Ways to Optimize Field Service Scheduling and Enhance FSM Business Productivity
Impacted by the advanced technologies, field service management has gone through several transitions in the last two decades. Whiteboard scheduling, paper documentation, making several calls to technicians just to know their availability and job status are all gone. High competitive-rates have given rise to cutting-edge business to fulfill customer demands.
Automation has streamlined day-to-day workflows in transforming manual processes and has increased business productivity, performance, and efficiency. Seamless customer data management has improved customer satisfaction and customer retention in the long run.
Health care, emergency services, logistics services, delivery services, HVAC services, appliance repair services, plumbing services and many other field service business verticals have reported a sudden boom. Organizations, with field service management as the center of their businesses, are attracting high demands and running a lucrative business.
Improving Field Service Technicians Productivity with FSM Tool
Companies hire technicians, train them, and transform them into a professional workforce to manage and meet the requirements of the customers in the field.
Optimization of scheduling and dispatching results in increased productivity, improved team performance, lower down operational and labor costs and meets customer demands.
Prognosticating Business Demands
Understanding your business in and out is much-needed to align, adjust, and accelerate business growth and meet customer demands. Observe the busy hours, seasons, and months to equip your field service team to meet the upcoming requirements.
It’s ok for a small size or mid-size business to operate with limited resources. Be clever enough to meet the big business hours and increase the positive impact on your business. Forecasting the upcoming events will prepare the organization to grow the sales funnel and increase revenue.
Catching Up With the Inefficiencies
If you have already introduced your business environment to the field service software, you could have observed inefficiencies in some areas. Few common inefficiency includes:
- Scheduling novices to services that demand high expertise. Scheduling an additional resource can be a problem.
- Scheduling clashes, miscommunication between employees and freelancers can bring up a problem.
- Without realizing the increase in demand, decreasing the resource team to reduce costs can mess up the workflows.
Here Are A Few Tactics To Overcome The Challenges:
1. Keeping a record of weekly or monthly workflows.
- Calculate the number of first-time fix rates.
- Track the number of emergency or unscheduled service calls received.
- The number of rescheduled or missed appointments.
- Days with highest business demand.
- Monitor the number of times an additional field technician was scheduled to complete a service.
- Total operational costs due to the above-mentioned challenges.
2. Scrutinize and implement the field service management software to overcome the challenges. The tool can be of mountainous importance in tracking and managing important key metrics, provides accurate business insights, and access data anywhere, anytime.
3. The field service management application for field technicians can save a lot of time and effort.
4. Try finding the answer to the following questions.
- Calculate the average number of times a field service agent had to switch places.
- What is the role of novices or juniors in your field service team?
- Are all the dispatches were essential and successful?
- Have you managed to tackle the high priority and low priority tasks?
- What is your emergency planning during heavy service demands?
Finding the Best Business Priorities
Your decisions directly affect the growth of your business. Examining the entire workflows can help you to increase the efficiency and productivity of the business. Set high standard business goals and align workflows to achieve them.
Scheduling optimization improves business productivity and helps in boosting up your business.
Let’s Have a Review of A Few Scheduling Guidelines and How They Have Hit Your Business in Unusual Times
Scheduling Rules
- Assignment of tasks during the field technician’s shift timings
- Schedule tasks only to trained or certified field technicians
- Equipping the technicians with the right to get the job done
- No to overbooking of field technicians
- Scheduling field technicians around their preferred geographical location
- Provide all the requirements to execute a service by the field technician
The Effects of Rule-Breaking
- Overtime pay, breach of rest allowance
- Unexpected injuries, breach of laws
- Leaving the customer site to obtain the required tools and decreased first-time fix rates
- Incomplete work order, poor customer satisfaction
- The need for increased travel time and transportation facilities
- The scheduled outage, time, and cost overrun
Effectively Aligning Scheduling Rules with Business Priorities
Stay proactive. Field service businesses have no standard theme of workflows. Anything can happen anytime, go proactive, breakdown your requirements and workflows and aim at achieving perfection in getting the job done.
Take note of impacts when a rule is broken, when the job is not assigned based on priority.
Tactical Scheduling For Optimized Operations
Tactical scheduling enables the creation of schedules that goes in hand with all legal requirements, company and individual agreements, and fulfills company, employee, and customer interests.
The scheduling is made based on the following considerations:
- Working time demand
- Number of field service technicians
- Employee shift timing
The schedule meets the following objectives such as:
- Business Productivity
- Cost for Field Service Technicians
- Service level agreements
- Customer satisfaction
- Employee satisfaction
Optimizing scheduling can be a tedious process. The FSM dashboard helps you to gain a full-comprehensive view of your business with accurate business insights to form strategies and optimization of daily schedules becomes bliss. You can achieve streamlined schedules by assigning or resolving field service tickets based on your company’s goals and your customers’ demands.
Wrapping Up!
Achieving increased business productivity becomes possible only with effective scheduling. Enhance business productivity with the discussed tactical approaches and implement the right field service management software to enhance customer satisfaction, lower labor, and operational costs! Try QuikAllot, the #1 FSM tool to streamline workflows, enhance business efficiency, and grow business revenue! Contact us today for an online demo!
Categories: Field Service Management