To truly understand improvements in operations efficiency using field service management software, one needs to understand the old way of doing business. Let’s use an example of a duct cleaning business. The old way would be that their field technicians would leave their homes, and drive into the office. From there, either through a morning meeting or a white board, they’d get their schedules for the day, collect the pre-prepared paperwork they needed for each job, and finally hit the road.
They have their regular sites that they’d visit, sometimes passing other coworkers on the road. At the end of every job, the clients would sign off on their work orders, which were all collected, and at the end of the day, the technician would have to drive back to the office to drop that paperwork off on their managers desk. Now the manager has a stack of work orders the next day, and would have to review each work order, and write up a new invoice, containing basically all the same information as what was on the work order.
Every single step above contains an inefficiency that is solved when properly leveraging field service management software. Field technicians can leave their home, log on to their mobile device and immediately receive their scheduled work orders for the day that are already efficiently scheduled based on geolocations of other appointments for the day, minimizing travel time and gas money.
Customers can receive automated emails notifying them when the technician is en route to their location, with an estimated time of arrival, and a picture of the technician that’s going to arrive. On a particular job, if an additional requirement came up that wasn’t included on the original quote, they can easily make the necessary changes to the work order on the fly. Providing top notch customer service to clients in need, and keeping the customer happy.
When jobs are finished they can automatically update any changes in inventory, collect digital signatures and payment, and have their signed documents saved to the cloud. Automatically sync the job to the companies accounting software, and have the completed work order accessible by the back office in real time. Thus drastically reducing the work to payment cycle and improving overall cashflow, and automating the traditional back office processes.
By empowering technicians with mobile devices with access to back office software, not only can multiple hours per day can be saved and applied to additional jobs by field technicians, but back office processes can be totally automated and eliminated improving productivity of the back office, and overall efficiency.
