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In field service businesses, work order software is typically used as a way to track appointments, revenue, and customer information. Some even use the metric of completed jobs vs. invoiced jobs, which can speak to how effective your billing processes are. (You don’t want to have a lot of completed jobs that haven’t been invoiced yet.)

At the end of 2015, MIT’s Sloan School of Management did some research on organizational priorities. The research covers 11,000 senior executives at 400+ companies, including many service businesses. One of the most astounding facts was that 67 percent -- 2 in 3! -- of the senior managers could not name one or more of the company’s main priorities. Microsoft has done research, presented in an article called “The Paradox of Workplace Productivity,” that shows similar lack of priority in many different types of companies.

Boosting Sales in the Slow Season for HVAC Companies [...]

At a trade show recently, we met a small business field service owner. We ended up having a great conversation, and one aspect stood out. He told us that he searches the Internet all the time for solutions for small businesses, but most of the articles he finds are fluffy and generic. They’re full of buzzwords. “Don’t get me started on some of the groups and forums out there,” he said. “They used to be good, but now it’s all just people selling stuff to you.”

HVAC is an industry within field service where time and efficiency are crucial. If a client’s heat goes down in the winter (in most parts of the world) or his or her AC goes down in the summer (ditto), it could mean millions of dollars of lost revenue and affected parts and machines if an HVAC technician can’t be dispatched quickly and fix the problem the first time out.

Access Your Work Orders Anywhere There are two major [...]

Invoice on the Go with Mobile and QuickBooks Integration [...]

Improve HVAC Field Efficiency with Field Service Management Software [...]

If you think about the last 20-25 years of business in any industry -- but definitely within field service management -- one of the most interesting things that’s happened is that challenges to business growth have moved from “external” to “internal.” What does that mean? Well, 20-25 years ago, you had a lot of external challenges, mostly around available technology. If you wanted to monitor your technicians in the field as they moved through appointments, you could maybe call them (if they had a mobile phone) or page them. GPS might have been around in some academic environments then, but it wasn’t a standard in business. Most of your challenges to growing and sustaining a business came from external factors, then -- elements beyond your control.

By some research, 37 percent of field service organizations are still primarily using a pen-and-paper model for record-keeping, business decisions, and essentially running their entire businesses. That’s 3 in 8, despite the fact that it’s 2016 and we’ve managed to develop games where augmented reality can put Pikachus on your smartphone relative to your location.