How Mobile Apps Are Improving Productivity

All businesses have information they need to collect and share. There are millions of processes happening each day–some you see (e.g., the plumber who brings an invoice to your house) and some you don’t (e.g., safety inspections happening at every construction job site). 

There’s a revolution happening with how these organizations are collecting and sharing information, and it’s awesome seeing GoCanvas lead the way.

But how are businesses and organizations really using mobile apps to better collect, share and learn from their data?

We love seeing all the ways businesses are streamlining their processes and rapidly transforming their work with mobile forms on phones and tablets. Organizations are not only using multiple form apps, but they’re also building and deploying them to their workforces faster than ever before (almost 70% built an app in a day or less!)–an indication that businesses of all sizes are shifting from expensive, resource-intensive custom builds to cloud-based mobile business app solutions.

Here’s a look at how a few key industries are using mobile form apps to automate their work processes.

The GoCanvas 2015 online survey was completed by more than 1,600 decision makers from a broad range of company sizes and industries that have historically relied heavily on paper forms and manual processes, most prominently construction and contracting, field services, retail and wholesale distribution, healthcare, manufacturing, government, and transportation & logistics.

 Key Survey Findings

• Organizations using multiple mobile business apps – Two-thirds of respondents indicated their organization used 1-5 mobile business apps in 2014, and a robust 20% of organizations used 10+ mobile business apps last year.
• Organizations are saving money converting manual processes to mobile apps – Of those tracking their cost savings, 17% saved between $25,000-$100,000 annually switching to mobile apps, while 81% indicated cost savings between $1,000-$25,000. 
• Mobile apps are still used most heavily for inspections and work orders – When it comes to specific tasks businesses are using mobile apps for, inspections (52%), work orders (35%), checklists (20%), and surveys (20%) remain the four most popular – as was the case in last year’s survey.
• Signature capture and image capture popular features – The 2015 GoCanvas survey also tracked, for the first time, which mobile business app features organizations have used in the past 12 months. Image capture (56%), signature capture (52%), workflow (23%), and GPS (22%) were the most popular.

Use of Core Business Applications  

64 percent of businesses see value in integrating core business applications – such as Dropbox, PayPal Here, Salesforce, and Quickbooks – with mobile devices and tools, up 1 percent from last year’s survey. That said, significant customer data gains were experienced by Box and Google Drive for cloud storage, and PayPal Here for credit card processing.

The survey of GoCanvas customers, conducted March 25^th – April 7^th, 2015, included companies from a broad range of industries and sizes. Of the respondents, 28% were from businesses with 500+ employees; 26% were from businesses with 101-500 employees; 19% worked at organizations with 26-100 employees; and 27% hailed from small businesses with 25 employees or less.

Interested in how your business can streamline manual processes, eliminate paperwork and transform the way you collect, share, and learn from your business information? Browse our collection of Inspection and Survey mobile templates.

Check out even more resources