How to Boost the Productivity of Your Field Service Engineers

If you are managing a team of field service engineers, you probably spend a fair amount of time field service job scheduling software jobs and ensuring your technicians are working as efficiently as possible. After all, the more calls your engineers can make in a day, the better it is for the bottom-line.

If everything appears to be running smoothly, you may think why fix something that ain’t broke!

But be honest, how much time and resources are being spent on non-revenue-generating activities? And how many variables are out of your control? Are your engineers spending too much time on paperwork? How much time do your engineers spend driving back and forth to the office? These are all valid things to think about when considering engineer productivity.

Think how many more customer jobs you could fulfil in a year if every engineer could manage one more call a day! Stay with us! We’re about to show you how.

Let technology look after the detail

If you haven’t yet tapped into the benefits of field management software, we’re about to show you how it’s a game-changer for improving workflow and field service productivity. It not only makes tasks easier, using software instead of paper and spreadsheets, ensures greater accuracy too.

Stay ahead of the curve – planning

Planning plays a vital role in the field of engineering, not just for managers but for engineers as well. Lead engineers who are managing a project or looking after multiple businesses across different geographical areas, must keep a check on ongoing developments, deploy tasks, ensure completion, and visualise the whole project from start to end. Without an appropriate planning tool, it is hard to keep tabs on everything that is going on.

Mobile workforce management software makes managing teams out in the field a dream. Planning, scheduling tasks and ensuring the progress of pending tasks, is quick and easy. With a mobile engineer app you can deploy jobs instantly to engineers according to skills and location. Diaries can be viewed in an instant and a drag-and-drop module makes it easy to move tasks. The status of any job can be checked in real-time, and GPS Tracking means jobs can be allocated to the most geographically convenient engineer.

Using high-tech software not only saves time, but half of the planning process gets facilitated by the software itself. It keeps you and your engineers on top of your game and ahead of the curve.

Integrated inventory management

Stock movement varies – some materials go directly from the supplier to jobs, while some (especially those used regularly) are ordered into stock, kept in the warehouse, and dispersed from there. Smaller, less expensive stock items may be kept in engineers’ vans.

Without an integrated system, keeping track of the total available stock is challenging and time-consuming. An automated system ensures no time is wasted in the requisition process, so engineers don’t suffer hold ups waiting for spares. Information is kept up to date in real time, which eradicates problems of over or under ordering.

Stock control software (built into field management software) enables efficient and effective auditing of stock. You can see in an instant how much stock is in vans, in the warehouse and out on site, and easily make system transfers between locations. Stock is deducted automatically as engineers select used parts from their van or on site, which means stock levels are always up to date. You can even set minimum ordering amounts on stock levels, triggering alerts to raise purchase orders for suppliers.

Efficient route planning

The art of scheduling jobs to engineers is a delicate balancing act, which includes matching skills to jobs, prioritising urgent repairs, taking into account parts on board, and efficient route planning. Time and cost savings are at stake. While route efficiency can be planned in, once engineers are out on the road, it can be a challenge to implement last-minute changes to schedules efficiently.

Engineer GPS tracking technology tracks engineers’ devices so you can see where they are at all times. It might seem a bit ‘big brother’ at first, but it’s actually all about making life easier for your engineers. Consider it a culture of support rather than anything else. The App also benefits engineers, saving them time in terms of working out routes between jobs. It means engineers can easily and quickly resolve queries and spend more time doing the job they were trained to do!

Historical tracking

Live tracking helps you take care of the day-to-day, while a historical tracking tool gives you the complete picture at your fingertips and makes time tracking for engineers and timesheet checking much easier.

As you can see, there are lots of ways the right technology can save time and improve workflow for managing your engineers! And the benefits extend to engineers too.

There’s more.

No more paperwork blues

Engineers don’t need the headache of lots of paperwork. It’s not what they were trained to do!

Going paperless isn’t just about being a more environmentally friendly business. Digitising your field service business also facilitates smoother workflow, enables easier client conversations, helps in document organisation, ensures information is easily backed up and retrieved, and offers complete data security. And engineers no longer have to drop paperwork back to the office.

Mobile forms – Switching to mobile forms software makes work life simpler and more practical. For example, you can install industry standard mobile forms or set up custom-made ones according to the needs of each project. Engineers access these quickly and simply on their mobile devices. Health and safety compliance forms can be made a mandatory part of the workflow, enabling engineers to easily complete a risk assessment when they arrive on site. Customers can also interact digitally. That’s heaps of time saved on compliance and is likely to improve customer satisfaction.

Mobile forms

Switching to mobile forms software makes work life simpler and more practical. For example, you can install industry standard mobile forms or set up custom-made ones according to the needs of each project. Engineers access these quickly and simply on their mobile devices. Health and safety compliance forms can be made a mandatory part of the workflow, enabling engineers to easily complete a risk assessment when they arrive on site. Customers can also interact digitally. That’s heaps of time saved on compliance and is likely to improve customer satisfaction.

Efficient workflow

Maintaining workflow electronically is so much more convenient. With an appropriate mobile App, engineers complete the required workflows in a specific order to maintain compliance, meet health and safety standards, and ensure customer satisfaction requirements. Processes are connected and lots of manual paperwork tasks can be automated. It’s so much more efficient!

Whether your business specialises in planned preventative maintenance or reactive maintenance, Joblogic can enhance the efficiency of your team.

Job costing

In field service management, a manual system of monitoring costings against each job is incredibly time consuming and involves a lot of paperwork from engineers. Software with a job costing feature makes it easy to track costs against even the smallest of jobs. And time and costs can be automatically fed into reports and invoices.

Engineers can instantly add in additional costs. Hourly cost rates for every engineer can be set up, incorporating factors like salary, insurance, etc. Pictures of job sites can be uploaded. An engineers’ time billing App is a godsend for engineers – no more complicated calculations and no paperwork to deliver to the office!

Time and billing software for engineers is a no brainer – once you’ve got it, you’ll wish you’d started using it before.

Collecting electronic signatures

Nowadays, electronic signatures are equivalent to a signature made by a pen on a paper in all courts of law. This saves so much time, especially when there’s a query – a PDF format of a signature is easy to access compared to the hours that might be spent going through stacks of documents at the office.

As you can see, paperwork belongs to yesteryear!

Join the App revolution

Mobile phones and other hand-held devices have evolved a million-fold since the ‘Dom Joly’ era. Not only in their size but in the powerful things they can do – mobiles have replaced everything from paper diaries and maps to cameras!

Technology has advanced significantly enough that organisations can now use Apps to conduct much of their daily activities. It has provided a golden opportunity to the field services industry.

The benefits of a specialised App include:

• No more time wasted on writing notes
• Constant and instant updates from back-office
• The ability to create instant invoices on site
• Enhanced workflow
• A birds-eye view of manpower resources
• Better engagement and communication
• Improved output

Joblogic: consistently boosting the productivity of field service engineers

Joblogic’s innovative and intuitive software brings productivity wins to every aspect of field service management, including the workflow of engineers.

• Joblogic’s quoting software tracks new enquiries and quotes, turning them into live jobs
• Our planned maintenance software creates asset registers and develops maintenance schedules to create maintenance calls ready to dispatch to engineers
• The online portal with a user-friendly dashboard enables quick access to management and customer reports
• Innovative GPS Track feature keeps you abreast of where engineers are out in the field, keeps you up to date with job data and helps with the verification of timesheets
• Joblogic’s invoicing software covers all bases, from batch invoicing to consolidated invoicing

We help business in the field management services sector achieve ambitious goals. To find out more about how Joblogic’s mobile app could boost your engineers’ productivity, book a free demo today.