Keeping your competitive edge means sharpening many aspects of your business operation. For the field service industry, much of the company depends on a well-managed service schedule. Leaving this task to human error when other field service companies have adopted optimized service scheduling software to better handle the job will likely dull your competitive edge before it’s had a chance to cut into a piece of the pie. Why does optimized service scheduling software make such a profound difference? The answer lies within your business financials.
Service scheduling software cuts operational cost so that your business can continue to offer fair and competitive pricing. Here’s how:
Lower Transportation Expenses
By implementing optimized service scheduling software for your field service company, you are essentially passing critical operational information through a highly specialized system that is better equipped to make scheduling decisions, like which technician to send based on their current geographic location or what the fastest route will be to get to a customer request. This eventually boils down to lower transportation costs. Better routes and logically assigned technicians mean less wear and tear on vehicles that are traversing unnecessarily and less money spend to fuel these fleets.
Reduced Time is Reduced Money
No matter the industry, the financial equation is always the same. Time is money. Utilize service scheduling software to automate many of the schedule management tasks that eat hours out of the day. Service scheduling software allows for:
- A simpler scheduling process that saves time.
- Job status tracking so that a clear depiction of your company’s current job saturation can be effortlessly analyzed.
- Automated resource assigning that saves a great deal of effort in trying to figure out which technician is closest to the request location and best qualified to resolve the request.
- Simple invoice creation so that once a job has been fulfilled, the job cycle flows seamlessly into the billing and closeout phase.
- Automated repetitive maintenance scheduling.
Each of these time savers will affect the average cost required to operate your business by minimizing overtime and optimizing productivity. By the year’s end, you’ll notice a decrease in overhead and increase in profits.
Reduced Error is Reduced Money
Lastly, investing in service scheduling software will greatly reduce operational error. By nature, the human mind is not equipped to handle the volumes of data and information that compile to form a business’s infrastructure. We can manage bits and pieces, but never every number and algorithm necessary to make the most logical split-second decisions. That’s why we invent solutions that manage this data and information for us. By utilizing tools to handle these tasks for us, we minimize human error; saving time normally spent correcting mistakes, the likes of which often impede on overtime hours. Better management of data and information will also eliminate penalties due to missed service level agreements.
Make Best Use of Subcontractors
Optimized service scheduling software can also help to ensure that your subcontractor’s time is being spent as wisely as possible. Your company is paying them for their time and if a proper and efficient scheduling tool isn’t in place, they could be burning through company dollars while waiting on direction.
There you have it – one tool that packs powerful savings. As with any business investment, the decision to spend money will always be influenced by the return on that investment. Service scheduling software practically pays for it’s self by saving your company money in transportation and time. You’ll rest better knowing that your investment is working to save money and replace manual responsibilities with highly refined technology that’s faster and less error-prone.
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Michael Runshe is an expert in feild service workforce management solutions and ClickSoftware implementations. He is the marketing manager of Euclides Technologies Inc, a global Clicksoftware partner. You can follow Michael’s blog posts at www.euclidestech.com/blog.
