Field Service Management (FSM) is a method of planning and optimizing operations that take place outside of the office or in the field. The process leads to overseeing the installation, servicing, or maintenance of systems or equipment and is also referred to as FSM.
Identifying routes, controlling employee activity, scheduling, and assigning work, assuring driver safety, and integrating such operations with inventory, invoicing, accountancy, and other back-office systems are just a few examples of FSM.
If you’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering. – Jeff Bezos
5 Tips to organize your Field Service Management
1. Estimate how much workforce you’ll require
It’s difficult to maintain an optimum level of people in the field service industry because demand is continuously changing. There are, however, a few techniques you may do to boost your productivity.
- Forecast the influence of external events beforehand so that it doesn’t disrupt the natural flow of the process, which causes some planned maintenance to be delayed. You can plan what workforce will be required to handle available tasks by anticipating these situations.
- Evaluate your results from the past before implementing new changes in the upgradation cycle, so that you can keep those measures intact when you are most productive. You can look at why you were able to be so efficient.
- Establish a baseline to determine how much workforce you’ll need to go through a typical day, and then calculate how many more man-hours you’ll need if you need to handle ‘n number of tickets’. This enables you to devise a strategy for ramping up as necessary.
2. Enhance your organization’s precision with point-to-point contact
You must be aware of what your field staff is doing, when and where they are doing it. It will make the overall process easier as you:
- Get accurate results with a consolidated schedule view that displays everything you need for the day or week.
- And, dispatches, on the other hand, can be shown on a real-time map powered by live GPS.
A characteristic of Field Service Management software-induced with maps is a pop-up of anticipated work orders that is available to all technicians and team leaders. In this manner, everyone is aware of the scheduling and dispatching, as well as the job that has been completed and that still must be completed.
This type of organizational structure promotes the development of teamwork.
3. Evaluate Employee Competency Level and assign a Skill Tag
Skill tags are placed on digital badges to indicate which skills the candidate had to exhibit to earn that certification. Using Skill tags helps you with:
- A fast and simple way to match the right employee to the right job.
- Rapidly add capabilities, certificates, credentials, or specialty training to any field worker.
When you have the correct field tech for the job, you’ll almost certainly see better initial fix rates, productivity, and faster delivery, as well as elevated customer happiness.
4. Better optimization of Routes
Route optimization can be aided by real-time maps in a variety of ways. Dispatchers can see field technicians in real-time and utilize location data to schedule work based on relative and level of expertise.
But you can also use the map to create ideal pathways to save fuel costs and boost field tech productivity so they can finish more jobs in less time.
Typical dispatch software for service technicians is GPS-enabled, providing for location data and redirection to the most accessible and least congested route to the customer’s doorstep.
Obtaining visibility into service operations can aid in the implementation of safety measures as well as more efficient and genuine work.
5. Don’t compromise on a dispatcher’s salary
If you have a developing and sophisticated organization that demands a lot of management abilities, hiring an incompetent person as a field service personnel is a bad decision.
The dispatcher will quickly become overburdened, and you will bear the consequences in terms of less work completed and disgruntled customers.
It’s also a huge mistake to handle it yourself since, even if you’re proficient, you’ll find that administrative activities eat up all of your time. As a result, you will be unable to devote the necessary time.
So it’s a wise practice to allocate the right funds to onboard the personnel who fits perfectly into the system and requires minimum training.
What is Scheduling?
Scheduling is the process of allocating network bandwidth or facilities (equipment, people, and space) overtime to work on occupations, operations, projects, or customers. As a result of scheduling, a time-phased plan, or schedule, of activities is created.
What is dispatching?
Dispatching is the physical transfer of a production line order to the operating facility via the rollout of shipments.
A guideline is followed in full compliance with an originally developed strategy of operation (time and sequence). It is formed by the manufacturing and logistics department’s sequence-dependent setup.
The field service management market is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 11%. At this rate, the FSM market that has an estimated value of $3 billion in 2020 will reach $5.1 billion by 2025. (MarketandMarkets, 2020)
Why is it critical to maintain your dispatch and schedule structure?
A haphazard system can cause confusion and make work more difficult, as well as misunderstanding and unintended errors. As a result, utilizing service technician scheduling software, service technician dispatching software or a combination of the two, it’s critical to sort and manage your schedules and dispatches.
Therefore, to minimize unplanned downtime, multiple reservations, poor customer service, and eventually failure in field service management, it’s critical to keep them organized with such a system installed.
The primary concern for companies should be to schedule work orders based on customer choices and assign experienced and qualified workers to do the task.
Scheduling and dispatching are the lifeblood of Field Service Management, as it is the link between them and their clients.
Simplify your Field Service Operations with Kapture
With Kapture’s mobile application, your Field Service Management can become more productive by incorporating the above-mentioned features which makes it simple and efficient for organizing your schedules and dispatching.
Get ahead of the competition by deploying field service management software that encourages streamlined, productive, and intelligent operations that will save your company time and money.
About the Author | |
 | Raajdeep Saha Content Writer |
| Raajdeep Saha is a published poet and writer. He previously worked as a marketing executive and a creative writer for a product-based company and therefore holds technical knowledge in the marketing and advertising domain. He has worked on several blogs, ad copies, transcripts and is now contributing the same at Kapture CRM. | |
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