A field service management app helps businesses by automating their operations & processes. Read about “Features of Field Service Management”
Introduction
If you own a field services-based business, then certainly you must have well received the buzz around field service management software. These kinds of software suites claim to be new-age tech enablement that helps field services to overcome the operational challenges, simplify the field workforce management process and improve the productivity and efficiency of the mobile workers or technicians.
A field service management app or software helps businesses by automating their operations and processes. Needless to say that automation is one of the must-have field service management solutions necessary for any business that requires managing a mobile workforce or services.
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So, certainly, businesses are increasingly incorporating this kind of software program in their operations and aiming to achieve the digital transformation that can put an end to numerous slow and dragging manual methods. Automation is needed to speed up the processes, to keep them error-free, and also to ensure that everything is measurable and trackable.
As the industry’s big players are banking on advanced technologies like the Internet of Things, Augmented Reality, and Artificial Intelligence, it is high time that even small businesses in this industry must ride on technology and get rid of the degraded and low-profile legacy ways. Field service management software for small businesses is a cost-effective and easy to adopt tool through which field automation can be attained.
However, as you go about choosing a field service management software, you come across a range of similar types of products, and it often gets confusing which one to pin down one. So, how do you choose the right software that fits your business needs?
Seven must-have features of a field service management software
- Scheduling & dispatch: Field services need automation in scheduling and dispatching to ensure certain kind of accuracies in scheduling, such as:
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- To avoid scheduling conflicts like duplicate schedules, overlapped schedules, missed schedules, etc
- To ensure that there is even distribution of work, for no one is gets overburdened, and no resource is left underused
- To ensure the skill-based job distribution so that maximum first visit effectiveness can be achieved.
- To ensure territory management in job distribution so that technicians or workers don’t have to face productivity leaks because of extensive traveling or detours
Thus, your chosen field service management software should have the automation capacity to assess the technician’s availability, proximity to the job site, and skill sets. Accordingly, the software must automatically assign a job to the nearest available rightly skilled technician or worker.
- Route planning & tracking: As technicians need to visit different job locations, the field service management app should help them with optimum real-time route planning, so that traffic congestions and detours can be avoided. Also, the software must facilitate real-time tracking of the locations of the field technicians for their performance and productivity tracking.
- Work order management: For managing the work orders, i.e to ensure that everyone in the team is doing what needs to be done within the right time frame, a proper communication set-up is needed. There should be no communication gap among the stakeholders. Thus, make sure that you choose a field service management software that has an automated setup for standardizing the communication. For instance, as a schedule is made, the software must send an automated schedule-notification to the technician. Similarly, in an automated format it must send location details, service details, client details, etc, Also, it must automatically update job-status like technician checks-in and check out time.
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- Time-tracking & timesheet: To facilitate easy and convenient real-time tracking of the mobile workforce performance and productivity, a field service management app must facilitate time-tracking through time stamping and remote timesheet filling.
- Data management: Always pick a cloud-based field service management software, so that data collaboration can become a real-time affair possible through remote access. Be it accessing some enterprise data like Contract & warranty reports or uploading data like pre/post inspection reports, or downloading invoices, the software must facilitate real-time data collaboration along with online and offline support.
- Inventory management: Inventory management is integral to field services, thus it is important that you choose a software that helps you with that .For instance, the technicians should be directly able to check the availability of parts and tools in the inventory. They should be able to raise inventory requirement requests on a real-time basis. The inventory management facility in the software ensures that the inventory is not pilled up with unnecessary stock blocking your capital. Also, it ensures that it is well provided with project-specific items, tools, parts, equipment, and other material.
- Reporting & analytics: Data analytics is the core of new-age business systems. Without that, it is impossible to have a detailed insight into business metrics and make the right decisions for your business. Thus make sure that you choose a field service management software that has inbuilt analytics and reporting modules, that can automatically pull the field data captured at different touchpoints, and create visually representative reports regarding your business.
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Conclusion
First and foremost, you need to become clear about what kind of field service management solutions your company requires. You may not find a product with the exact kind of built-in solutions, but your business-specific requirements can be easily achieved through customization. Thus, the right way to pick a field management software is to ensure that it has the basic must-have features, as listed above, and on top of that, there should be customization feasibility with the software.
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