If you’re investing the time, money and effort to bring on a new piece of technology, the last thing you want to worry about is how long it will take to actually see results from its implementation.
While you can’t expect to see a full transformation in your field service business overnight, a few “quick wins” from switching to new technology (like cloud field service software) can help assure you that you made the right decision for your business.
The top three quick wins when you switch to cloud field service software?
Cloud field service software can help your business run more efficiently, give you better visibility into your operations and help you increase profits with specific features for:
- Job scheduling
- Integrated inventory management
- Business reporting
Since you and your staff can access all of these features in one spot, from anywhere, at any time, you eliminate wasted hours spent manually tracking this information on spreadsheets or whiteboards.
This means you can react faster to customer needs, business needs and in turn, run more efficient operations.
1. Job scheduling
Job scheduling and dispatch features help you instantly eliminate wasted time spent filling out whiteboards or spreadsheets by hand to manage the daily job schedule.
By taking away these manual tasks, you’ll be able to schedule and dispatch faster, and therefore complete daily jobs more efficiently.
With cloud-based field service software, you can schedule and dispatch field staff from one central dashboard and ensure that you send the right engineer to the right job every time.
You can do this by designating specific engineers to serve certain areas by setting up zones or even dispatch based on their expertise with certain assets, customers, or types of jobs.
2. Integrated inventory management
Managing your stock with pen and paper or on a separate platform from the rest of your operational management tools leaves room for human error. It also makes it nearly impossible to properly anticipate when you need to order new materials and prevents you from ordering them quickly and paying the best price.
Moving from a separate platform (or manual stock management) to centralised stock management instantly shows you where you might be sitting on unused materials . It can even show you if you're overpaying for certain materials by integrating with top supplier catalogues.
With this increased visibility into your inventory, you can quickly run stock counts with the click of a button and more accurately track your materials as they move throughout your business.
3. Business reporting tools
To get an accurate picture of where you're succeeding (or failing) in your business, you need to easily gather, analyse, visualise, and act on your business data.
Without central business reporting tools, you’re left wasting time muddling through disparate data that may or may not even be accurate.
Once you start gathering all of this data in a single spot, you can both notice and react to underperforming areas in your business faster and easily prioritise where you most need to improve. Armed with this knowledge, you can instantly make better-informed decisions day to day that helps you increase your profitability overall.
Switching to any new type of technology in your business can be challenging, and it takes time to see the long-term positive impacts on your overall efficiency, visibility, and profitability.
No matter what roadblocks you might come across as you learn how to best use your new technology, by noting your “quick wins,” you can stay motivated and rest assured that your decision to implement a new tool was the right one.
To find out how simPRO’s job management software solution can help transform your field service business, visit simPROgroup.com.