Field service management – What solutions for SMEs-SMIs?

Long the preserve of large companies, on-site service call planning and optimization software products are opening up to SMEs-SMIs. Find out how they can help your company rise to the main challenges now facing it.

A few years ago, only large companies were able to afford to equip their mobile teams with planning and optimization software dedicated to their specific activities – sales forces, delivery personnel, installation and maintenance technicians, field experts, diagnosticians, etc. Indeed, the configuration, integration, deployment, and maintenance of these software products required technical skills that very few small organizations were able to afford, at least with any hope of a return on investment within a reasonable timeframe.

What is an optimization solution for?

The new Field Service Management (FSM) solutions have now fortunately consigned this era to the past! Now, SMEs-SMIs as well can:

• Maximize their field operatives’ useful time and productivity, thanks to better operational planning, routes that minimize mileage between service calls/visits, to mobile business applications that give them access to all the information and tools they need to achieve their missions and reduce time spent on administrative tasks.
• Increase the company’s vehicle utilization rate(company cars, service vehicles, delivery trucks) or even reduce their number (along with the associated insurance and maintenance costs) by rationalizing routes.
• Improve the quality of the service provided to their customers, by adhering to communicated times, better preparation of service calls, and by assigning jobs to operatives with the relevant individual skillsets.

In an inflationary environment in which cost management is more than ever a condition of survival, new generation optimization software products give SMEs-SMIs the wherewithal to “do more with less”. How? By quickly delivering savings of between 15% and 30% on their fuel expenditure and productivity increases of the same magnitude. After all, it would be a crying shame to restrict this privilege only to large companies!

The benefits of a turnkey and business-orientated optimization solution

Thanks to developments in the product offering of specialist publishers and the ubiquity of SaaS distribution, there is no longer any reason for an SME or SMI to deprive itself of what an optimization solution has to offer:

• Hosted in the cloud, these software products no longer need to be installed on-site – Farewell the need for dedicated servers and sufficiently large IT teams to manage them, supervise production, and perform the indispensable updates and other maintenance operations. These tasks are taken on by the publisher who also guarantees the applications’ availability and the protection of the associated data.

>> Your co-workers are always using the latest version of the software.

>> Your company automatically benefits from functional improvements and enhancements provided by the publisher to address the emerging problems and needs of a large user community.

• Designed to be used directly by operational teams, the new FSM solutions, such as Nomadia’s Opti-Time Field Service, incorporate the know-how, terminology and logic specific to your business.

Because salesforce problems are different from those of delivery personnel and installation or maintenance technicians, Nomadia has chosen to tailor its route planning and optimization software products to each of these major activities. Addressing the main use scenarios, they are easy to learn and all the quicker to deploy as they avoid you having to resort to bespoke developments that are as expensive to deliver as they are slow to provide a return on investment in the context of a small organization. On the other hand, customizing them is simplicity itself!

>> Instead of calling on outside skills to tailor your solution to the specifics of your company and your field activities, you yourself configure the features, the values and the weighting of the criteria you want to prioritize.

>> Because you have neither the time nor resources to “do the same things over and over again”, your configuration and customization settings are preserved during updates.

>> To enable your co-workers to master their new work tool quickly, our software features an intelligent dynamic help function which provides step-by-step guidance as you discover and make best use of the available features.

• Finally, our SaaS software products’ modular design enables you to pay only for the features your teams need and to fast track your optimization solution, both in terms of the number of users and the product’s functional coverage of your needs, and of integration with your other business tools.

Intelligent optimization is no longer the prerogative of big companies!

The field operations management needs of small and medium enterprises are fundamentally the same as those of large organizations: in all cases the challenge is to organize field service by professionals both in space and time and to give those professionals the means of efficiently executing their mission, with everything that mobility situations imply in terms of constraints and hazards. This supposes the inclusion of numerous parameters and variables: distances, travel times, service call durations, customers’ locations/call-out locations, contractual service levels, vehicle categories and, of course, the number of co-workers, their respective skills, and workloads.

Our software optimization algorithms are designed to create balanced schedules and calculate optimal routes while factoring in all these criteria yet sparing you the complexity. Moreover, once configured, they do it in the blink of an eye whereas currently you take hours and hours to arrive at a satisfactory result in Excel. Our dedicated SME-SMI solutions immediately confer on you the benefits of intelligent optimization and enable you to fight using the same weapons as do large companies – without spending hours and thousands of euros you do not have on training and bespoke developments.

>> As a result, your company will have more calls per co-worker, less time spent on the road, better customer service, fuel savings and, because your SME also has environmental targets, lower CO₂ emissions.

Do you find it hard to believe this is possible? Book an appointment now for a demo!