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As we conclude our series of excerpts from the exceptional industry guide 'Mobile Resource Management for Dummies', which has been commissioned by Verizon Connect we bring you ten benefits Mobile Resource Management (MRM) can bring to your business.

Is Mobile Resource Management a key Topic for you?! Dive straight into the full eBook by hitting the button below!    

 

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If you have missed any of the other excerpts within this series you can catch up on the other topics we've explored which include: Understanding Digital Transformation in a Connected, Mobile World  also Thinking Outside the Silo and Harnessing the Power of Telematics,  Realising the Value of Mobile Resource Management and Avoiding Mobile Resource Management Pitfalls and Driving Employee Engagement with Gamification

However, the eBook contains a wealth of other key chapters offering important insight for any field service professional and we advise downloading the full eBook on either of the links at the top and bottom of the page...

 

Cloud-based MRM solutions can help your business to achieve numerous benefits: lower fuel costs, improved driver safety, better fleet utilisation, increased worker productivity, proactive maintenance and enhanced customer experience to name a few.

But the benefits to other areas of a company may not be as obvious. A comprehensive MRM solution can deliver benefits to many departments and roles within a company, including increasing return on investment (ROI) and lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO) of mobile assets, improving productivity, increasing business agility and achieving competitive advantage.

By connecting vehicles, mobile assets, people and work, MRM gives the organisation the insight, agility and customer experience to stop lagging behind competitors and lead the market – to not just succeed but thrive.

In this way, MRM can transform the way the organisation does business.

So let's explore a few of the benefits experienced across various areas within the organisation.

 

#1 Operations:

An MRM solution provides operations managers with the tools they need to be able to plan for the day, week, month and year ahead. It gives complete visibility into everything that’s on-the-go so that teams can help to control running costs, streamline operations, optimise current assets and staff, make the most of the customer experience, and ensure compliance with all safety standards and regulatory mandates. It provides the data to help to plan for the future as companies look to grow and advance.

You need a broad platform approach to help automate manual processes, ensure consistency and efficiency throughout all operations and know that it’s all working. You need to be responsive and agile to customer demands. A negative customer experience damages you, your operation and the company as a whole. Organisations all live and die on the efficiency of the operation, and you need to introduce new services quickly and cost-effectively to meet the fast-changing expectations of customers.

 

#2 Fleet Management:

MRM programs can keep fleets in the best shape possible by reducing management and maintenance costs, creating proactive maintenance alerts, and opening a direct connection to maintenance providers. An MRM solution can also help to optimise the way the organisation uses its fleet, with planning tools that help to ensure that the right number and type of mobile resources are assigned to the right jobs, people and vehicles.

 

#3 Information Technology:

Through the use of an MRM solution, IT can access the data it needs to support the optimisation and automation of work and cash flows across the organisation. A cloud-based MRM solution also means fewer systems for IT to maintain, easier integration without the need to create and maintain application programming interfaces (APIs), faster deployment in the cloud, and simpler management of a single platform.

An MRM solution allows the team to enable and secure the collection of operational data from vehicles and drivers, and integrate that data with other applications for complete operations visibility.

 

#4 Making Safety a Priority:

An MRM solution can help businesses to make safety a priority by monitoring mobile resources such as construction tools, cherry pickers, cranes, and other heavy equipment to ensure that they’re being properly operated and maintained.

An MRM solution can also help management to create safer driving behaviours, such as avoiding speeding and harsh braking, through the use of driver scorecards and coaching tools, monitoring seatbelt usage, and providing accident notifications with airbag deployment alerts, along with in-cab alerts and live reporting. It can also help the team to reduce the possibility of accidents by optimising drivers’ routes and cutting out unnecessary travel. Finally, an MRM solution can help drivers with regulatory compliance.

 

#5 Risk Management:

With MRM, risk management teams have the ability to ensure regulatory and policy compliance in vehicles and demonstrate a mobile duty of care.

By identifying unsafe driving behaviour, providing insights into accident or damage claims, mitigating fleet liability risks, and protecting against potential fraud, theft and supervisory negligence claims, businesses can reduce risk due to consequential losses.

