When is your company at the point that investing in a field service platform is giving you a good ROI?
Often these decision are made in the board or by higher management. They want to modernize their division and improve how they can manage their engineers out in the field.
But most of the time managers don’t have a clue what happens in the field other than what they hear from their employees.
And that is a good thing.
How your employees feel while doing their job is one of the key indicators of a successful company. And what you hear from them is how they experience their job.
You want happy service engineers, because they will be happy doing the work in front of your clients.
A field service platform is a great investment to make your employees happy by making a lot of tasks easier.
But what signals should you look for in your company that show it is time to invest in a field service platform to improve your employees happiness?
1. Technicians are complaining about the paper work
Technicians want to get their hands dirty.
But not with ink from leaking pens or pencils. They want to be doing a real job and focus on providing value to their clients.
A technician doesn’t want to spend a lot of time on administrating what they’ve done.
Their focus should be on fixing the failure or providing the best preventive maintenance.
Look out for technicians that complain about doing the paper work.
Do they still write down all the information that you want to get out of the field to do your analysis?. Or do they write down only the necessary stuff just to get it done.
I bet it will be the last in 99% of the cases.
Nowadays everybody owns a smart-phone and everybody knows how to handle it in all cases.
But when they get to the job they need to go back in time and write things down on paper.
It takes up more time to write things down then to type it in on a smartphone or tablet. Especially if you have auto-correct help you with typo’s and your grammar.
By automating the input of remarks during the work you’ll improve the ease of administrating for your field service engineers.
This will result in better data and a more presentable service report for your client.
2. Administration is spending hours on collection data
Let’s say you have 10 technicians on the road each day. And every one of them will do an average of 5 jobs on one day.
For every job they need to write one service report about the work they did and what materials they used.
At the end of the day, when they come in the office, all 10 of your engineers dump their five work reports of the day on your desk.
The next morning the administration needs to be done.
This means collecting the data from the total of the 50 handwritten service reports from the day before.
Most likely it will cost about 10-15 minutes to collect all the data from the service reports. And then having to enter it manually in your back office systems.
An easy calculation of 15 minutes times 50 service reports is a total of 750 minutes spent.
Assuming a workday of 8 hours, this means 1.5 employee has to spend their full working day on collection data from the day before.
This is a big red flag that it might be smart to look for a field service platform.
One that will automatically send the data the engineer has entered in the field into your back-office systems.
You no longer need to throw away 1.5 working day on manually entering data from a hand-written service report.
By a simple calculation like above you can make a solid business case for your boss why a field service platform is the worth the investment.
3. Unreadable handwriting resulting in incorrect data
When is the last time you wrote a letter?
For me it has been a while. Even though I’m still happy to take out my Moleskine notebook during a meeting when everybody hides behind their laptop screen.
Also calligraphy is not one of my core competences. My handwriting looks more like hieroglyphs. And probably the same goes for your technicians.
So the service report you’ll receive from them has been written on with their greased hands somewhere on the back of a collega.
The paper has been wrinkled, the hand-writing itself is hard to read and the ink has become vague.
But still this is the evidence of the work that the engineer has completed for your client. And the basis for how you invoice your clients.
Taking over the correct data can be hard.
Especially numbers are easily confused for another one, which can completely change the outcome of your invoice. Has he used 5 or 8 bolts for the job? Is that a zero or an O in the serial number?
And why would your engineer need to write out the full specification of the materials used?
It is much easier to write down an abbreviation of it. But is the administration translating it back to the correct material again?
A field service platform solves this by having the data directly available in your back office.
What the engineers enters will become available in the back-office.
You can make use of predefined values that your engineer can select to make sure they only use the correct ones.
Engineers can register materials within the app that connects to your warehouse so it is instantly updated.
And maybe even to your suppliers system to order new materials and keep your warehouse optimally stocked.
4. Each technician has found his own way of working
Managers like to think about the work process. What is the most efficient way for my employees to do their work.
And what changes can we make to get some time improvements and use that time to do more work.
We spend time and money on training our engineers on how to do their job as efficiently as possible.
