Manual Sketching is a Thing of the Past – Here’s Why

For the last several decades, estimators and restorers have relied on manual sketching methods. Although these manual methods have supported the growth and success of many businesses, embracing technology is the next step.

Concerns about changing what already works well or altering effective processes are common. But in reality, the accuracy and speed of new technology will drastically improve your business practices and customers’ experiences.

Embracing technology makes estimating 7x more efficient

As the VP of Product Innovation at DocuSketch, I’m focused on providing significant cost and time savings, better accuracy, and more customer efficiency.

As a 15-year Xactimate Certified Trainer, I’ve learned firsthand that embracing technology is the way to do that.

Industry-leading sketching technology like DocuSketch is almost 7X more efficient than manual methods.

Additionally, there are four key ways DocuSketch improves accuracy, saves business owners money, and improves the estimating process:

• Save on opportunity and labor costs
• Improve working relationships with insurance providers
• Speed up cycle times
• Produce more accurate estimates

Save on opportunity and labor costs

If you sent someone to manually sketch a one-story house like mine, it would take about three hours.

DocuSketch does this in a fraction of the time –– you can document the entire space and order the highly accurate sketch in less than an hour.

In this scenario, regarding labor alone, you’ve gained an efficiency of at least 3 to 1. And if your estimators have to spend those additional two hours on-site sketching a job, they have less time to do more skilled tasks such as:

• Evaluating the coverage
• Ensuring the reserves are correct
• Corresponding with policyholders, contractors, insurers, sub-contractors, or material vendors

Improve working relationships with insurance providers

DocuSketch can improve your working relationship with insurance providers, too.

Let’s say you must send three or four employees to a loss at two in the morning to deal with immediate problems.

Without DocuSketch, your project manager would have to show up the next day to measure the site, obtain photos, gather data, and often go back to the office and write an estimate. Of course, you might have to send your project manager directly to another loss instead. By the time they get back to the office, the details of each job have probably gotten a bit fuzzier, so now they’ll have to look back up the scope of each loss and put together the sketches and the estimates.

Delays like this can set the claims process back by days, each one of which makes the insurer — and the insured — a little less happy.

“Delays like this can set the claims process back by days, each one of which makes the insurer — and the insured — a little less happy.”

The beauty of using DocuSketch is that one of the people you send to that loss site in the middle of the night can also gather the information you need — and they don’t need to be a trained technician to do it.

They set up DocuSketch’s 360-degree camera, gathered data from the site, and then send the information directly to your office. You’ll then get a complete floor plan and estimate for mitigation and rebuild — often within one business day. This entire process — from gathering the 360˚ tour to receiving the sketch to getting the estimate — is done within DocuSketch.

Speed up cycle times.

In this scenario, the project manager would still visit the site. But this time, they’ll have the sketch and estimate in hand and can move on to perform more value-added skills like walking the loss and ensuring the estimate is detailed, accurate, and technically sound. Your claim cycle time now goes from many days — or weeks — to hours.

“Your claim cycle time now goes from many days — or weeks — to hours.”

This greatly assists the claim indemnification process if insurance is involved, allows the contractor to get started sooner, and ultimately finish faster.

That translates into faster payment and, most importantly, gets the insured or customer party back to their pre-loss condition faster.

Produce more accurate estimates.

We experimented on a PuroClean Training Floodhouse in Florida to determine whether there are any blind spots in a manual, “old school” hybrid estimating process. In a hybrid estimating process, one person creates the tour, and a different person uses the tour to create the estimate.

After completing the estimate, the estimator noted several missed opportunities and found inconsistencies due to assumptions made.

The “old school” estimating process meant key elements of the estimate were missed, including:

• Kitchen window
• Bathroom window
• Bathroom vanity
• Laundry window
• Length of upper cabinetry
• Void in the lower wall of the stairs in the basement
• The wall difference in the upstairs primary bedroom and the primary closet
• How the basement fit into the upper floor estimate

DocuSketch’s Quick-Capture Technology captures everything for you with a high degree of accuracy so you don’t have to worry about missing pieces of an estimate. Inaccurate estimates cause imprecise claims, which can ultimately affect your bottom line.

Plus, it works much faster.

Case Study: testing the difference between new vs conventional methods in real time

I set out to better understand what type of efficiencies I could experience by using it to sketch a 1,304 square-foot portion of my home in Arizona.

I wanted the sketch to include all details: cabinets, plumbing, electrical, correct door swings, and wall thickness.

Testing process:

• Part one: I first made a sketch the manual way using a laser tape measure. I created a detailed and accurate floor plan in about 54 minutes and 22 seconds.
• Part two: Then, I set up my 360-degree DocuSketch camera and did the same thing in just eight minutes — including labels for all the photos it took.

DocuSketch provided the details I was looking for and gave me a more accurate, precise sketch in a fraction of the time it would have taken me to do it manually.

And that 8 minutes was consistent for the three different Ricoh 360˚ cameras I tested.

Transform your business with tech

Embracing technology allows you to save on opportunity and labor costs, improve working relationships with insurance providers, gain better efficiency, and produce more accurate estimates.

DocuSketch is the technology you need in order to do all of that.

If you talk to other restoration contractors or use it yourself, you know that DocuSketch can drastically reduce the time you need to create sketches and estimates. And, making DocuSketch a part of your process helps you, as a business owner, better manage the number one cost in every business: labor.

Since DocuSketch moves the whole restoration process along more quickly (and more accurately), you’re ready to take on more work and grow your business faster.