How scheduling conflicts can cause troubles, and how to fix them?

If you are already running a field service business then you must be all aware of the importance of scheduling and dispatching. And if you are about to set up a field service business and browsing to understand what are the key areas that you must not miss, then 'scheduling and dispatching' is one key aspect that is of extreme importance.

Inaccuracy in scheduling and dispatching can cause big issues:

In field services, scheduling the jobs or work orders among the technicians or field representatives is like the first crucial step that ensures the efficiency of the service.

Many factors related to service quality such as average first response time (FRT), timely delivery of the service, first-time fix rate, average time to resolution, etc. depend on how well the schedules are made or how accurately the jobs are distributed among the service team.  

Poorly made schedules can cause issues like duplicate schedules or overlapped schedules that waste the time of the technicians and leads to revenue leaks.

The service manager requires committing a service time to his clients, and these commitments are made based on the availability of the schedule slots. But if the workforce fails to stick to the schedule then there occurs a delay in service and then new schedule commitments are made with inaccuracy. This offends the clients and also tarnishes the company’s brand reputation.

How scheduling conflicts can be fixed?

Making field job schedules is not a random job, because that way there will always be scheduling conflicts. Schedules need to be calculative, which requires assessing too many aspects. Also, there are always an emergency and ad-hoc situations that disturb the pre-done schedules, so it is quite common to have scenarios where schedules need to be redone to make adjustments. Thus, the best way to manage the field workforce schedules is to use automation facilitated by field service scheduling software. These software suites are designed for field workforce management, and scheduling is one of its prime features.

How field scheduling software automates the scheduling process

1. The field scheduling software is powered by technologies like GPS, time stamping, data mining, etc. Thus, before making the schedules, the software runs an automatic assessment of information like the existing schedules of the technicians and ensures that no newly made schedules conflict with the pre-existing schedules.

2. The software very well tackles the issues of which technicians should be scheduled with which job. The service scheduling software checks the criteria like the availability of the technicians considering their pre-commitments, it checks their time stamps to presume when they are likely to finish their exiting job, it also checks the job-site location proximity of each technician by tracking their live locations, and also assess the skill sets of the technicians. This way the software ensures that a job is always scheduled to the nearest available and rightly skilled technician so that the technician can reach the job site at the earliest.

3. This feature of the software also helps a lot during emergency service requests, as that way the manager or dispatcher can quickly check who is the nearest available technician, make adjustments in the schedule calendar if necessary. And all these can be done from a single dashboard, using simple drag and drop methods or a few clicks.

Conclusion

Scheduling made with the aid of field service scheduling software is way more time shaving and efficient compared to the old school ways, where before making any schedules, the service managers or dispatchers needed to make several calls to the multiple technicians checking their availability and location proximity to the next job site. While the software-enabled automated scheduling is smart, quick and accurate. It helps the workforce to be more productive in their jobs.