Preventative Maintenance ensures peak efficiency and minimizes deterioration of a piece of equipment.  Recurring service tasks are generated, assigning the right technician with the right availability and skills set.  Regardless if the work is completed by an in-house personnel or through subcontractors, the ability to capture work details in the field is key.  PM work details and check lists must be traceable and auditable.

Basic mobility is need for collecting time and expense information, as well as, for filling out forms and check lists.  Many service-companies choose to perform their mobile tasks through web browsers tethered to a “hot spot” instead of a true mobile application. This allows device flexibility while providing a secure environment to enter customer specific data.

Optimize your PM Schedules through PM Batches.  PM Batches, what’s that?  If you perform hundreds or thousands of PM Schedules per year, you may opt to do batched PMs.  This eliminates the need to adjust reports on “Open Cases” and minimizes a bog down in the Incident queue.

Companies evaluating Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and CMMS rank Preventative Maintenance as a Top 10 functional requirement.  The Chart is taken from Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) 2013 Market Survey Report.

Top 20 EAM and CMMS Strategies by TEC 2013 Report

To access this report download the PDF.

The post Preventative Maintenance a Key Component of an Asset Management Strategy appeared first on Fieldpoint Service Applications Inc. .

The post Resource Scheduling & Mobile Signature Capture appeared first on Fieldpoint Service Applications Inc. .

Toronto, ON  – June 14, 2013  Fieldpoint Service Applications Inc. announced today that it has been selected by a K-12 Education Agency as Service Management CRM software partner.  The client’s mission is to provide “safe, healthy, efficient, comfortable, energy and resource conscious environments” for their students and staff members.  They selected Alert Stratus as their Facilities Management solution.  Alert Stratus will manage their “Energy Efficiency Projects” to improve the bottom line by managing costs, reducing their environmental footprint and building stronger relationships with the local community.

“We are ecstatic to have been selected as part of their Green Program initiatives…” says Rich Smart, President of Fieldpoint Service Applications.  “Our project management and job costing software solution is flexible and can be used in traditional B2B environments for project planning, resource scheduling and time collection.  However, we are seeing more of our customers using the Fieldpoint platform as an internal workforce management solution.”

Alert Stratus will align the agency’s energy goals with their facilities operations by providing:

• Project Management and Job Costing Functionality
• Resource Assignment and Scheduling
• Recurring Preventative Maintenance Schedules
• Work Order Details
• Mobile Time and Expense Capture

 Download the Press Release (PDF)

The post K-12 Education Agency Selects Alert Stratus for Their Facilities Management Solution appeared first on Fieldpoint Service Applications Inc. .

1. Do you have any regulatory requirements regarding needing to control your own data?  Are 3rd party providers allowed to handle your confidential information?
2. How much integration is needed? Do you have several systems in the back-end which you need to pull the data from?  Are there customizations needed to meet your business processes?

In general, if you have answered “Yes” to the above questions then On Premise would be the better deployment option for your business.

However, if you do not have regulatory issues, nor need customizations or integration to in-house systems, then software-as-a–service (SaaS) would be a viable route.

The Benefits of Cloud Deployments:

• Pay per user
• Easy for monthly budgeting
• No additional license maintenance costs
• Limited commitment, usually a one year contract
• No upfront costs needed for acquiring new servers
• Multi-tenant hosting lowers costs and makes services affordable
• Security and Service Levels Agreements (SLAs) are the responsibility of the service provider
• Patches and updates are automatically scheduled without the need for dedicated I.T. resources to run this task
• I.T. can focus on strategy and aligning business goals rather than being a break-fix shop

Considerations:

• Before embarking, consider doing an integration assessment.  Forecast a future state of your business and do a “what if scenario planning” session.

Ask your trusted consulting partners for a “current and future state” assessment.  They will look under the hood to evaluate your business processes, maturity levels and provide recommendations that make sense for your business today and for the next five years.

The post Cloud Versus On-Premise appeared first on Fieldpoint Service Applications Inc. .

Microsoft Dynamics ERP is a perfect example.  They have their core Financial Management products with different flavors depending suited for particular vertical market and/or size of the company.  They leverage their “Independent Software Vendor” (ISV) partner ecosystem to provide a complete solution.  Microsoft provides the platforms to support niche solutions to the marketplace.

