CHRIS BAILEY: Hi, everyone.
Thanks for joining.
We're excited to talk to you today
about the deskless workforce and how
you can digitize and streamline their work without writing
a line of code.
We'll talk about who the deskless workforce is,
what are the challenges they're facing,
and how organizations can use AppSheet
apps to solve those challenges and boost productivity.
We'll walk through several great examples
of what these apps look like and how they are actually
being used in the field.
Now, before we jump in, we'd like
to give a quick introduction to who we are.
My name is Chris Bailey.
I'm a product marketing manager on the Google AppSheet team
and was actually with AppSheet before it was acquired
by Google in January this year.
And I'm very excited to be joined by Johnny Hacking, who
is the Director of IT at BHI.
Johnny, would you like to introduce yourself and maybe
give a little background about BHI as well?
JOHNNY HACKING: Awesome.
Thanks Chris.
Hi, I'm Johnny Hacking.
And I'm the IT Director here at BHI
and have been for the past three years.
And I've been in the IT field for over 15 years.
Now BHI is a turnkey general contractor
that began as an electrical contractor
and has grown into a company that serves a civil, pipeline,
communication, electrical, and renewable energy industries
across the United States.
CHRIS BAILEY: Now, we've already mentioned
AppSheet a couple times.
And I realize that many people are just learning about it.
So I wanted to start off by giving a quick introduction
and overview to what AppSheet is.
AppSheet is a no code application development
platform that enables anyone to create apps fast.
At a high level, it's a simple process.
First, you connect your data.
AppSheet can connect to a wide variety of data sources,
including Excel files, Google Sheets, cloud SQL,
and on-premise databases.
Then you can customize your app within the AppSheet editor,
and create and adjust views, workflows, notifications,
and more.
Finally, you can deploy your applications out
to both mobile and desktop devices.
And AppSheet does an excellent job
of being responsive and working on all of these devices.
So while AppSheet integrates with a wide variety
of software, we found that it is particularly powerful
when combined with G Suite.
The two products work together in many ways.
You can store app data and content on drive.
You can build an app directly on top of Sheets,
and create, read, update, and delete Sheets data
from the app.
You can open up Google Meet, use Docs as templates,
create and update calendar invites,
and extend your forms functionality.
There's a lot of goodness that comes from using the two
platforms together.
And I definitely recommend exploring
how you can use them to solve your business challenges.
So that's a high level overview of what AppSheet is.
Now we want to shift the topic and focus more
on the deskless workforce and the ways
we can utilize AppSheet to enable those teams.
80% of the global workforce is deskless.
These are people working in the field
and on the floor who have to get up and move around,
and don't spend the majority of their time next to a computer.
Think of field technicians, construction workers,
sales representatives, doctors, nurses, event managers,
manufacturing specialists, just to name a few.
More and more, we're seeing deskless workers looking
to technology to find ways to improve productivity
and efficiency.
And these challenges they are facing
are different from those faced by desk workers.
For example, while it may be very easy for someone sitting
at a desk to open up a new Sheet, write up an invoice,
adjust margins and formatting, that
can be much more difficult for someone who's in the field,
as they may not have a computer and they
may be on their mobile phone or tablet
where it's just trickier to format a document
and perform actions like that.
Now BHI's deskless workers have been
using AppSheet in some really interesting ways.
So I actually want to pass it over to Johnny
to talk about those challenges they were facing,
and how they use AppSheet to solve them.
JOHNNY HACKING: Awesome, thanks.
So a challenge we faced was we were
required to submit multiple inspection
forms on a daily basis for one of our projects.
And current processes just didn't work.
It was to fill out paper forms in the field, and then later,
inputting that data to send off from a computer
either at a hotel, job trailer, or other location.
This needed to be done for all inspections
that day, which were multiple, sometimes 30 plus.
And we didn't have the manpower to meet these requirements.
For this project, management looked to IT for a solution.
Because hiring more people would put the project's success
in jeopardy.
The current process was not working.
Forms and spreadsheets brought challenges
of managing data and workflows across multiple jobs.
Developers can be costly.
And external solutions are inflexible because it's never
just one external solution.
You know, we have multiple divisions here at BHI,
and they all have different needs.
Now BHI had just migrated to G Suite
and was having great success with the collaboration
it brought.
And that's when we found that AppSheet on top of G Suite
gave us the ability to take full advantage
of these digital platforms.
It gave us the offline capability in an actual app,
and was easy for our users in the field
that are in very different working conditions.
AppSheet works seamless with Google Sheets and Docs,
making it easy to push out applications fast and simple.
Actually, one of the apps in the demo you will see later,
we made in a matter of hours on a job site in a job trailer.
Customization of AppSheet has helped us save money
because we are custom making apps for specific jobs
that sometimes only get used once for a project.
