Field Workforce Management Challenges – How to Deal with Them?

When it comes to efficiently managing field service businesses, then one of the biggest challenges faced by the service providers is to manage the field workforce.

This blog attempts to deep dive into the operational complexities around workforce management.

Also, the blog will describe what small-medium and even large-scale businesses can do or what kind of tool they can use to better manage their field workforce.

Common Challenges Related to Field Workforce Management

Tracking the productivity of the field technicians:

Because of low field visibility, it becomes challenging for the service manager to track the productivity and performance of the field servicemen.

Usually, there is a gap between when jobs are done and when those are reported to the supervisor or service manager.

Because of this gap, it becomes difficult for the service manager to make timely intervention which is necessary to ensure the workflow of a particular job or to keep the process error-free.

In field services, the supervisor also faces challenges in tracking aspects like how productive a particular technician has been, did he spent too much time traveling, when did he check into a job or when did he check out, how much time did he take to finish the job?

Field workforce management software is an automation-enabled tool through which the supervisor can gain maximum field visibility.

He can track the current locations of field technicians or servicemen on a real-time basis. He can know which route they are taking in, where they are stopping by, basically, he can timestamp their field activities.

Assigning work among the field servicemen:

Another big challenge that a service manager confronts is how to evenly disseminate work among his team.

He needs to make sure that no one is overburdened, at the same time he also needs to ensure that a job gets allocated to the rightly skilled technician who has the efficiency to do the job in the right manner.

Basically, he needs to perform a skill-based job distribution. Besides, the service manager also needs to take care of aspects such as the availability of the technician, his location, and proximity to the job site.

Taking care of so many aspects manually and scheduling the jobs without any conflicts is a hard task, especially if the team is big.

Field workforce software is of great help in this regard. The software uses its data-mining capabilities and in no time it can check the availability of a technician considering his pre-existing schedules, the software can scan the skill sets of the technicians to judge who is the right match for a particular job.

By tracking the real-time locations of the technicians, the software identifies which technician can reach the job site at the earliest.

This way, the software assigns a job to the nearest available rightly skilled serviceman.

Precisely, field workforce scheduling software helps the service manager to promptly manage the schedules of a larger team by investing minimum time and minimum manual efforts.

Through a simple drag and drop, method the Service Manager can make changes to the schedule calendar.

Communication with field workforce:

To ensure the workflow, it is important to maintain seamless and real-time communication with the field servicemen.

Field workforce management software can automate standardized communication, thus mitigate the need for a communicator.

The software sends automatic notifications to the technicians informing them about their new schedules, change in plans, customer details, inventory details, etc.

Real-time access to information:

Lack of information at the time of need is one of the prime reasons for poor productivity among field servicemen.

To and fro communication with back-office staff for accessing a piece of information is a major productivity leak.

Field workforce software is a centralized cloud-based location that stores enterprise data at one commonplace. Field technicians can access this database from their personal devices using the field workforce management app.

Thus, on a real-time basis, they can have the needed piece of information such as service history, warranty and guarantee contracts, inventory status, etc.

Conclusion

Whenever there is low operational efficiency in field services it is common to believe that the field workforce is the root cause for it.

It is a conclusive thought that the poor efficiency of the workforce has undermined the service quality.

But to be efficient, the field workforce needs the right tool, access to the right technology, and also needs to be managed in the right way.

Field workforce management software is the one-stop solution for the above-stated three requirements.

Field service providers must make use of such software to improve the efficiency and productivity of their field workforce.