Overburdened and understaffed IT professionals are facing mounting pressure to deliver exceptional results for their organizations. Security concerns are increasing, and managing threats and developing effective new protocols are vital. Doing more with less and less has become the new mantra. Now more than ever, finding new and secure ways of accomplishing priorities is mission-critical.
Purpose-built to empower field service workers and the IT and operations teams that support them, ProntoForms is the global leader in field-focused low-code application platforms for enterprise.
SourceForge recently caught up with Alvaro Pombo, CEO and Founder of ProntoForms. Alvaro has 30 years of leadership experience in Field Automation and IT, including CIO at Alcatel Lucent, Exxon, where he played a key role in introducing field automation solutions, and Palm Inc.
In our conversation, Alvaro shared details on how IT and operations teams can use a low-code platform to empower field technicians. He also discussed the problems these workers experience and shed light on the benefits gained when citizen developers are enlisted to shoulder some of the burden faced by overwhelmed IT and operations staff entrusted with taking care of frontline employee’s needs.
CEO & Founder of ProntoForms
First off, can you please share with us a brief overview of your company? What kinds of customers are using your solution?
ProntoForms has been around since 2001 and is a financially stable company that has been publicly-traded since 2009. Our product is used by numerous service-oriented companies to help their IT departments scale to solve increasing business challenges. Many IT professionals and line of business workers rely on our robust solution to quickly build and deploy secure mobile apps for the field.
The majority of our users are large commercial and enterprise companies in multiple industries but primarily include heavy manufacturing, medical device manufacturing, oil and gas, and utility industries that have successfully scaled ProntoForms to larger user groups seamlessly.
How does ProntoForms enable IT and operations teams to better empower their field workers?
Our low-code platform is what truly enables IT and operations teams to support fieldwork success. ProntoForms’ user-friendly interface helps citizen developers, including those without any coding experience, quickly build and deploy enterprise-grade, smart mobile apps into the field.
We offer deployment models that put the power of choice in the hands of IT or line of business. The idea is that administrators can choose the right framework for each of their deployments.
Our platform is secure and offers password policies, role-based permissions, single sign-on, MDM integrations, and more. IT has complete control over what goes on.
Tell me about the product. How does ProntoForms work? Who does it serve?
ProntoForms helps companies develop made-for-mobile front-end apps that deliver great experiences without the need to build or maintain any code. These mobile-first native apps act as a front-end to add enhanced field service capabilities to an organization’s existing tech stack, including Field Service Management (FSM), Environmental Health & Safety (EHS), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), Asset Performance Management (APM), Fleet Management, Quality Management, Sales Enablement, CRMs or vehicle-tracking platforms.
Overall, ProntoForms is an excellent component of your field service automation stack. Our platform enables a wide variety of different workflows that large back-office systems don’t take into consideration, are not optimized for, or don’t have the agility to be iterated closer to the field to make 100% digital workflows a reality.
With ProntoForms, field teams are supported by native mobile apps built once and deployed to work on multiple platforms and are easy to use and adopt. Mobile forms make it easy for field technicians to work step-by-step through complex processes faster so they can get back to what matters to them: performing quality work and delivering excellent customer service. Another bonus is that we provide offline functionality for remote work ensuring field techs can still get the job done, even if there’s no network connectivity in their location.
We have great app-to-app capabilities that seamlessly integrate into other systems including Salesforce Field Service and ServiceMax Go, as well as permit other components from an allowed domain or app to contribute to a workflow.
ProntoForms also delivers workflow capabilities to automate sequences of predictable and repeatable tasks that automatically trigger next steps and thread together employee collaboration – from the field to the office. Our Teamwork feature allows work in progress to be submitted and made available to another field tech who can continue the work.
Our product integrates with numerous apps and systems and extends them to be field-focused. ProntoForms has dozens of point-and-click integrations to move and store data and documents in cloud services or systems of records, including Microsoft, Dropbox, Google Suite, Salesforce, and ServiceMax. These connections can also provide access to part lists, customer data, and more to streamline data collection in the field.
We also have an easy-to-use, powerful REST API for additional advanced integration opportunities to programmatically integrate data sources, download form submission data, and manage users as well as connect to your server.
We’ve made our system open from day one and have taken a modern approach to automation. Our philosophy is that we believe in the fluid exchange of information and want to encourage users to make the most of our platform in a way that best meets their needs.
What are the benefits gained from using a low-code platform?
It’s really about economics here. We set IT professionals up for scaling automation; having analysts and professionals that know the line of business processes enabled with the power of automation is liberating. There’s no need for IT to maintain and update these mobile business apps constantly without relinquishing critical control of all the vital parts of an application. IT is no longer talking about a six-month process with a team of 12+ people and a price tag of two million dollars to build and deploy apps. IT is freed up to take on larger, value-adding projects that impact the organization.
Don’t just take it from me. Gartner said that “By 2024, three-quarters of large enterprises will be using at least four low-code development tools for both IT application development and citizen development initiatives.”
How quickly can someone get up to speed with building mobile forms and apps?
