Solutions for How to Better Prioritize Your Work Orders

For many mobile service businesses, supervising a team of techs who rarely report to a physical office can be incredibly challenging. Even worse, some managers still depend on traditional, manual methods to assign work orders and track their teams — a job that is often tedious and increases the chances of human error.

To make matters worse, any work delays, incomplete information, or miscommunication can lead to sub-par customer service, idle tech time, and reduced efficiency.

Surprisingly, approximately 60% of companies surveyed in a Field Technologies Magazine article reported they are not currently using field service software, which could dramatically increase their organization and efficiency.

While no one ever claimed that work order management is an easy process, there are automated tools available to help make the process smoother. In fact, work order management technology is crucial for today’s mobile service businesses. It can help them better organize their work schedules without spending wasted time and money.

field service management

Here are some common challenges associated with managing work orders, along with suggestions about how to better prioritize your work orders that can resolve these issues:

Problem: Difficulty Organizing and Prioritizing Work Orders

A key aspect of work order management is keeping your work orders easily accessible, up-to-date and well organized. If your company deals with excessive work order volume due to multiple locations and extensive equipment inventories, this task can prove quite difficult.

Solution: Digitize Your Work Orders

With work order management technology, you can better organize and prioritize previous and current work orders. This will help you easily and quickly retrieve data when you need it. You have the ability to search by date, customer name, and order type, among other search and filter options.

work order software, work order form

Problem: Finding the Right Technician

Supervisors sometimes have to make decisions about what work needs to be done. Only then can they pick which technician is best to perform the work. This can be challenging when you have to choose from numerous competing schedules. Also, not everyone is available when you need them or are they the most appropriate for a specific job.

Solution: Automated Scheduling and Job Matching

A good work order management solution can make this task easier. It can help you discover, evaluate and assign appropriate techs for a specific customer job. And with integrations to your CRM and Marketing Automation software, you can follow up with customers and sell them on future services in a more segmented and personalized way.

Problem: Inefficiencies In Your Admin Process

It’s no secret that inputting, submitting and recording data are all aspects of work order management. If you perform these tasks manually, it can be woefully inefficient. It’s wasted time and energy that office staff can better use to improve processes.

Solution: Online Booking and Mobile Access for Techs

With work order management software that includes online booking, it is easy for customers to place service requests. You can also monitor your techs in real-time. You can have access to GPS tracking capabilities, get feedback on the work and maintain organization. These features let the entire company work in real-time, no matter their location.

Problem: Reduced Levels of Project Visibility

Work order tools allow you to oversee your jobs through to completion. Traditionally, when supervisors have to monitor teams as they performed assigned tasks, they would have had to travel around to various physical locations to ensure workers arrived on time and finished the work to a satisfactory level.

Solution: Real-Time Visibility

Thanks to the intuitive and analytical features in work order management technology, you can gain increased visibility into service data across all trades, project categories, physical locations and technicians within your company to find answers quickly. This allows managers and techs to react to changing conditions smoothly and without a loss of critical time.

The Bottom Line

As a service-based business, prioritizing your work order management is of the utmost importance. You need it to be efficient, to remain competitive and to get the job done.

With today’s work order management solutions, you can track jobs to closure and capture vital customer and business data for your techs to carry out their jobs without delay.

You also can gain complete knowledge about all of your company assets. Things like: Locations, equipment condition, maintenance history, repair costs, and customer info. You also know which tech worked on which job and what they did. In other words, you can gain back control – and your sanity – while also helping boost your company’s bottom line.

Lisa C. Dunn is a writer for TechnologyAdvice and a freelance writer, copywriter, and ghostwriter who develops high-quality content for businesses and non-profit organizations. For over 20 years, she has worked with numerous PR and digital marketing agencies. She publishes work in Forbes, VentureBeat, Mashable, Huffington Post, Wired, B2C, USA Today, among others.

Curious to learn more about how work order software can help improve the way you operate your business? Book a free, private demo of Vonigo.