The following is a guest blog from ServiceMax partner ProntoForms. For more information, visit their online Marketplace listing.
Knowing what is going on in your business – whether you’re small or large – at different points of any given day, quarter, or year has a huge impact on productivity, and is often the difference between a successful company and a struggling one.
It’s important, then, to set yourself up for success by closely examining how your business works today, and how you can help your team do it better.
Keeping Track of the Paper
Within the field service organization, certain things like dispatching field technicians, billing customers, collecting timesheets, paying suppliers are table stakes. These activities involve multiple people processing paperwork and, unfortunately, the manual nature of paperwork can lead to errors, things going missing and, frankly, low visibility into process and customers.
Make sure you have a good way to track and store the data embedded in that paperwork, without resorting to dozens of man hours chasing after incomplete forms or filling in spreadsheets after they’ve been filed.
Metrics
Leading mobile forms solutions like ProntoForms offer dashboards for things like job completion rates, which gives managers a real-time picture of how you’re tracking against goals. There’s no need to chase technicians at the end of the day because managers can spot oversights when they happen and can take immediate action.
Hey, Stuff Happens
It’s also important to put in place a contingency for how to react when things go wrong. Accidents happen. In case of a safety-related incident, ensure the right person is contacted immediately so they can take appropriate action. For instance, with the right systems in place a safety breach could automatically trigger a notification that goes to a safety supervisor.
Quarterly Tracking
Quarterly business reviews often seem to come out of nowhere.
They spring up every three months, and the mad dash to collect paperwork and crunch numbers begins. But it’s only after trend and data analysis is a team able to identify areas of strength and weakness – and it’s only with effective business processes that all these things can happen without the madness.
Recording data automatically when it’s submitted, and directing it straight into an analytics engine, can expedite the process from a lengthy series of reviews to a fully automated dashboard, which can be automatically emailed to company executives, business partners, or customers.
Viewing Data Over Time
Once you’ve started to collect data in a structured fashion, it’s time to put the data to work by viewing trends over time. An analytics system can help companies evaluate not only overall business trends, but also how efficient an individual worker or team is in the field.
The data might show there are regional trends that need further investigation – why are teams on the East coast able to perform 10 inspections per week, whereas the average team out West only manages six? What separates the best performers from the worst? Perhaps there’s a need to share best practices across the company.
Easy access to this information means addressing potential issues before they become problems. Analytics tools are also well suited to evaluate seasonality, making it easy to compare year over year trends across teams, regions, and the entire business.
Efficient business processes are vitally important to companies of all sizes. These workflows increase productivity and allow teams to be more proactive as the business grows and evolves.
ProntoForms and ServiceMax Help Drive Operational Excellence
As a certified technology partner in the ServiceMax Technology Alliance Program, ProntoForms complements the ServiceMax field service management platform by offering customers a greater depth and breadth of mobile app capabilities, integrations and workflows, as well as analytics and reports.
ProntoForms’ mobile app capabilities also complement ServiceMax’s rich work order form with additional information and other forms, including Planned Preventative Maintenance, Timesheets, Safety Checklist, Quality Inspection, Asset Management, Punch List, Vehicle inspection, Vehicle inventory, Field Service Report, Quotes/Estimates, and more.
The combination of ServiceMax and ProntoForms provides customers a complete end-to-end solution with the ability to transform any business processes.
To learn more about operational excellence and how these aspects work together to create a service system that is far greater than just the sum of its parts, check out our new free ebook.
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