FSM tool is a central interface which provides field industries a platform to minimize their back office work and field technicians work.
FSM tools must be equipped with necessary features to accomplish all the related tasks for any field business.
FSM tools available in the market are loaded with lots of features which could be considered important by one vendor but insignificant by the other.
But here we are focusing only on the general features that a field service management solution should possess
Job scheduling:
Scheduling in the FSM tool allows you to plan and schedule jobs with the availability of field technicians. One can look into the available time slots and schedule jobs accordingly. These scheduled jobs can be assigned to one or multiple field technicians. All your service operations can be monitored by using Scheduler. Simple drag and drop and a few clicks to schedule a new job and even schedule a recurring job.
Inventory management:
To control the inventory and stocks, inventory management in the FSM tool is an important feature. Industries want their inventories to be managed efficiently saving time and money.
Low stock item alert and stock history can be managed easily with inventory management.
How much item is in the stock and what is exhausted can be easily monitored with this feature.
Contract management:
Many companies have customers who want services on contractual basis, be it a monthly contract or an yearly contract.
A contract has multiple jobs to be executed within a contract time period.
Till the contract ends, there are many things that need to be taken care of like contract start date, creating recurring jobs, creating contract or job based invoices, track of the field workers working on that contract, number of jobs done within the contract, equipment used and maintenance period of contract.
Real time location tracking:
Tracking the location of your field technician is an important feature that every company require from any FSM tool.
The ability to monitor the field worker’s location on map to know where they are and what is the status of their job, how far are they from the job site and what route have they chosen to reach there etc are some of the important points.
Work order management:
One of the most important feature an FSM tool should have is Work order management, Creating Quotation, After getting Approval from the customer creating job, Editing job, Assigning job to any fieldworker, Execution of that job-work by the fieldworker and at the same time monitoring that job by the back office manager, generating invoices and getting paid all these steps comes under work order management.
After a job is completed, servicing or maintenance is equally important. Inspection or Audits needs to be done for providing a better work service and experience to your customers.
Easy integration with other business tools: A FSM tool should have options to integrate itself with the other business tools like inventory, accounting and other back office integration tools, some examples could be Quickbooks, MYOB, Tally etc.
Efficient Reports:
Analyzing the performance of any business ,monitoring efficiency of your field technicians and visualizing the number of jobs accomplished, all these can be done with powerful reporting of any FSM software. There should be options to create customized reports or a software must provide different levels or types of reports for improving the operational efficiency of any business.
Expense management:
Expense management is a two way procedure wherein the fieldworkers or technicians need to give the details about the expenses they have made and the Admin or back office manager who approves or disapproves the expenses claimed.
Transparency is of utmost importance to get the claim reimbursements easily.
When a fieldworker puts in all the necessary details about the expenses made by him from the mobile app, it gets easy for the company to look into the information fed and thereby paying of the expenses.