This post was written by one of our staff members in our customer support department detailing her path from becoming a document controller to joining DocBoss.
As the saying goes, when one door closes another one opens. This couldn’t be truer when it comes to my career in Document Control. I spent almost 10 years working for an EPC as a Vendor Document Control Lead. In this role I was responsible for identifying ways to save us time, resulting in more profit and more client satisfaction. When layoffs were handed out, I wondered how I would translate my experience with vendor documentation into a future career outside of Oil & Gas.
Then I saw the post for Support Specialist with DocBoss. Being familiar with DocBoss, as some of our vendors were using it themselves, I messaged Brad, full of excitement at the possibility of putting my vendor experience to use again! It was meant to be!
In my previous role, we had one client for 8 years. This allowed us to really hone-in on exactly what our customer’s needs were. We were then able to create Job Instructions to pass along to our vendors to ensure the documents they were delivering required minimal re-work. One of our major bottlenecks were data book submittals. When I first started, there were no data book requirements. Vendors simply put together their documents in a way that made sense to them.
We often would need to re-work the books, have our engineers review them and submit to our client in their required format. This was my first task, write up an instruction to pass on to each of our vendors with clear instructions on how we expected to see the data books. It took time and wouldn’t have been achievable without full project and Client support but over time data books started arriving in the proper format, cutting our involvement into half.
We didn’t really concern ourselves with how difficult it might be for our vendors to get the work done the way we wanted to see it… Fast forward a few years, and now I’m with DocBoss getting a firsthand look at what our vendors had to go through!!
My favorite thing to do now is work with our customers, sometimes even reading over their client’s document requirements and helping to set up the system to work for them, especially when it comes to data book/compilations! I understand the financial hold backs and the pressure on Doc Controllers. No one wants to be responsible for holding up final payment.
It’s fun seeing what we used to ask for reflected in client specs and seeing how DocBoss can achieve that and more. I love hearing “Wow, it’s EXACTLY what we wanted” after we’ve set up the compilation. Then hearing “it’s been approved” on the first submittal!
Some other tasks I like being a part of (just to hear the excitement in our customers voice) is setting up the auto-generated numbering and use of customer templates. Both can be daunting and tedious work when you don’t have a system in place, but with DocBoss it’s almost a set it and forget it kinda thing!
One of the things I love most about working for DocBoss is the personal care we give to each of our customers. We aren’t just here for you reach out to if you’re really struggling. We’re here to listen and help you get the most out of the system. Not saying we can do it all, but if there is a way to streamline your processes and we can help, we will. Our goal is to make the document submittal process as smooth as possible.
In the past, working with document control systems has felt very rigid. What you see is what you get, and any suggested improvements we made to the document control system provider seemed to go into the “Never do” pile.
If you think of something that would make your job easier within the system, we are open to learn and investigate what it would take to get it in the system. We are constantly learning and evolving with our customer’s needs, which in turn, helps our customers meet their customer requirements, often exceeding them.
I’ve heard from many of our customers that this was an unexpected bonus of working with us. We’re here, and we’re engaged. We know what kind of things go into customer specs, and we do everything we can to keep the solutions inside DocBoss. Many of the items you see today came from customers with the same problems you might have faced. Why not give us a call and put us to the test. I bet we’ll surprise you with our understanding of your submittal pain points!