Investing in preventative maintenance solutions is a smart investment on all sides. Every customer can save between 12-18% in investing a preventative maintenance plan, rather than just being reactive. And as a field service provider of that maintenance, it is a smart investment to have a contract management software to handle the responsibility of managing all those contracts. Then you can not only sell the benefits of investing in preventative maintenance but also how your efficiency is an added boost to that investment.
How can contract automation software make you more efficient?
- Greater ability to manage every contract
- Levels of automation
- Advantage in reporting that leads to renewals
Let’s dig into contract management and where preventive maintenance software solutions can benefit.
Manage all of your contracts
Management – it’s literally in the wording of contract management for a reason. Managing all the contracts your business has signed can be a challenge. Are you still using file cabinets, paper contracts and maintenance schedules on Excel spreadsheets? That’s not the most efficient you can be when it comes to contract management, as it’s a lot of work to keep up with paper tasks. It’s very easy to lose or misplace contracts, forget about edits to information in the contract, and time-consuming to create renewals, schedules and work orders. Plus, you have to house them all, and the idea of massive silos of information in a file cabinet isn’t that pleasing in 2020.
If preventative maintenance is your field service specialty, then having a top system to manage that type of maintenance is a must. Contact automation software will be the ‘everything’ when it comes to managing your contracts from start to finish, and hopefully, renewal. Gone are the days of file cabinets on back walls, replaced by cloud-software that makes everything contract related accessible to everyone on your team. Does your technician need access to contract terms or want to see equipment under contract? With a cloud-based preventative maintenance software, they can access that information from a mobile field service app.
The long list of benefits to using contract automation software around management is endless.
- No more paper contracts, which means no file cabinets on paper.
- Edits and changes to the contract are in one system, accessible to all.
- All information around the contract is available inside the specific contract. No misplacing work orders, new terms or important information.
- Simple to create new contracts, cover new equipment, and offer more service.
Automate preventative maintenance
For every piece of equipment you have under contract, every product you service and for every service you offer, you will need to create a work order. If you are offering recurring work, such as weekly maintenance as part of a janitorial service, or quarterly inspections of HVAC systems or IT infrastructure, someone is going to have to create the work order and schedule it. How does that process work in your business, and have you ever missed an appointment?
Missing appointments that are under contract is an easy way to lose a customer. And creating those work orders and getting them scheduled is time-consuming. Contract automation software makes both more efficient. By applying levels of automation to your contract management, these routine tasks are automated, ensuring that every work order you have planned as part of a maintenance schedule will be generated and ready to schedule on time.
For any field service business that offers routine on-site maintenance and inspections for compliance, such as in the oil and gas industry, these inspections can happen each week. Do you want to make a new paper work order every week and then have your technicians input data on their own, or pay someone to input that data for mandatory compliance reporting? That’s time-consuming and expensive.
Automating contracts produces work orders based on a maintenance schedule you make. Every part, checklist, technician, and instructions built-in one are applied to them all. It’s an accurate way to manage your contracts and ensure efficient delivery of maintenance every time.
See how contracts are performing and get the renewal
The only way to get more efficient is to see yourself doing it and compare it to what you have done. Every contract has analytics, has data to turning into meaningful reports that can change how you offer preventative maintenance to current and future clients. But without some form of preventative maintenance software to take that data and make it useful, you’re missing out on the benefits of analytics and reporting.
Some data you want to know would be:
- What is your average call time for preventative maintenance calls?
- How many other issues pop up from routine maintenance?
- Are your customers compliant?
- What parts do you use the most for maintenance?
- Are you hitting scheduling targets by getting technicians on-site?
- How much revenue are you generating per contract?
All of these questions are valuable questions to ask and preventative maintenance software with reporting, business intelligence and analytics can help find those answers. Change the parts you offer, find new routes for your technicians to take, assign more experienced technicians to maintenance calls, and change your rates of service to ensure you remain profitable.
By knowing this information, you are empowering your ability to make the right decisions when it comes to preventative maintenance. It will improve your efficiency, and when it’s time to go back and ask for the renewal, you are armed with plenty of data to present to your customers.
Make it easy to manage your contract business
Investing in contract automation, and a system designed to offer more efficient preventative maintenance service will pay off in the end. Not only will you see the benefits of complete contract automation software at your office level, but your customer experience will improve, leading to more contracts signed and more renewals of older contracts. Ditch the paper and file cabinets, and get a software solution that will free up office space, reduce the time drastically to turn out work orders and have them scheduled, and give you greater insight into your business that you didn’t have before.