In this day and age, the concept of digital is very broad. Everyone is talking about how everything will improve by adding “digital” to it, from small brick and mortar businesses to Fortune 500 companies. But what does it mean really? Especially in the field service industries? Let’s take a look at how digital is implemented in this “field” and how it can make or break any field service companies.
Benefits of Going Digital
Field service is a profession where it can adapt to changes very quickly compared to other professions. Especially if it involves things that will speed up processes and makes everything easier for the technicians. And because of that reason alone, going digital as early as possible is the best bet if you are looking to open a company in that field. And if you already have a field service company then you need to go digital ASAP. Implementing job tracking with MS Dynamics 365 is miles better than having to answer a phone call every hour
The main bottleneck in most field service providers is the uncertainty. An equipment can malfunction and the technician won’t know about it until after multiple days. If we are looking to be as efficient as possible then the technicians need to know the malfunctions as fast as possible, in fact by implementing digital practices some errors can be detected before it happens. Pretty neat right?
Digital in the field service context are designed to solve time-restricted tasks. The main focus of digital in field service should be to provide the technicians with easy access to information about equipment status and location. Just by having a solution for those two things, a field service companies can save thousands of dollars soon by being more efficient.
Additional benefits can be realized by looking at solutions that leverage cloud computing to
Another benefit of going digital is to have the option to go almost paperless. Paper-based tasks will be replaced with cloud computing processes and it can also provide more functionality such as customer portal or price estimation. If you’re sick of too much paper in the office then maybe going digital is the right move.
Should You Go Digital?
There are a couple of factors that you should consider before looking to implement digital in your field service company. Here are two of the most important ones:
Cost: Do you have the budget for it? Implementing digital and replacing legacy systems will cost a lot of money especially if you already have an established company. Have you calculated the ROI of going digital vs staying the same? Will, it makes everything efficient or just smoke and mirrors? You need to think about this hard before deciding to go digital!
Size: It does not make sense to go digital if your company has less than 10 people employed. And even if you have more than 100 employees it’s not always the right thing to switch everything to digital. You have to consider the fact that you might have to relieve some of your employees due to going digital abruptly.
