Data-Driven Decision Making: Leveraging Field Service Analytics to Improve Your Business Efficiency

Data-driven decision-making is a buzzword that has become prominent in all forms of business types, and the world of field service management is no different. At its core it means that your business should be using easy-to-access field service analytics and data to drive informed decisions about how your business operates. Often this conversation is focused on top-level metrics like profitability, but the reality is a data-driven approach can revolutionise not just your bottom-line, but also the business processes you rely on day in and day out.

How can data-driven decision-making help your field service business?

If you’re serious about using field service analytics to drive data-driven decision-making in your business, you need to look at how to embed the concept throughout your entire business. Traditional focuses for data-driven decision-making tend to focus on areas such as top-level business performance, but the truth is that you can bring that approach into your day-to-day operations if you have the right software in place to give you access to the analytics.

What does field service analytics in day-to-day operations look like?

At the heart of driving decision-making via field service analytics is field service management software. With a cloud-based field service management software in place, both your field team and your office staff will be able to provide live updates to various systems and databases, allowing you to have access to live analytics data to drive your operational decision-making.

Examples of how field service analytics can affect day-to-day operations

1) Route Optimisation

With field service management software in place, your office team will be able to leverage the analytical data to identify the most effective job scheduling and route optimisation for your field service team. Taking live analytical data such as location, traffic & job priority, your team can make informed decisions, driven by the analytics, on who to assign and manage the jobs that need to be completed.

2) Inventory Management

Live analytical data for your stock control and inventory management systems is an essential part of any field service business. Without it you end up creating artificial blockages in the work pipeline as the inventory and stock needed to complete jobs get assigned and used without people knowing what’s been taken, resulting in an increased risk of jobs having delayed completions because necessary parts aren’t available.

With a proper field service analytics set up though, you can ensure that both your office and field teams have access to a live feed of stock information, allowing your field team to set customer expectations at the correct level and enabling your office team to act swiftly to rectify any shortages of parts.

These are just two important examples of how analytics can impact the day-to-day operations of your business, but the true power of data-driven decision making comes at the top-level of decision making in your business.

Examples of how field service analytics can affect top level decision making.

1) Performance Tracking

With the correct field service management software installation in place, you’ll be able to gain access to a range of analytical data streams that can show you how well your business is doing across a range of common metrics. These include areas such as:

• Response times
• First-time-fix rates
• Engineer and contractor productivity
• Customer Satisfaction

Access to this data means that you can see where your teams are struggling, and you can deep dive into why you have problems and build out approaches on how to fix them with analytics as the cornerstone of your approach. Additionally, it will show you where your business is excelling and where to focus more attention to.

2) Resource Allocation & Availability

Often, there is a need to assign a field engineer or contractor to a job that has a specific skillset or qualification requirement. This can add additional levels of complexity to your job management approach and can cause issues if there are not enough qualified engineers or team members to allocate to a job.

With a full set of accessible field service analytics, not only will it make it easier for your office team to assign properly qualified engineers to the right job, to also access details about how often, and how long these sorts of jobs take. You can then decide whether you need to acquire additional resources for your team by hiring more qualified engineers, or, by upskilling your current team to become qualified in new areas.

3) Cost Analysis

At the heart of any business is the desire to drive increased profits. Often, there are hidden costs that impact the daily operations of a business, and these costs can hinder the efficiency of your operations, if you don’t have the ability to identify them through high-quality field service analytics.

By using field service management software, you can identify the hidden areas where you’re losing money, by accessing expense analysis related to labour, equipment costs, cost for parts and of course the cost of travel.

With access to this data, you’ll be able to build out a range of action plans to lower your costs across all these areas, allowing you to control your expenditure and increase the profitability of your business, all through the power of having access to your analytics.

As you can see there’s a lot of benefits to having access to your field service analytics, but getting that access means you need to have a full cloud-based field service management software installation to enable you to track and report on your analytics. If you’re looking to get field service management software, or to change your software provider, then you can book a demo of our platform. Make sure to ask them about our analytics, reporting and dashboard functionality.