staff working across several sites – for example a portfolio of multi-tenanted offices. Taking advantage of user-defined fields, the company has designed its own electronic forms to capture the data needed for each stage of the start-up process. As part of the onboarding element, so vital for payroll and HR, the employee starter form has a space for a photograph, electronic signature and scanned right-to-work documents such as a visa or passport.
The field manager completes the form on their mobile device, which is then synchronised to the main server at head office where a member of HR checks the details on screen, before electronically ‘accepting’ the document and forwarding it via Workflow to payroll. From there, data automatically populates the time and attendance system which is also dynamically integrated into TemplaCMS, meaning that within a short time the contract is ready to go live with all employment details checked and loaded in the back office and in the field.
A similar process is followed by the sales team, who complete a new client set-up form with fields for the operational and financial data. This form is reviewed by admin, who check it for completeness before ‘accepting’ it onto the system.
There are two types of electronic form. The first, such as a cleaning specification or risk assessment, does not update any fields in the TemplaCMS database, but uses a reference number to store itself automatically behind the relevant client or site record. The second, or ‘intelligent’, form contains data fields, including images, which will automatically populate or update fields on the central database.
THE BENEFITS As Jamie Bull of DOC Cleaning said: “The benefits of the system can be summed up in two words – speed and accuracy. We don’t have to wait days for forms to arrive and the data is entered only once. In one fell swoop, and with the minimum of processing, we can create a new employee or a new client record. Once the data is keyed in, the integration between the central database and the processing modules ensures that we carry out transactions accurately and have full visibility, across the company, on just about any piece of information you would care to mention.”
www.templacms.co.uk twitter.com/TomoCleaning
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