What is Field Service Management? A Complete Overview

Learn the ins and outs of field service management – its importance, components, practical applications, and more in this one-stop guide.

Businesses today, especially those operated remotely, often struggle to juggle between monitoring workflow, planning schedules, managing absenteeism and ensuring productivity.

They rely on rudimentary ways of running critical business functions that generate more problems than solutions. Nevertheless, there’s a way to escape those bottlenecks by switching to field service management. Let’s discover what field service management encompasses and how it assists businesses.

What is Field Service Management?

Field Service Management (FSM) is the process of organizing and managing operations performed offsite, in the field or the office. Some common industries that provide field services are consultation, repair/maintenance, customer support, sales, research surveys, etc.

These days companies resort to tools and software to manage and streamline on-field activities. TrackoField, a field force management software provides an array of modules like expense, task, order,  attendance & leave, etc. to offer a comprehensive FSM software. The objective of these modules is to automate field service management activities like:

• Physically deploying technicians to their task locations.
• Manually managing expense report submission, approval, and reimbursement.
• Recording employees’ punch-in/out, days off, and breaks on spreadsheets.
• Checking on task status via phone calls, messages, and emails.

Substantial Components of Field Service Management Software

Field service management (FSM) software supports a set of tools designed to be used together to bring your end-to-end operations under one umbrella. Here are different components equipped within the software:

1. Attendance Management

This module provides various ways for employees to mark their attendance from the app, i.e., geocoded, visual verification, and biometric attendance marking. It saves technicians’ time to travel to the office and managers’ efforts to manage overhyped spreadsheets. Managers get all their employees’ attendance data on a centralized platform. Thus, bidding adieu to misplaced attendance data and welcoming ease of attendance marking and transparency.

2. Leave Management

The leave management solution frees the HR team from managing employees’ leaves manually. Managers can acknowledge leave requests online, custom set up leave model, and monitor leave insights for individuals and teams too. Additionally, the module enables employees to check their leave balance, raise leave requests, and access their upcoming holidays at their fingertips.

3. Expense Management

Expense management makes the whole process of raising, submitting, acknowledging, and reimbursing, employee-initiated business expenses a lot more simplified. The module discards the need to run around managers for signatures, bills passing, documents collection to create expense reports, and other manual tasks. Additionally, it incorporates features to easily upload expense evidence, streamline multi-level approval structures, calculate payroll, and check real-time claim status.

4. Task Management

The task management module helps you move beyond the days of burnout with optimal schedule planning, strategic ad-hoc task allocation, and target vs achievement reports. It is an easy-to-use platform that supports remote work and team collaboration. From managing project activities to tracking milestones, and analyzing task reports, the task management system makes it all seamless with a few clicks. This way, it helps managers invest more time in completing tasks

5. Payroll Management

The payroll management system automates the entire life cycle of payroll operations, thus making the finance & HR team’s tasks hassle-free. It auto-compiles employees’ total working hours, expenses, days off, etc., calculates payroll hours, processes payouts to each team member, and in the end, generates reports and payslips. With a payroll management system, managers can reduce their hours by automating employees’ wages calculation and avoid month-end havoc.

6. Order Management

The sales order management system optimizes order placement by letting field employees create new orders on the move. It allows instant order placement, real-time order visibility, and faster order processing. Eliminating the need for manual order management, the system prevents data fragmentation and helps you gain detailed insight into orders.

7. Field Service Insights and Analytics

Field service management software is nothing without metrics, analytics, and reports. These are essential to evaluate overall field operations and consequently, making further decisions. From assessing the first-time-fix rate to total work orders and absenteeism rate, you will learn about all in one place.

Top Advantages of Field Service Management Software

Field service management software helps field managers achieve unparalleled visibility, accuracy, and other benefits stated below:

1. Automated Workflow

Field services demand a substantial amount of time and administrative effort. Field service management software lets managers and employees dedicatedly perform their crucial job roles by automating supplement tasks such as reporting, updating, collating data, etc. Moreover, businesses are no longer stuck with errors from manually entered data, missing files, and hard copy documents, thus dedicatedly focusing on what matters the most, running a business.

2. Enhanced Field Team’s Productivity

Field service management software lets employees carry out their work more quickly. For instance, they can mark their attendance, upload expense evidence, request leaves/time-offs, and get tasks, all while on the field, unlike, earlier, when they needed to visit the office for such micro-jobs.

3. Real-time Employee Visibility

Leveraging the capabilities of GPS technology, field service management software provides a detailed insight into employees’ job statuses, whereabouts, performance, etc. Managers are provided with live details on employees’ movements to make last-minute changes in shifts and tasks.

4. Centralized Team Coordination

Dissemination of information among all team members in real-time is the dream of various field managers. By turning this dream into reality, field service management software helps managers achieve better transparency, improved teamwork, and enhanced responsiveness. The software provides a centralized place for team members where they can discuss targets, deadlines, and strategies.

