The Freedom Boat Club franchise revolutionized access to boats and oceanic recreation, offering dockside boat use service and training to its 90,000 members. Freedom Boat Club maintains more than 5,000 boats at over 400 locations worldwide, including 32 in Tampa, Florida, where Paul Cianci, director of special operations, is based.
Using Jotform Enterprise…we can knock out twice as many inspections, capture more detail, and focus on our work instead of the paperwork. It’s a game changer.
Paul Cianci, Director of Special Operations, Freedom Boat Club
Paul Cianci says it’s hard to remember a time before Jotform Enterprise, but he remembers the paper — a lot of paper — used to perform monthly inspections of a fleet of over 700 boats. Staff responsible for inspections had to type responses to the 41-point paper inspection document into Excel or Google, and then send the report out at the end of what was often a long travel day.
“Using Jotform Enterprise, we moved the process to an online form, put it on our tablets, and now we can knock out twice as many inspections each day, capture more detail, and focus on our work instead of the paperwork,” says Cianci. “It’s a game changer.”
| Increased productivity | Number of users | Number of forms | Turnaround times reduced |
|---|---|---|---|
| 200% | 36 | 700+ | From 30 days to 3 |
Instead of carving out time to input handwritten data into Excel or Google Sheets, Cianci and his team can now inspect more boats and perform more detailed inspections.
After that initial success, Freedom Boat Club began to leverage Jotform Enterprise to streamline processes in sales, marketing, and member training. “We went from having one or two forms to over 700 different forms that we utilize today,” says Cianci.
Cianci explored other online form solutions, but none of them matched Jotform’s ability to automate, populate, and migrate data. Ultimately, he said the decision came down to what you can accomplish with the wide range of tools offered in Jotform Enterprise.
“In Jotform Enterprise, I can have questions answer other questions by pre-populating forms with submission data, use widgets to enable dropdown fields to talk to each other, calculate numbers based on form responses, and tie form submissions to an email in an instant,” says Cianci. “The completeness of the solution makes everything so much easier.”
Freedom Boat Club takes advantage of these capabilities to manage its boater training program. Through the program, members receive unlimited free training from Coast Guard-certified captains and can progress through different levels throughout their membership.
“We have a 60-question form to audit the member’s understanding across six different categories,” says Cianci. “As soon as they submit the form, it automatically calculates their score and places it in the header of the notification email so our team immediately knows the score and can readily access everything that the member selected on the form.”
Improving incident reporting turnaround times with Jotform Enterprise
Cianci also automated a messy, manual incident reporting process that required both pen and paper and multiple emails between departments. The process was inefficient and difficult to track, resulting in incomplete reports and Freedom Boat Club not recouping all the money it needed.
What used to take three weeks to a month, if it was getting completed at all, is now happening within three days.
Paul Cianci, Director of Special Operations, Freedom Boat Club
Cianci created an approval workflow in Jotform Enterprise, seamlessly routing an incident report form digitally through nine departments and notifying relevant individuals based on the form fields selected. In just four months, they’ve received 1,100 submissions, and more than 50 percent of those are finalized, recouping monies for lost or damaged items.
“Instead of multiple confusing emails going back and forth, the new workflow automatically routes the necessary data through every department in the company, so people can just click on the notification, complete their task, and get on with their day,” says Cianci. “What used to take three weeks to a month, if it was getting completed at all, now happens within three days. I’m very proud of it.”
Cianci also built a no-code app to support the incident reporting process and shared it with Freedom Boat Club’s 16 directors across the United States. The app lets them view the inspections and training forms pertinent to their location and easily follow up as needed.
“I’m pretty excited about the app I created and downloaded to my phone,” says Cianci. “Now, when someone asks me for data, instead of having to log onto my computer to find the data they need, download it, and send it over, I can just share the app.”
Not surprisingly, he’s also looking to improve his app. “I saw a few videos the other day that made me want to do more to make it look just right and do things we hadn’t thought of before.”
How Jotform Enterprise Customer Support fuels Freedom Boat Club’s success
Cianci continues to explore Jotform Enterprise’s potential to improve operations and reporting and appreciates the dedicated customer support team that ensures his forms and workflows are optimally designed.
I’ve worked with several people from the Enterprise Customer Success team, and every one of them goes out of their way to make sure that what I build is working, and they do so with a smile on their face.
Paul Cianci, Director of Special Operations, Freedom Boat Club
Cianci has leveraged their expertise for everything from brainstorming workflows to merging and organizing 700 forms across two Enterprise accounts.
“I’ve worked with several people from the Enterprise Customer Success team, and every one of them goes out of their way to make sure that what I build is working, and they do so with a smile on their face,” says Cianci. “They’ll make a copy of whatever we’re working on so we can play around and test different methods. They’re always happy to assist, and I learn something new every time.”
Jotform Enterprise can spit out a report for me, and it will go wherever I need it to go and look however I need it to look. The data updates in real time, so we don’t have to wait on someone to input the numbers or compute the data.
Paul Cianci, Director of Special Operations, Freedom Boat Club
Automating reporting and creating actionable data with Jotform Enterprise
Jotform Enterprise has helped Freedom Boat Club optimize how it manages its data. Often, organizations struggle to use data because of the work required to get it in a format that enables individuals to extract and communicate something of value. Cianci remembers collecting data and asking, “Now what? What do we do with this?” No more.
“Jotform Enterprise can spit out a report for me, and it will go wherever I need it to go and look however I need it to look,” says Cianci. “The data updates in real time, so we don’t have to wait on someone to input the numbers or compute the data.”
As Freedom Boat Club looks to incorporate artificial intelligence and automation, Cianci and his team are exploring Jotform’s integration with Microsoft Power Automate.
“There’s a lot that can be done using the Jotform Enterprise integration with Power Automate,” says Cianci. “We’re learning about updating dashboards, Microsoft Power BI, data collection, and tracking different data points to get the most out of our forms.”
Ridding your organization of manual paperwork with Jotform Enterprise
Cianci encourages others who are looking to rid their organizations of paperwork to try Jotform. “Click on one of the hundreds of Jotform’s templates to get an idea or post a question to the online support,” he says. “If you can imagine it, the Jotform Enterprise support team can help you get there.”
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