Diogo Pereira
Marketing & Communication
Marketing & Communication
The very same problem of the “last mile” that we experience today reaches as far in history as the days of ship transport of tea between India and England. The final stretch of the movement of items from the hub to the final consumer remains the most expensive part of the supply chain. When we hear about this problem, it’s mostly addressed as an issue of parcel delivery. However, the problem concerns field services just as much, if not more.
Let’s be honest, you can’t effectively optimize your service delivery manually without losing a lot of precious time. Read on to find out how to make your field service management help your business grow instead of just generating costs. Find out how to: a. increase profitability and b. reduce the time and resources needed to provide your field services, just as it’s done with parcels.
1. Automate the most tedious tasks
Thanks to automation with Field Service Management software, you can reach optimal flexibility in terms of planning, and scheduling. Who said you can’t make changes in your planning throughout the day? It will surely spare you the frustration and cost of inefficiency and wasted time.
2. Don’t let your resources go to waste
Using an FSM solution to carry out the assignment and routing of field personnel can enable a direct impact on your profitability. In other words, your teams will be optimized to do as many jobs as possible, all resources considered. You’d not only be able to reduce the time spent in the car and increase productivity, but also decrease fuel charges and drop the amount of harmful emissions created.
3. Plan effectively at the dispatch stage
FSM software provides technicians with their tasks for the day together with the best route to get to the exact places where the tasks need to be performed. This enables for quick and effortless dispatch of technicians, making sure that they will always arrive wherever they have to be on time.
4. Stay prepared for unexpected changes and communicate in real-time
Without an FSM solution, businesses and their field service providers remain at the mercy of the situation they find themselves in. As you probably know, no day is the same and the situations in the field can take unexpected turns, resulting in undelivered services or poorly executed tasks. Your service providers may suddenly end up at a location without the parts or skills needed to perform, they may arrive later than planned or other factors might stand in the way of delivering.
5. Improve your overview of service providers in the field
Thanks to GPS tracking, managers can benefit from a better view of the location of the individual field workers. This makes the distance from the job location and the actual time of arrival apparent. Such tracking together with communication via the FSM can help management prevent mistakes from happening on the field.
6. Scale-up your field services stress-free
Businesses offering field services tend to grow fast, not just in terms of personnel, but also tech and processes involved. This has a direct impact on administration costs and profit margins. Automating your field services will help you manage the complexity of all the aspects of scaling up and keeping customer’s everchanging expectations met. You can especially feel the impact of automation in the management of SLAs and having control over all the field service teams involved in daily operations at various locations simultaneously.
7. Stay flexible with a SaaS
Field Service Management solutions today allow customized deployment that matches the specific needs of a business. Cloud FSMs can help you reduce or avoid upfront expenditures altogether thanks to subscription models, where nothing other than pure data is managed by your business. It gets even better: with a SaaS FSM solution, you will also work with a dedicated consultant to help you implement it and make the most of it in the specific context of your company.
So, what are you waiting for? If parcel delivery can benefit from automatization so can your field services!