With the growth of the field service team, managing field service requests was becoming an increasing challenge. IMV also had engineers within the field who had no link back to the CRM so they were unable to check parts availability or update customers service calls while onsite. This meant they had to provide their engineers with additional admin time to update customer reports and ultimately led to time off the road to do this. This also led to a delay in receiving information between customers and internal teams.
"This was a lot larger than initially expected, we had quite a lot of B1 functionality which automated a lot of our process however this, unfortunately, was not able to be transferred within the Field Service Management software which did make things tricky initially and has meant we need to rethink some of our processes,” explains Sean Stevenson, Service Manager at IMV imaging. “The project was led by one of the consultants within Coresystems who worked very closely with me and IMVi IT Team, the installation and setup was pretty straight forward. We spent a lot of time creating checklists (smartforms) and customer reports which long-term has made things a lot more efficient and has cut down on user error as you no longer can mistype something due to most of the report being checklist driven.”
What would life be without challenges? In this case mainly related to the synchronization with the cloud. This was fixed with some software upgrades for the CRM and iOS updates for IMVi’s field team. As with any process change, the biggest challenge is people. IMV had completely changed the way their engineers and administration teams worked, and some of them had followed a similar approach all their working lives, so changing this with software and automation was a challenge for IMV and it took a long time to embed this in the team. “In hindsight, I would have had them more involved in the design phase to ease the transition,” Sean adds.
There are so many features to SAP Field Service Management that we will be looking to implement soon! Our current project is around workflows and Coresuite time to provide us with further efficiencies and visibility. Coresuite time and workflows will allow us to better calculate utilization within the field teams and provide a set workflow that engineers will follow to ensure the accuracy of the information held within our CRM. - Sean Stevenson, Service Manager UK, IMV Imaging
Easily manage the queue and schedule service calls, including assigning multiple workers to a job if required. The technicians can spend more time on customer visits by being able to update service calls on-site, as well as review inventory, customer information, previous service calls, and other information directly on-site. Technician checklists (smartforms) enable technicians to perform routine maintenance quickly and efficiently. Last but not least, field staff could immediately provide customers an easy-to-read document upon completion of the service.