Redback WMS
The square peg
I’ve heard quite a few times from users of field service management systems that one of their biggest concerns was the fragmentation or the dysconnectivity of their solution. Often, they say there is a lack of end-to-end flow to and from other enterprise systems. And this may even be despite having the best technical integrators.
The square peg just doesn’t fit into the round hole.
Some of the more specific complaints I’ve come across were:
“Garbage in, garbage out. Whatever we receive from the customer, through integrated or manual tickets, just makes it to the field regardless and it’s the agents that are left to push back on invalid tickets. Sometimes, the address was wrong, which means they wasted time driving to the wrong place. Sometimes, the repair requirements weren’t as stated, and the dispatched agent doesn’t have the right skills or parts to fix the actual issue. If only the requests could be validated first.”
“The field agents did whatever they needed to do to resolve the issue, even if it meant an out of scope or out of contract variation. Now, the back-office administrators are left grappling to get an after-the-fact approval from the customer in order to even be allowed to claim revenue for the work. And sometimes they won’t be able to. If only the out-of-scope work could be approved first, before working on it.”
“We’ve done this piece of work many times in the field, and each time, it ends up taking much longer than expected, which then messes up the rest of the day’s schedule and creates more missed SLAs. We just don’t seem to learn that we need to give ourselves more time. If only we were able to learn from our experience in the field and adapt our plans moving forward.”
“At the end of the month, we need to spend days reconciling what the field agents did and aligning it back to what we can and can’t claim on the contract. Sometimes, it just doesn’t line up, so we must fill in the gaps with made-up data. That takes a long time and leaves us exposed. If only we could make sure the right data is captured correctly the first time and then used to automate the financials.”
The Gaps
It’s almost as if many of the field service management systems out there were good at doing the “field management” parts of the process (of course), but don’t really care about where the work comes from or how it got in. And then, they stop caring after some data has been captured and the assignment is complete.
It’s almost as if they see the end-to-end process in this way:
Where “Generate” means anything that will generate some work: Sales orders, Integrated tickets, Planned maintenance, IoT, Etc.
And “Financials” is both the payable and receivable parts of the claiming process as well as payroll or any related account settlement.
But there seems to be gaps, missing links, between generating the work and scheduling it and between finishing a field assignment and completing the financials. There should be something there to help filter out the “garbage”, help validate work plans, help learn from in-field experience and help automatically generate and reconcile financials.
These field management systems are built on the assumption that “something else” will be taking care of these parts. But what, and how, and what the best practice to link it all together is often remains unspecified, leaving service providers with fragmented, disconnected systems.
The enclosing process
This may be because many of these systems forget that field management is just a portion of the overall business of managing work.
If field management is the tip of the arrow, the pointy end of business, the fletchings on the tail end of the arrow is the work management process. It allows to aim and control the direction. Both need to work together for the service organisation to achieve its goals.
Filling in the gaps, the work management process looks like this:
The work management process is about making sure that what goes out to the field is valid, planned and approved. It’s also about reviewing the work that was done and gathering learnings from it before feeding it back into the planning stage. And it is also, importantly, about generating financials that are a direct resultant of the actual work that was done.
Most of these steps are typically done in the office, as opposed to the field, which is why many field service management systems “forget” about them or assume “something else” will take care of it.
Whereas field management is mostly about dispatchers and field agents, work management is about flowing responsibility between many back-office delegates. It’s about defining the groups of responsibility within a business (CSRs, Work Planners, Approvers, Customer Approvers, Reviewers, Billing, etc.) and allocating the right record at the right time to the right office administrator in order to ensure quality and efficiency of delivery without slowing down the process.
Work management is actually quite hard to execute well and often not as “sexy” as pure field service management – which may be another reason it’s often forgotten – but as mentioned, it is fundamental to get right in order to connect field service management into the overall enterprise framework.