You've Got to Automate to Accumulate

Aug 29, 2019 • Features • future of field service • Service Automation

Laryssa Alexander, President of ECI's Field and IT Service Division explores how field service should be automating for success.

Managing customer relationships is critical to driving growth and securing repeat business for field service organisations. CFOs are making critical financial and risk management decisions based on data secured through manual processes which result in inaccurate reporting. This lack of information or equipment knowledge can lead to poor decision-making and can often result in selling contracts that are either over-priced in order to cover unknown costs resulting in a less than favourable position against competition; or under-priced which may help you win the business but is not profitable nor sustainable.

The Value of Data

Do you know how much data your business has at its fingertips? IDC (International Data Corporation) predicts that the collective sum of the world’s data will grow from 33 zettabytes (ZB) this year to a 174 ZB by 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 61 percent. Amassing a huge amount of data is worthless if you don’t know what to do with it. A complete business management solution enables you to have more insight to make smarter, data-driven decisions. In fact, that is exactly how an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution is defined. In reality, it is so much more than that; it’s a solution that can dramatically simplify and streamline your operations so you can focus on your core business activities.

Automating Contract Management

Service contracts are at the core of your business and right now, without a complete business management solution you may be using many different solutions, doing everything manually or some combination of the two. This is where automating contact management through an ERP can come in. We have identified 4 steps to improve contract management that can help drive efficiency and profitability:

1. Standardise your contract process

The solution is to eliminate the paper trail and consolidate systems into a single ERP. This will help you prevent bottlenecks by creating standard contracts with automated approvals, renewals, and billing that can be deployed to any number of customers. Data that is entered once flows through the system and is dispersed to the various teams and departments for accuracy, optimised workflow, and increased productivity. Standardising the contract management process will result in 4 major benefits: stronger contracts, compliance and control, fast approvals and valuable business insight.

2. Provide a variety of service maintenance contract options

Once you have standardised your contract management process you can then easily allow for the inevitable variables that are unique to each customer and create more customised service contracts and options that ultimately are still profitable and fit within your desired business objectives. In most cases your customers will have complete service, support, and maintenance packages which you can easily monitor, manage, and maintain using automatic notifications and reporting. If, however they still want the option of hourly or per-service solutions you will be able to easily add them and let the system do the work so you can avoid hours of number crunching.

3. Continually monitor contract and performance

Having standardised service maintenance contracts in place doesn’t mean you can ‘sell it and forget it’ but having a robust business management solution will support every phase of the contract lifecycle from initial quoting to ongoing support and finally renewals. Ensure you enable continuous monitoring, generate regular profitability reporting and automate preventative maintenance calls at each of these stages. Additionally, at the equipment level within each service agreement you should be able to track serialised equipment on job sites, understand profitability by model or system and ensure your field technicians are fully optimising their time.

4. Be proactive with contract management

Proactive monitoring with flexible service contract arrangements allows you to protect your business from loss and address customers’ unforeseen needs and concerns as they arise. Automatically launch the renewal process with all the relevant contract performance data, accessible in one system which provides context for any negotiations or adjustments ensuring your team is prepared efficiently and effectively. This way the sales team can proactively re-engage with the customer, ward off potential competitive threats, and ideally increase customer satisfaction in the process.

Increased Visibility

Your teams don’t exist in silos, sales needs to know what service is doing and finance needs insight into both. The same is true for your business management solutions, if you’re running separate systems or working in multiple spreadsheets, you don’t have true insight in your operation. Having one integrated ERP solution means you can be confident in the data. At a glance, you will be able to know how your business is performing and will be able to make quick business decisions that will enable you to fight shrinking margins, beat your competition, and grow your business.

By collecting all data in one central place; increasing visibility and stardising the contract process with continual and automatic monitoring, field service organisations can ensure contracts are and remain profitable with limited manual intervention.

Laryssa Alexander, President of ECI's Field and IT Service Division