In other words, MRM software is the eyes and ears to ensure the on-the-go organisation is running as smoothly as possible, and provides peace of mind for business owners and directors, as MRM insights allow for greater control and measurement of key compliance and safety legislation.

#6 Sales and Customer Relations:

An MRM solution helps to give sales and customer relations one of the very best outcomes possible – more on-time service calls, deliveries and appointments, and better customer estimated time of arrival (ETA) visibility. That, in turn, creates long-term fans and brand advocates who’ll come back again and again.

 

#7 Human Resources:

Human resources can use an enterprise fleet management solution to gain a near real-time connection to all on-the-go employees. Whether it’s visibility, near real-time coaching, training or helping drivers to hit more of their targets by being more efficient, an MRM software solution gives human resources the tools they need to make employees even better.

 

#8 Tax Recordkeeping:

An MRM solution includes driver apps, simplifying the classification of business and personal journeys. This helps to reduce administration time and produces mileage reporting in an HMRC- ready format. MRM solutions can also control routes, helping to avoid road tolls.

 

#9 Payroll:

By making aspects like miles and hours driven, hours on site, and time from clock-in to departure easy to measure, and by moving from paper to electronic timesheets, an MRM solution helps payroll to perform more efficiently.

MRM helps you to better manage wage bills by matching the right skill to the right job, rather than sending overqualified staff to easier, low-level jobs. An MRM solution can also help you to manage labour distribution efficiently so that you can assign jobs to less utilised employees earning standard time, rather than employees earning overtime for a given pay period, when possible. And when payroll is more efficient, salaries and payments go out on time – which makes everybody happy.

 

#10 Finance:

An MRM solution improves cash flow and speeds up billing, by helping the finance department to speed up all payment and processing operations, as well as reduce invoice and settlement disputes. Financial reporting is also faster with easy-to-create and distribute reports that demonstrate savings and productivity throughout the organisation. This is possible because an MRM program can help to automate the entire workflow – moving from paper to digital.

Want to know more? The full eBook is available as premium content to fieldservicenews.com subscribers. Access it now on the button below... 

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Our series of excerpts from the exceptional industry guide 'Mobile Resource Management for Dummies', which has been commissioned by Verizon Connect has so far explored Understanding Digital Transformation in a Connected, Mobile World and also Thinking Outside the Silo and Harnessing the Power of Telematics.

Now in this latest excerpt, we turn our attention to how field service organisations can realise the value of mobile resource management...

Is Mobile Resource Management a key Topic for you?! Dive straight into the full eBook by hitting the button below!   

Sponsored by:

Data usage note: By accessing this content you consent to the contact details submitted when you registered as a subscriber to fieldservicenews.com to be shared with the listed sponsor of this premium content who may contact you for legitimate business reasons to discuss the content of this content.  

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If you need to catch up on the previous articles in this series you can find part one here and part two here...

The full chapter this excerpt is taken from explores four key areas how field service companies can ensure they are realising the value of mobile resource management which are:

• Driving Productivity and Efficiency
• Reducing Costs
• Improving Safety
• Increasing Customer Satisfaction

Here we will look at the first of these in greater depth.

 

Driving Productivity and Efficiency:

Productivity, a word loved by managers, is conversely often a word that has frightened many an employee. To them, it just sounds like more work and an opportunity for supervisors to be looking over their shoulders.

But increasing productivity isn’t about being a drill sergeant. Rather, it’s about empowering your team, boosting efficiency and helping – not telling – your employees how to better spend their time.

The fact is that an employee who goes home at the end of the day feeling like they’ve been productive and accomplished a lot is happier and more fulfilled than the not-so-productive employee who’s always looking to pass off work in favour of knocking off early.

In addition to improving worker productivity, there are some other positive and far-reaching benefits to using the right tools with your mobile workforce.

