Give your business the edge when it comes to managing field service operations 

Any business that involves managing personnel who spend most of their time offsite, such as technicians, engineers, drivers and maintenance workers, is faced with challenges. Hiring and retaining skilled people, rising operational costs, such as fuel, parts and materials, as well as meeting customers’ increasingly complex service needs are just some of the issues such businesses have to deal with.      

While specialist field service management software is designed to make the lives of field service personnel easier, through automated scheduling, ensuring they have the right information for each job to hand, updating parts inventory and optimising travel routes between off-site jobs, best-of-breed mobile workforce scheduling software can also empower organisations to transform how these operations are managed.

Let’s explore what to look for in a best-of-breed field service scheduling software solution.

Customisable to suit your business

Customers expect a seamless service, delivered on time and budget by polite, efficient people, that’s why they trust you and work with you. But delivering on that seamless service promise requires coordinating multiple different jobs: installations, repairs, preventive maintenance, as well as equipment, assets, spare parts, among field resources often across numerous sites. As businesses grow and expand and take on more clients and contracts, this complexity only increases. Top field service management software enables you to integrate your customer data and configure the application based on your business’ specifics, allowing the creation of different work order types, such as repair and preventive maintenance, for example.

Scalable and flexible to adapt to organisational structures

Field management software is design to replicate your company’s organisation structure. Different levels and groupings for field personnel, based on factors like skillsets and roles, availability, location, can all be inputted, along with information on service areas and customers, to enable simple scheduling.

Enhance data organisation

Good quality data is essential to running a successful business especially any whose success is contingent on servicing customers. Field service management software provides tools to organise sources of data, about customers, job sites, assets and parts, which links each asset to a job site, which is linked to the customer. Organising data in this way makes it easier to create and track work orders. 

But not only that. This data can be easily retrieved and updated to create a rich history of customers and site-specific assets, so that you can gain more insight. There might be aging assets versus newer ones that require more resourcing to maintain and repair. FSM cam be interfaced with enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other legacy IT systems to import and synch customer data. Better data organisation allows you to adapt your servicing or other offsite activity to the needs of individual customers, offering a more responsive service.

Improve service call planning and service response

Emergency call outs can happen at any time, often on the busiest days, packed with routine or general maintenance jobs. Work order management software processes every type of job, enabling you to organise resources, based on job specifications, without worrying about letting customers down. Intuitive interfaces let you qualify, schedule and edit jobs whenever you need to.

Service calls information entered directly in a work order, created in the software, is the exact same information that goes to the technician, reducing opportunities for error or mistakes when calls are recorded and then relayed.

Better job planning

Field service scheduling software can allow you to organise off-site visits according to type of activity, from one-off installation and commissioning activity to weekly or monthly visits, depending on types of work your business specialises in, or jobs. It allows you to set a specific visit frequency and link these to job sites and serviced assets. Maintenance jobs, which can vary in terms of type of job to frequency, are grouped by contract or under a set of work orders, so they’re easy to find. These can be closed out by sending the customer a single report.

Field service scheduling software also allows you to automate the process of creating and scheduling recurring jobs for a given customer, with a special “Recurring” feature to coordinate preventive maintenance on customers assets.

Time to transform your operations

A growing roster of companies, across a range of sectors, are discovering how FSM is helping them evolve their businesses to be better, whether in terms of improving customer service, or operational efficiencies. Field service management software can provide transparency throughout operations, even those managing a mix of offsite staff and contractors with a broad range of skillsets from painting and decorating, to plumbing. It is not unusual for companies to become used to working with established software and IT systems, such as working in Excel spreadsheets to create schedules. Implementing service order management software can provide visibility across the entire field service team, providing dispatchers and management teams a clear view of who is doing what, when and where in the field at any given time. This allows for quicker decision-making as well as simplifying scheduling and efficiency gains. 

Even larger organisations managing hundreds of field service teams can realise multiple benefits from implementing field service management software. These can range from real-time monitoring, from as soon as a job ticket is created on the client’s system and sent to the technician, so management can track job progress. 

Choosing a field service management solution that is intuitive to use, not only among field service operatives, but also admin staff and management personnel, assures buy-in among employees when it comes to fully deploying the software. Customers benefit too, because the field data collected using the field service management software app helps organisations provide clients with evidence and data to show that contractual obligations have been met.