As a low-code platform, ProntoForms empowers users to quickly and easily build mobile apps for many business processes. Our version control capabilities help ensure releases are controlled and make it easy to roll back a change or check previous versions to see what’s gone on.
Low-code tools like ours set companies up to iterate quickly and develop, test, and deploy their own mobile solutions. A company’s first field service app can be built and deployed today in hours or days – not in months or years! We have vast experience in including sample form templates to get people started, achieve a rapid impact, and use them to then scale up. We enable it in a very iterative mode with deployments reaching thousands of users within just a few weeks.
There are two deployment options available with ProntoForms.
- DIY. This approach is ideal for organizations that will be using forms for low complexity work, don’t require complex integrations, or feel confident getting their hands dirty and want to build their own workflows.
- Assisted. Companies use our Professional Services team to deploy complex workflows quickly or wish to have additional training and dedicated contacts at ProntoForms to rely on to accelerate their development, our team is ready to provide our expertise.
Can you tell me a bit about security and reliability as it relates to your product?
We take security extremely seriously at ProntoForms. It’s a top priority for our company. We closely follow industry best-practices and have successfully completed audits against the Service Organization Control (SOC 2 Type II), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Security Rule, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH), and have received Title 21 CFR Part 11 Compliance attestation for electronic records and signatures.
All data that flows through our system is encrypted using industry-standard TLS 1.2 or higher in transit and AES 256 at rest. Our developers are trained regularly in secure coding practices. All code goes through rigorous peer reviews and is scanned for vulnerabilities before release. We constantly monitor our application and environment and are quick to notice if anything goes wrong. We regularly engage third parties to conduct penetration testing and promptly resolve any issues.
As for reliability, our customers need to access their data at all times, wherever they are. We’re extremely proud to maintain the availability of our services above 99.9%. ProntoForms has implemented safeguards to address any system performance or availability issues quickly and securely. We have a team of on-call support staff ready to immediately respond to and resolve incidents once they’re identified. Our team also regularly practices our incident response and disaster recovery plans to get on top of security threats and ensure our customer’s data is readily available.
Q. After all this time, how does ProntoForms continue to innovate?
One of the three core values in our company is ‘solve,’ and we aim to “solve complex problems elegantly and easily.” How do we do this? It’s through continued innovation in product and enablement so users can adopt and grow with ProntoForms. We use innovation when taking great care of our customers. Customer success is extremely important for us and this includes ensuring field service workers are satisfied, a group that other providers sometimes underestimate. These workers are our biggest fans. Field technicians absolutely love the ease of use of our platform and the clarity our system provides in helping them do their jobs. We are also driven to help our customers scale. This includes ensuring they’re able to use our product with multiple languages and locations. Our team never wants our product to stall and we’re constantly expanding with exciting new features. Latest additions to the platform include:
- Optical character recognition (OCR) turns photos into searchable PDFs.
- CSAT forms capture customer feedback immediately after a service call. These forms also can include images for a customer to review and approve as proof of delivery or completed work.
- Mobile search allows techs to enter a search term, find existing form submissions, and check job site history. They can then click on previous forms and read or edit them.
- Camera-to-text sets field techs up with the ability to capture complex information by simply taking a photo.
- Document to PDF scanning for technicians to include paper documents directly within their digital forms. OCR harvests text from images and converts it into a PDF document
Q. Can you provide a sample use case for ProntoForms?
Johnson Controls (JCI) is a large, global HVAC, Fire, and Security equipment organization. The company turned to us to help them give their field technicians every digital tool possible to deliver consistent remote service. They required a solution to advance their digital transformation goals and empower techs of various experience levels to reliably complete high-complexity tasks and workflows without using paper-based tribal knowledge. Additional objectives were to increase customer loyalty, improve service operations and obtain office-to-field digital transformation.
Members of JCI’s team presented our mobile forms solution to their IT department, who after reviewing it, granted their approval given we met their integration and security requirements. From there, it didn’t take long for Johnson Controls to start deploying forms. The first one took between five to ten minutes to create!
Johnson Controls’ field techs now perform preventative maintenance tasks with ease as every check they need to go through is spelled out for them. The operations team uses our user-friendly, intuitive mobile forms to guide technicians through specific workflows. Having an efficient workflow that’s easy-to-use sets frontline workers up for success and helps them problem solve. Resolving a problem in front of a customer is seamless as field techs have asset-contextual information on their mobile devices. Taking care of these issues is faster than before which has increased customer satisfaction.
I’m only touching on a small part of this incredible story! I’d invite your readers to check out this case study and watch the customer success story video for more details.
About ProntoForms
ProntoForms has been around since 2001 and has been a publicly-traded company since 2008. We are consistent, driven, and dedicated to innovation. ProntoForms is a reliable company with proven expertise and is a partner that’s laser-focused on our customer’s success.
Since our product launch, we’ve become the global leader in field-focused low-code application platforms for enterprise. ProntoForms has 100,000+ subscribers from a wide variety of industries who rely on our intuitive, secure, and scalable solution to increase productivity, improve service quality, and mitigate risks.
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