Field service management as a strategic tool for industrial manufacturing and services companies

Let’s start with the basic question: if you’re in the industrial services or manufacturing marketplace, how can field service management be a strategic advantage for you? (And, perhaps more importantly to your team, can it ultimately be a revenue-driver?)

The answers are:

• In numerous ways
• Yes

 For the second bullet point, download our white paper on driving revenue and profitability from field service in industrial manufacturing and services. Hopefully you’ll learn from it -- and as always, we’re here to help.

Let’s get back to that first bullet point, though: how can field service management be a strategic advantage for you in this space? We’ll run through a couple of concepts quickly. 

Improved customer experience

We often discuss this when running through the benefits of field service management in any industry, but it’s specifically relevant in industrial manufacturing and services -- when machines sit idle or go through long periods of downtime, that can represent millions of dollars lost. Customers want quick fixes that last -- and now, increasingly, they want predictive maintenance (so that they don’t even have to inform someone that a machine is down; via Internet of Things and connected devices, your back office will know exactly when to dispatch a tech). Good customer experience is the backbone of effective business, and field service management done right provides a strategic advantage in this regard. Imagine that your customers:

• Don’t have to contact you; you know when to come on-site
• Can track your tech from departure to arrival
• Smile when your tech arrives with all the parts necessary to work
• Can be billed on-site

These are all little things when taken individually, but when taken as part of a bigger picture, they add up to customer satisfaction. That drives repeat business and drives referrals, and both of those are crucial to continued business growth.

In short? Field service management done properly = great customer experience = retention and referral = revenue growth.

Better technicians

This is an overlooked benefit of field service management in industrial manufacturing and services. You want happy techs, right? They’re the front-line workers of your company -- and they interact with the clients directly. If your techs aren’t happy and aren’t doing a good job, that can show in discussions with clients -- which can sink business relationships.

When field service management is done right, though, techs:

• Have real-time visibility around parts requirements and availability
• Pull up instant mobile access around customer/on-site history
• Can access GPS navigation to easily route to a customer
• Hand off mobile invoicing to a customer, preventing another round trip to the office

 Happy techs = happier customers = retention and referrals = compound revenue growth. But it begins with making sure techs have the resources and process to do their jobs effectively, and that comes from field service management.

Streamlined management

 In any job, one of the worst situations is not knowing where a key resource is -- or, conversely, spending hours looking for something that should have been easy to find. This can happen in the industrial manufacturing and services space, and when it happens there? It can be deadly for your business. Imagine a multi-million dollar client concerned about machine downtime … and you can’t find his invoicing history, or your scheduling of a tech to meet him was done without context and the tech is on the other side of the city.

Now that customer is annoyed -- and rightfully so -- and you’re in a dire situation with regard to retention and referral there.

Field service management allows for streamlined, time-effective management -- which ideally frees up more time for decision-making and puts less time toward base logistical tasks. When field service management is done right, managerial teams reap these benefits:

• Faster and more effective scheduling
• Invoice/purchase order filing
• Integration with e-mail client to allow everything to be done in one interface

The baseline strategic advantages of field service management

In summary, you’ll find strategic advantages of field service management to be:

• Development of stronger customer relationships
• Increasing effectiveness and happiness of techs
• Continued streamlining of management processes and time spent on rote tasks

 Those are three wins for any industrial manufacturing and services company.

To learn more about driving revenue in the industry via field service management, download our white paper.

Written by Julio Hartstein