Posted by With numerous service requirements and many clients in different regions, field work management may be quite challenging, especially when your company encounters unexpected events such as cancelled appointments, technician unavailability or insufficient internal resources. It’s perhaps surprising that many companies we speak to are using paper-based systems or basic spreadsheets to manage their field-based workforce. In such instances, you often find that the scheduling team, managers and operatives are all flying blind. Meanwhile, technicians do not see any foresight into the task they are about to embark on, often feeling frustrated as they are mismatched to jobs.
In these situations, assigning tasks to appropriately qualified technicians become extremely difficult. So, what is the solution for an effective field service scheduling?
It would be ideally opting for “intelligent scheduling software”. Let’s see how does it help?
Collect and analyse data
Data on delivery logs, time spent on each site, and routing records can be used to improve scheduling efficiency. Monitoring and analysing such data, helps identify patterns in activities such as which field technician is operating the fastest, who completes the most assigned work orders, average travel time to job sites, and the fastest travel routes. Analysing such key metrics help dispatcher optimally schedule the workforce.
Increase communication and collaboration
Helps field technicians reach out to the office for assistance or contact a fellow worker who can help troubleshoot an issue without being on location.
Besides, it reduces the need to have more than one technician on site to solve an issue, as it provides technician with an access to previous service history, vital documents, or digital guides to perform tasks better.
Schedule preventative maintenance
When a customer requests an emergency service, a dispatcher will have to find the nearest available field technician to handle the job, which can eventually throw off the schedule. But preventative maintenance eliminates the frequency of emergencies and keeps you in control of the schedule.
Routing tools in your field service mobile app
For longer travel, getting technicians to the job faster is key, and routing tools in their mobile app will help accomplish this with turn by turn directions. In field servicing industry, it’s not always point A to point B to point C. With routing tools, even when a technician has to crisscross a city, they are assured to do it in the fastest way possible.
Finish Line
Organizations can no longer rely on gut instinct to schedule their technicians. They must look inward and assess which scheduling practices aren’t working and are potentially hurting their bottom line.
By implementing actions such as enhanced forecasting, analysing and reactive scheduling decisions, field service organizations will be able to achieve gains in productivity across their business as a whole.