These include:

• Less time spent on non-profitable administrative tasks such as data entry, tracking compliance and paperwork
• Faster processing of compliance requirements such as vehicle inspections.
• Less time spent on paper-based compliance logs for technicians and drivers.
• Quicker and more accurate generation of near real-time service reports.
• Improved customer service and capturing of client data for more effective management of support tickets, sales calls and marketing campaigns.
• Lower hardware costs and easier deployment using the mobile devices your team’s already carrying.

Several opportunities for driving productivity and efficiency in a modern mobile workforce include:

• Streamline work order management.
• Make paper forms disappear.
• Automate regulatory compliance.
• Perform required pre- and post-trip vehicle inspections.

 

Streamline work order management

Keeping teams in the field at their most productive is easy with prioritised mobile job management. Scheduled jobs are provided directly to the worker’s device at the start of their shift.

You can prioritise jobs based on:

• Location
• Proximity to the technician
• Service-level agreements (SLAs), such as time window restrictions on when the job can be done
• Manual overrides

Jobs can be signed on the device by customers and automatically marked as completed on departure and transmitted back to base in near real time. Or, conversely, any issues can be immediately reported back to the office for timely review and resolution.

This means less non-productive time for teams outside the office, fewer miles, more productive time on the clock and better customer service. Mobile job management keeps both workers and customers happy.

 

Make paper forms disappear

Getting your teams to keep their paperwork up-to-date is never easy, but it’s crucial to your service operation. Automation of forms on a mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet, can be a huge time saver for your business.

Paperless forms help you to:

• Log the right information on the right form at the right time
• Keep job history accurate
• Update customer records or government compliance
• Automate the process so that correct invoices are raised automatically (adding to the bottom line)
• Ensure that internal reports and dashboards are current

To improve the accuracy and timing of required paperwork, mobile automated forms are a crucial tool for today’s mobile worker. The impact of reducing the paperwork burden on your drivers and field workers can also improve employee retention.

Electronic forms also save time and reduce errors for your back-office staff who no longer need to decode handwriting from paper forms and manually enter it into the system. All the job information gets saved directly into the database from the driver or field worker’s connected device.

 

Automate regulatory compliance

For any company with a fleet of vehicles, government regulations are a cost of doing business. If you don’t have the right tools in place to comply with these regulations, your company can quickly find itself in hot water.

Automating your compliance processes can help to:

• Reduce workload
• Lessen audit risk
• Ensure that compliance is being met – correctly.
• Minimise fines and violations.

 

The best way to consistently remain compliant is by using a mobile workforce management solution. Not only does it take the guesswork out of deciphering rules and regulations, but it also speeds up roadside inspections due to the device being used for evidence of driver activity without the need to wade through paper logs.

The solution stores your drivers’ activities by recording on-duty, off-duty, sleeping, and driving events, and displays available duty hours.

This helps to streamline operations and eliminate paperwork. With a mobile workforce management solution, each driver is given a Driver ID, which is critical for not only reporting but also serving as a mobile time card.

 

Perform required pre- and post-trip vehicle inspections

Does your company require mobile workers to perform driver vehicle inspection reports (DVIRs)? Are you looking for ways to automate these reports and make sure that drivers complete them accurately?

DVIRs are commonly overlooked or completed without physically inspecting the vehicle, increasing the chance of fines for non- compliance, breakdowns or even accidents due to missed maintenance and malfunctioning safety features.

With a mobile DVIR solution, you can get immediate confirmation that the report has been completed and the driver did a physical walk-around inspection.

Using their handheld device, drivers scan a two-dimensional Quick Response (QR) code affixed to specific vehicle inspection points. This instantly verifies that the individual checkpoints on the DVIR have been completed. You can also add photos to the report when any damage or maintenance issue is identified.

  

Want to know more? The full eBook is available as premium content to fieldservicenews.com subscribers. Access it now on the button below... 

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Sponsored by:

 

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Data usage note: By accessing this content you consent to the contact details submitted when you registered as a subscriber to fieldservicenews.com to be shared with the listed sponsor of this premium content who may contact you for legitimate business reasons to discuss the content of this content.  

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