Understanding the dynamics of Field Service Optimization

Be it any field service organisation, everything starts with the people, for the people, performed by the people and catered to the people. Corporate directives begin with an idea, budget, and goal to proceed with a proper planning for execution. At every stage, a field service company needs a mix of right people to work within the office and handle customers, teams moving out across the fields and authorities to supervise & monitor as per the hierarchy levels.

Considering the factors involved in field service optimization, human personnel at every level are facing high pressure to achieve more with less. The supervisors are compelled to meet customer expectations and take care of worker safety, quality of work, and performance. Field service manpower has to set out across different locations to fulfill the request and accomplish their tasks. This indicates the important role of employees with expertise, skills, familiarity with work, trustworthy and result-oriented.

Talking about the people aspect, the discussion would remain incomplete if skip the “customers. Since it’s the customers to whom an FSM company is supposed to serve; the success is heavily dependent on their association. In any case, it is crucial to understand the customer needs, pay attention to their details and ensure a maximum level of satisfaction.

Doing right things in a right manner at the right time should be the mission! To achieve this, a company needs to lay out a game plan matching the present field service optimization dynamics. There are a number of processes involved in field service management that need to be aligned properly to achieve high productivity and efficiency. Every process requires a firm participation of people and use of tools to accomplish it.

Field service business comprises of the following core processes – capturing service tickets, scheduling appointments, assigning work orders, scheduling and dispatching resources, managing service level agreements, inventory management, worker communication and  safety and support. These processes have to be queued in a well-defined manner to avoid any chaos and generate revenues.

While some of the processes are reliant on the back-office teams, some are concerned with the mobile workforce. But, every procedure of field service optimization involves heavy communication and coordination on a day-to-day basis. It has to be agile, optimized, and industrious to deliver the outcome.

Mobile workforce automation or field service software is not new to the world. However, there is a drastic change in the form it was previously and the present field service dynamics. There has been a major transformation in the field service technology, which was more or less about ERP, billing and basic scheduling software to high-end dedicated solutions now. It is converging to an independent work culture for all the workforces and synchronises the same with systems.

The main driving force behind this revolution is the emergence of cloud technology with the service and subscription-based delivery model. To make things economically feasible and help the organisations leverage benefits of IT, SaaS (software as a service) works the best. A field service organisation needs no specialised hardware, software, expertise, upfront infrastructure investment, and a specialised IT team to use the cloud platform.

A complete field service management solution involves a service desk software for the back-office team to manage scheduling, dispatching, task allocation, report generation, predictive analytics and customer management; a device-independent MobileWorker application for field technicians to receive work orders, update status, auto-route, offline access, collect signature, add notes, synchronise real-time information, communicate and seek help in dangerous situations; and a Mobile Manager application for worker visibility, coordination, near-by task assignment and daily performance analysis.