Tracking Time is Important in Field Services Organizations

In a field services organization, such as companies in the utilities industry, telecoms, or even healthcare, employees are dispatched into the field on “jobs” to deliver services to clients (which generally include repairs, installations, or in case of healthcare, in-home care).

When it comes to field service management (FSM), companies must be able to manage several key requirements and resources, including:

• Employee productivity: employees in the field can be difficult to monitor, and their time is extremely valuable to the company. Measuring their productivity utilization (productive time vs. total hours worked) can greatly increase their efficiency and reduce costs.
• Job profitability: similar to a professional services or consulting environment, the time spent on service/work orders or jobs needs to be tracked to determine your job costs. Understanding your costs will help drive profitability.
• Equipment: How, when, and IF industrial equipment is being used – expensive equipment that sits idle can end up costing the company thousands, or even millions.

Driving Field Services Profitability

To drive the profitability and success of the company, most field services organizations are understandably concerned with measuring the costs on jobs and invoicing customers on a timely basis.  Field services team members need to be able to quickly and easily record their time and expense data at the service order, work order or job level daily and feed that data back to your FSM solution for job costing and invoicing.

Here are a few questions to consider when evaluating your options for capturing this critical data:

• I need to capture this data remotely. What are my options for capturing time and expense data (web, tablet, mobile app, etc)?
• My crew or team supervisors need to record time on behalf of their team members. Do I have to enter those timesheets one at a time, or is there a crew entry option?
• The Accounting and Billing team needs this data to measure costs and bill our clients. Is this information integrated with our FSM and ERP solutions?
• We bill our customers as soon as the job is done. Can I enter, approve and correct time and expense data daily?

Implementing a simple, user friendly solution, with multiple, remote entry options, allows you to answer those questions.  With the right solution, your field services team members can quickly and accurately track the amount of time and effort they spend each day on the work they are trying to complete.  Having accurate data in a timely manner will help the organization drive the profitability and success of the organization.

“Journyx Timesheet enables us to track time, expenses and revenue by project, user, department, bill type, etc. It has streamlined the overall time entry process and provides an avenue for submitting revenue and expense entries to finance…Journyx increases our consultant productivity with its ease of use and flexibility.” –Susan Singleton, Kissimmee Utility Authority

Read the case study to find out how Kissimmee Utility Authority increases productivity company-wide using Journyx.