The construction services industry technology stack has remained largely unchanged over the past twenty years. General construction and engineering companies usually employ project management software and programs to manage end-to-end projects.
On the other hand, for the businesses that provide services to construction and engineering companies, they need a different type of solution to manage the many day-to-day activities across their field operations. Today’s construction and engineering service businesses are turning to field service automation technology to help gain better control over their activities.
Field service automation software, like Field Squared, enables service businesses with overly complex processes, as well as their mobile workforce of technicians, contractors and continent labor pool, to do everything they need within an all-in-one software. This means they gain visibility across every facet of their service operations—field service, assets and mobile workforce—within a single pane of glass.
In this post, I present how to effectively utilize field service operations automation software in construction services. Keep in mind this applies to other industries, including engineering services as well as industrial services providers.
Construction services is notorious for dirty, disorganized work. In fact, one of the leading reasons customers reach out to us is because they simply want to be able to track assets, trucks, parts, and equipment. Loss prevention is another related reason for employing field service automation to surface the location of these things.
Today’s technology is ever-more advanced, providing construction services with real-time asset tracking solutions.
For instance, we recently talked with a construction and industrial services business that needed the ability to track their fleet of trucks and mobile technicians. At the time, they had zero visibility into the who, what, where and when of their service operations.
By applying field service automation, tracking technicians, assets and trucks in real-time is effortless as well as a no-brainer.
The nature of construction is always having a project—or two or three or four—in various stages of progress, at the same time. Beyond that, we’ve found many of the construction services customers we interact with need to continuously bid on new projects.
One of the most time-consuming tasks for construction services field technicians that aid in the process of bringing in new business is what we call the quote-accept-complete cycle. Paper processes make it thrice as difficult, but even lack of the right technology solutions has the potential to slow the process down further.
Starting with your own quote form, but digital, adding in a dash of automated email notification to the customer you’re quoting, sprinkling in their approval signature (and anyone else that needs to sign off on the new project) and then automating the approved quote process back to your home office.
Now, you start the work. It’s that simple.
Routine jobs are commonplace across the construction and engineering services industry. Sometimes, the act of scheduling a service is overly complicated when factoring in all the things that need to get done at the job site.
For instance, what seems like a simple maintenance job turns into a much larger project given inventory, staffing, and asset constraints. Spreadsheets can’t handle this type of situation. Moreover, if you don’t have an asset registry or inventory management solution, you lack the much-needed capabilities to attach them directly to a job site when scheduling the work.
Whether it’s installations, maintenance or repairs, disposal operations, heavy equipment services, or practically any other type of work a construction services business conducts, field service automation scheduling solutions take on the heavy lifting of coordinating it all. Enter the inputs and the automation engine takes over. This is particularly useful in the case of recurring maintenance work.
Some field service automation software, Field Squared for instance, can propose routes via route optimization, reducing drive time.
No two days are alike in the construction services industry. Actually, no two businesses are alike either. Generally speaking, however, from small to enterprise construction services businesses they face the same challenges as it relates to lack of visibility across their field operations.
Many service businesses maintain a large, distributed mobile workforce, sometimes spread across multiple states. Combine that with assets, inventory and equipment, and you get a recipe begging for organization.
Field service automation helps construction services providers gain a global, consolidated view across their entire service operations.
In the case of Field Squared, operations managers/executives, project managers/directors, division managers, and supervisors leverage scheduling, mapping, technician tracking, reporting, field communication and asset management capabilities via a web application. This allows the operations leadership to centrally manage everything in real-time.
The reality is, mobile forms are only one factor in the overarching goal to digitally transform your entire field service operations. Watch the 60-second video to see how Field Squared works.