Reactive Maintenance Software: The Benefits

Reactive maintenance is defined as the type of unplanned maintenance that occurs when your client’s machinery or electrical equipment fails unexpectedly. Ideally after this, an engineer is immediately dispatched to repair the issue and minimise downtime. However, due to the unplanned and reactive nature of this maintenance, jobs are often carried out on short notice and with little planning.

If repairing client equipment within a short time frame is vital to your business offering, then all aspects of your operation should be geared towards this end goal. This is where reactive maintenance software can make all the difference. By investing in tools that can streamline and optimise your maintenance process, you can act faster, more efficiently and with greater precision when an issue does arise.

Let’s breakdown some of the key benefits of reactive maintenance software:

6 Benefits of Reactive Maintenance Software

1. Mobile Engineer Tracking

Your engineer’s time management is essential, especially when paying a premium rate for their services. But when they’re spending a large chunk of their day travelling between job sites or sitting idly off-site waiting for a job, it eats into your profits. By tracking your engineers’ whereabouts, you can instantly see who’s available (or busy) and allocate tasks accordingly.

Joblogic’s mobile tracking feature uses GPS technology to track your engineers’ locations and see where they’re headed. This information can be used to optimise travel routes, identify gaps and inefficiencies in coverage, monitor employee productivity, and notify consumers when their technicians are en route.

Overall, mobile engineer tracking can help you achieve a better work/life balance for your team, and drastically increase productivity.

2. Monitor Costs Against Reactive Maintenance Jobs

Every reactive maintenance job has estimated costs, from parts and labour to other incidentals. But because reactive maintenance is typically emergency-based, managers can become tunnel-visioned on the repair at hand. This can lead to them inadvertently missing unexpected expenses as they happen, which affects your bottom line.

Reactive maintenance software helps organise and keep track of your project’s costs. Once recorded in the Joblogic software, managers can quickly compare their estimated costs against their real-time expenses, empowering them to make better cost-based decisions in the future.

For example, suppose one of your engineers regularly goes over budget on a specific type of repair. In that case, you may want to investigate your estimated material costs against current market prices or introduce a more efficient repair process.

3. Effectively Schedule Your Engineers

There’s nothing worse than receiving emergency reactive maintenance callouts only to have unavailable engineers due to double bookings or mismanagement. Unfortunately, this happens regularly and can seriously impact your customer satisfaction levels and bottom line. To counter this, your job scheduling process must be on point.

Joblogic software for reactive work provides employee scheduling and dispatching tools, helping you to manage employee shift patterns. You’ll have access to your engineer’s workload, performance records, and their proximity to job sites to ensure you can service clients quickly. And as job data is stored in one location, your team can quickly view the relevant job details, no matter where they are.

Overall, reactive software helps to avoid costly delays and ensures your engineers are always available when you need them.

4. Route Optimisation

Engineers having to drive around in circles looking for the site can be a real time killer. Late arrivals don’t just impact your SLAs, but also reduce customer satisfaction and your chances of repeat business. Your technicians should get from A to B as quickly and efficiently as possible in an ideal world.

So to ensure trudging commutes are kept to a minimum, Joblogic uses route optimisation software technology. This considers traffic, weather conditions, and engineer proximity to pinpoint the quickest routes to your job sites. If a technician is running late, you’ll be notified in real-time and can take action before they miss the appointment. By predicting traffic conditions and providing real-time re-routing, you can ensure your engineers arrive on time.

5. Keep Your Customers Informed

All reactive maintenance services revolve around the customer, making them a company’s most important asset. From a client’s perspective, you should do equipment repairs as quickly as possible with minimal disruption to their daily lives. This means that clear and efficient communication is paramount to your success.

Rather than communicating via a phone, which typically leads to voicemails and long wait times, Joblogic’s reactive and preventive maintenance software offers a user-friendly customer portal. This provides customers with a self-service option, allowing them to view job status, engineers’ ETA, and any hiccups that may delay the project. And while mishaps are sometimes inevitable, informing your customers in a timely, proactive manner can help build trust, loyalty, and good relations.

By being transparent with your customers instead of leaving them in the dark, you can turn a bad situation into a positive customer experience.

6. Make Informed Decisions with Dynamic Dashboard Reporting

Business reports are a crucial tool that can tell a lot about your business. These can include job profitability, inventory levels, customer feedback, and more. With this data, you can adjust your business model to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

To make extracting this data as easy as possible, Joblogic’s software includes a range of dynamic reporting features that help you track vital business metrics and KPIs. With our dashboard, you can generate and access reports in minutes, giving you a clear overview of specific business areas that need improvement.

For example, if you notice a trend of late job completions and suspect it’s due to missing parts, you can quickly pull your latest stock level reports to verify this. By nipping problems in the bud, you can reach the root cause and prevent them from happening again.

Field maintenance is a fast-paced industry, making it all the more important to have the right tools at hand to succeed. Joblogic software is designed to help reactive maintenance companies overcome some of the unique challenges they face. From route optimisation to dynamic reporting, our software is packed with features that will help you get the job done.