How Geofencing Helps Locate Technicians in the Field
Automation has taken over the service business. Today, there is slew of field service management software products that will totally automate your service business. Every aspect of your business — from your Dispatching and Scheduling through your Accounting and Reporting all the way to payroll calculation and Inventory management can now be totally automated. But the best part of automation is the way in which GPS and “geofencing” are used to locate all your service technicians in the field and know exactly where they are — even if they have not yet arrived at the customer’s location or they have already left the customer’s location. GPS Geofencing will change the way you do business and will change your life.
To see exactly how geofencing works, let’s take a look at FieldSurf, one of the leading field service management systems for service businesses with more than three technicians in the field.
Built into FieldSurf and a critical component of it, geofencing allows you, the business owner, to set up virtual boundaries (“fences”) around real physical boundaries anywhere within the geographical area where you do business. When one of your GPS-enabled technicians using FieldSurf enters any predetermined geographic area, FieldSurf immediately sends a push alert to the system. Anyone who needs to know this information can access it instantly, provided they have Internet access and they have been granted permission to access this information. The position of each of your technicians in the field is indicated on FieldSurf’s GPS map.
Different personnel in your company use FieldSurf and its geofencing capabilities in different ways.
Your Dispatcher can look at the GPS map and see where everyone is at the moment. If a call comes in, he can send it to the technician closest to the location of the new call. If the tech is still on site, the dispatcher knows this at a glance. But the beautiful part about FieldSurf’s geofencing capabilities is that your dispatcher can also track the movement of each technician after he has left the last location and is on his way to his next job. Or to Starbucks. You always know where everyone is. So when something urgent suddenly crops up needing to be taken care of immediately, you can use the information from FieldSurf’s GPS map and divert one of your technicians to the nearest Ferguson’s because you just got a customer call with an emergency need for a part, so you want your nearest available technician to go and pick it up at Ferguson’s and take it to his next job. Your dispatcher will then send another technician to that location to pick up the part.
Before FieldSurf, accomplishing something like this used to take a lot of work: cell phone calls and texts, Post-It Notes all over the place, Work Orders and Invoices on paper in triplicate — it was hard to tell exactly what was going on with all your guys out in the field. Now, with FieldSurf’s incredible geofencing capabilities, it’s all live in real time, it’s all paperless, there is a permanent electronic record of everybody’s movements, and everyone who needs to be alerted or informed about this latest maneuver gets automatically notified by push SMS text. As the business owner, you can access this GPS map from anywhere – your desktop computer, a tablet computer, or even your smartphone from anywhere. There’s nothing like FieldSurf’s geofencing feature. It will change your life and the way you manage your technicians in the field..
Let’s look at some real examples of how the head of a local plumbing company uses the geofencing aspect of FieldSurf to manage his field technicians.
Before using FieldSurf with geofencing, the main way to get hold of your technicians in the field was by phone. But that’s a very inefficient way of communicating, especially when it’s time sensitive. And you could call a tech and ask him where he was right at that moment, and the tech could lie, tell you he was stuck in traffic, but in actuality the tech was at Starbucks, and the reason he’s not picking up his mobile phone is because he’s talking on it to his girlfriend at the moment. If you needed to reach him in a hurry, you may be out of luck.
Then you start using FieldSurf with its GPS. Now, without needing to call your tech or anyone else, you know exactly where each of your field techs is at any given time. If a technician leaves West Hollywood and enters Beverly Hills, everyone in the company with access to the GPS features of FieldSurf can instantly know that the tech is now out of West Hollywood and has entered Beverly Hills. Field techs can no longer lie about their location — in the same way that installing video surveillance cameras in a business immediately makes the employees more honest, the same is true with GPS geofencing. Your techs know that you and your dispatcher always know exactly where they are at all times. With GPS geofencing, your field techs immediately become more honest as well as more efficient.
FieldSurf is loaded with features to automate your business and make it more efficient. Their GPS geofencing capability is only one of FieldSurf’s many wonderful features. Take a demo of FieldSurf, and see how it can instantly make your business more efficient, reduce or even eliminate office and field paperwork, and help you make more money for the same amount of effort. FieldSurf is 100% Internet based, is easy to learn and use, and even integrates with Quickbooks to streamline your entire business using a single software program.
