We are heading into bank holiday season and for some that's great news - who doesn't love a long weekend? For others it means spending your bank holidays caught up in work, trying to manage jobs and projects with a reduced workforce. We all deserve a break. With the right job management software you can streamline your operations, improve your efficiency and reclaim your friends and family time.
Here's how it works:
Job management software in a nutshell
Specialist software, such as a job management system, makes complex elements of your business, simple. Designed and created for field service businesses it efficiently manages your mobile workforce and day-to-day operations. From scheduling and dispatching to invoicing and reporting, job management software streamlines every aspect of your business.
If you are already keen to learn more, you can talk to an expert or read on to see how BigChange can make a difference to your business.
How job management software frees up your bank holidays
Plan ahead
As we all know, repetitive tasks consume a lot of valuable time, so make the most of automation within the software. Freeing up time never feels better than when it streamlines your business at the same time.
For example, create template worksheets for regular jobs that your business performs. Relevant worksheets are then automatically added when a job is scheduled. Best of all, because the job scheduling and CRM are part of the same system, the customer details will also pull through.
Job management software can also take the pain out of one of the hardest jobs in field service management: job scheduling and dispatch. With BigChange's intelligent scheduling and route optimisation, you can automate the entire planning process with just a few clicks. No more spending bank holidays juggling calendars and rearranging technician schedules.
Making holiday plans have never been easier than when you can request, approve and display absences on a single system. Technicians can request leave using their tablet and their line manager will be sent an automatic notification. Once approved, the absence will appear on the schedule so that they won't be allocated jobs, further protecting your well-earned break.
Monitor progress
Job tracking means that you can view the progress of every vehicle or job in real time. You don't even have to choose between viewing at a glance or by completion status because you can change the view with a click.
BigChange gives you complete visibility into your field workforce. That means that you can monitor things just as easily from your sofa at home as you can from your office.
Even better, this allows you to react faster than ever to last minute emergencies and easily create new jobs. With full oversight of who is working and where they are, assigning the job is simple and speedy.
Paperless operations
A job management software solution is the perfect way to say goodbye to mountains of paperwork throughout the year. The BigChange system digitises everything from job sheets to financial information, making them instantly accessible through the cloud. Meanwhile, the mobile app revolutionises life for your field service team. They have full job information at their fingertips and can capture customer signatures, all whilst reducing the amount of manual data entry.
The result: faster job completion and no more wasted journeys to the office and back shuttling completed paperwork. It also means no more incomplete forms or missing elements, such as photographic evidence of completed work.
Going digital also provides a number of new opportunities. For example, offering instant access to customer documents via a customer portal. Or you can reply to quote requests in an instant when you have a tailored digital template ready for use.
Which means that there is no need to fear that you'll miss out on work if you miss a day in the office.
Reports and Analytics
When you use BigChange's complete job management software, there is no issue understanding what's happening whilst you're away. Set up reports for delivery at your convenience, and rest assured knowing everything is on track.
Whether it's a bank holiday or normal workday, there's no more need for you to do manual number crunching. Reports are available for all key areas of your business, including performance, productivity and finances.
For instance, you can create a report to show jobs that started late. The report will include the names of the technicians and customers involved and whether or not it finished on time.
Or perhaps you want to check up on payments or on how planned work compares to actual? Job management software excels at this sort of data analytics and can make it easy to understand or present. Our dashboards mean that you can check up at a glance or dig into further detail when you need to.
You can click here to find out more about how job management software can unlock the potential of your business
Real life success story: Trent's Drains
As a family-run business with over 6 decades of experience, there wasn't much that Trent's Drains didn't know about the drainage industry. However, when it came to paperwork around jobs, the situation was different.
The business operated using a mixture of cardboard job sheets, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and WhatsApp. What was manageable for a small company was impossible for one that was growing.
“As we expanded this became unmanageable," said Louis Trent, Director and Co-Owner, Trent’s Drains. "We had to work through mountains of job cards, ours as well as our customers’, scanning and matching them to quotes, purchase orders and photos, and we knew we needed to make a big change."
The answer they settled on was indeed BigChange and following its implementation the company’s turnover has seen a tenfold increase, and the fleet of specialist jetting vehicles has doubled. Trent’s now handles approximately 800 jobs monthly, achieving this expansion without the need for additional administrative staff. Moreover, the company is saving upwards of £30,000 annually in administrative and accounting costs.
This is how Jozef Przytocki, Operations Manager, Trent’s Drains puts it: “Using BigChange, we can build different templates for different job types with a mixture of questions which, when completed, can be fed into different job sheets. This improves onsite productivity and reduces back-office administration.
“It’s not just about the engineers doing a great job in the field, it’s about reporting on this service to the end client. We get a lot of feedback about the detail and speed of our reporting from our commercial clients.”
Read the full Trent's Drains case study here.
Bank holidays should be for rest and relaxation, not working overtime. With BigChange's leading job management software, you can streamline processes, increase efficiency, and take back control of your schedule. Spend more quality time with family and friends by implementing BigChange today.
Arrange to learn more from one of our experts to hear about the full features of our award-winning job management system.
