Using in-cab digital forms during Covid-19

Forms are an essential part of your drivers’ daily round, used routinely for logging arrivals, deliveries and departures and helping ensure your business processes are maintained. But while you’ve been using these forms in your day to day operations, you might not realize how they can become a powerful tool in responding to unforeseen changes in the way you do business. Having access to flexible forms that you can quickly create and implement provides agility during uncertain times, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic.

In order to protect the health of workers and minimize the spread of the COVID-19, businesses have faced dramatically changed processes in the supply chain and have had to cope with variations in these new processes as drivers travel across different jurisdictions. For some of our customers, tapping into the power of flexible forms provided the answer to responding rapidly to the changed conditions.

At its most basic, a form is simply a screen on the driver’s device asking the driver to input info, be it text, numeric, or checkboxes. But beyond asking questions, forms can also be used to push information to the driver, including pictures or diagrams. Being able to set up forms quickly and push them out to the drivers’ devices, along with information on what they are for and how to use them, lets you change your operational processes, no matter where your drivers are currently located, within a matter of hours.

One of our clients, a large pharmaceutical company, used this feature when the pandemic hit. They created a form to ask drivers questions to ascertain whether they were at risk of having COVID-19. By asking a few yes/no questions such as whether the driver had particular symptoms, had the driver traveled to certain locations and whether the driver had been in contact with anyone diagnosed with COVID-19, the company could assess whether the driver was an appropriate person to send on any particular job (for example going on-site at a health facility). 

The data was kept to maintain a log of driver status and possible risk level. Since the form relied on a few quick questions drivers could use it quickly throughout their day to update their status. Combined with the trip history data from the Coretex 360 platform it provided a robust contact tracing tool. If any driver did contract COVID-19 they could trace not just their possible interactions with customers but with other drivers and then match it against those drivers’ health status at the time.

Such a system could also be used to demonstrate regulatory compliance around contact tracing and driver health should it be required, although this would obviously depend on the business being willing to share the data.

How and when forms are presented depends on how the forms are created. For example, with our platform customers who are using the jobs module can set a form to pop-up based on an action within the job, such as driver arrival at destination or job completion. This means that a newly implemented form designed to be used as part of a changed process can be quickly inserted into the driver’s workflow to trigger at the appropriate moment.

The ability to create forms quickly, push them out to drivers’ devices and have them triggered by defined job or driver statuses gives fleets the ability to adapt comparatively painlessly to unforeseen changes in the way they are required to do business and is a powerful feature residing in your fleet management platform that you might not be using to its full extent.

To learn more about how you can use flexible forms to adapt your processes to unexpected challenges get in touch.