Written by Max Joy, General Manager of Mobile Business Technologies at BSA
Company-Wide, Cost-Effective, Risk-Free Technology
BSA is a public company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. The BSA Group is a diverse engineering, contracting company focused on the delivery of infrastructure projects, services, and equipment to the building service industry. It is also one of the leading communications and technical services companies in Australia, providing installation and maintenance solutions to the broadcast and telecommunications industries.
I operate in a new division and start-up initiative for BSA; the Mobile Business Technologies business unit. The vision of our start-up is to be the most trusted business technology people anywhere by helping small to medium businesses use practical technology in the most cost-effective, risk-free way possible. iFormBuilder is our recommended field-based platform for our clients and is one of the key ways for our clients to begin the journey towards standardizing their business processes.
We aligned with iFormBuilder for a number of different reasons. The main driver was familiarity with the platform and previous success with rapid design, development, and deployment of customised field data capture solutions. iFormBuilder APIs and guaranteed POST capability also make it very flexible. The level of security around the iFormBuilder platform and the ability to host in their Australian-based server help us achieve a level of compliance that really stands out to our marketplace since many clients need to adhere to government standards of privacy if they want to work for them.
BSA uses iFormBuilder across the Technical Maintenance Services Division, and has done so every hour of every day for the past 4 years, as the field record documentation and transmittal process. It is used to send and receive work orders, confirm equipment and plant operation status in critical areas, control labour costs through integrated timesheet postings, and most importantly document any and all work hazards prior to conducting any work or performing any task. All of these capabilities have delivered insights into time to complete works, mean time between failures for plant, and labour costs – budget vs actual.
The Mobile Business Technologies division has created complete stock management systems, purchase order processes, subcontractor work order completion forms, as well as log on and log off kiosk arrangements for its clientele. We see ourselves pushing the capabilities of what we can do daily. As more and more features are developed within the platform there is only an upside to continuing with iFormBuilder.
As previously mentioned, the most useful features we see are the APIs. iFormBuilder’s transactional capability is fantastic. We’d like to see that grow even more and start tying in some real automation behind record creation and assignment.
Any organization can benefit from using iFormBuilder because of the standardization achieved when data is returned from the devices. Super users will benefit from the more advanced functions around data feeds, queries and the API but anyone can get started and build a form to deploy.
We’re very proud to have been selected as a winner of the iFormbuilder Distinguished Project Award and to be qualified as Certified Business/Program Consultants/Partners with iFormBuilder in Australia/New Zealand. It is a fantastic platform which we believe in, the staff are fantastic, and the business strategy set by iFormBuilder’s leadership team seems to be working.
About the Author
Max Joy is the General Manager of the Mobile Business Technologies division at BSA, an Australian-based company. Self-taught in data structures, Javascript, HTML 5, and SQL, he has been an iFormBuilder user since 2010. Recently, he developed and deployed a nationwide solution for BSA using the iFormBuilder platform. Max has worked for a number of top engineering services firms, progressing from Project Manager through General Manager.
