Overcoming Field Service Challenges In Facilities And Property Management
Marc Tatarsky, SVP Marketing, FieldAware offers us an excellent case study of how Meadows Service Group are overcoming the challenges their field service operation were facing…
Those working in facilities and property management today must tackle some seemingly overwhelming challenges that are facing the industry. From managing multiple sites and varied programmes while maintaining service levels and meeting customer expectations. There is compliance with strict regulatory standards to manage while juggling responsibilities around maintaining often ageing assets and infrastructure and facing pressure to cut costs and complete more work with fewer resources.
FieldAware has recently released a new customer case study for Facilities and Property Management, which looks at some of these challenges, how they are being effectively managed and the benefits that are being achieved.
The case study highlights how FieldAware helped Meadows Service Group – a subsidiary of Meadows Office Interiors – to drive revenue growth and deliver their service promise.
About the Meadows Service Group…
Founded five decades ago, Meadows Office Interiors – a market-leading contract furniture dealer – creates innovative workspaces that are strategically designed to help customers improve business performance, increase collaboration, realise cost efficiencies and build brand recognition. Recognising a customer need that extends beyond furniture delivery and installation, Meadows Office Interiors created Meadows Service Group to offer ongoing support to their customer base, ultimately maximising the lifetime and integrity of customers’ valuable furniture assets through furniture maintenance programmes, inventory control, asset management and more.
Keeping pace with business growth
Meadows Office Interiors has always had a strong focus on their customer-centric service and delivering exceptional value to their clients. Over the years, Meadows had operated well using manual processes to manage its operations, but the business was expanding rapidly and it soon becomes clear that more streamlined ways of working had to be introduced to keep pace with their growth.
“When we launched Meadows Service Group we started out with what now looks like fairly basic processes in the office,” explains Ethan Bajrak, Director of Enterprise Solutions with Meadows Service Group.
“But with the speed of growth we experienced, we quickly realised we had to be more strategic in the way we worked to effectively manage the operational side of the business, which was becoming more and more challenging. We needed to gain the maximum benefit for our clients and our teams, but the processes we used were not visible to everyone and were manually updated outside of our CRM and ERP systems. There was lots of room for error. With the business expanding, we were in real danger of our service levels slipping and missing opportunities. We knew we couldn’t carry on operating that way.”
Driving efficiency
The company needed better efficiency and control of the workflow, the crews, and their tools. But their existing CRM /ERP system, NetSuite, was very important to them so they wanted to leverage its use and not change their processes too drastically.
“Our first step was to see what could be done within NetSuite,” explains Ethan. “The next was to look for products that were tightly integrated with the platform. We also worked with our NetSuite integration partner to get their recommendations for products their other customers had proven success with. FieldAware checked all those boxes.”
Reaping the benefits
Meadows has been delighted with the improved day-to-day operational management they have seen and through driving the revenue growth of the Meadows Service Group. The company has increased visibility and control as they have been able to standardise their processes and capture all jobs accurately.
They have been able to minimise downtime, while also improving productivity. Everyone has a FieldAware portlet in NetSuite so they can see everything in real-time. Everyone can now see what’s on tap for all the resources, including employees, vehicles and special tools.
On-time arrivals at job sites have increased and a big part of this is that technicians can plan their day in advance and save time by not calling back and forth to the dispatcher to determine where they should report next. The company has much better tracking of technician’s time spent on each job which, in turn, allows them to bill faster and more accurately to clients.
“Meadows Service Group is a newer revenue stream for the company,” commented Ethan “and FieldAware is helping us manage the growth of this division while effectively delivering our service promise to Meadows’ clients.”
Translating into true ROI
So as the business continues to expand, the challenges can continue to be addressed and managed.
“Teams have an increased level of confidence in our service team and customers are pleased with the level of communication and timely response. Because of the real-time sign-offs in the field, and the additional documentation provided for each job, the customer invoice payment cycle is faster, which helps our accounting team.”
“Our technicians are more productive because they are equipped with all the information they need. We can handle more jobs and are seeing less errors and repeat trips, which translates into true ROI,” concludes Ethan.
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