Most routing and scheduling software is used to plan and schedule routes for fleets of trucks and vans in the grocery, manufacturing, distribution and service industries. But what about using routing and scheduling software to manage your field service engineers?
If you are responsible for managing a field service team of technicians, such as plumbers, HVAC engineers, electricians and appliance repair professionals, you will probably already be focused on increasing the number of appointments per engineer while reducing mileage and fuel costs. At the same time you will need to deliver the best customer experience possible to increase repeat bookings, generate word of mouth recommendations and differentiate against your competition.
Some businesses use spreadsheets to create schedules. Others may use basic planning tools to schedule the workload of their teams out in the field. While this approach may be viable to start off with, it will hold you back as your business becomes more complex. In addition to growing numbers of field service techs and work orders to arrange, the length of servicing time on site may vary between products; some of your services may require specific skills, or equally customers may have day of the week, or time of day preferences for your visits.
It’s hard to remember all these important details. Even more so when your most experienced planner is taking a vacation, or a sick day.
With routing and scheduling software, you can factor in all of these different parameters, allowing you to increase service engineer efficiency, reduce mileage and fuel costs and deliver a better customer experience. Here are a few examples of how you can benefit from automating your planning process:
Once you have implemented your advanced routing and scheduling software, you may also want to consider integrating it with a vehicle tracking system. With in-vehicle devices tracking the location of every driver, you will be able to compare your plan against what is actually happening on the day. Then if one of your field team is delayed on the way to the first appointment of the day, your customer service teams can be alerted to potential delivery delays or missed appointments straightaway. This makes it possible to better manage exceptions and understand how they will impact schedules.
How do field service companies use Paragon?
Our customers use Paragon to plan the workload of insurance agents, washing machine fitters and experts in furniture restoration, to name just a few.
For one customer who delivers and installs electrical devices, Paragon’s routing and scheduling software is being used to produce next-day schedules for home-based service engineers making thousands of daily repair calls, allowing them to save in mileage and reduce administration costs. With the next day’s schedule downloaded to Paragon from the engineer booking system every morning, the software takes less than five minutes to calculate all the routes and schedules, automatically accounting for engineer availability, skill levels and road network details, as well as time needed to complete each call request.
No matter what type of field service organization you have, Paragon’s software flexibility will support your needs for scheduling appointments, optimizing routes and lowering costs in your service organization. While our own mobile team of implementation and support consultants have experience in helping organizations faced with similar challenges to get up and running smoothly, and see the return on investment (ROI) as soon as possible.
Why not get in touch to find out how we can help you manage your field service team better?
