Search
Close this search box.
Slay-the-Scheduling-Dragon_2000x600

Slay the Scheduling Dragon:

Solve the 3 Key Field Service Challenges

In today’s competitive field service marketplace, not only must you do the job right, but you also have to do it fast. Unfortunately, the scheduling dragon can lay siege to field service companies, causing delays or misplacing assets which can lead to lost customers, singed reputations and flambéed bottom lines.

Field service management knights need the right tools to succeed, those that increase efficiency, productivity and revenue, without breaking the bank. Thankfully, Smart Scheduler is the sword in the stone that can help you conquer the scheduling dragon threatening your business.

Top Three Scheduling Challenges in Field Service

Field service managers face many challenges. Day in and day out, they must juggle customer demands and tight schedules and ensure technicians and company assets are where they need to be when they need to be there. Three key scheduling challenges make it difficult to accomplish these goals.

5

1. Tribal knowledge

Field Service planners or schedulers tend to have a great deal of tribal knowledge. They know the customer territory and the capabilities of their technicians in great detail. This allows them to be more productive and to work much faster than others on the team. While these are good, they can lead to information silos. So how can field service managers capture that unique and earned knowledge to help the rest of the team be more productive? In today’s world of the Great Resignation, retirement, and skilled worker shortages, there’s a pressing need to harness and spread that knowledge to more people inside of the organization before those workers ride off into the sunset.

5

2. Clearing bottlenecks

Planners or schedulers wear many hats. They perform account management duties, communicate with customers, and manage and react to changes in the schedule. But to successfully chart the course for your organization, they need time to plan and institute that schedule, and to establish roots with technicians. Time, of course, is often the scarcest commodity. Placing all so many critical tasks in the hands of one person can lead to delays. Too often, the dispatch center becomes the bottleneck to growing the field workforce, reducing productivity and opportunity for more business. Worse, if there are inefficiencies today, scaling up the operation simply means scaling up those inefficiencies, too.

5

3. Inefficient Routing

With all the concerns and tasks planners are trying to balance, the result is they often do not have time to carefully plot out the work. Lack of time means reacting rather than planning ahead. It also leads to mistakes. This is how techs end up with inefficient routes and unnecessary or excessive travel time or, worse, sending the wrong technician to the job. These mistakes reduce revenue, lower customer service ratings and can lead to lost opportunities.

View FieldAware Smart Scheduler Demo:

Smart Scheduler: Pull the Sword from the Stone

Utilizing the right technology is the key to eliminating inefficiencies and empowering field service planners and managers to increase tech and asset utilization, increase productivity, and drive new revenue. Smart Scheduler provides back-office staff unprecedented visibility and insight into daily operations and tasks.

Smart Scheduler helps service managers streamline fundamental operations, enhances efficiency, and eliminates unnecessary costs by ensuring vehicles and teams are where they need to be, when they need to be there. It automates the time-consuming and error-prone manual process of dispatching appropriate technicians to the correct jobs. Dispatch software efficiently tracks arrival times, locations, and supply inventory to give service managers a clear, complete picture. For example, if one of your technicians is delayed on-site, Smart Scheduler allows you to quickly locate and reroute other properly skilled resources to eliminate a late arrival.

Simply put, Smart Scheduler’s key feature allows service managers to assign work and route the right technicians to the right job at the right time, smoothly and seamlessly. Once the dispatcher approves the job and route, techs are immediately alerted and can access all the job’s previous data. This data includes which technician the customer worked with previously, which equipment is needed, and other information vital to getting the job done. Lack of crucial data like service history is one of technicians’ top complaints. Dispatch software provides techs with that important data whenever they need it. The platform makes documentation much quicker and more efficient. Arrival times, job notes, and more are automatically imported into the work order, reducing human error in record keeping.

Before dispatch software innovation, a dispatcher was often forced to spend their entire day overseeing and scheduling a group of technicians.

With Smart Scheduler, service managers can handle hundreds of technicians with a small team of dispatchers, and invest more in their core business and technicians.

Rule Your Kingdom

Don’t let a scheduling dragon ruin your kingdom. Take advantage of effective dispatch software, like Smart Scheduler, which can help you slay inefficiencies and eliminate errors that cost your company valuable time and money.

Menu