Seven tragedies of paper for HVAC Businesses — Fieldinsight
I’m Paul from FieldInsight and I’m going to talk about the seven tragedies of paper for a HVAC business.
We all know the challenges of running a business, in this post I describe why paper can be a killer for productivity and profitability.
The 7 pain points can be summarised as follows:
1. Lots of Paper
You can easily have a dozen pieces of paper for a job, paper expands and before you know it you have more than a dozen pieces of paper. Keeping track of all that paper is just a major headache. It takes time to find all that information and keep track of all that sort of stuff.
2. Easy to Lose
It’s physical. It’s hard to back up. It sits in a filing cabinet, but if you got a lot of paper and big jobs, you’ve got lots of filing cabinets. You’ve got paper everywhere, and because you are moving paper all around, it’s maybe on the floor of a car or under the seat of a car, or it’s left on site, or …
We spend a huge amount of time just shuffling paper around, and I mean by getting in the car and driving around to pick up a work order, or driving back to pick up a purchase order, or driving around to drop off time sheets or pick up inventory. The value of time is more jobs not time in the car wasted shuffling paper!
A piece of paper just sits on the desk, someone gets distracted by some other emergency and that paper’s is ust sitting there. The paper is silent. It doesn’t tell you anything. It’s not changing colour, not letting you know that something needs to be attended to.
A paper can’t really say, “Look. I want you to do this before you do this on this piece of paper. I want you to go and take some photos before you start this job, and I want to go through your SWMS safety checklist before you start the job, so you can’t get into your job and flick it as accepted to start your workflow until you’ve done these things.” Paper just doesn’t do that
Dropbox folders, or they’re in iCloud folders, or they’re just on your hard drive, or they’re in spreadsheets, or they’re in whiteboards, or they’re scribbled down in diaries. T
Then, there’s this wonderful stuff which is in people’s head, this can prevent timely completion of the job and can lead to scheduling conflicts, delays in getting the invoice out and you getting paid.
So, there are the seven tragedies of paper for HVAC and electrical businesses. Lots of other businesses have this problem, but HVAC just ends up having so much paper to keep track of because they have complex projects/jobs with lots of moving parts.
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Originally published at https://www.fieldinsight.com on January 11, 2018.
