Application Brief: The Motorola ES400: Transform Field Sales And Field Service Workers From Informed To Empowered

Your field workforce spends the most time with your most valuable asset — your customers. Regardless of whether this workforce is involved in field service or field sales, the quality of their interaction with your customers, their on-the-job productivity and the efficiency of the overall field service operation has a direct impact on the health of your business. It is the level of service they provide that will lead to customer satisfaction and retention — or dissatisfaction and attrition. And inefficiencies in these business units drives the cost of a field visit up, directly impacting your margins and your profitability.

If these workers spend the day out in the field disconnected from your core business systems, they must act as the link between your customer sites and your business applications, forced to collect information on paper that must then be entered into the computer at a later time. Data must be touched twice, inserting time and the opportunity for errors into your business processes. The lag time between when information is collected, entered and visible in your computer systems impacts the accuracy of other critical business initiatives, from demand forecasting to production line scheduling and inventory management. In addition, your mobile workforce and your vehicle fleet are two of your most expensive assets. Without a real-time connection to this field workforce, supervisors cannot monitor the location of these mobile workers or the disposition of work orders and sales calls — information required to best manage customer service levels and control the costs of these business divisions.