Front line workers are wasting massive amounts of effective work time doing redundant paperwork at the end of the day. How much time are they wasting?  A mining industry expert Atheer talked to said anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes is wasted per work order.  That adds up to between 2,000 to 10,000 hours of effective work time being lost per mining machine asset.

We’ve heard similar numbers from experts in Manufacturing regarding paperwork for production lines and Oil & Gas for machine assets at rigs and refineries.  It’s easy to see how paperwork can add up to millions of wasted hours of employee effective time every year. But that’s only the beginning of the problem with reliance on paper work for reporting processes. A single machine breakdown can cost your company millions of dollars.

In this article we’re going to look at the most important problems caused by paperwork and show these issues can be easily overcome by digital Front Line Worker platforms to:

1. Eliminate redundant dual data entry through automatically generated reports
2. Improve quality of data capture to protect your equipment's health
3. Elevate traceability to make sure crucial maintenance work is done
4. Make reporting available for analysis in real time.

Paper costs quality of life for your front line teams

Paperwork ruins the beginning and end of your team's day.  For management, paper based processes mean spending hours at the beginning of the day manually breaking jobs into discrete tasks and assigning them to individual workers,  printing out work instructions and fitting them into three ring binders.  

At the end of the day, all the paperwork done in the field needs to be turned into a report on the computer and filed in the company’s computer system by front line workers. Often it needs to be filed in multiple systems. This means front line workers are doing the same work twice and sometimes three or four times. This is a real morale killer. Dual data entry is also error prone, inefficient and mind numbingly boring.

The Cost of Paperwork For Your Equipment

The time your front line teams spend doing paperwork could be spent doing the highly technical work they’ve been trained to do, performing machine monitoring which keeps your machines  running. These expenses can skyrocket when equipment isn’t properly maintained. Oil and Gas companies can lose up to $220,000 per hour for every equipment failure incident. Manufacturing companies lose almost a trillion dollars a year every year to machine breakdown. Machine failure is also where a huge portion of work related fatalities occur.  

The Cost of Paperwork For Data Quality

Paperwork doesn’t just affect equipment by depriving production lines of crucial workers to perform condition monitoring and maintenance activities.  Paperwork also lowers the quality of these crucial tasks through inadequate data collection and poorly standardized work instructions.

The information collected for machine inspection is limited to what the front line worker sees with their own eyes. The company only has the worker’s word that the job has been done properly or even completed at all.

These observations are recorded in handwriting that may or may not be legible. The data is then entered into a company’s siloed systems and aren't available in real-time to management or other front line workers. Often this data is only useful in tracing the root cause of accidents after they’ve already happened. This lack of transparency and traceability  puts workers’ safety and productivity at grave risk.  

The Cost For Management's Operational Visibility

Managers, Directors and VPS aren’t given real-time data to improve front line operations. They are essentially operating in the dark. Management is often unable to determine if preventive maintenance has even been performed.

The quality of information captured from service tasks is low and doesn’t reflect the truth on the ground. This prevents management from ordering preventative maintenance measures in time to prevent systems from failing. This unstructured, siloed data captured by paper based processes is also of no use for preventive, predictive or prescriptive maintenance.  

The Cost For Innovation Projects

Workers have so little spare time because of all the paperwork they spend their time filing that they are unable to implement digital solutions that would free them up to spend more time performing their most important job tasks.  Yes, you read that right. Paper based processes not only makes your processes inefficient but also makes sure that you don’t have the time or energy to leave them behind.

How Do You Reduce Paperwork and Elevate Reporting?

So how do you reduce paper  work and improve processes? The term digitization has become such an empty buzzword that it could mean almost anything. So let’s not talk about simply digitizing your processes. To eliminate the inefficiency of paperwork you need a low code/no code integrated digital solution that will:

1. Improve data capture with photographic or video evidence of step completion
2. Eliminate redundant paper reporting to free up workers to do the technical work they've been trained for
3. Put job scheduling and work assignment on autopilot
4. Create instant decentralized reporting to increase traceability

You need a Front Line or Connected Worker Platform. By 2027 it’s predicted that the global market for Connected or Front Line Worker Platforms will hit 12.1 billion. It's forecasted to grow even larger in the future and become a business necessity.

How do Front Line Worker Platforms work?

Atheer offers a low code/no code Front Line Worker Platform integrates your front line workers into their environments through the devices they naturally use in the flow of work (laptops, smart phones, tablets and Smart Glasses).

Atheer's Front gives your teams the digital tools your experts need to create visual, highly contextual training, detail oriented standardized workflows and provide front line teams with instant access to AR Powered remote assistance when the unforeseen occurs.  Here’s just a couple of the benefits you’ll get from our last mile software:

1. Increase Partner & Worker Satisfaction With Automatically Generated Job Reports

Cut out long delays getting your partners the reporting they need with Atheer. You can automatically generate reports as soon as a job is completed  and update relevant stakeholders in near real time. In Oil and Gas, Mining and Metals and Manufacturing it can take anywhere from 15-45 minutes per work order to file redundant reporting.  Eliminate mind numbing dual data entry for for your front line workers by digitizing processes and get workers back to doing the machine maintenance they were trained to do. It's the easiest way to increase job satisfaction and improve worker retention.  

2. Improve Quality of Job Data And Verification

Atheer doesn’t rely on checkmarks on a piece of paper as proof of job completion. Each step of machine maintenance is time stamped, and can be verified with photographic or video evidence to show that the job has been completed and done correctly to your high standards. You can even get supervisors to check the work of inexperienced workers before they close the job with our restricted job permissions feature. Our highly standardized workflows and advanced instructions can help even the  most inexperienced worker do the right the first time.

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3. Want to be doing paperwork or leading a team?

Supervisors and managers spend hours every day breaking jobs into discrete tasks and printing out work instructions. Put the work assignment process on autopilot with Atheer’s job scheduling feature for recurring tasks. This means the right job is assigned to the right worker with the right instructions automatically.  You can spend the time you save leading your teams. With Atheer you can also measure individual performance and offer positive feedback to workers who are excelling and mentoring employees who are falling behind.

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4. Work Offline Without Worry

A huge reason  companies in Energy or Mining and Metals have been late to digitize processes is because of a lack of connectivity when they’re working in the field. With Atheer you can complete work processes offline using your devices and your data will be integrated as soon as your device is back online without fear of data loss.

5. Decentralized Real Time Reporting Available To Stakeholders

Management can get instant access to high quality real time data to help you order preventive maintenance and prevent issues from cascading into system failure. This never before possible level of transparency gives management the data driven insights they need to improve productivity. Get the data you need right away and perform root cause analysis to eliminate issues in the future.

6. Easily Break Abusive Cycle of Paperwork

Atheer is a low code/no code platform that makes it easy to eliminate thousands of hours of paperwork for your front line teams in the hour it takes to digitize the process permanently. Sound simple? That's because it is.

7. Integrate Atheer Data Back Into SAP and JD Edwards system

But will it show up in SAP or JDE? You can use a simple industry standard API integration to get all of Atheer’s job data integrated into your legacy system with no added hassle. Atheer plays well with Mulesoft the industry standard connector. We can easily integrate with ERP, MES and BI systems without putting stress on your IT resources. Atheer makes it easy to sync your stack.

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