The field services industry is seamlessly entrenched in society today, as it supports the needs of – well – everyone. Whether a delicious pizza delivery on a rainy night or an electricity line repair that turns your lights back on, these businesses provide a variety of services that help you live your life.
An essential component to the success of these services is the processes that are in place to ensure the right pizza goes to the right house or the right electrical line flows energy to homes and businesses.
Despite the importance of these processes, 21% of businesses still use manual paper processes, which not only cause delays but also allow inconsistencies due to human error. By digitizing paper documents, employees can become more productive, operations more efficient and data collection easier.
SOTI Snap is a cross-platform solution that helps businesses rapidly create apps to replace paper-based processes. With it, manual processes can be upgraded to digital forms in seconds.
In this blog, we will dive deeper into the challenges the field services industry faces, the power of field service automation and our solution for you – SOTI Snap.
What Are Common Field Service Management Challenges?
There is a direct correlation between how productive employees are and how successful a field services business is. This is because the more an employee accomplishes, the more profitable revenue the business makes.
When downtime or operational inefficiency occurs, there is a significant impact on the business’ outcome. The following are specific examples of these challenges which a field services business may face:
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Time-Consuming Manual Data Entry: When businesses use paper-based processes, how is the data transferred into their backend systems like databases? Someone manually does it. Despite their best efforts, this process requires a lot of time and effort and oftentimes results in errors.
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Poor Scheduling Processes: The best way to optimize a worker’s day in the field is to schedule it most efficiently. However, if scheduling processes are out of date or manually managed, last-minute changes are difficult to make, even if they offer valuable opportunities.
For example, if an employee has completed a job, and another job becomes available nearby at the last minute, inefficient scheduling processes can't work quickly enough to identify this opportunity. Consequently, the business ends up paying more in time and resources to fulfill customers’ needs.
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Lack of Data Organization: In the field services industry, a wide range of information is required to be successful, such as customer information, employee availability, inventory and more. When this data isn’t organized effectively, lost information or errors are more likely to occur. This can result in missed jobs, costly mistakes or lack of stock, which impact the business overall.
The Impact of Field Service Automation
Now that we better understand the obstacles that are faced, we can identify the significance of a digital transformation!
With the right tools, your business can build and deploy apps that your workers use to accurately capture and share data. Instead of filling out a paper form and manually handing it in whenever possible, workers can complete a digital form that is submitted immediately, expediting the process.
Did you know the path of the digital form can be automated as well? Once filled out and submitted, a predefined workflow can guide the form to the right approver, ensuring they see it and action it to keep the approval process moving.
With these two enhancements, operations will become more efficient, customer satisfaction will improve, new revenue opportunities will present themselves and downtime will decrease.
Furthermore, the digital transformation of critical documentation, such as work orders, purchase orders, timesheets and inspection reports, shouldn’t mean the hassle of complicated, costly app development.
That’s where SOTI Snap comes into play!
Discover What SOTI Snap is Capable Of
SOTI Snap enables organizations to rapidly create apps that digitize paper documents, streamline data collection and boost worker productivity. This cross-platform solution can help field service businesses digitize manual processes and optimize their mobile device investments.
Explore the other possibilities that SOTI Snap has to offer:
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Enhance Data Accuracy: Manual data entry is time-consuming, error-prone and costly. With SOTI Snap, your business can rapidly create its own app that increases the accuracy and speed at which data is collected.
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Digitize Paper Processes: Transform your paper-based processes into a customized digital form in seconds with the help of SOTI Snap. With field service automation, you can even configure who will receive approval forms once submitted to ensure processes are efficient and forms aren’t lost or delayed.
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Increase the Speed of Approval Workflows: Approvals are essential for compliance, accuracy and customer satisfaction, yet they can become a bottleneck if misplaced or delayed. SOTI Snap allows IT Admin to add Workflows into applications that automatically notify approvers for instant visibility and quick actioning.
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Take Advantage of AI: Want to digitize a form but not sure where to start? It’s easy with SOTI Snap! Take a picture of your current form and upload it or describe the app you want. SOTI Snap features an AI function that will get you started.
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Customize Digital Forms: While AI will create a form based on your prompts, you may want to alter or improve it. That’s why SOTI Snap offers a Drag-and-Drop feature, which allows you to easily modify the form to ensure it’s exactly what you need.
Is your field services business looking for an effective way to enhance employee productivity, speed up operations and more? SOTI Snap can guide your digital transformation, allowing for improved efficiency and greater success.
For more information, reach out to us today:
