The following is a guest blog post from DeAnne Judd, Director of Retail & Logistics at ForeFront, a ServiceMax partner. For more information, visit ForeFront’s site listing in our online marketplace here.
Field service executives across industries are looking for ways to maximize productivity, customer loyalty, employee engagement and, most importantly, service revenues. If you are looking at your service organization today and trying to make decisions based on gut feelings and guesswork, it’s time to change how you approach this reactive, break-fix model and shift to an analytics-based, predictive model.
Metrics allow you to paint a clear picture of your organization in the present, so you can prioritize where you want to be in the future and determine your roadmap. Real-time visibility into these key areas creates accountability that will allow you to make informed decisions on how to maximize operational efficiency.
ForeFront provides our customers with a framework for successful ServiceMax implementations, starting with these five power metrics. (Remember, if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.)
First-Time Fix Rate
With insights into first-time fix (FTF) rates, you can learn how often your techs are getting the job done correctly, with the correct equipment and expertise, the first time. With ForeFront service accelerators, such as Help Lightning and Best Tech on Call, field service organizations are FTF and mean time to repair (MTTR) metrics, and transforming their service offering with a higher touch experience.
Warranty and Contract Leakage
Warranty leakage is the money a company loses providing services that are assumed to be covered under warranty but are not. In other words, leakage is the “free stuff” you are giving away because your technicians either don’t know, or can’t access, warranty information. By giving technicians the tools they need, such as ServiceMax mobile, they can unlock warranty information in a single click.
Service-to-Cash Cycle
This important metric is the gap between when a technician completes a job and accounting receives payment. What’s bottlenecking your invoicing? ForeFront seamlessly integrates ServiceMax to any ERP, SAP, Oracle, or other back-office systems so you can quickly uncover this revenue.
Attach Rate
Attach rate is one of those metrics that field service leaders have used to justify the implementation costs of a field service management solution. If you can move the needle by even a marginal amount, the reasoning goes, you are contributing to your service revenue and margins. Make sure that your technicians are equipped with the knowledge and soft skills to maximize potential revenue and engage customers while on-site. Many service organizations incentivize their technicians to upsell contracts, for example, since techs often have the closest relationships with customers. By rewarding this behavior, technicians become more engaged employees and deliver a better customer experience.
Uptime
When a critical piece of equipment goes down, it can mean heavy service level agreement (SLA) penalties, lost business — and even potentially dangerous situations. The key to maximizing uptime is to harness the power of machine intelligence. ForeFront specializes in Internet of Things technologies and can integrate IoT platforms and analytics with your ServiceMax instance. The benefit? You can monitor performance in real-time and get ahead of failures through smarter preventive maintenance dispatches. ForeFront’s any-to-any integration experience means that we are similarly committed to the IoT space as a vision of the future to ensure predictive, outcome-based services and solutions.
Optimization Strategies
Still tracking work orders on pen and paper? Wasting hours on admin tasks that should be simple? Consider a mobile strategy. We put the power in the hands of your field service technicians with mobile devices that allow real-time updates and information at your fingertips, as well as merged reality video available for on-the-spot support.
Automatically generate work orders, optimize dispatch routes, and utilize ForeFront’s Best Tech On Call solution to ensure you’re optimizing truck rolls and first-time fix rates. Utilize dashboards that help you visualize the overall health of your field service organization.
These metrics provide the insight to track and act on performance with true visibility into your operation, but metrics alone do not transform your service organization. It is the people and processes behind them that make the difference, which is why ForeFront provides a combination of powerful field service accelerators, industry leading insights, cross platform expertise and integration excellence, enabling you to maximize the ROI on your ServiceMax implementation.
ForeFront works smarter not harder. We leverage best practice methodologies like Agile, a more collaborative and iterative approach to quickly deliver software based on core business objectives. We also utilize our Maestro release management accelerator. Maestro is a proprietary suite of methodologies, tools and best practices for seamless Force.com release management and test automation. Our combination of field service domain expertise with integration know-how across platforms, industries and oceans translates to a best practice ServiceMax implementation that will deliver insights and help you take back control of your field service organization. Contact us today at ForeFrontcorp.com.
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