Every line of business is remodeling its ways of operating and delivering services. Digital transformation plays a critical role in rearing this change. For businesses, it is imperative to join this change because failing to embrace the new technological advances means missing the mind share and market share of the customers. Digital transformation is the fundamental requirement of every business, including the businesses that operate through field operations, like HVAC maintenance services, roofing tiling, cleaners, etc. However, executing digital transformation requires significant planning and a thorough understanding of what are the business needs and what are the bottlenecks. Accordingly, the roadmap of success for digital transformation should be planned, so that it rightly integrates into the existing business processes and allow the employees to smoothly get along with the new imposed technology changes. Another important aspect that every business cares about is the cost of adoption for any kind of transformation.
If you are a field service business owner, who is contemplating bringing in a digital transformation in your business operations, then you understand that the planning and execution is a tangling process. Lack of clarity often causes procrastination of the actual process of digital transformation. The challenge is most hard for small businesses. But that doesn’t stop a smart and ambitious businessman from lack behind as he understands the importance of staying abreast with new-age technology advances to scale up the business and avoid hitting the saturation point.
Talking about the field service businesses, such a business involves field jobs, thus one of its significant field operational hurdles is mobility. To operate efficiently, the business needs mobility solutions at various fronts. Field workforce management, job scheduling, work supervision, client handling, knowledge, team collaboration, and data management, everything needs to have a mobility solution.
This blog talks about field service scheduling software, and how it empowers field service businesses to achieve much-desired mobility by automating the whole process of job scheduling. The software is designed to help businesses overcome the challenges related to job scheduling with the help of automation. The blog will also explain the positive outputs of automated job scheduling and how it improves the other field operations benefiting the overall business.
What are the complexities related to job scheduling and how does the field service scheduling app help?
The complexity in job scheduling is multi-dimensional as the job scheduling manager require to ensure that the schedules are made acknowledging various aspects such as:
The time gap within the subsequent schedules
The job scheduling manager needs to manage and arrange the job schedules in such a way that the field technicians get sufficient time to wrap up the job in one site. There should not be overlapping schedules. Thus, the time slot for the next job schedule should also consider the travel time from one site to another. However, the traveling part is fluctuating because it depends on external factors like traffic on the road, weather conditions, and many others.
Thus, it is important for the service managers to have real-time visibility on the onsite activities of the technicians. Also, he should have the provision for rescheduling on a real-time basis. Then the standard communication, i.e the process to inform the technicians about the changes schedules also happen on a real-time basis.
The field scheduling software allows the service manager the have real-time visibility of the field technicians live locations, their work status, and thus he always has the right idea about when a particular technician is likely to finish his job, and how much time he will take for traveling, as the software can do real-time-optimal route planning. Thus, he can do the scheduling in the most efficient way, ensuring there is no scheduling conflict. The biggest benefit of the scheduling software is that it does the scheduling in a completely automatic way. Thus no matter how big or small the team is, the scheduling manager can always maintain an optimum scheduling calendar for his field technicians.
Territory management
While making the job schedules for the field workforce, the scheduling manager requires the territory management to reduce the travel time for the technicians. More on-road time means poor productivity of the field technicians as well as increased fuel expense. If a manager receives a service request from location x, then instead of assigning the job randomly to any technician, he needs to find out who is the nearest and the earliest available technician, so that travel time can be minimum, and torn around rate can be high. The field service scheduling software is ideal for this kind of territory management.
Skill-based task matching
Before scheduling a job, the manager needs to check on the skill sets and availability of particular technicians. But it is true that not all the technicians are available round the clock for a job. Some may be preoccupied with a job in hand and some may be on their weekly leaves. Moreover, not all technicians are equally skilled to do a job efficiently. Using the online field service scheduling software, the manager can achieve high accuracy in skills-task matching in job scheduling.
