Improving the Efficiency of Field Operations with Computerized Maintenance Management Software
Operational inefficiency is one of the biggest obstacles that restrict the growth of field-based services like a flooring business. The most challenging part is that the management often didn’t even realize that the business is facing setbacks because the operations and its execution procedures are not streamlined. This happens because a flooring business anyway abides by a process to maintain its service workflow, but how efficient is that process, is it improving the team’s capacity, is it facilitating quick turn around, is it meeting customers’ expectation, are some important considerations that management often procrastinate to introspect. As a result, the business fails to reach its full efficiency, and this impacts profitability.
Understanding the Impact of Operational Inefficiency
Operational inefficiency can be because of various types, listed below are two major factors that are the root causes for the majority of operational challenges. explained below how CMMS maintenance software can rightly address these two factors:
Scheduling conflicts: Is the job assigned to a field agent is available for work today? if not, which field agent should be chosen as the last-minute replacement? Is a service agent assigned with overlapping schedules, or is there an error like duplicate scheduling?
It is very hard to manually track all these loopholes in the scheduling process. If a service manager sits to manually resolve the conflicts that are inevitable in the scheduling process, then it will take him a long time. But a CMMS software and promptly take care of these challenges through automation.
Through the software, the service manager can maintain transparent job-schedule calenders, wherein he can assign jobs amongst the agent as per their availability. Provide them with the optimal route plans, Territory management also gets very easy, wherein service agents can be allocated to job sites in proximity so that they don’t have to spend time on roads.
And where there arises the need to address an ad-hoc situation like a last-minute replacement, or a new service request, the manager can geo-track the live-locations of the field agents, know their work status, and accordingly can assign the job to the nearest available agent, maintaining a quick turn around time.
Poor and non-traceable collaboration: Throughout the service cycle, there prevails the requirement of seamless collaboration between the field agents and other stakeholders like managers, back-office team, customers, etc. Collaboration over phone calls, unless recorded, doesn’t get documented, so it doesn’t leave a trail. This doesn’t provide the transparency necessary for maintaining accountability among the stakeholders. But CMMS maintenance software is ideal for maintaining real-time traceable collaboration. Be it updates, notifications, reminders, instant messages or data sharing, every form of collaboration is facilitated through the software. Be it customer details, service quotations, inventory list, on-job queries, job status, route plans, job-schedules, everything can be shared over this collaboration platform and everything can be digitally recorded for future reference. Thus, there is complete transparency on who communicated what to whom. Besides, the software functions as a centralized cloud-based data repository. So, one can easily access the information on a real-time basis.
Conclusion
By rectifying scheduling conflicts, and by making data collaboration real-time as well as fully traceable, the CMMS software makes it a lot convenient for the managers to provide the field crew with the kind of support necessary for executing the field jobs with complete efficiency.
