Do You Need Field Employee Tracking Software?

The Industries That Benefit From Field Operation Automation. The Covid-19 pandemic has revolutionised the way people shop and expect after-sales services.

Resultingly, the demand for on-field employees has increased exponentially. That is evident from the need for employee tracking software which has increased by 59% since the pandemic. 

Regardless of your niche, you’d need workforce management software if it needs on-field sales, services, or promotion. 

In this article, let us look into why 78% of 2000 employers track their employees in real-time through software aid.

Automation is going to define our world soon anyway!

What is Field Employee Tracking Software? 

The name field employee tracking software makes the primary function of the tool crystal clear. It tracks executives who work on the field, hence, are not in face-to-face contact with their teammates and managers. 

Sure, managing a team, in general, is a demanding task, considering how many metrics are external and uncontrollable. However, field employee management is a whole different niche. 

Why? 

Because communication becomes highly complicated when managers and teammates cannot be in touch. Other than difficulty in building team spirit, managing tasks, performance, and even attendance handling becomes a hassle. 

Field employee tracking software strives to solve these problems through real-time tracking, attendance, leave, task, and document management. Therefore, if managers need to know where each employee is at any given time, they can hop on to the software and find out. 

Any field operations manager will need field force management software to keep functions profitable and their sanity intact. This is because of the field-centric and specialised functions it offers.

Why Do You Need Automation in the Field? 

Most field service designations such as field sales executives are believed to be high procrastination jobs. So much so that 64% of employees admit to spending work hours browsing through the Internet, roaming around, or engaging in essential non-revenue generating activities. 

Here is how the rest of their time is mainly spent

• Disorganisation: When executives’ documents are unorganised, they spend about 55 minutes daily looking for things they already own. This sums up to about 13 days a year!
• Procrastination: Employees end up procrastinating for about 122 minutes a day. Therefore, they spend about only 73% time doing their job.
• Time Theft: Remote employees can steal up to 4.5 hours weekly from their employers. This sums up to about six full work weeks in a year!
  
• Faulty Attendance: With manual timesheet management, about 80% of employees need to correct their working hours due to faulty log in/log out.
• Transit: Field executives have to spend 11% of their time on the field in transit. This is enough time for them to schedule more meetings and customer relations.
  
• Planning: Field executives have to spend about 6% of their time planning their schedule and other manual administrative tasks.

When field executives can only use 35.2% of their time on revenue-generating activities, organisations lose too much time and revenue. However, the answer is not to keep a strict check since the benefits of some leisure time-theft outweigh its cost. The best that can be done is to automate operations to reduce unnecessary manual administrative time. 

Here are the benefits of automation in your workforce management system

• Increased Productivity: Other than procrastination, administrative task execution is the biggest woe of revenue-generating productivity in the field. Field productivity is bound to improve when field force management software takes over and automates most of these tasks. 

• Eliminates Mistakes: Humans are prone to errors, while a well-built software is almost impervious. Errors can either cause operational blunders or be time-consuming in the correction phase. Workforce management software solves both these problems quickly. 

• Saves Time: Field employee management software can easily save at least 15% of employee time by making travel time efficient and cutting down on time spent on administrative tasks. 

• Reduces Confusion: Confusion is not a worry when the software automatically does most planning through data analysis. The software can be more accurate, instructive, and understandable than manual field force management. It will tell people the recommended route, and the job is done!

• Future-proofing: The future will run on automation, where more operations will be conducted not by humans but by artificial intelligence. It only makes sense to use automation today so that your business is ready for the changes to come in the future, right? 

Automation is the best way to prepare your business for later operations while saving ties and other resources. When most of the working day on the field goes into travelling, planning, and running administrative chores, any way to save time, energy, and resources goes a long way! 

Major Features Offered by Workforce Management Software 

Sure, automation is essential in the field. However, before you choose whether you only want employee tracking software or full-fledged field employee management software, you should know what the latter offers. 

• Real-time Tracking: Buffer-free, live search allows managers to precisely understand where their executives are at all times. This further helps in managing productivity, meetings, and much more. 

• Attendance Management: Fool-proof attendance management systems ask for visual and geocoded verification to avoid false attendance marking. Moreover, field force management systems can also track employees’ device’s network and battery status. 

• Task Management: Offline task assigning, bulk assigning, transparency and easily editable tasks allow managers to quickly handle each executive’s functions. This way, executives know their to-do list and managers can manage their productivity. 

• Documentation Management: Online documentation removes the physical burden from field employees and saves a lot of storage space in central offices. Moreover, custom forms and fields allow easy feedback and information input from both clients and executives. 

• Expense Management: Executives can enter invoices into the software when they make any expenditures from their pocket. A nifty expense management dashboard simplifies the task allowance procedure in organisations. 

• Seamless communication: Avoiding cross-platform communication allows operations to be much smoother and confusion-free. Any issue or query can be resolved right where the tasks are assigned. 

• Employee profiles: Know each executive’s personal and professional information as long as it is relevant. Managers can see their task histories to know which executive is ideal for what job and how they’ve been performing. 

• Insightful reports: Productivity reports, along with other field metric reports, allow managers have a 360o view of field operations. They can plan, strategise, and alter functions accordingly. 

Where Can You Use Field Force Management Software? 

