Service Management: Cut Costs Without Cutting Revenue

By Sarah Howland, Integrated Solutions magazine

Can you imagine the many challenges you'd face managing a mobile field service workforce that receives its daily schedules via fax, takes handwritten notes on physical log books while at customer sites, and calls in to dispatch for historical customer data? Chances are these manual tasks seem obsolete to those of us who are accustomed to the convenience of today's technology and the real-time access to information it allows. However, in reality, there are a large number of service organizations today that are still using such manual processes in the field. According to Aberdeen Group, only 23% of firms in the service industry have a mobile field service extension to their service management system. This means that while these companies may be managing data on the back end, there is no real-time data communication with the workers in the field. With all of the technology options available today to provide real-time data to mobile workers and automate these manual processes, why aren't more service companies taking advantage of them? In Aberdeen Group's 2009 Trends In Mobile Field Service survey, 31% of companies listed limited perceived value/lack of ROI as a challenge to mobile solution adoption. While this perception may very well exist within the service industry, CMS Mechanical is one company that proves that perception to be entirely inaccurate.

Used with permission from Integrated Solutions magazine.