Ten Ways Scheduling Makes a Difference

Working in field service you face some pretty unique challenges. Companies with a field service operation often cover a range of different areas of work. They may cover everything from design work to installation, repair, renovation and service work; meaning each day is different to the last and no two jobs are the same in a day. The work may be highly complex and require specific skills, parts or tools for the individual tasks. Workflows may have a number of dependencies, which need to be stuck to, to complete the job so crews have to work well together.

For many of these companies there is also a mix of planned and emergency work throughout the day. The emergency calls that come in obviously need to be managed and worked into the day’s schedule. It means changes to the planned work and it is often difficult to make instant decisions on what needs to be changed around or moved down the priority.

Changes may be needed as jobs overrun due to their complexity, customers not being available or traffic and weather conditions impacting on a technician’s schedule.

Given that many companies still rely on paper-based processes, to some extent, in managing their field service work these challenges becomes all the greater to manage.

This brings additional difficulty to making changes to schedules and dispatch, allocating work to technicians as those in the office may not be working with all the information they need. So, the use of paper-based processes can mean a huge amount of time and resource is taken up by making the schedules for the start of the day and then managing them as changes occur throughout the day.

For any field service company, total visibility of field technicians and their work is key for complete optimization of resources and effective service delivery.

Here are ten ways that the right scheduling solution makes a difference. The right schedule and dispatch software -

Field Service Scheduling & Dispatch Software Benefits

1. Gives you fast, accurate scheduling and dispatch straight from the work order all in one easy application

2. Enables you to make changes to accommodate incoming work – all at the touch of a button

3. Provides great visibility of your teams, with maps to show where all your field workers are at any time

4. Allows you to find the nearest worker to a job and enables better route optimization to get them to the job in the quickest time

5. Takes into account service regions, worker skills and location

6. Allows for planned, emergency and in-day tasks to be dispatched to the right, skilled technicians and engineers

7. Allows you to schedule crews to specific jobs, while recording each individual’s time worked and different rates per crew member on the same job

8. Ensures field workers have accurate information and the correct parts and equipment

9. Gives you visibility of assets to assign them to jobs

10. Provides your field technicians with job information on their mobile device and delivers the back office with job status updates in real-time

FieldAware allows you to schedule your resources easily and quickly and dispatch the job to the field instantly. Our leading field service scheduling software can transform how you run your field operation and ensure that you can get the most out of all the resources you have.