Mobile App Benefits: Field Service Scheduling and Dispatch

Within the field service industry, organizing your business’s schedule can be one of the hardest challenges to tackle. As you juggle several different jobs, employee metrics, and equipment usage, it can be easy to let something important fall through the cracks. With today’s technology at your disposal, now is time to start working smarter instead of harder. A field service management software with mobile compatibility can help. Here are some of the scheduling and dispatch benefits you can enjoy when you make the switch. 

Finding The Right Employees for the Job

How do you divvy up hours when creating a work schedule? For some, this becomes a sinkhole of calculations, including questions like:

• Who is available to assign to this job?
• Which employees have the skills and experience needed for this job? 
• Who fills the role required for this project?
• Of eligible employees, who is the closest to this job site?

Finding the employee who meets all of your criteria can be a time-consuming process. Field service scheduling and dispatch software apps have a solution: digital sorting.

When using a field service management software—like FieldEquip—you can sort through lists of employees using real-time information like availability, role, primary and current location, and skillset. This takes the time-consuming guesswork out of finding the right employees for the jobs.

Making the Most of Your Resources

Managing employee and equipment availability can be a non-stop juggling act. However, mistakes in this process—such as under-scheduling or over-scheduling—can create costly havoc for your business. 

• Under-Scheduling Costs: When your business under-schedules resources, you face serious opportunity costs as you bypass the chance to take on a full workload. Under-scheduling is often a safety net necessary for businesses that lack a clear view of employee and equipment availability, preventing you from ever making the most of your resources. 
• Over-Scheduling Costs: When you stretch your employees too thin with over-scheduling, you may find them unable to do satisfactory work within the available time frame. Overlapping work orders might simultaneously put multiple jobs at risk. Similarly, over-scheduling your equipment distribution can leave employees on the job site without the tools they need.

These scheduling troubles are notorious for causing project delays, poor customer satisfaction, low employee retention, and the loss of future opportunities. So what can you do to avoid these troubles and make the most of your resources? The solution is simple: resource utilization monitoring.

Resource utilization monitoring software features keep track of your personnel and equipment availability, helping you make accurate and data-driven business decisions. Equipment usage can be marked during scheduling, helping you avoid bottlenecks. Likewise, employee availability is automatically updated to reflect new job assignments, ensuring real-time data accuracy. For other availability changes—such as vacation time—your employees can maintain visibility by proactively entering this information into their schedules from the ease of their smartphones once it has been approved. 

Your field service software will give you an overview of your resource availability each time you make a work schedule. Before partnering with a field service scheduling software and app, check for resource utilization monitoring capabilities to get the right tools on your side.

Dispatching: Transparency and Delivery of Employee Schedules

Transparency is key when it comes to employee dispatching. Long gone are the days of calling or messaging your personnel individually with scheduling information. With new technology innovations, even mass dispatch emails are becoming a thing of the past. Instead, a software system can automate the dispatch process.

Once your schedule is in place, you can instantly notify employees with ease via mobile app. Employees will not only receive a notification of their schedule, but they will also receive detailed information on the assigned job. One key benefit of mobile app compatibility is that these notifications will be delivered straight to the employees’ smartphones, ensuring important insights are never missed. Instantaneous delivery will eliminate communication disconnects and delays in your dispatch process. 

Collectively, field service management software solutions can improve every aspect of scheduling and dispatch for the employee, the leadership member in charge of this process, and, most importantly, the customer.

Keeping Track of Important Updates

Software features introduce a new level of convenience, tracking, and data visibility. Here are some of the software features you may be missing out on:

• Barcode Scanning: When scheduling a delivery, barcode features available on your mobile app allow you to scan equipment or parts. This ensures accurate tracking of activity on customer assets and movement of spare parts inventory. 
• Dashboards: Keeping track of job metrics and business performance is easier than ever with software dashboards. These portals organize all of your information—whether it be from IoT monitoring, AI learning, or mobile form data—into easy-to-read and actionable visualizations. 
• Image Capture: Whether you are facing equipment damage, job site challenges, or reporting uncertainties, you can use your mobile app to capture an image and send it to the proper source for documentation and reporting. Before and after images are also valuable to customers as proof of work performed during a work order.

These are just a few of the features that will help take your information tracking and internal processes to new heights.

FieldEquip: Field Service Software

FieldEquip is your comprehensive field service software solution. We streamline scheduling/dispatching, though this is just one component of our comprehensive software. While our solutions are popular within the field service industries, our software can be adapted to support almost any business. Best of all, our convenient mobile app can help make business management easy from anywhere. You can schedule a free demo with our professionals or contact us today to learn more about how we can help your business.