Until last year, PRCS’ activities in Pakistan generated numerous paper reports every month, all of which had to be entered manually into an internal operations database and the national database. This was a process plagued by the complications involved in using paper forms, such as trying to match hand-written patient and village names or trying to restore family links of unidentified patients by comparing them with records in the area/national database. Since paper records were returned at the end of each week, discovering and fixing issues – such as an incomplete report or unclear handwriting – was extremely difficult. The transcription of each report/record into the operations and the national database was time-consuming, costly and error-prone.

Over the past year, 70 percent of PRCS’ manual workload has been transferred to WFM. Field staff and teams carry Android handsets with the WFM app installed. The huge reduction in manual data entry means more of the PRCS department’s time can now be spent on verifying the quality of data and providing analysis rather than digitizing and aggregating data. The simplicity of setting up WFM apps and ease of exporting and analyzing the results also means PRCS is able to record unidentified patient data in real-time and serve as a means to restore family links in record time. Mobile data collection is now being used by PRCS’ operations in Punjab, and in parts of KP, Sindh, Baluchistan, Gilgit Baltistan, FATA, and Azad Jammu & Kashmir. The use includes logging basic first aid training conducted in different areas nationwide, recording psychological first aid being provided in hospitals all over Pakistan to patients by PRCS officers and monitoring volunteer and officer activities on a national level through WFM’s GIS capabilities and real-time tracking of each member’s device.

Among the many benefits of using WFM, PRCS is confident that being able to enter data in the field has allowed them to more accurately capture the number of people they reach with their training programs and the number of patients they serve.

Real-time Task Assignment

This feature has allowed for more efficient management of the 100+ member field crew and volunteers, distributed all over Pakistan. A key challenge with field-based work is task assignment and making sure that high-performing staff always has enough to do. Because WFM allows managers to assign specific tasks to specific people and monitor their progress in real-time, tasks can easily be reassigned to another staff member if needed, removing the needless interruptions in day to day operations.

Web-based Management Interface

LMKT’s workforce management solution’s interface has made it simple to manage data collected from 12 different forms, 7 provincial supervisors, 100+ member field crew and volunteers all across Pakistan. New crew members are added, forms updated on the fly, tasks assigned as needed, data downloaded to monitor quality, and field crew and volunteer activities tracked–all in real-time.

Offline Data Collection

PRCS is benefitting from WFM’s capability to create complex forms to perform data collection offline and then periodically sync this data to a central server. As Wi-Fi and cellular can be spotty in remote areas even with 4G-enabled handsets. Through this offline data collection feature, teams don’t have to rely on a connection for data collection.