Peak Paper: The end of pen and paper in equipment operations

Paper has had its day, at least in the Enterprise. We can even speak of Peak Paper, in the same way we speak of Peak Oil, as writing paper consumption has been dropping since 2008. The transformation from paper to digital is escaping the office and is at last reaching the depot, the warehouse and remote field staff.

Paper has dominated administration and communication since the printing press exploded onto the European scene in the 1500’s. The mass printing of books revolutionised communication and brought down the price of paper, allowing it to be used for the key activities of administration: planning, collaboration and record-keeping.

The digitisation of writing is following a similar pattern. The internet and e-mail are consuming paper’s role in written communication. This success has driven down the price of the underlying technologies such as the laptop, smartphone and tablet. Mainframes started making inroads into the planning and accounting tasks of businesses 50 years ago. The idea of the Paperless Office had to await the Personal Computer. Smartphones and tablets are now doing the same for Enterprise Operations teams.

In many ways, Operations is a more natural fit for paperless working than an office. In an office, small spaces with intimate collaboration is the norm, think design sessions around Architect’s drafting boards or meetings hunched over action plans. In a warehouse or at a remote customer site, leaving a sticky note on your colleague’s keyboard is not a practical approach.

The administration of operations is less about collaboration and more about communicating what needs to be done and accurately recording what was done. Paper is no longer the best approach for either of these functions. A delivery note or work order will now typically start its life in a company’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Planned and organised digitally by the back office team, the instruction will finally be printed out and transported to the operations person who conducted it. Which part of this communication is not transmitted at the speed of light?

Worse still, when the work has been completed it must be accurately recorded, so that it can be billed and equipment and other histories updated. So the work order must be retyped into the ERP, an error prone data entry process. Slow communication, unnecessary work and mistakes are, for operations, the legacy of paper.

Extending the digital link that final fifty yards, from the back office to the tools workshop or loading dock, using an Operations Platform like our own product Phalanx, closes the loop. Work can be communicated to operations teams instantly on their smartphones. The record of completed work is entered once, with all of the powerful validation that is possible when the entire enterprise’s data sits behind the smartphone’s screen. Once entered, the work information is available across the company. The promise of the ERP system can finally be realised as the truth of its data matches the reality of operations.

For a case study on how Balfour Beatty replaced paper with mobile apps, barcodes and RFID tags, download the case study by clicking here…

Paper has dominated the organisation of operations because it was the lowest common denominator; always available and always understandable. But that is changing, it will soon be more common for an employee to have a smartphone in their pocket than a pen. This change will alter Enterprise Operations, and a paper-based works order will soon be as inconceivable as paper-based payroll.

The flight from paper to mobile apps is a great opportunity. Peak Paper in the Enterprise will lead to new peaks of innovation in Operations.