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The Cost of Paperwork For Reporting

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 2,000 to 10,000 hours of effective work time lost per mining machine asset.

Manufacturing and Oil & Gas experts report similar paperwork burdens for production lines, rigs, and refineries. It’s easy to see how paperwork can add up to millions of hours of lost productivity time every year. But that’s only the beginning of the problem with reliance on paperwork for reporting processes.

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

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

Paperwork affects the quality of life for front-line teams

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 must 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, sometimes three or four times. Dual data entry is also error-prone, inefficient, and mind-numbingly boring.

The Cost of Paperwork For Your Equipment

Every hour spent on paperwork is an hour lost from essential machine monitoring and maintenance. This inefficiency has serious financial consequences:

Oil & Gas: Equipment failures can cost up to $220,000 per hour.
Manufacturing: Machine breakdowns lead to nearly $1 trillion in annual losses.
Safety Risks: Poor maintenance is a leading cause of work-related fatalities.

Without proper maintenance tracking, minor issues escalate into major failures. Paper-based processes make it harder to track preventive maintenance, increasing the risk of costly downtime.

The Cost of Paperwork For Data Quality

Paperwork doesn’t just affect equipment by depriving production lines of crucial workers who can perform condition monitoring and maintenance activities. It also lowers the quality of these essential 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.

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 isn’t unavailable to management or other front-line workers in real-time. Often, this data is only helpful in tracing the root cause of accidents after they’ve already occurred. 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 high quality 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 are so bogged down by paperwork that they don’t have time to adopt digital solutions. Yes, you read that right. Paper-based workflows make your processes inefficient and ensure 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 paperwork and improve processes? Digitization has become such an empty buzzword that it could mean almost anything. So, let’s not talk about simply digitizing your processes. You need a low code/no code integrated digital solution that will:

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

You need a Front-Line or Connected Worker Platform. By 2027, the global market for these Platforms is predicted to hit 12.1 billion. It’s forecasted to grow even larger and become a business necessity.

How do Front Line Worker Platforms work?

Atheer offers a low code/no code Front Line Worker Platform that integrates your front line workers into their environments through the devices they naturally use in the flow of work (laptops, smartphones, 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 are just a couple of the benefits you’ll get from our last-mile software:

Increase Partner & Worker Satisfaction With Automatically Generated Job Reports

With Atheer, you can cut out long delays in getting your partners the reporting they need. You can automatically generate reports as soon as a job is completed and update relevant stakeholders in near real-time. By digitizing processes, you can eliminate dual data entry for your front-line workers and get them 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 replaces unreliable paper checkmarks with verifiable 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.

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

Supervisors and managers spend hours each 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 automatically assigned to the right worker with the right instructions. You can spend the time you save leading your teams. With Atheer, you can also measure individual performance, offer positive feedback to workers who are excelling, and mentor employees who are falling behind.

4. Work Offline Without Worry

A huge reason companies in Energy or Mining and Metals have been late digitizing processes is 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 the Abusive Cycle of Paperwork

Digitizing workflows with Atheer takes as little as 15 minutes. Thousands of hours of manual data entry can be permanently eliminated with a simple, intuitive process.

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

But will it show up in SAP or JDE? With no added hassle, you can use a simple industry-standard API integration to integrate all of Atheer’s job data into your legacy system. Atheer plays well with Mulesoft, the industry standard connector. We can easily integrate with ERP, MES and BI systems without stressing your IT resources.

Ready to Transform Your Operations?

The era of paper-based reporting is over. With Atheer, you can digitize your workflows, eliminate inefficiencies, and unlock new levels of productivity.