Hello everyone, I’m Martha, the Office Administrator at ACME Engineering. ACME’s owner is my neighbor and we were both doing yardwork one Sunday when he leaned across the fence and asked me if I’d be interested in some part-time office work, while my kids were in school. Well, that was 30 years ago and I’ve been with ACME ever since.

The company has flourished and the team has grown. Business is booming and we’re always bringing on new clients. This is all great news, except for the fact that it meant a lot more paperwork for me. Our field engineers were always late with their timesheets and I could never read messy, smudged, handwriting on inspection reports, nor decipher dates on maintenance checklists. A stack of papers would pile up on my desk and I’d end up staying at the office until 7pm during the week and then bringing work home with me on the weekends. I was frustrated with our antiquated processes, but also not really sure how to change things.

Seeking answers or advice, I emailed some of my admin friends at other engineering firms – I was curious how they stayed on top of paperwork. Suzy, the office admin at Big Digs Engineering, quickly wrote back and said that they’d started using an online tool called FieldFocus. She said it had changed the way their office did paperwork and that she was no longer behind in submitting safety reports to insurance, nor sending invoices to clients. Suzy was jazzed! I did a quick google search and shared with ACME’s owner. He agreed to do a trial run to see how we liked it. I was a little nervous to switch our processes from what we’ve always done to something new, but after hearing how easy it was for Suzy and Big Dig, I knew I had to try it.

Our FieldFocus trial was a huge success. Not only do we use it in the back office to track engineering site visit reports, but we also use it to review and approve timesheets, send job tracking reports to clients for invoicing and also to keep track of maintenance on our equipment. I use FieldFocus on my desktop computer to create custom forms – timesheets, inspection reports, checklists, etc – and then assign the forms to our field engineers. Each form takes only 5-10 minutes to create and then it’s hands off – everything is stored online! After the engineers submit their forms, I can create reports using their data in just 5 minutes and then just email them to the client. What used to take hours with a pen and paper, now takes just minutes and it’s made my job so much easier. I have my weekends back and I have FieldFocus to thank.