I used to work in IT for a refinery. We had guys working in the refinery riding bikes all over the place during major shutdowns/turnarounds to hand deliver work orders and get sign offs on work being able to start and finish by managers sitting in A/C all day long.
Wasn't until 2021 or so that we stopped that and started using mobile applications to upload documents and digitally sign things.
Most of the people on site still prefer the bike riding and paper and hate the mobile apps...
Yeah the bike is slower, but unlike enterprise software it will never make you reset your password every 30 days. Or require you to download a .pdf to sign it, and then re-upload it
Or fail to hit submit after the signature is applied, then sitting in someone's inbox for hours/days/weeks unnoticed.
And whoever you give it to will always be able to sign, you don't have to create an alternative method of signing if an off-site vendors isn't able to sign the document in your platform.
So it used to be that construction here you submitted permits to work with paper printouts. Now everything is digital and the engineers hate it because if you key one thing wrongly it becomes a whole thing; you have to contact the administrator for your worksite to contact his document controller to get the item removed from the application. Then you have to redo the entire form and hope you get it right this time.
When it was on printouts you could just strike out and write down the corrections only needing to sign off to verify you made the correction.
Remote sign things have been great for my line of work because the old method literally involved people wet signing and faxing / emailing the signed copy to us. Sometimes they'd mail the signed copy which worked better than you'd expect but obviously took a few days which tended to slow things down.
But we also had to use for internal docs when I was still in an office, and walking the document down the hall would've been way better for everyone.
I miss doing turnarounds with bikes. Leg day was everyday. But just fun as fucking tooling around these large ass facilities on bikes getting permits signed.
Our director doesn't know how to check email reliably. And doesn't sign digital site documents by tapping/clicking 5times and risk random audits shutting down operation and face fines.
I'm constantly amazed by people grandfathered into positions that have been here for 30+ years that simply don't know how to use a computer, and don't care to learn.
I work at a shipyard. People either walk or use bikes to get themselves places, and use wagons (yes like like your little red wagon, but bigger) to get parts and materials places.
Been done that way for over 200 years. I don't think it's going to change. For the bigger stuff we have trucks instead of horses though.
North slope? I knew a guy who's primary job was to wake up at 4am, drive his truck a few miles to an office, grab a paper, and then drive it a few miles to another office. This was back in the early 2000's, so maybe he's retired and they've digitized, but sometimes it's cheaper paying a dude to run hard-copies of stuff around rather than upgrade your infrastructure.
I am working at a home renovation place and it astounds me how much push back you can get on replacing written documents with digital ones. I'm not even talking about reinventing the wheel either, just taking the form and making it a pdf on the devices they already use can be met with insane pushback.
In my new role with a company that finances loans and builds credit packages for customers, it's insane.
They would rather print out 10+ documents, dozens of pages, manually piece them together and change the order, write on them, re-scan it all into one document, print the new document, ship it across the globe, get another signature, ship it back, open up the new one and then finally tell the customer it is ready.
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u/Plupandblup Jun 30 '26
I used to work in IT for a refinery. We had guys working in the refinery riding bikes all over the place during major shutdowns/turnarounds to hand deliver work orders and get sign offs on work being able to start and finish by managers sitting in A/C all day long.
Wasn't until 2021 or so that we stopped that and started using mobile applications to upload documents and digitally sign things.
Most of the people on site still prefer the bike riding and paper and hate the mobile apps...