Your Next Field Service Priority? Data-Driven Decisions

How do you identify and acknowledge a resource that is valuable to your field service business? What are the internal and external sources that create value? And when this value is uncovered, who can guide you towards action?

The first step is to identify your priorities. Visibility and control? Improved productivity? Replacing outdated workflows? This time, our newsletter highlights how field service operators have turned a critical resource into their best opportunity for success: Data, and the power to answer your priorities.

Field service companies generate significant data, simply through their own trading activity. Moving this data into Business Intelligence (BI) tools creates useable information: Performance indicators for customer experience, employee satisfaction, and cost savings. This supports holistic decisions and mitigates risk at operational, tactical, and future strategic levels so that processes and procedures remain in line with your objectives.

Plus! In a follow-up to our new-for-2024 e-book Designing Value: The Case for Real-Time Field Service Optimisation, we’ve returned to the topic of business intelligence, and how to use data to maximise first-time fix rates.

Maximise First-Time Fix Rates with Business Intelligence Data

'First-time fix' means resolving an order during the first field appointment. Any further customer contact or second appointment for the same service call is no longer a first-time fix. In addition to the customer perspective, this indicator is also important from an organisational perspective because it has a direct impact on margins, turnover, and operating costs.

How can you use BI to improve your first-time fix rate? The first step is to determine your rate, with accuracy. For example, a field service organisation with a first-time fix rate of 75% indicates they must schedule 25% of their appointments as follow-ups. Read more.

How To Determine Authentic Field Service Optimisation

What is authentic field service optimisation specific to your industry or sector? When, for example, appointment costs are solved, where is the added value?

Some field service management platforms may only be designed to solve one or two of your operational priorities, such as travel time or shift costs. Worse, lightweight scheduling systems often rely on customer service re-keying, or only consider filling appointment windows and producing routes later on, with no consideration of real-world conditions.

What must project teams demand to ensure their provider stands up to their data-driven objectives? Read more.

Innserve: Historic Planning Data helps Prove the Case for Scheduling Automation

Innserve Ltd is an established service provider specialising in the supply, installation and maintenance of beer and soft drinks dispense systems. 400 field operatives 'Keep Britain pouring' across more than 90,000 premises in all parts of England, Scotland and Wales.

Alan Gormley, Director of Transformation at Innserve explains, "Whilst the opening hours of premises restricts the times we can visit for planned work, in-day priority visits operate under strict SLAs. These can relate to gas safety and this requires a field technician to be properly trained and certified to work within a regulated environment. Meeting these obligations meant our regular work was being pushed out of the schedule, thereby impacting on cost and efficiency."

Working with Innserve's IT, Operations, and Service Delivery teams, FLS took historic planning data and presented the outcomes FLS VISITOUR would have instead designed; a resource that proved critical when it came to move into a trial. Read more.

Extracting Value: Data-driven Field Service Decisions

Successful field service management is built on decisions made with accurate, real-time data. Replacing intuition and guesswork with comprehensive data analysis increases your organisational advantages: Better customer insights, enhanced strategic planning, and cost savings for efficiency and productivity gains.

FLS MANAGEMENT INSIGHTS raises a holistic evaluation of your field service business with data sourced directly from FLS VISITOUR. Highlight correlations and patterns that might not be visible when data is siloed. Read more.

Planning to Do More with your Field Service Data? Begin with our On-Demand Resources

Have you visited our Resources hub? It's packed with e-books, checklists, and guides. We've recently added our latest on-demand webinars (and a podcast!)

• The Decarbonisation Opportunity: The Road to Lower Emissions featuring Webfleet

Field service fleet operators continue to face the combined pressures of planning their operations to meet increasing customer demands, all whilst aiming to lower fuel spend and reducing, or eliminating tailpipe emissions. Watch.

• Recruitment, Retention, and Making the Best Use of your Field Force

Highlights from the FLS + The Direct Works Forum keynote session at Housing Digital 2024. What is the scale and reasons behind challenges in field service recruitment and retention? How can UK Housing better support repairs and maintenance skilled trades with technology to bridge gaps and make it more attractive to stay? Watch.

• The Social Housing Podcast

John Doyle, CEO of Voicescape , sits down with Jeremy Squire to discuss how FLS is helping social landlords solve the scheduling problem for their operatives. Includes: Compliance challenges across the sector and FLS' proposition for social landlords. Listen.

Click here to visit our Resources hub!

LOGISTICS UK: Five Years of Successful Vehicle Inspection Services Scheduling with FLS VISITOUR

Logistics UK is the only organisation in the UK to represent the entire logistics industry, with more than 20,000 members across all modes of transport. As part of this offering, they are the largest national supplier of field-based Vehicle Inspection services.

The project's priorities were transforming safety and solving planning's "heavy time investment" says Alex Lester, General Manager of Customer Operations at Logistics UK. Five years later, new operational priorities extended use of the system to include On Site Compliance and Consultancy and Standards teams. "We continue to work on our processes to ensure we balance our three key areas – Engineer satisfaction, Customer service levels and efficiency." Read more.

Partner Spotlight: FLS & Inciper

The FLS Partner Programme brings together a valuable ecosystem of software and consulting services to improve customer experience, digital workflows, business processes, and efficiency through managed services.

Inciper: Delivering value faster through rapid delivery. Driving insights from your data.

Our purpose as Microsoft Business Application consultants is simple. To help mid-size companies to solve their business challenges using Microsoft Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Azure services. We start and end with your business to ensure you get tangible, measurable value from your technology investment. Since launching, Inciper has had one vision: To be the go-to consultancy for organisations looking to benefit from improved ways of working powered by Microsoft technology.

Microsoft's market leading Data & AI tooling allows organisations to leverage the value in their information assets to surface insights to drive decision making. At Inciper, we believe the value that can be realised through effective data management, visualisation, analytics and AI can drive competitive advantage for your organisation.

How ready is your organisation to leverage the power of AI?

Join us on 5th September, as we explore the dynamic world of AI. Embracing AI has become crucial for organisations seeking a competitive edge. In this online event, we will discover how AI can revolutionise your business, boost efficiency, and drive success.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand the current AI landscape and its impact on businesses.
• Learn practical strategies to implement AI within your organisation.
• Explore Microsoft's cutting-edge advancements in AI technology.
• Hear success stories about AI-optimised organisations.

Register to join us virtually here:

WEBINAR - How ready is your organisation to leverage the power of AI?

Celebrating One Year of Real-Time News!

This July, our newsletter crosses the one year line and we want to take this opportunity to thank you for subscribing, commenting, and sharing FLS thought leaders and original research.

Your top five stories of the past year were:

• Trend Report: Top 10 Challenges in Field Resource Optimisation
• Digitalisation in Technical Field Service: Core Elements, Challenges and Solutions
• BRUNATA-METRONA accelerates an Energy Transition with Route Planning
• Pennington Choices: New Levels of Efficiency and Service
• FLS - FAST LEAN SMART Shortlisted Twice at The Housing Digital Innovation Awards 2024

We appreciate every interaction we receive and would like to extend special recognition to the members of our Partner ecosystem who have contributed. You can find previous editions here.

Thank you for reading. Keep in touch: Click "+Subscribe" to never miss an issue. Do you know someone who would be interested in field service scheduling and mobile workforce management? Feel free to share our newsletter.