RocketPlan offers a lot of different services on one platform but, if it does have a single defining feature, it’s would be cloud-based image and data storage. Put simply, it’s a revolutionary step for the restoration industry, and one that will allow your company to attract more work than ever before.
But there’s a common question about this feature: why couldn’t I just use DropBox or Google Drive to organize my company information? Don’t they do cloud storage, as well? Below, we’ve compiled just 5 of many reasons why RocketPlan’s restoration-focused design enables far more than those general hosting platforms ever could.
No matter how diligent you are in creating the perfect organization for your company’s data, you will always run into the inherent limitations of nested folder trees.
If you’re trying to organize all your data on a particular property, should you put all of it in one folder? Not only does this make each folder a confusing mess of different file types, but it means that you can only navigate your data by property and not by the type of data. Put all types of info into separate folders and now correlated aspects of the same property becomes extremely time-intensive.
The fact is that general file storage services are not sufficient for the needs of restoration companies. There are too many technicians, managers, and outside stakeholders handling too many pieces of information over too long a period of time for something like Dropbox to allow efficient operations.
On the other hand, RocketPlan makes it easy to keep photos, notes, geotags, timestamps, blueprint mark-ups, and more accessible as easy to review. Not only is all your data kept in a coherent, property-down structure, but information can also be filtered and searched from within the platform.
The thing about your custom Dropbox folder structure is that, beautiful though it may be, someone else will always screw it up. It’s not their fault; it’s hard to adopt someone else’s idea of how information should be recorded, and often technicians will house data where they think it belongs but where nobody else will ever find it.
RocketPlan offers the best of both worlds, allowing you to simultaneously cater to the real world needs of time-strapped workers and create a useful long-term record of all data on a particular job. Simply by using RocketPlan as their easy method of data collection and entry, workers automatically place all information where it’s expected, and where it can be found again in the future.
There’s no onboarding process explaining your approach to Google Drive that will accomplish that.
The way that traditional cloud storage services work, there’s a real incentive to limit the amount of data you keep on the service; whether it’s literal storage limitations or just an install size that starts to bog down mobile devices, traditional cloud storage services don’t lend themselves to keeping huge amounts of data over the long term.
So, RocketPlan introduced the idea of unlimited cloud storage, and removed the requirement of constantly mirroring files on your desktop or mobile devices. This allows your backlog of work data to become arbitrarily large, without downsides – nothing gets bogged down as your data backlog grows, meaning that your RocketPlan profile just becomes a more definitive hub for your business over time.
With all your data available for all time, no client or insurance adjuster can ever surprise you with a request for old information. And when you’re never surprised, your operation runs more smoothly, every day.
One problem with the data collected by the restoration industry is that it’s not really data collected – it’s a note for later work. The difference is notes aren’t in their final, needed form, but act as memory joggers for workers in the future; if you take a photo of damage but then have to manually refer to that photo for reporting, then where do you really report the data? When taking the photo, or when your duplicated that effort to submit it?
With RocketPlan, your workers only do work once: the first time. With all data collected and stored on the RocketPlan platform, it can then be auto-filled into document fields or appended to reports, as needed. There’s no further need to obsess about photos, notes, or any other data stored on your RocketPlan profile.
Cloud storage clients are notorious for their limitations in sharing information, both for security reasons and because such services are constantly trying to cut their own bandwidth costs. With RocketPlan, because our business lies in helping your restoration projects, and not in cost-effective cloud storage, you don’t have to suffer through limitations – and because of our secure permissions-based platform, you can share your data with anyone you please.
That means that team members with permissions access to a project can find any data they need, but also that outside stakeholders can see any data necessary, if you so choose. Sharing data isn’t just limited to photos, either; if you’d like, you can show a client the timestamps for work done, or the notes about why work progressed the way it did, just as easily.
There’s really no comparison between the value offered to restoration companies by RocketPlan versus a conventional cloud storage service. Not only does RocketPlan offer an approach to organization that actually works for sprawling, remote teams of workers, but it packs in with this cloud storage a host of value-adding features drawing from that organization, like easy sharing and auto-report filling.
10 years ago, cloud storage made real waves in the industry. Now, it’s time for the industry to move on to something even better still.
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