Advancements in technology have an impact on how field service managers operate. These solutions, like TimeLinx, provide an opportunity to resolve the challenges that you and your team face on a daily basis.
Here are 4 ways to improve your field service operations.
Move Away From Paper
Is your team still creating paper-based work orders or scheduling on whiteboards? Take paper out of the hands of everyone and digitize that information; instead, work orders and checklists can be completed on a mobile app. Using mobile first applications to quickly and seamlessly report project and work order status instead of end of day ticketing. This ensures technicians are following their workflows step-by-step, and drives compliance among your team out in the field, and compressing reporting times.
Streamline Your Team’s On-Site Performance
By connecting your team via a single mobile app, you’re able to accurately track and record on-site performance. Having access to arrival and departure times, the details of the work performed, logging of information – all improve accuracy and accountability among your dispersed team. In addition, you can use the information available to compare active jobs with previous completed jobs, reassign work or adjust schedules.
As a field service manager, you oversee all of this information and have real-time visibility into the activities and schedules of your field technicians. If a worker runs into an issue, you can streamline on-site problem resolution and, if needed, assign jobs immediately based on the information you receive, as it happens.
Tap Into Data and Measure Results
Measuring performance and the data captured by your field service team is a very important step in optimizing your operations. This information provides greater visibility into each worker’s quality of service and data points into the tasks performed. It allows you to verify work is actually completed, versus estimating or hoping jobs get finalized.
For example, TimeLinx allows you to integrate multiple data feeds to provide a unified operating system that enables you to capture potential untapped (or dark) data. By deploying a no-code platform at scale, our customers achieve improvements in productivity, safety, quality and customer service. These improvements are particularly valuable for companies trying to cope with the increase in demand following the COVID-19 crisis and to minimize the risk fir field service staff.
Provide Technicians With Additional Training
Finally, due to increasing competition, high customer demand and an aging workforce, many companies choose to outsource their field services to independent contractors. Working with contractors can create an additional layer of complexity, but it doesn’t need to. You can all work as one team, collaborate together and provide these workers with in the moment training.
Field managers should consider standardizing work operations with easy to implement, off-the-shelf technology that provides training and a faster time to value. They can then identify opportunities, and provide tailored support to field staff and monitor their performance.
In our new world of distributed workforce management, it’s clear that the only way to lead a business to success is to understand and manage the technologies that contribute to success, and to locate the potential pitfalls of these technologies. As a field service manager, you have a responsibility to more effectively manage your distributed workforce, leverage technology to foster collaboration, maximize efficiency , achieve the best business results, and guide employees in the most appropriate way.