By now, you are well aware of the problems you can expect in the field if you do not take aid from proper software tools. However, are you sure where workforce management software is used in the first place?

Well, it is sold to businesses that involve their employees working in the field. However, what are these businesses that need field employees? Let’s learn in this section!

Segments That Need Field Employee Tracking Software

You first need to understand the segments that necessarily need workforce management software. These are places of functioning where employee tracking and on-field management become imperative for smooth functioning.

• Sales and Marketing: Managing on-field sales and marketing becomes a hassle because executives must continuously go around the city to find their next target audience. Managers struggle to manage attendance, schedules, tasks, expense, documentation, and productivity. 
• Field Operations: Field operations such as sample collection, line management, and things that help businesses function through on-site functioning require exact location, task, and documentation management. Maintaining smooth functions is imperative to allow the entire company to run smoothly. 

• Post-sales Services: Effective post-sales service defines customer relations with the company. However, managing it comes with diligent tasks, appointments, schedules, and documentation management. Moreover, managers should know each executive’s skillsets and give feedback on customer interaction and task handling. 

• Field Research: Most industries need field research to get better insights into market needs and growth prospects. The challenges faced here include communication gaps, documentation handling, and precise data collection. Field research also consists of transportation management because of regular commutes. 

Industries That Need Field Force Management 

Each industry aided by field force management software comes with specific requirements. Most of them are easily solved by applying a mix of all the functions offered by field force management software. 

Each of the following industries requires field staff management software since they heavily rely on their on-field operations. Each industry has unique requirements and functions that they need to fulfil to get the most out of its operations. 

Pharmaceutical

The pharmaceutical industry must sell and market its drugs and collect samples. 

The industry works with medical representatives who bridge the gap between pharmaceutical companies and healthcare practitioners. Field employees in the healthcare industry can also be responsible for door-to-door services providing first aid or sample collection. 

Some core functions needed to make the field services in the healthcare industry possible are:

• Real-time tracking to know the whereabouts of door-to-door practitioners and sample collectors 
• Task and appointment management for medical representatives to keep up with meetings 
• Documentation handling to keep a record of patient feedback and practitioners’ requirements and orders 
• Accessible communication allows representatives to stay in touch with the company and its manufacturing capacity. 

Construction

The construction industry majorly functions with field employees of multiple levels. Almost everyone is always on the construction site, from manual labour and site managers to operations managers, project leads, and contractors. 

Most construction industry employees might not have to move about much. They mostly have to stay in one site or maximum move between limited and defined locations at a time. Since the number of employees on the field are massive at any given time, here are some needs the industry might have with field employee tracking software:

• Live locational tracking to know whether each executive is actually on the field and where exactly they are on the field. 
• Fool-proof attendance to handle movements of a large number of field employees and ensure minimum possible time theft. 
• Task management to check how productive each employee has been and clarify the operational requirements for some time. 
• Expense management for the food and travel allowances employees should be getting. 

Security

Security services are mainly in the field, and customers rely on businesses to be completely precise with their functions. 

Field requirements in the security services industry include manual guard services and technological security device installation. They can also have field research on the security-based problems customers might face. 

To aid all the managerial problems that come with these functions, some functions from workforce management software that security services businesses need are:

• Real-time tracking to know if security guards are actually where they say they are. Any loitering around should be noted. 
• Task and appointment management help the post-sales team know where they are supposed to be. 
• Productivity management to see if the sales team can get any leads. 
• Accurate feedback from data collection and analysis to get an idea of the effectiveness of each security guard.

Retail

While retail business employees might not have to jump between stores, managers have to oversee functions for multiple store employees simultaneously. Moreover, there should be seamless communication between employees of different stores at various locations. 

Here are some things that field employee management software can do for real businesses:

• Offer fool-proof attendance to know for sure to know that employees are serving their entire work hours at the store assigned to them. 
• Productivity tracking through impeccable task management. 
• Sales and store feedback digital document handling so that employees do not physically deliver them. 
• Spectacular single-platform communication channel to allow for simple coordination.

Publication

Field operations in the publishing industry amalgamate field research, operations, and sales and marketing. 

Depending on the kind of publication house your client owns, they will need field research either for content or to get in touch with printing services. However, a publishing firm’s most significant field task is field sales and marketing. With each book or journal published, sales executives visit bookstores to get bulk clients or set up kiosks to sell copies themselves.

Publication businesses might need field employee tracking software for the following features: 

• Live tracking to know where each employee is on the field and check if anyone is procrastinating. 
• Documentation management to have a clear idea of how many clients or touchpoints sales executives have been able to contact. 
• Expense management allows executives to spend on their transportation on the field without worrying about having to pay from their pockets. 
• Employee profiling to know which field executives are appropriate for B2B and which are great for B2C interactions. 

Does Your Business Need Field Staff Tracking Software? 

The automation that field staff software brings to the table has massive potential to change the way your field executives function entirely. And all of these changes will be for the good because they will have more time for their primary revenue-generating role. 

No solution can be a one-size-fits-all tool. However, if your business heavily relies on field executives, you should undoubtedly use the best field employee tracking software out there.

So, what are you waiting for? Try TrackoField, and you’d never want to switch to any workforce management software because of its features and simplicity.