Kirona polled over 1,018 civil servants and found that public sector organisations don't understand the options available to them to effectively schedule and mobilise their field based workforce. 

Field service management commonly refers to organisations who need to manage activities such as installation, service or repairs of systems or equipment at the property of clients, rather than on company property. It is also known as mobile workforce management. 

Field service management is used by organisations in diverse organisations for diverse activities including social housing repairs, utilities installations, community based health and social care patient care visits and by retailers to appoint and mobilise field based home estimators and fitters – to name but a few.

Field service management technology enables delivery of data and services to field based workers to carry out their job efficiently and securely, eliminating paperwork, speed up job completion and support data capture on a range of platforms and devices. 

Field based workers remain connected and work can be tracked in real-time; and true insight can be gained across the entire operation enabling continuous improvement.

Why should public sector organisations be adopting field service management tech?

The public sector is not innovative in its approach to managing field based workers. This means that even a small change could have a big impact on services.

As such, the government needs to make the most of its civil servants, wherever they are – but Kirona research has shown that many organisations are not thinking about their field based workers.

As public sector organisations are being asked to make ever-greater efficiency savings, at the same time as boosting their productivity and improving public services, field service technology can help.

Typically organisations that adopt Kirona’s field service management technology benefit from an increase in productivity of an average of 25%. Put in another way for every 10 field based workers, organisations see productivity improvements the equivalent of having another 2.5 members of staff.

The reason that such levels of productivity improvements are achieved is that field service technology directly addresses and reduces unproductive time:

• Electronic delivery of jobs to field based staff reduces the need to return to your head office.
• Intelligent route optimisation significantly reduces travel time between jobs ensuring more ‘work’ time.
• Dynamic scheduling during the emerging day ensures that every hour of every field based worker is optimised.
• Less time is spent each day by field workers completing paper work 
• The appropriate field worker is allocated to each job ensuring the most efficient use of resources available.

With such improvements in productivity, the challenge is how to capitalise on the productivity improvements. Increased capacity will enable your organisation to:

• Reduce costs through workforce adjustments or reducing the amount of contract staff or overtime working.
• Improve customer service by reducing wait times for service delivery.
• Improve quality by ensuring the right amount of time is applied to every job or task. 

With Kirona’s field service software organisations are enabled to configure the technology to meet their specific business goals. This enables organisations to prioritise customer service over cost reduction, or increase their revenue in Q4 to meet year end targets. 

Are other public sector organisations already using field service management tech?

Field service technology is already used in the social housing sector to manage the repairs and maintenance of social housing stock. Some local authorities are using it to appoint and mobilise environmental services such as street cleaning and parks maintenance. 

Central government organisations such as DEFRA are using Kirona’s Scheduler and Job Manager field service software to effectively plan, schedule and mobilise their The Animal and Plant health Agency (APHA) work. They have benefited from increased visit efficiency, improved workforce utilisation, improved data quality, and enhanced customer experience, together with enhanced inspector experience.

However within central government organisations 92% of appointments are still being booked either by shared calendars or email. Compared to other areas where government organisations has made big leaps in its use of cutting-edge software, field service has been left behind.  

Managers and field based staff do recognise the problem. Just over three-quarters of managers (76%) said that the productivity of their fieldwork teams could be improved. Some 39% said that the ability to know where field workers are in real time – such as through better use of location services – would be useful, while 23% said they would like to ensure staff had less unused time between jobs. Others called for reductions in the cost of managing staff (25%) and the ability to lock or secure a device if it were lost or stolen (14%).

Public sector organisations need to know that there is a better way of managing their field based staff’s time, which will ultimately lead to cost-savings, efficiency gains and a better service to the public. 

Download the free whitepaper 7 Deadly Sins of Managing Field Based Workers to find out more

Meet Kirona at SOCITM Annual Conference 2017, 9th & 10th October