Field Service Management – Detection and Utilization of Field Service Optimization Potential
After-sales service is not only increasingly understood as a profitable business model in mechanical and plant engineering, but also influences your customers' purchasing decisions as an integral quality feature of your products themselves.
Field Service Management Software (FSM) enables optimized field service planning and execution. In addition to system-guided support for planners, mobile workers and external technicians, through easy-to-understand processes, all information and documents relevant for processing are provided by the software. This enables the service to be provided on site as professionally and efficiently as possible.
Challenges and goals of Field Service Management
Field service management (FSM) is primarily about efficient field service planning of personnel and other resources. The service technicians should be enabled to carry out their assignments at the customer's site reliably, confidently and to a high standard of quality. To achieve this, everything from the customer inquiry to the technician's service assignment must be planned and documented in detail.
Successful planning of assignments includes not only the cost-saving planning and scheduling of field service employees, but also, for example, customer management, the provision of information for and by the technician, reporting and the billing of assignments.
What are the current challenges facing employees in field service management? You can find answers to this question in this blog post.
The optimization potentials include in particular:
- Increasing the reliability, quality, and efficiency of on-site service
- Reducing field service costs
- Improving the quality of employee performance
- Quick and complete documentation of service calls
- Process and respond to customer inquiries quickly
- Make maintenance and incidents predictable
- Make service transparent to all employees
- Improve customer service and satisfaction
- Collect and analyze data to optimize processes
How does a Field Service Management system harness this potential?
As a collaboration tool for internal service, it enables transparent and clear capacity planning in the team as well as access to information that is important for planning. In addition to the early detection of workload bottlenecks and free capacities, other factors such as the technicians’ skills, travel times or service level agreements with the customer can be taken into account when planning.
For the mobile technician, such a solution enables on-site:
- access to all information relevant to the service case
- the fast and comprehensive recording of all data for the digitally signable operation report
so that this information is later available for invoicing without any media discontinuity.
Field Service Management software and ERP systems: differentiation and integration
While an ERP system e.g. SAP system aims to map a large number of a company's business processes, especially commercial ones, Field Service Management focuses in particular on the operational business surrounding the provision of services in the field. The commercial components, such as maintenance contracts or service orders, which are very often managed within the ERP system, naturally form the basis for this.
Therefore, it makes sense to transfer information from the ERP system to the Field Service Management system so that, in addition to the constant transfer of master data, ordered quotations are also immediately available to the dispatcher with all the information important for processing and planning. Conversely, the recorded service data from the field is reported back to the ERP system so that invoicing can take place without media breaks based on the services recorded in the field service.