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C ritical to a field service company's success is planning for growth and being ready as an organisation with a structure designed for field service management. Field service providers are increasingly turning to specialist software, especially on a scalable SaaS basis. In most sales and mechandising sectors, readiness and scalability is an important, if not the most important, strategy for increasing sales and customer loyalty.

In sales and mechandising, field service in its simplest term is all external activities that are carried out in order to maintain relationships with customers and to offer them the company's goods or services. These include:

• Initiate, mediate and close deals
• Presentation of goods and offering of technical services
• Collect information about the market situation and hard data about the market factors

Field visits are managed by controls, planning, and specifications. Individuals' appointment and visiting routes and the activities of field resources are determined. Further elements of the control are:

• Instructions on the content and form of the order
• Definition of the number of field resources/representatives
• Order completion targets
• Employee motivation
• Development of route planning

The planning of field services can therefore become very complex and time-consuming. To save time and costs as well as to maximise profit, software for field service control as SaaS (Software as a Service) is ideal. The efficiency of a mobile workforce is increased by field service control software. At the same time, reaction times and costs are minimised.

FIELD SALES AND MERCHANDISING CONTROL WITH SAAS

Field service control with SaaS offers a company the real possibility for easier planning of upcoming orders. The software itself saves all data in a database in a ready format. It then intelligently transfers customers/accounts and their orders to the most suitable sales representative. The software issues the orders based on information about the customer and field force such as local proximity, working hours, job and qualifications of the employee as well as other restrictions.

With a SaaS solution for field service control, all employee devices can be provided with the entire knowledge, present and historic, for the respective order. In this way, employees know in a matter of seconds which job is assigned to them, what their tasks are and where they have to go. Data works both ways, and digital signatures and photos may be uploaded from the field, into the account files. A field service control with SaaS thus offers the best possible data and communication between field service employees and head office.

IMMEDIATE ADJUSTMENTS MADE EASY

In day-to-day business there can always be spontaneous changes that alter the plan and the distribution of orders. These events include, for example, the absence of an employee due to illness, customer cancellations or urgent and spontaneous orders. Such events lead to the need to change the plan quickly. The plan change must also be communicated further. This can lead to stressful situations and desperation for dispatch teams and schedulers.

Field service control with SaaS again solves this problem. The field service control software automates the relocation of the affected orders and distributes the other orders to the appropriate employees and their vehicles. This prevents spontaneous events from destroying the company's entire planning for the day or week. Thanks to this accelerated cloud-based communication, the sales representatives quickly learns of their changes and maintains a personal overview of their orders.

MORE EFFICIENT TIME MANAGEMENT THROUGH SMART ALGORITHMS

In a large company with many employees and many accounts to service, achieving optimised time management can be very complex. Software for field service control with SaaS solves these issues in the background. An intelligent SaaS solution processes information at lightning speed.

The working hours of the field staff are compared with the orders and a schedule is created. There is no overlap as the software removes hard borders (patches) in favour of an overlapping radius. Employees are assigned their orders according to their availability. Customer orders are completed in the fastest possible time. Changes can still be made manually in the database and the software automatically and quickly sets up a new schedule.

MINIMISING COSTS - MAXIMISING ORDERS

High-level advantages of field service control with SaaS can be summarised as follows: Minimising costs - maximising orders. Our platform for planning field service control, FLS VISITOUR, delivers, among other things, far fewer kilometers driven and thus a minimisation of travel, stress, and waiting times.

BETTER FIELD SERVICE MANAGEMENT WITH SOFTWARE INCREASES CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

Thanks to the optimal allocation and allocation of orders, field sales and merchandisers have to work less overtime and are kept efficient. In addition, the number of completed jobs per day is maximised. This increase in productivity and efficiency not only results in cost savings of around 20%, but also increases sales and profits. An increase in customer satisfaction contributes to future growth. Companies continues to grow and gain customers, good reviews and success.

See the results of a strong field service framework with the case studies REWE Digital and PV Automotive.