One thing to note is that it isn't just IT
that is developing these apps, but people from multiple teams
that help make them better because a lot of the times,
they understand the needs of their project
better than we do.
IT is just brought in as a final step
to review the app before it goes live.
Since using AppSheet, I've been told multiple times
on job sites how much they love the apps,
and to keep them coming because they're
making their job a lot easier.
Now AppSheet has solved a lot of our problems
and transformed the way we work as a company.
Its ease of use allows for my small team
to deploy apps that meet the requirements
of multiple disciplines rapidly.
Forms that are required on every job
are now digital and filled out on the fly,
with all the data being stored in Google Drive.
Apps aren't just forms, though, but something
that is tailored for each job.
We have ones that are used across the entire company,
and others specific to projects because of the information
gathered and reported in real time.
This has cut costs by reducing our overall IT
budget by 10%, when we normally paid that to other third party
softwares.
And an example is some quality inspections on electrical work
was taking up to two hours to do one inspection.
By the time everything was filled out
and inputted into a PDF, combined
with pictures taken onsite, and emailed
to the client on a daily basis from a computer
back in the office.
Not only did our apps allow this to happen in the field,
but they also cut down these inspection forms from two hours
to six minutes.
This was a solution to our challenge
in the previous slide.
The result was money saved and we're
able to meet the job requirements.
AppSheet has also given us more time.
With two of our AppSheet apps, from one department
completely freed up 20 to 30 hours a week.
This time was generally spent on printing and scanning
forms to manually inputting data into a spreadsheet
so that it could be analyzed.
Now our workflows do this in a matter of minutes.
We are now making decisions on data that's happening now,
versus what happened two weeks ago.
The best part about this is our employees
are coming up with new, innovative ways
we can use AppSheet, which isn't happening in conference rooms,
but across construction sites all over the country.
CHRIS BAILEY: Awesome.
Now Johnny, if it's OK, let's actually walk through
some of the apps you've created with your team and talk
about how they've been beneficial
for the mobile workers.
JOHNNY HACKING: So this is our company dashboard app.
It's basically, we call it BHI Relay.
And it's a bunch of apps you can see
that we've created for a lot of use cases,
such as equipment rentals, time tracking, PTO, and HR forms.
With the company being as diverse as it is,
it's an easy one stop shop for people
to find what they need, regardless of their department.
CHRIS BAILEY: Great.
Now let's open up a couple of these apps
and walk through how they're actually being used.
So let's click on Safety apps demo,
which will open up another menu of safety specific apps.
And let's look at the Near Miss Report.
JOHNNY HACKING: Awesome.
So yeah, this is filled out whenever
there's an incident that almost occurs on a job site
or in an office building, anything like that.
So if it were to happen and I was an employee,
I could either notify my foreman or myself.
If I was in that position, I could come to here.
And first off, the view you're going to see
is all the Near Miss forms that I filled out in the past.
Or if I was a foreman, and I would
be able to see ones that I have filled out
or ones that have been filled out for the employees
that I'm over.
And if once I open this up, I'm right here.
In the bottom right, there's a plus.
And let's say I need to fill out a Near Miss.
I'm going to hit that plus, which
is going to bring us to the form and start walking us
through here.
Fill out our incident location, where this happened out
in the building, janitor closet, parking lot, whatever.
And then right here in the Near Miss, you get to a section.
We've had times like this.
As a construction company, we do work for other people.
And sometimes, the companies we do
work for, they require us to use their forms.
Well we want people, our employees,
to use the app because it's very important for what we do.
But at the same time, we don't want
to be requiring our employees to fill out
three or four different type of forms
and wasting all that time when they can be doing other things.
And so we made it easy for them to select the picture item.
And then they could click on the picture icon
and actually take a picture of the Near Miss they filled out.
CHRIS BAILEY: And I'll interject here, and just
say that when you select picture,
and you're on a mobile device, it will just open up
the camera right there so that you can actually
take a picture of the form and save it down to your app.
JOHNNY HACKING: And we also created that for a file.
Because on some jobs, someone else
has filled out the Near Miss for that other company,
and then e-mailed us a PDF copy.
Well it's given us a way there that we can click on File,
click on that icon, and browse to a PDF or some other document
on the computer and upload it as well.
But let's say for this instance, sometimes, we don't have those.
We can click NA.
And then that is going to present us
with the rest of the information that we
need to fill out in order to complete the Near Miss form.
And so, we're just going to kind of go down and fill out
some of the data, answer the questions.
And one thing I really like here,
and which is huge with all our safety apps,
is sometimes, it's nice to be able to require the information
that needs to be filled out.
CHRIS BAILEY: Yeah, so essentially, everything
with a star is required.
And if you try to move on to the next step
without filling those out, you'll get an error.
And you can also set additional parameters
on those requirements like, specifying
that it has to be an email or a number or something like that.
