Every field service provider is looking for ways to grow. There are many options for them to explore.
- They can look to attract new customers through sales and marketing efforts.
- They can raise their rates, hoping to target premium-tier clientele.
- They could expand their service offerings to tap into new markets.
- And, of course, they can increase their workers’ productivity.
Field service teams often avoid the final option. They think it requires a lot of effort without much reward. After all, how much more productive can you make your personnel? With the right tools, productivity can improve quite a bit.
Here we’ll explore why maximizing your field technician productivity is worth the effort. This article will also highlight the most effective ways to go about it.
Why Improve Field Technician Productivity?
Improving productivity makes your workers more effective, obviously, but the key question is, why spend limited time and resources on this area of improvement over others? Because your technicians are the cornerstone of your service operation. Make techs more effective at their jobs, and you improve all of the workflows and revenue-generating activities they’re involved in. Some of the specific reasons why include the following:
Better Labor Utilization Rates
Labor is expensive, especially highly-skilled labor like your field technicians. Making techs more efficient at work means you’ll help technicians complete more jobs daily, increasing revenue, making customers happier, and getting maximum value from your wages.
Improve Performance Towards your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Two of the most important field service KPIs are First-time Fix Rate (FTFR) and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR). Improving your technicians’ FTFR saves you money by reducing return trips, redundant labor, and extra material use. Your MTTRs will drop, too, when workers are more productive.
Improve Data Collection
More productive employees generate more data, which feeds your business analytics. That, in turn, improves your reporting capabilities. And if you choose to go digital, you’ll also be able to automate data collection and reduce paperwork, further making your technicians more productive, not to mention dispatchers, accountants, and other administrators.
Better Talent Retention
Experienced technicians are more productive technicians. Research has shown time and time again that hiring and firing costs more than managing talent and retaining your top employees. Give your technicians the tools they need to do their jobs better, and you’ll not only improve their performance in the moment, but you’ll also improve their job satisfaction and help you retain them in the long run.
How Do You Improve Field Service Productivity?
Taking a comprehensive approach is best, but focusing on any one of these methods will help you improve your technicians’ productivity. These methods focus on improving individual technician capabilities and the processes within which they operate.
Technician Skills Management
Your technicians are valuable resources for your business. You need to understand the skills and certifications required to work on the equipment your technicians will work on. Do your existing technicians meet those requirements? If not, you can train them or hire additional technicians who do.
But managing technical skills involves more than just having skilled resources available. You need to match those technician resources to different job requirements. Tracking jobs and technician profiles digitally make this task much simpler.
Work Order Management
The most important way to improve technician productivity regarding work orders is to go digital. You’ll eliminate paperwork and improve job traceability. In addition, you can make digital manuals and knowledge base articles for all service equipment easily available to technicians. You can even link these relevant digital documents in your work orders so technicians can quickly pull them up on-site.
Route Optimization
Too much time is lost traveling to and from manually routed appointments. With digital assistance, your technicians can maximize the number of jobs they complete in a given day. Moreover, they’ll do it with minimal driving and be able to complete as many add-on requests as possible.
For example, if a technician is heading out to work on a repair and there is a preventative maintenance (PM) request sitting in the queue for that site, why not attach it to the current service request?
Mobilization
A connected workforce is a more effective one. Provide mobile devices to your field technicians so they have everything they need to complete jobs at their fingertips.
We’ve already discussed easy access to digital manuals. But by using mobile devices synched to your field service management software, they can also see their schedule and everything they need to know about their current job. For example, contact information, parts needed, and customized checklists.
Inventory Management
Automating your inventory tracking makes life easier for everyone on your team—technicians, dispatchers, and warehouse managers alike. So look for ways to organize and automate your material inventory.
For example, keep lesser-used parts in your distribution centers and out of your trucks. Only stock the most frequently used materials in your trucks. Use software that automatically deducts them from inventory when a technician uses them.
Use Technology To Improve Field Service Productivity
We’ve alluded to this a few times, but field service management software and mobile technology are excellent platforms to improve your technician’s productivity.
Understand Your Metrics
Field service management technology helps with a broad range of tasks, but primarily ensures you understand your metrics. For field services, the most important ones are those we’ve already discussed, FTFR and MTTR. You need to understand your current rates, which means you need tools to track them effectively.
Automation
Automate your processes as much as you can. Automating manual processes develops new work efficiencies and makes jobs easier for your technicians. There is less back-and-forth between dispatchers and customers when they have everything they need on their tablets. They get to be a superhero, get to the job site as quickly as possible, and fix the issue the first time.
Remote Diagnostics
Embedded Internet of Things (IoT) sensors on site can notify dispatchers of a problem and automatically generate work orders in your field service software. Technicians may be able to use those remote diagnostics tools to resolve the issue without traveling on-site. And if they do need to travel, the sensors have already provided detailed fault codes to help resolve the issue quickly.
Advanced Analytics
Analytics tools take the data you’ve collected from your technicians, their mobile devices, and remote sensors and process it to enhance your operations. For example, analytics could estimate how long new jobs will take by considering the past performance of the assigned technician on similar jobs.
Suggested Failure Templates
Analytics tools can also identify failure trends you might not have noticed. When they do, they will suggest new failure templates you can create so technicians receive the right parts and knowledge base articles before they arrive on site.
Remote Assist
Advanced field service management software is starting to include remote assist features. For example, a senior technician or another subject matter expert (SME) can tap into a video stream from a junior tech on-site. That junior tech can show what they need help with and receive real-time assistance.
Velosio Can Help You Maximize Your Field Technician Productivity
Velosio helps you maximize technician productivity by leveraging Dynamics 365 for Field Service. So, if you’re ready to help your technicians work more effectively, improve their job satisfaction, and generate enhanced data, get in touch today.
