Business Goals
- Meet health and safety requirements
- Effectively communicate critical health and safety data
- Accelerate incident report processing time
Outcomes & Results
- Over 12 form types mobilized, and growing
- Over 30 hrs/month of data entry eliminated
- 1-hour incident report processing
The Challenge
The Crosstown Transit Constructors project is a joint venture of four Canadian and American construction firms, lead by Obayashi. Its goal is to complete the western contract for the Eglinton Crosstown Extension LRT for the city of Toronto, to expand the city’s subway system.
This extensive construction project is one with high health and safety requirements, including the undertaking of regular construction audits and adherence to stringent regulations.
Featuring close to 300 employees (including subcontractors), the Crosstown project uses over a dozen types of critical forms that field workers must fill out. Thus, according to Christina Lindstrom, the Crosstown project’s Health and Safety Manager, the communication of information is a key challenge.
“We began the old-fashioned way, with paper forms in the field, for everything from safety site checklists to surface engineering reports. But we knew there had to be a more efficient and effective way of communicating this data.”
The Solution
Through research and due diligence, the Crosstown project leads decided on mobile forms from ProntoForms to speed up business processes and increase productivity.
ProntoForms is a mobile form application and platform for smartphones and tablets that allows media rich data to be collected on the job site – no matter where it may be. Users fill out forms on mobile devices, capturing text, signatures, photos (with the ability to sketch on an image), bar/QR codes, GPS and time stamps, and more.
Users can also access key back-office data within forms (ex. parts or client information). Once complete, forms can be sent to a variety of destinations, including back-office systems such as Oracle or SAP and cloud services such as SharePoint, Dropbox and Google Sheets.
“We tested out ProntoForms and liked it right away. It was easy to see the value in mobilizing our forms in the field. We began our ProntoForms rollout with approximately 15 users on iPhones and iPads, with plans to expand use.”
The Benefits
Several of the ProntoForms features have proven to be invaluable to the data collection process, including offline functionality and photo capture.
“We use iPads in the field and underground, so the ability of the ProntoForms application to function without network connectivity is huge for us. Our field staff fill out mobile forms. Then, once connectivity is established, the forms are sent from the App’s outbox.”
“Previously, paper forms would eventually make their way back to me. I would then have to review them for errors and perform time-consuming data entry or scanning.”
“Before, the process could take up to five days. Now, forms are dispatched to all of management via ProntoForms and the whole process takes an hour.“
CHRISTINA LINDSTRM, HEALTH & SAFETY MANAGER, CROSSTOWN/OBAYASHI
“The success of the mobile form deployment has management looking at other processes in which ProntoForms can be deployed.
“In an industry where safeguarding employees and the job site is paramount, ProntoForms has greatly helped to streamline and speed up our health and safety data collection and reporting.”