JOHNNY HACKING: And then we're going to get down here
with the employee signature.
Just so you know that if you are on a tablet or a smart device,
and you click on that, you'll be able to just draw
with your finger or a stylus or whatever,
and actually capture people's real life signatures.
And then at the very bottom, you can fill in an email address
if, for some reason, you need it to email
a copy of this Near Miss to that person for reporting purposes.
You fill that in.
Once it saves, AppSheet has a workflow
that combines this information, puts it into a PDF,
and emails it off to that person.
Now that we've hit Save, you can see all
that it's been added with the other Near Misses that
have been filled out.
And it's right here.
And we have done our job.
CHRIS BAILEY: Now, there's one more app
that I think is really clever that we want to show you.
The Time Entry app.
JOHNNY HACKING: So yeah, this app
is really interesting because COVID had just happened.
And we needed to create something
that would meet all the requirements
of social distancing and not to touch as many surfaces
as possible as we could for this job site.
And to keep track of time, people
would just click on a tablet and punch it in.
Well, not with this case.
We created a solution so we didn't have to.
On Setup here, each employee will be in the list.
And we'd add employees.
And we'd give everyone a bar code that was a sticker.
And we'd put that underneath their hardhat.
From there, every day, the person in charge of time
would click on Check In.
And what that would do is it would open up
the scanned section.
And if you were on a tablet, it would open up the camera
itself.
And it would just stay open all the time.
What would happen is when a bar code is filled in,
or you hold their hardhat, the bar code sticker,
the camera will recognize that, fill in the bar code.
It will save it, and automatically
go to the next one.
And it will just keep doing this all day until that person would
come back and get the tablet, at which everyone has been clocked
in for the day, not having to touch the iPad or the tablet
or anything.
CHRIS BAILEY: At this point, you're
likely curious to see what these applications look
like on the back end.
So I'm going to open up the AppSheet editor
and show you what it looks like.
So let's look at the Time Entry app that Johnny just showed us
and see what it looks like behind the scenes.
Now all of that apps data is hosted in this Google Sheet.
It has two tabs, the first with a simple table
that will update as people clock in and out,
and the second with the employees emails and associated
bar codes.
To create an app, all you'd have to do to get started
is to pull up AppSheet and connect it
to a spreadsheet like this.
So let's see what it looks like in the App editor.
This is the AppSheet editor.
Over here on the right, you can see a live preview of the app.
And you can switch to different views,
whether you want to see phone, tablet, or desktop views.
On the far left, we have the main menu of Edit Options.
The key ones you need to know when you're getting started
are Info, which gives high level information
about your app, Data, which lets you build and update
your tables, columns, and sizes, UX, where you can adjust
the look and feel of the app, and Behavior,
where you can set up actions, workflows, and reports.
Let me highlight a few key features of this app.
So when we go to Data Tables in this time tracker app,
we can see that the same tables in the spreadsheet
are also listed out here.
Timesheet and Setup.
When we select View Columns, we see that all the columns
were added as well.
There's also some additional columns
that have been created to add functionality to the app.
And several of them, if we look here,
include formulas that we've added to help
run the logic of the app.
Next, if you wanted to adjust the look and feel of the app,
you can go to UX Brand and easily change your app
to light mode or dark mode, and adjust
your colors, which you can see being updated
in the live preview here.
Now let's say you wanted to have an automated report sent
to the payroll manager that showed how long each employee
worked that day.
That report is simple to set up.
You can go to Behavior, Reports, and select New Report.
Here, we've already created one.
So let's just open that up to give you
an idea of what that report can look like.
So Daily, at 8:00 PM Mountain Time,
use the Today's Timetable, which, just so you know,
is a virtual table or slice that we created within this app.
We don't have to set additional conditions.
So let's leave that section blank.
And do this.
Let's send an email to these two addresses
with this information, and a note
here that you can have piped text to.
And let's also send a text message
so that they know the report is in their inbox.
So you update all this.
And after that, you click Save, test the report out
once or twice, and start using it.
Now I'm going to stop the demo here because, unfortunately, we
don't have time to go through every piece of this app.
But we have extensive documentation online, as well
as a very active AppSheet community
that can help you get started and answer
any questions you have.
Now before we end, we wanted to just give you
a few more ideas of other common apps
we see customers building for their deskless workers.
We've talked a lot about field service and inspections
and audits.
But we also see people using actually
for inventory management, project management,
such as on-site budget tracking and worker
management, human resources, such as onboarding, training
and time sheets, and sales and marketing,
which is especially useful when you have
a mobile workforce that spends a lot of time
out in the field talking to prospects and customers.
Hopefully this presentation has given you
some valuable information on how you can better
enable your mobile workforce.
If you'd like to learn more about AppSheet
or start creating apps, you can get started at AppSheet.com.
So thank you for watching this presentation and happy app
building.