Three Reasons Why Optimized Field Service Routes Can Help Overcome Economic Pressures

By Rashid Abdur-Rahman, Head of Industry Solutions, Zuper

Today’s field service teams face more pressure and challenges than ever before. Due to circumstances completely outside their control, ranging from the long-tail effects of the Covid-19 pandemic to rising fuel costs driven by war in Ukraine, field service teams must find new ways to maintain profit margins and employee well-being. Operational efficiency is crucial: the more field service teams can derive value from their people and equipment, the better chance they have at surviving and thriving during an extended period of uncertainty.

Thankfully, field service teams also have access to more tools and solutions than ever before. Before the era of digital transformation, team leaders had to rely on assumptions and manual organization to plan their operations and improve overall efficiency. But with the rise of software platforms and artificial intelligence, field service teams can now plug their information into a dedicated system and use the resulting recommendations to inform their routes and schedules.

The currency and lifeblood for these technological innovations is data. By ingesting everything from customer addresses to equipment specifications to employee schedules to assignments, field service workforce management solutions deliver recommendations that are backed by clear, unimpeachable data. What’s more, these recommendations can be constantly refined and improved: using GPS sensors on company equipment or employee mobile devices, AI-backed algorithms can steadily enhance their analysis and help the company reach more ambitious goals.