Scheduling and Dispatching: 5 Questions Every Successful Services Company Must Ask!

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2 Introduction Service management as a business process is in a state of transition, and two factors drive this change. First, service is transitioning from cost center to profit center. According to a 2012 survey of 160 companies by independent researcher Aberdeen Group, more than 70 percent now view service as a strategic profit center. Going further, more than 50 percent operate their groups as independent business units with their own profit and loss objectives and executive leadership. As features and price become less of a competitive differentiator, service organizations see value-added services as a growth opportunity. Second, personnel expenses continue to outpace other expenses. This makes it unrealistic to simply add staff as a response to an increase in service entitlements. Fortunately, companies are discovering ways to improve the productivity of existing field personnel, as well as to provide support for the third-party contractors that play an increasing role in handling field service assignments. Some of these improvement measures can be accomplished using traditional scheduling and dispatching software, but many of those gains have already been achieved by most organizations. The next frontier is to connect these feature sets with internal accounting and sales software. An efficient and productive field organization addresses both of these challenges and can make a significant contribution to the bottom line. As highlighted in another Aberdeen Group research report, best-in-class organizations achieve a 14 percent increase in workforce productivity, compared to a 2 percent increase for organizations that do not take steps to boost field productivity. 2

3 This Fieldpoint ebook provides real-world responses to five questions service managers are asking about the topic of service management, scheduling and dispatching. 1. How do we improve our service-order management as we grow? Business growth does not have to result in the growth of support staff. Armed with visibility into scheduling systems, managers can remain agile in their assignment of field personnel including utilization of third-party service providers. Fieldpoint software maintains a skills database that allows managers to search for the right resource for any given job. Schedule gaps can be identified quickly and pushed out to field personnel via updates to mobile devices. As schedules change, automatically monitored dependencies trigger messages to management for handling. This enables streamlining of workflows and automation without sacrificing management s ability to intercede when circumstances warrant. 2. How do we better manage our service contracts? Support for a range of service contract types is becoming a strategic advantage in the marketplace. Traditional break and fix contracts are increasing being supplemented or replaced by preventive maintenance agreements that can employ a variety of service levels. Entitlements have to be tracked, preventive schedules must be maintained and the personnel necessary to service and support these must be coordinated. 3

4 Having schedule visibility across the organization s entire workforce allows service managers to reassign personnel resources as needed or to bring in specialized thirdparty service providers to fill gaps. Integrating these resources into a single view further simplifies management and helps to maintain service levels while minimizing expenses. In addition to personnel management, preventive maintenance (PM) contract management should include support for an unlimited number of major or minor PMs per customer asset. Tracking these and scheduling equipment changes could easily become cost prohibitive without the right kind of integrated software. 3. How do we plan and schedule our field services resources more efficiently? Service organizations can increase the productivity of those in the field by moving beyond simple project management and scheduling software. By tying these systems to internal systems, the productivity of office-based personnel also increases. Ask these questions to be sure your field service software has the right planning and scheduling features: Does it provide a composite view of all schedules, including external resources, and does it allow managers to drill down to specifics on an ad-hoc basis? Does it provide customizable portal views for both internal and external field personnel? Can schedulers easily drag and drop tasks to specific employee or vendor calendars? 4

5 Can managers respond to urgent requests by easily searching for specific training and skills? 4. How do we manage time, expense, and billing in the field to maximize efficiency? Implementing mobile technology for field personnel would seem like the logical solution for maximizing efficiency in the field. But the growing reliance on third-party service providers to supplement internal staff complicates this solution. Coordinating this variable resource with internal staff can pose challenges unless the proper systems and controls are in place. Seek out service management software that is device independent. In addition to the expense of providing specific hardware to third-parties, not to mention internal staff, also consider potential security exposures. The best solutions are those that can be tailored to your current workflows and that support a range of devices. Software should be easily configurable to achieve minimal data entry using standardized responses to speed input and minimize errors. Checking boxes or choosing from pre-defined pull-down options ensures that field input is unambiguous and easily integrated with customer records to minimize time-consuming and errorprone data entry by administrative personnel. Make sure this functionality is easy to set up and maintain, and that responses integrate with accounting and sales systems. 5

6 5. How do we improve our cash flow from billable services? Obviously one way to improve cash flow from billable services is to reduce the time it takes to bill. A second, often-overlooked answer is to provide customers with detailed backup for each billing. Let s look at each of these. It is not uncommon for field personnel to file their reports after several days, or even weeks. Every day that passes pushes out the due date for the invoice to the point where a 30-day payable becomes a 60-day, or longer, payable. The key is to automate invoicing, ideally initiated at the time of service. Giving technicians to remotely enter their time and supplies used allows the back office to quickly prepare and send out invoices for payment. It s also worth noting that for organizations utilizing third-party service providers, customer billing cannot take place until the service organization has been invoiced by the third party. Allowing the third-party access to your system to enter their hours allows costs to be quickly collected and shortens time to billing. In addition to the speed of billing, studies confirm that detailed bills are paid faster than those without sufficient explanation. Without the need to ask for back-up documentation or clarification, the invoice can be approved for payment more quickly. Submitting invoices with detailed, line-item explanations is easy once these options have been programmed into the service management software. Choosing from dropdown options and check boxes, field personnel can quickly complete the necessary paperwork to align a billed line item to a detailed explanation. 6

7 Conclusion Effective management of field service resources is growing in importance. As pointed out in the same Aberdeen Group 2012 research, companies with customer satisfaction ratings of greater than 90 percent, compared to those with ratings of less than 50 percent, experience bottom-line benefits from a focus on service management A higher level of customer retention (92 percent vs 26 percent) Higher gross margins (32 percent vs 25 percent) Better year-over-year service revenue growth (7 percent vs. -6 percent) The lifetime financial value of your service customers is a significant opportunity and enterprise service management software is an important investment for supporting that opportunity. A service management system that is tightly integrated with project and personnel management and based on open standards for easy mobile access is critical for achieving these goals. It also enables the organization to offer new value added services in a cost-effective manner, which can deliver higher margins to your firm s bottom line. 7