Field Service Operations Best Practices for Safety and Success

Whether a business employs technicians to install and repair HVAC systems or mobile home healthcare workers looking after patients in their own homes, managing mobile workers in field service operations involves a lot of competing factors. There’s a lot to juggle, between personnel schedules, issue assignments, equipment, contingency plans, and above all, ensuring satisfied customers and clients. Field service operations best practices can fall to the wayside in the chaos, if your organization isn’t careful.

Sometimes, it may feel like your company’s commitment to providing fast, effective service takes precedence over employee productivity and employee satisfaction, but we’ll tell you a secret—they’re actually one and the same! Taking the time to study and optimize processes can help your business accomplish both goals. In this article, CompanyMileage has compiled some field service operations best practices to help you get started. 

Best Practices for Every Operation

A wide variety of roles within a wide variety of industries fall under the umbrella of field service. Despite the range of applications, though, many practices can be universally beneficial. 

The Role of Data: Collection, Analysis, & KPIs

Continuous advancements in technology have made a lot more data a lot more readily available to companies, giving them insight into operations, as well as spotlighting potential areas for improvement. Such information includes, but is not limited to, data on the behavior of field workers, delivery service speeds, time spent at each visit, and safety incidents. It’s now easier than ever before to use this information to break down your system to identify bottlenecks, areas of waste, and trends, such as seasonality. 

Use the data available to your organization to choose key performance indicators, or KPIs. KPIs are quantifiable metrics that can provide teams with targets and milestones to gauge success and set goals over time. For example, KPIs to measure safety may include data on workplace incidents or near-misses, or amounts spent on fuel or employee travel to measure costs. 

The more information your business collects and thoroughly analyzes, the better-equipped you are to make the right decisions. If you’ve forgone a closer look at your operations under the belief that you know all there is to know about the goings-on of your mobile employees, we recommend you utilize time and resources to investigate. You may be surprised at what you find. 

Communication and Mobile Tools 

One of the field service operations best practices that can’t be ignored: The importance of clear and consistent communication! In-field communication goes beyond simply phone calls, texts, and emails, although these are definitely helpful resources. It may be time to go one step further and invest in cloud-based software solutions with centralized mobile apps. 

These solutions offer real-time, on-the-go communication for workers, in and out of the field. The utilization of mobile tools also eliminates the need for time-consuming, wasteful physical paperwork. Instead, employees will have digital access to policies, handbooks, manuals, forms, and other materials they may need, while cutting down on the materials they have to cart with them from appointment to appointment.

In order to fully implement one of the most important field service operations best practices within your company, you need to assess what support workers actually need in the field and look into the kinds of apps and software that can meet those needs.

Managing Resources

‘“Resources,” in the context of field service, constitute everything an organization needs to deliver its services. Resources may include the employees themselves, equipment such as tools or personal protective equipment (PPE), vehicles, and much more. Failing to accurately account for the whereabouts of this equipment, even something as seemingly trivial as gloves, can prevent or delay the successful delivery of service. Therefore, it’s vital that your organization have a method for keeping track of all of these moving parts. 

Resource management is another facet of mobile field work where field service operations best practices can—and should—utilize digital systems. These systems facilitate accurate and up-to-date inventory forecasting and proactive restocking. Automating administrative processes such as forms, expenses, maintenance logs, and vehicle upkeep also help businesses manage equipment without putting additional stress on their workforce.

Scheduling, Dispatching, and Route Optimization

Mismanagement isn’t a risk that’s limited to just equipment! A lot of things can get lost amid the fast-paced activities of your workplace: PTO requests, reimbursement forms, expense reports—the list goes on. Losing sight of one element has the potential to throw everything else off. But if you know where your expenses, personnel, and other resources are at all times, you’ll minimize scheduling mishaps, improve customer satisfaction, increase productivity, and save precious time.

Consider implementing smart scheduling across skills, locations, and equipment availability to streamline and synchronize operations. Scheduling systems can also track routes, arrival times and other data, providing valuable visibility into field operations. This streamlining can extend as well to planning and optimizing routes for employees who need to drive between multiple locations over the course of their workdays. Using algorithms to calculate best routes can minimize travel time, reduce costs, and shorten response times between service deliveries. 

Safety Oversight

Another of the more crucial field service operations best practices is comprehensive safety management. Monitor and inform employees of the most common hazards they will face in the field, whether those be falls, machinery incidents, or exposure to chemicals. 

Use available information on these hazards and the danger they pose workers to institute a safety management program. Include regular risk assessments of common field hazards, and the creation and distribution of standard procedures for safe field operations. Be sure to solicit regular input on these procedures from employees, creating a continuous cycle of feedback to help monitor and consistently improve safety performance. 

Leveraging technology can enable a greater focus on safety in your organization’s field operations. Interactive equipment checklists, geo-fencing, and real-time monitoring of employees can help promote and secure worker safety.

Emergency and Contingency Planning 

It’s impossible to plan for every circumstance, but it’s still possible to plan ahead! With enough data and analysis of your operations, your organization should be able to predict some events with accuracy, and prepare months in advance. For example, resource capacity planning will help determine if your company has sufficient resources and employees necessary to complete any task. 

Capacity planning is also useful for anticipating peak and backup coverage. Make sure to have oversight and access to backup resources, including replacement personnel, spare parts, and emergency kits at all times. Running regular data-driven simulations of emergency situations can assist your organization in anticipating and avoiding failure scenarios, while obtaining a better understanding of when and how to dispatch backup. 

Regular maintenance is a vital and underlooked way to prevent service failure in emergency or contingency scenarios. Field service operations tend to be designed around reacting to problems after they occur, but by tracking services and scheduling regular “checkups,” your company can reduce the frequency and severity of emergencies, stay in control, and improve satisfaction on all sides. 

The Missing Link in Field Service Operations Best Practices

The final step in competent management and oversight of workers and their operations in the field is finding and utilizing the right digital workforce tools. With CompanyMileage, fill the missing link in your mobile employee mileage reimbursement processes with an intuitive, easy-to-use automated software solution. 

SureMileage by CompanyMileage takes a novel approach to logging and reimbursing mobile employees’ work-related travel. Rather than verifying the miles that were driven, SureMileage has employees enter the start and end locations of each work trip, then calculates the expenses to be reimbursed based on the most expedient route between those two points. This method, called point-to-point calculation, optimizes route planning while eliminating the risk that inflated mileage estimates or personal travel will make their way into expense reports. 

Our mobile app, SureMobile, makes it fast and easy for employees to organize trip data while-on-the-go, even letting workers submit expense reports directly from their phones. SureMobile also offers employees the ability to log travel info with the literal tap of a button using our QuickCapture feature. Additionally its Integrated Address Books can save client information in real time and be populated with workers’ current client lists. 

Mileage reimbursement doesn’t stop with mileage logs or report submission, and neither does our software. Once expense reports are submitted, they move through a digital approval workflow, which is easily configurable to meet the needs of your organization. Our systems also integrate with all major accounting and approval software, ensuring a seamless process from start to finish. 

There are many field service operations best practices you should adopt for the benefit of your employees and customers, and CompanyMileage is one of them! Our customers have seen up to 30% reduction in reimbursement costs. With no setup fee, and the first two months of service free, why not try and secure these savings for your business? 

To find out more, contact us for a demo today.