Many field service businesses miss the mark in trying to manage all these different sections of their business with outdated processes. With too many outdated processes, the entire system grinds to a stop. And the full potential of their business is lost because they made one too many critical management decisions along the way.
To establish a system of management that will see your field service reach its potential, field service management software is being used to deliver in all the different areas of management. That includes things like work order management, which is the lifeblood of many field service businesses. How a business handles its work order management can tell a lot about their business. Are they on time with service? Do their technicians have access to service history? Are work orders completed on a Field Service App, or still on paper?
Let’s look at additional management areas that field service management software is helping to address.
Contract Management
The field service industry is all about contracts. Preventative maintenance, predictive maintenance, and warranties are contracts signed daily. Those contracts dictate the terms of the agreement, pricing, obligations, and work order management. If you’re going to put pen to paper and have customers sign a contract, you need to deliver. Missing contractual obligations is an easy way to ruin your businesses’ credibility. With maintenance contracts becoming the main source of recurring income for field service businesses, it’s something you need to get right the first time.
Ensuring work orders aren’t missed is so important that automating as much of the process as possible is critical. Preventative maintenance schedules should generate work orders automatically, including parts and checklists that need to be applied. That’s good work order management and will speed up the dispatching of those service calls. Field service management software will trigger those work orders and handle all the workings of a contract. Maintenance contracts are the bread and butter of many field service businesses, so they can’t be left to chance. Meet your contract management obligations with a field service management software that can deliver all aspects of the contract to your customers.
Financial Management
If your financial management is struggling, there is little chance your business can succeed. Financial management is so much more than just turning work orders into invoices. It goes beyond the payment process and includes so many of your business’s daily activities, such as:
- Invoicing reviews and approvals
- Auditing and inventory
- Purchasing and requisitioning parts
- Pricing strategy for service and parts
- Monitoring revenues, margins, and volume
How you manage your finances can tell a lot about how you manage your business. With so many inner-workings in field service management software, it’s important that your financial system and software speak together. That’s why integrations are so important to successful financial management. It should be a seamless transition from your work order management system to your accounting system. That’s because whether you are invoicing, purchasing, or coming up with pricing strategies, the two departments need to work together. So, their software counterparts should be working together as well.
Performance Management
Measuring the performance of your workforce can be a game-changer for field service businesses. There is so much from work order management that can be transformed into performance metrics that need to be tracked, such as:
- Travel times
- Labor times
- First-time fix rates
- Technician utilization
- Route optimization
With field service management software, take the metrics from your work order management and turn it into useful data that will transform your business and help you better manage your people. That’s because field service management revolves around the performance of people. How well your technicians do in the field will obviously have a direct result on your business.
And you want to figure out who the weakest link of your team is through many different metrics in order to right the ship. Find out the reasons they are late to service calls, or why they have such a low first-time fix rate. Perhaps it’s because of the type of calls you are scheduling them for and not entirely their fault. Using performance management tools, you will be able to address these issues before they become a problem for your business.
Relationship Management
Work order management can be thought of as a lot more than just what service you are providing. It can be looked at through the eyes of the relationship you have with a customer, or, in the case of a new customer, one you want to build with them. How you handle your clients and how you build your relationships with them determines the type of contracts you sign and the projects you take on for them.
You could say that relationship management is a mix of every type of management we’ve discussed. How you handle your preventative maintenance contracts affects your relationship. How fast you bill customers or provide quotes matters. And what metrics you are tracking to ensure that each technician is performing up to the level you want will affect the relationship with your customers.
It also can be the relationship you have with vendors and subcontractors. How you manage other people outside your organization and how well you work with providers can determine your success, especially in a world where subcontractor usage is on the rise.
More Than Work Order Management
It’s pretty obvious that field service is a lot more than just work order management. It’s plenty more people management than anything. Getting people where they need to be, tracking their progress, working and building relationships with customers and figuring out the financial implications are all important types of management to a business. Working with field service management software will help manage all those aspects of your business. Focusing on only doing one well could leave your business struggling in the future, so don’t choose which one is the most important. Let field service management software help you tackle them all.