5 Ways Field Management Software Improves Your Business
There are many reasons to implement field management software, or to potentially upgrade to a better service. In lots of ways, field management software has completely revolutionised how we do business. Logistic and tracking processes that used to take ages are now fully automated, your FMS will take care of scheduling, routing, dispatching, services, invoices, and will even a provide a centralized dashboard containing data from across the entirety of your customer base.
1. Improve human processes with technology
In addition to saving you money and making your business flow more smoothly with a lower margin for error, FMS also helps increase overall satisfaction of both your clients and your employees. More and more studies are showing that greatly improved overall job satisfaction of field workers, allowing them to do their jobs more efficiently and spend more time actually engaging with the customer and helping them solve problems.
Eliminating the mundanity of many data entry and tracking tasks means that they can focus on what they are really there to do, ultimately getting best results in less time. So if you’re convinced, here are some tips to make sure you get the right field service management software to suit your organization and start seeing results immediately.
2. Identify your strengths and weaknesses
You probably already know that your business is unique and has different needs from the competitors, but it is important that you’re able to lay these out clearly in order to choose the right field management software. A good place to start is to create a list of the areas and processes in which your business needs improvement, then you can determine KPIs to measure success for each process, and approximately calculate your return on investment (ROI).
By clearly outlining what you need and what you hope to achieve, you can begin the process of evaluating vendors according to your personal metric in order to find the perfect partner.
3. Choose several key features
With the proliferation of services available, it is also important to establish a few key priorities that will allow you to avoid getting bogged down by vendor jargon and unreasonable expectations. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the different features available, sit down and split the features into various categories.
Make sure that you involve your team in this process, they are likely able to shed more light on things than you can observe from the outside. Go about dividing your FMS feature list “must have” and “nice to have” features, according to your vendor vetting research and on-field technician inputs.
4. Consult some existing research
Take the time to read reviews and talk to other people in your industry about which FMS they are using and what they think about it. As the software becomes more detailed and refined, there have been more and more in-depth research reports that include extensive market research reports and that rely on proprietary qualitative data analysis methods to demonstrate market trends, such as direction, maturity and participants.
5. Don’t forget about the practicalities
Ultimately, you also want to choose a system that is going to be easy to implement and offers a straightforward and easy to use training program. Implementing a new field management software program is obviously going to cause a disruption and will have an impact on the whole organization, so you want to trust it will go fairly smoothly.
It is also important that you explain the value of implementing this new tool to your team in advance, so they are not left feeling frustrated and confused by the intrusion. Although sometimes the extensive training will pay off, make sure you’re not signing up for a system that offers more complicated features that you really need at this time.