When we think they’ve got it under control we let them go out in the field. And as soon as they get in their van they will start defining their own process.
They change everything that you thought off and decide for what works best for them.
Off course this doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
Everybody works in a different way and everybody should be able to do their work in the way they feel best.
But sometimes there is a work process that needs to be followed due to safety regulations.
You can train people as hard as you want but they’ll most likely find some loopholes to do things in their way.
By having a workflow driven app you can make some tasks or fields mandatory and make sure those are executed before completing the rest of the job.
You can build in safety checks and steer your technician in the process you want them to follow.
What registrations are mandatory and what information is optional.
Guide your employees step by step through the workflow for each job.
They have more time to focus on executing the job than to think of all the regulations they have to follow.
5. Your planners don’t know where your technicians are
Image this; all your employees are out in the field working somewhere.
Suddenly an emergency call comes in from one of your clients.
They report a failure in one of their main systems that needs to be fixed asap. According to your SLA you should be able to do this within 2 hours.
As a planner you’ve send out all technicians with a pile of work orders for the day.
You know which clients they should be visiting that day. And you have an idea how long each job should probably take.
So you might know which engineer has time to go to the emergency.
Also you think you know which of the technician is the closest to the location of the emergency.
Now you have to start calling the engineers to check whether everything you think is true.
If they are on schedule for the day and are in the location you think they should be.
After having called a couple of them to check it, you are still not sure which is the best option to go to the emergency.
Finally you decide to pick the one you feel is the best for the job.
But the chosen engineer has just started working on his next order. He can stop working and come back later which is not a good sign to this customer.
Or he can finish the job first and arrive at the emergency later.
One of the other engineers was just finishing up his order and thus would have been the better fit for the job.
Nothing to blame on you as a planner, because you don’t have all the necessary information in front of you.
A field service platform provides you with real time information that you can use to handle your emergencies.
A map view will show you where each engineer is, and you can see the status of the work order real time.
Is he traveling to his next order, or is he still working on it. And does he take the shortest route, or is he enjoying the tourist route?
Also you can see whether his previous work orders were completed within the planned time which gives him more time to go to the emergency call.
Without using a platform that gives you all this information you are planning in the dark.
6. Keeping track of the actual worked hours is hard
Off course we all trust our employees. And everything they say and all the hours they claim to have worked.
You don’t want to come over as someone who wants to check everything they do.
But you also want to be able to manage your company based on the real hours spend on the job.
You might plan 2 hours for a maintenance job while in reality it never takes longer than 1 hour to complete it.
Or it could take up to 3 hours and your engineers never manage to get everything done within the planned time.
Without a solid tracking system you never know the reality over what your engineers write down on the service report.
Maybe you calculate a standard front fee to your customers that appeasr to not cover the time spend on the road traveling.
This kind of information is essential if you want to improve your business.
Also you don’t want to type the worked hours from paper into your HRM system for your salary administration.
And then again into your ERP to invoice your customer.
Providing your field engineers with an app that keeps track of their worked hours is a great way to make sure you can analyse that data.
By breaking it down in different activity types your analysis will be even more useful.
7. Technician don’t know anything about your client
As a technician you want to know everything you can about the customers you’re visiting.
This will help you provide the best service possible.
Off course you need to know everything about the reported issue. But you also want to know when the last maintenance visit was.
And what were the latest failures reported on the asset and what has been done to fix those.
Which of your collega’s has been there the last time. So you can call them if you need any extra information that hasn’t been reported into the system.
By knowing all that kind of information you feel more confident when entering a job where you need to get to work.
You want to be prepared in the best way possible.
Engineers can call with their planners to check what has been reported during the last visit.
But you don’t want to use your planners as a service desk to provide technicians with that information on the go.
You want to make sure your technicians have that information with them in their smart phone.
When you notice any of these 7 signals you know it is time to start investing in a field service platform.
You can start looking at different back office systems that will solve a couple of these.
Or find a platform that combines a versatile mid-office with a flexible mobile app for the field engineers like FMP360.