Functional Gaps that Niche Service Management ISVs Provide:

• Project Resource Planning – Manage Workforce Capacity for Future Projects and Service Contracts
• Project Assignment and Scheduling – Easy “Calendering” to Assign Available Resources with the Right Skillsets to the Right Projects
• Project Job Costing – Real Time Data Points on the Financial Health at Every Phase of the Project Lifecycle
• Flexibility to Capture Information – Time, Expenses and Materials Needed for the Project
• Flexible Project Billing Triggers
• Field Service Management – Asset Maintenance, Dispatch, Contract Management and Work Orders

To find out more about Microsoft Service Management partners, refer to their Pinpoint Map.  It provides background on their partners by industry and location.  http://pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-CA/partners/fieldpoint-in-canada-4295733442

The post Microsoft Dynamics ERP Needs Service Management Add-Ons appeared first on Fieldpoint Service Applications Inc. .

The post Service Management Software Engine appeared first on Fieldpoint Service Applications Inc. .

Data that Must Be Captured by Field Technicians:

Calendar / Schedule Information

• Job and appointment dispatch.  Field Technicians have full visibility into their schedules and ability to accept or reject an incident or service request based on pre-defined business rules like availability, location, rate, etc.

 Travel Time and Mileage Expense

• Capture the distance travelled and the duration it took to get to the job site

Flexible Time Entry Details

• Allocating time against a job – enter time details on a work order form
• Entering time information directly into a calendar view

Rate Details

• Flexible rate adjustments
• Rates may change based on the time of day i.e.,  regular work hours, after hours, holiday hours and even different rates for peak versus low season
• Rates can change based on length of service i.e., first hour at x rate and second hour at a discounted rate

Work Order Details

• Parts and Materials used to complete the job
• Time allocation

Customer Signature Capture

• Sign off on work completed with full work order details

Invoicing On the Spot

• Create an invoice and close off the billing loop
• Or create a purchase order and have it push to your financial system

The entire process has several software components working in conjunction with each other.  On average to complete the process described you would need at least five different systems speaking to each other.

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to house your customer information
• Workforce Management System (WFM) to manage resource pools, skills, time, schedules and expenses
• Work Order Management / Service Desk system for dispatching  jobs, managing work orders, tracking assets, parts and materials
• Mobile Solution to aggregate the data to a mobile device
• Financial Management System to manage billing, purchase orders, inventory and payroll

A point solution for field scheduling or timekeeping is not scale-able and has several integration challenges.  To understand the complexities of the service industry a full round-trip software solution is required to optimize field resources, customer interactions and service margins.  The solution for field technicians must encompass CRM, WFM, Service Help Desk, Mobility and Financial Management integration.

The post Mobile Service Management Solution for Field Technicians appeared first on Fieldpoint Service Applications Inc. .

Activity Based Costing (ABC) provides financial intelligence, fairness / equity, better data for managing inventory, forecasting and higher profit margins.  ABC provides details on the sources that hinder jobs from being profitable.  The methodology looks at the all the variables that may affect the profitability outcome of a product or a service.  ABC provides a snap shot into the different costing pools and enables organizations to better plan a job or project to profitability.

Advantages of Activity Based Costing / Job Costing:

• Understand All the Costing Pools – Not Just the Total Cost
• Real Time Analysis to Minimize Non-Value Added Activities
• Budgetary and Cost Control (Inventory, Resources, etc)
• Better Margins

Understand All the Costing Pools – Not Just the Total Cost:

It is crucial to understand all the cost factors associated to getting a product, project or service contract delivered to a customer. Hidden costs will kill the profitability of your job quickly.  No two jobs are alike, so every job must be costed-out independently to measure the potential profit or loss.  A blended cost formula provides inaccurate cost analysis and unfavorable results.

To understand the total running costs of a service or project, you must allocate costs pools:

• Resources
• Time
• Expenses
• Utilization Rates
• Materials Needed for the Job

Real Time Analysis to Minimize Non-Value Added Activities:

Minimize non-value added activities each department performs to maintain your customer account.  Being able to optimize business processes minimizes contract revenue leakage and unbillable time spent taking away from other revenue generating activities.

Budgetary and Cost Control:

On demand inventory or “carry what you need” allows for better cost controls.  By having the right costing analysis behind every job and the ability to forecast pipeline opportunities has a positive trickle effect.  It minimizes the risk of holding aging inventory and an under- utilized resource bench.

Better Margins:

Always know where you stand at every phase of a project, job and customer lifecycle.  Understand the ABCs variables in real-time can steer you from unforeseen overruns.  Have full view of your profit margins at every lifecycle phase from implementation to go-live.

Find out more about how Fieldpoint provides the ABCs for project management and field service management.  Contact us directly.  We look forward to hearing from you.

The post ABC – Activity Based Costing for Service Management appeared first on Fieldpoint Service Applications Inc. .

The post Mobile Field Service appeared first on Fieldpoint Service Applications Inc. .

The post IDC Report on MSFT CRM Offering appeared first on Fieldpoint Service Applications Inc. .