Going Paperless

By Joe Frigo

• A dispatcher is on the phone with a foreman because a job has been pushed and two line trucks have to be moved.

• A payroll clerk is working through a stack of timecards, leaving a third voicemail for a crew that worked the weekend.

• In billing, someone is hunting for job packets that should have come back with last Friday’ s pole replacement work because invoices for that work need to go out.

• A pile of pre-use inspections on the shop manager’ s desk shows a digger derrick is down and a project manager just committed that same machine to a customer for tomorrow.

None of this is a paper problem. The paper did its job when it was written. The problem starts later when that paper has to travel somewhere else, arrive on time, be legible and be connected to the right job, asset and person. That journey is where utility and construction fleets quietly lose money every week.

Most conversations about going paperless target the wrong enemy because digital forms by themselves do not resolve any issues. A PDF that replaces a paper form but still gets emailed, downloaded and rekeyed into the fleet management or accounting system has produced no operational gain.

In some cases, it adds work. When an inspection form or work order is filled out in the field, for example, how many times must it be re-entered before the information is usable downstream? Every re-entry is a tax on the operation.

Most forms exist because regulators or owners require them. OSHA 1926, OSHA 1910.269, ANSI A92, DOT 49 CFR 396 and owner programs such as EM 385 all demand documented proof that equipment was inspected, crews were qualified and hazards were controlled. The rest exist because someone has to account for a crew’ s hours, materials and production to bill the customer correctly.

The costs actually show up before crews even leave the yard. They reflect expired operator certifications,

dielectric test records sitting in a binder that nobody has cross-checked against the dispatch plan, aerial devices that are overdue for pre-use or ANSI inspections and equipment that was supposed to be available but isn’ t because a swap last week never made it out of someone’ s head and into the fleet view.

Improving Productivity

FMI reports that 79 % of contractors believe better management practices could improve labor productivity by 6 % or more. In fleets, that management gap almost always traces back to the same issue: the people making the decision and the people maintaining the equipment are not looking at the same picture.

When readiness lives in binders, inboxes and memory, the yard cannot trust the schedule and the schedule cannot trust the yard. During a job, for example, when inspections, job tickets, production reports, incident and other forms are written on paper and carried back at the end of the day, the office is working blind while the work is underway. If a company has made those digital but each one lives

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