“Even if we’re saving just an hour of productive time per day, per person… that’s a potential $20,000 a day in savings.”
GOFORMZ CASE STUDY
AT-A-GLANCE
NTL Pipelines needed a more efficient means of collecting data on job sites and delivering it to the office for processing and review. With teams working in remote areas, NTL Pipelines needed a digital solution that would be both fully functional offline, and easy for their teams to learn to use.
NTL Pipelines used GoFormz to digitize their forms, routing, and record-keeping. Leveraging Automated Workflows and the Box integration, NTL’s completed forms can now be instantly routed to supervisors for review and authorization, and centrally stored within Box folders. Mobile forms can be completed offline, with data uploaded and immediately accessible once a signal becomes available – expediting data processing and simplifying data collection for mobile teams and drivers.
THE FULL STORY
NTL Pipelines has provided pipeline and facility infrastructure planning, estimates, and construction for over 30 years to Western Canada. NTL Pipelines is committed to prioritizing safety and environmental consciousness, while providing quality, budget-aware services to their clients.
NTL Pipelines, a Canadian pipeline construction company, sought a more efficient and thorough means of data capture. With teams spread across a variety of job sites, the NTL staff struggled to provide efficient, complete documentation. Jared Holmquist, CEO of NTL Pipelines, explained, “Prior to [mobile forms] our drivers would complete a paper form in the field. But sometimes they’re on a project for a week at a time, so it would take a week for those documents to get back to the office. Then, if there was any information missing from the form, a manager had to contact the driver to try and figure out what was missing… but to recall that information from days previous, information just got lost.”
Having used GoFormz at a former position, Jared introduced NTL to the mobile forms platform, citing offline capabilities and ease of use as his main reasons for doing so. “There was the ability to utilize the mobile forms in remote areas and offline,” Jared explained. “Any other digital platform I could find at the time required access to the internet.”
Jared found acclimating the NTL Pipelines team to the GoFormz mobile forms experience quite simple, “It didn’t require very much instruction for our transport division, even though our drivers range in age. Some of the older guys were a little nervous until they opened the app, and then they say, ‘well this is easy’.”
As a former Safety Manager, Jared was especially interested in digitizing NTL’s daily safety documentation and incident reporting. Leveraging mobile forms, if an incident or ‘near miss’ does occur onsite, a preliminary report can be instantly generated in the field by the onsite safety representative. The preliminary report captures critical incident details, including the capture of relevant job site photos, which can be easily taken using a device’s native camera and added to the mobile report. Once completed, the preliminary incident report utilizes an Automated Workflow to instantly email a copy of the report to a predetermined notification contact list.
After the preliminary report, a full incident report is also completed, including witness statements and the collection of ‘root causes’. Once completed, this form is instantly transferred to a corporate safety manager for review and approval, as well as distributed to the notification contact list and downloaded to a project file. Within GoFormz, reports are generated from incident form date, and used to identify trends and repetitive factors in project incidents.
The NTL team also digitized their Bill of Ladings, used to document the movement of equipment between job sites. Leveraging a digital Bill of Lading allows the NTL Pipelines transport division to rapidly complete and route delivery information that would have otherwise taken days (or even weeks) to deliver to the office. This efficiency is accomplished via automated form actions and the referencing of databases. For example, NTL’s digital Bill of Lading can leverage a GoFormz database to quickly populate what equipment is being transported, transportation rates, and more. Once completed, the Bill of Lading is automatically transferred to a manager for approval, before copies are instantly emailed to specific project teams, based on the job number in the form. Office management can monitor the incoming data in real-time, enjoying increased visibility into field team activities and project progress.
Jared and the NTL Pipelines team have also utilized the GoFormz and Box integration to seamlessly and dynamically centralize completed documents. “We went with Box because of the integration with GoFormz, so we have a centralized place for storing and routing information once it’s been completed.” Once forms are completed, they are instantly stored in Box and organized by project.
Mobile forms have helped the NTL Pipelines crew eliminate time wasted moving forms from remote job sites back to the office. With job sites anywhere from thirty minutes to thirty hours away, Jared estimates a three to four hour time savings for each incident when using GoFormz, due to real-time data access and offline capabilities. These savings continue in the field, where pre-populated database fields, automated routing, and streamlined reporting result in at least an hour saved per person responsible for completing documentation.
“It’s a significant amount, even if we’re saving an hour of productive time, per day per person… for an average of maybe $40 an hour… that’s a potential $20,000 a day in savings once we are able to fully integrate digital forms.
Adding to these benefits, reports are now automatically generated from the field data, leading to a more agile, informed workforce. “Compiling that information into a presentable report, that looks like a report that we would have generated, is a benefit as well.”
The NTL Pipelines team now plans to digitize their timesheets, field reports, inspections, safety and quality control forms, and eventually take their documentation completely digital.
“Even the suggestion of going back to paper would be outright rebellion.”