5. Comprehensive Reports & Analytics

Another significant benefit of field service management software is getting comprehensive reports & analytics on crucial business functions. For instance, managers can get leave reports to identify absenteeism trends, expense reports to assess the company’s total expenses, task reports to analyze individual or collective productivity, and attendance reports to evaluate employees’ retention rates.

6. Waste Minimization

Field service management software saves the company’s cost and time by cutting down on repeated visits. The software lets managers assess the most suitable employee to be dispatched to the client’s site. Moreover, it helps in assigning and tracking a group of tasks to a defined group of individuals. As the software replaces the manual process with a more advanced method, it emphasizes waste minimization.

7. Team’s Safety and Security

One of the major concerns among field managers is ensuring their team’s safety and security. However, it’s not possible with continuous calls and messages. Well, well, well…. The field service management software resorts to this concern with the SOS button. Field executives press this button in the event of an emergency to avoid tragic circumstances.

8. Offline Tracking

Even without an internet connection, managers can still monitor their field operations, keep their employees going, and ensure that every process is smoothly conducted, managed, and monitored. How? The system stores the location data locally and then syncs it to the server once the internet connection regains.

9. Unreachable Reports

Not just reports on employees’ productivity but the field service management software also provide reports on ‘when’, ‘why’, and ‘where’ the employee was unreachable during their working hours. This brings complete visibility into your overall field staff.

10. Instant Notifications and Alerts

With instant notifications and alerts on employees’ completing tasks, marking attendance, and requesting expense claims, the software takes field operations to another level. Your team members will never miss any updates about meetings, deadlines, and changes in plans, thus letting you avoid challenges like a pro.

Applications of Field Service Management Among Various Industries

Businesses in almost every industry enhance efficiency and customer experience with the field service management software in place. Here are just a few of those industries.

1. Servicing and Maintenance

This industry uses field service management software to track field technicians who visit customers’ locations for equipment installation, regular maintenance, and after-sales services be it laptops, electronics or at-home services.

2. FMCG

The FMCG industry uses field service management software to effortlessly conduct van sales and direct sales and ensure safe and secure deliveries with ePODs and code scanners. Moreover, the software helps FMCG automate the entire process from servicing, billing, and field service scheduling, to storing customer information on the cloud.

3. HVAC

Field service management software in the HVAC industry enables field technicians to access customer information, create invoices, and get job details on the go. Also, the software brings managers closer to accurate employee tracking, data-driven reporting, and efficient scheduling and reporting.

4. Pharmaceutical

FSM is particularly useful for pharmacy companies to dispatch medical representatives to the clients’ sites and deliver medicine samples and equipment. It is also crucial for keeping essential documents up-to-date, dispatching work, and creating necessary forms and documents.

5. Research and Surveys

Research and surveys tend to involve a large number of people. So, they use FSM to oversee agents on the fields, schedule tasks for them, and track the expenses of the multi-operational team.

6. Facility Management

Facility management services involve waste management, landscaping, catering, pest control, etc. Facility managers use the FSM software to plan, create schedules, and dispatch the right resource to the right site based on customer requests. Thus, they ensure uninterrupted day-to-day operations, repairs, and maintenance of the facility.

To Sum it Up!

Field service management is crucial to handling responsibilities and workflow related to offsite projects. You can strive to keep employees informed of any work-related updates no matter where they are located.

Besides, you can automate every process like gathering data, dispatching technicians, shift scheduling, expense reimbursement, etc. to cut down on mundane tasks. Want to get further insights into field service management software?

Book a free demo now with TrackoField and go on to maximize your business potential.

FAQs

• What is field service management?

  Field service management (FSM) involves managing the entire work happening outside scattered locations. It can be a strategy or technology solution that helps in optimizing remote operations. Industries with field force operations are construction, pharmacists, utility providers, etc.

• What are the important components of a field service management system?

  Here are significant components that you must find in your field service management system.
  - Attendance management
  - Leave management
  - Task management
  - Expense management
  - Payroll management
  - Order management

• What are the benefits of field service management?

  You will get an exceptional range of benefits after leveraging the field service management software.
  - Automated workflow
  - Real-time employee visibility
  - Offline tracking
  - Waste minimization
  - Centralized team coordination
  - Fast invoicing
  - Comprehensive reports & analytics

• What are field service activities?

  Field service activities include tasks performed by trained agents at various locations such as:
  - Equipment installation at the customer’s location
  - Maintenance tasks on the field
  - Home healthcare visits by practitioner
  - Safely disassembling of solid equipments

• How to implement field service management?

  Here are simpler steps you need to ensure to implement a field service management system.
  - Know what you want, and accordingly ensure certain basic capabilities of the software.
  - Appoint a qualified field service manager who is responsible for overseeing field activities, delegating responsibilities, and coordinating with the software providers.
  - Try to understand what sorts of data you need to collect and transfer.
  - Test out different modules and features of the field service management software
  - Now, just train your employees to access and run the software
  - Start using the software and effectively manage on-site operations.