the best field service management software! and other news

While reading up on the news today in the field service industry, I found yet another example of a field services management company which is just one of many similar companies, claiming to be the “leading” company in the industry. They get away with this because “leading” doesn’t really mean anything measurable when used in that context. See for yourself. A search for “leading field service management” mentions at least 5 different companies on the first page alone. We can’t all be leaders! Personally, I believe FieldMotion deserves to be called the leading field service management because it simply is the best. Hands down. Of course, I’m biased, and “the best” is not measurable either without context, let’s be honest!
So back to the regular news, then.
An opinion piece by George Malim on Vanilla+ suggests that customer service providers in the telecoms industry are using service management software now to improve their response times to issues, which in turn helps them to improve their customer ratings and their income. In Malim’s words, “We estimate that a ten-minute reduction on each job would increase service capacity by 50,000 jobs a month and earn a potential £6m in additional revenue a year.”
Field service software is not just for the industrial sectors. Even retail sector companies are finding that they need field service management software, as shown by this article by Aneesh Reddy which talks about effective sales and brand-building. In it, he says “led by evolution, retailers are using software like field service management for before-time workforce scheduling. They are also using route optimization software for swift delivery”. Hey, we do all that!
Finally this week, the Computer Business Review was at the Knowledge 17 conference in Orlando, US, where they reported on recent developments in field service management systems and workflow management (they called it “routing work”). They found the recent addition of Dynamic Scheduling to one product to be very interesting. We demoed our own dynamic scheduler last year at a conference, so I was very interested to compare the two. Ours schedules based on the job time, location, skills required, and the engineer’s daily work hours.