AUGUST 2017 | 45
Business
Read online at www.proinstaller.co.uk
MANUFACTURERS
UPBEAT
Production among UK
manufacturers grew at the
fastest pace since January 1995
in the three months to July,
according to the latest quarterly
Confederation of British Industry
(CBI) Industrial Trends Survey.
The survey of 397
trolled and garage doors
opened. You name it and
it’s becoming connected
and controllable from my
smartphone.
3. Augmented reality.
Already a company has an
app that when you point
the camera in a room or at
a scene in the open, iden-
tifies most of the things in
the photograph with text
appearing next to them
telling you what they are.
I saw a demonstration of
this a couple of weeks ago.
Applying this technology
to the trade, when I hold
up my smartphone in front
of a consumer unit or
boiler, it is likely it will be
able to recognise it. When
I describe the symptoms of
the problem, it will provide
diagnostics. I will be able
to solve the problems,
however rare the system
is.
The end of
paperwork
While the long-term pic-
ture may still be a bit fuzzy,
the impact on administra-
tion and paperwork for
trade companies is already
clear. Paperwork can be
made hugely less of a bur-
den using new technology.
My company Powered Now
has an app that runs on a
smartphone (and Mac, PC
and tablet) that helps with
paperwork and of course
we have competitors that
do the same. When we are
presenting our product, we
tell people there are four
benefits:
• they can invoice from
anywhere
• they can get their eve-
nings back
• they can grow their
business
• they can manage their
team
I will try to illustrate
how this works by asking
the following questions:
• Why would you ever
want to write out or
type a customer address
when you can look it
up from the postcode
or company name with
much less effort?
• Why would you ever
want to record or key
in an email address or
phone number if it’s
already on your smart-
phone?
• Why would you ever
want to write out or
enter anything you have
entered before?
• Why would you want to
post things when you
can email them faster
and with much less
effort?
• Don’t you want to know
when your prospect
has opened your email
and what they thought
of it?
• Why wouldn’t you want
highly professional
looking quotes when
it’s easier to do them
that way?
• Don’t you want to know
where exactly your staff
are during the working
day?
Thinking about these
questions gives you a small
taste of what is possible
with a smartphone based
computer system for run-
ning your business. Even
with what we have today,
business owners using our
system save an average of
nearly three hours a week.
Of course, there’s much
more that will follow and
it’s quite hard to forecast the
full eventual impact.
So what does
it mean?
Paperwork is the bane of
every trade company’s life
and especially when they
are smaller and can’t afford
a dedicated admin person.
The smartphone revolution
has the potential to ease
that burden. That’s good
news.
The l