Effectively scheduling your employees to handle jobs is an ongoing and important aspect of managing a field service business. If you handle field service scheduling, then you likely already know how challenging it can be. Whether you use a whiteboard, a calendar, or a spreadsheet, it requires hours of manual effort. Additionally, it’s difficult to forecast the availability of your people and required assets using these paper or spreadsheet-based processes. Field service scheduling software allows you to plan, schedule, and dispatch technicians quickly, conveniently, and more accurately. It eliminates any double data entry, hours spent filling out paper schedules, and the concern of double-booking a tech. Software offers the added bonus of automating more of the process, such as routine tasks and push notifications. Simply put, field service scheduling software streamlines your workforce logistics.
Benefits of Field Service Scheduling Software
Redlist’s Field Services and Dispatch module offers major time savings with a visual calendar for your people and resources. Not only can you assign jobs to your technicians, but you can also cross-reference the availability of your assets. This ensures that the equipment you need to get the job done will be available, and there are no surprises on the day of the project. You can configure the software to your needs and preferences, including automated work order assignments or automatically notifying your field employees of their schedules. When you implement field service scheduling software in your business, you can expect benefits including:
- A more efficient scheduling process
- Increased productivity
- Reduced number of schedule gaps
- Optimized coordination of people and assets
- Better communication between office and field employees
- Convenient real-time job progress data
- Ability to easily reschedule if jobs are running ahead or behind
- Shorten the quote to cash process
Additionally, with cloud-based field service scheduling software, field technicians can see the schedule’s real-time, current data from anywhere on any device.
How to Implement Scheduling Software
From your office manager and dispatchers to your field technicians and customer service team, everyone can benefit from the implementation of field service scheduling software. A mobile app is a perfect solution because your field service employees need to access job details while they’re on the go. Your in-office employees will focus on scheduling and tracking project progress. On the other hand, your field employees will focus on essential project information, their assignments, and the route to each job. Finding out what schedule and project details are important to each of the team members who will use the software will help you with implementation.
For example, with Redlist you can configure your job template to fit your needs. Then, when creating and scheduling a job, the necessary information will never be forgotten. This can include the job description, the purchase order number, customer point of contact, customer address, and even the billing codes to assist with the invoicing process after job completion. Now, your scheduling process can accomplish far more than a simple paper or whiteboard calendar.
Optimize Your Field Service Scheduling with Redlist
Transitioning from physical work orders and calendars to field service scheduling software will boost productivity and improve customer experience. A visual calendar, push notifications, configuration of forms and automation, cloud-based calendar syncing, and integration beyond scheduling will ensure that every work order is scheduled, serviced, and invoiced properly. Also, Redlist includes key operational reports that are auto-populated with your data. Reports like planned versus actual performance and available hours of service create visibility into your business that paper or spreadsheet-based scheduling doesn’t provide. Take the hassle out of field service scheduling for you and your team by implementing our easy-to-use mobile app.
