FSM Software Implementation Best Practices

Enterprise software deployments are costly and complicated and come with significant risk. Gartner estimates that between 55 percent and 75 percent of ERP deployments fail to meet their objectives. In 2015, the Standish Group’s CHAOS Report claimed that just 29 percent of enterprise management information systems (MIS) projects were considered successful.

Field service management (FSM) isn’t immune to this level of disappointment. While the high rate of failure (or at least the low level of outright success) of enterprise software projects may be surprising, the underlying problem is fairly clear: organizations underestimate the effort required to prepare for the software deployment; they don’t do the proper due diligence on the quality of data or ease of system integration required; and/or they fail to properly define the scope of the project and obtain organizational support.

For field service organizations (FSOs) specifically, many organizations struggle to create and maintain complete, accurate, and consistent service operational data. They may fail to state clear operational objectives, or they don’t optimize existing processes in advance of the project. Without this preparatory work, these FSOs may fail to implement and maintain an effective FSM platform, which leads to suboptimal results across the larger organization.

In some cases, FSOs treat the input and quality of data that is needed to fuel the FSM system as an afterthought because they have incorrectly assumed that their own internal IT staff or the software vendor will manage that process for them. They may lack sufficient resources to take the proper time and attention to map current processes, validate existing data, and then help the vendor configure the new platform.