As a manufacturer in America, your impact is significant. US manufacturing accounts for $2.3 trillion in GDP, employs 12 million people, and supports countless local economies. However, your business is probably facing challenges endemic to the industry. Your field service teams may be struggling to prioritize projects and allocate resources in order to keep costs down or contending with supply chain issues and labor shortages. Day-to-day communication may not always be clear at all levels of your organization, especially when the majority of your team is mobile.
Your company’s needs are uniquely demanding. Customer satisfaction with your product is highly dependent on how carefully and meticulously your product is installed at the customer’s location. The installation process demands complete accuracy as well as practical and customizable monitoring over the long term. Your operations team needs a streamlined preventative maintenance system, and your executive team needs data-driven insights into operational efficiency. Your field service teams is likely looking for a management solution with the flexibility to handle highly complex workflows.
Zuper’s comprehensive field service management platform more than meets these needs by digitizing your processes and accommodating your workflows. This means you are able to offer an outstanding customer experience, and to successfully scale, and transform your business.
The Power of Field Service Management with Zuper
As a manufacturing business, you need advanced technology that organizes your field service activities. Zuper’s field service management platform digitally transforms your installation, monitoring, and maintenance operations. It streamlines your installation process from initial site evaluation to the final inspection and gives you the organizational foundation upon which to expand your service revenue. This grants you access to consistent, predictable revenue and an ability to manage customer expectations effectively.
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Here are five benefits of the Zuper platform that are particularly well suited to the needs of a manufacturing business.
1. Effective Asset and Inventory Management
When you have your products installed at customer locations, it is hard to keep track of the details and specifics of these assets. Your field service technicians may reach the job site to perform repairs without the right tools for the job due to little or no details regarding the asset that requires servicing. You may even end up ordering extra parts when they are not needed or rushing to order them at the last minute for three times the price due to supply chain disruptions. This can prove to be particularly costly. Your teams may miss out on carrying out preventative maintenance services on customer assets, reducing asset lifetime, or increasing the flurry of emergency repair service requests due to sudden breakdowns. Either way, customer experience suffers.
With the Asset Management module of Zuper, your team can maintain detailed records of all installed customer assets along with the complete service and repair history. Asset maintenance and repair funneled through Zuper’s asset management software will help your field service technicians reach the job site with all the right tools and all the information they require to complete the job. All your customer and company-owned assets are stored in a single place with advanced search and filtering options that help teams to locate any asset swiftly. The system tracks asset lifecycle, warranty status, serial numbers, codes, categories, configuration, repair, and maintenance history. You can also customize asset inspection forms to fit your business needs.
Zuper also tracks historical inventory data and generates alerts when stock is low in the Inventory Management module. Your team streamlines tools and spare parts usage and avoids overspending or wasting time searching for what is needed for an installation or service job. The usage of all expendable supplies is tracked to prevent wastage or shortage of supplies. With efficient inventory management, your inventory is always stacked. You can avoid having to order supplies or parts in a rush or delaying services due to supply chain issues or low inventory stock.
Zuper’s flexibility and customizability allow both back office and field staff to manage all parts and services required for installation, repair, and maintenance jobs. This way, your field techs have quick insights into a particular product, part, or service prior to the job.
2. A Superior Kind of Planned Preventive Maintenance
Smart field service management with Zuper makes it easy for you to manage preventative maintenance schedules effectively. Rather than having your customers request repair services every time there is an equipment failure or a lingering performance issue, you establish a predictive maintenance plan for regular servicing and maintenance checks of customer assets. This increases the asset lifetime and ensures that asset performance is always optimal, and the downtime is minimal. This cuts down on urgent repair requests or unnecessary site visits. It lowers your maintenance and rehabilitation budget by reducing overtime costs, shortening downtime for maintenance, and improving inventory management.
The Zuper platform tracks asset maintenance schedules and triggers automated notifications to customers about impending warranty expiration, needed system cleaning, and inspections. Since your field teams have access to the latest data on each customer and their product, they can better suggest preventive services to extend the lifetime of assets.
Ultimately, well-executed predictive and preventative maintenance with Zuper means your team addresses issues early on rather than handling them when they have become critical.
3. Optimized Productivity Through Workforce Management and Smart Operations
Zuper allows your management staff to oversee the work of multiple technicians on multiple jobs. It also gives your field staff what they need to complete jobs and be in communication with management and customers.
The platform grants field staff oversight through online shift and timesheet management. Technicians clock in and out, generate automatic shift updates and reminders and request time off – all from the mobile app. The mobile component also allows them to view job details and chat with management and customers. Management schedules work orders, assigns tasks to specific techs, calculates billable hours, and utilizes geo-fencing to track techs in the field. Zuper’s documentation capabilities mean that supervisors can track and maintain information about field staff, and techs can keep thorough notes about a job.
4. Improved Scheduling and Dispatching of Work Orders
Smart scheduling and dispatching in Zuper helps you streamline your scheduling of all incoming work orders and service requests. Your back-office team schedules the jobs, creates and edits work orders, and assigns them to technicians based on skill, location, availability, and level of urgency. Zuper also enables you to automate or manually generate team alerts, ETA, and customer notifications to increase service time accuracy.
Additionally, route optimization capabilities help you generate the best service routes using field service technicians’ GPS-location data, the job site’s location, equipment, and employee availability. Zuper’s route optimization helps the back-office teams create the shortest possible routes connecting all the scheduled jobs for every field service team to reduce time on the road and increase productivity. All scheduling, dispatching, and route optimization actions can be handled from a single-view dispatch board.
5. Comprehensive Contract Management and Accounting
Zuper automates and digitizes contract management, removing the unwieldiness of a complicated manual process. Your team creates, edits, and signs multiple types of contracts all in one location. Zuper also tracks contract end dates and automatically generates alerts to management and customers about renewals. Based on these contracts, Zuper also enables you to configure workflows that send maintenance alerts to customers or create work orders periodically.
Additionally, your accounting staff administers project expenses, customer billing, and collections for maintenance and repairs in a way that frees up your cash flow. Estimates generated from a customized template for a service job, ongoing or otherwise, have line items transferred to an invoice without the need for manual re-entry. Zuper integrates with almost all of the leading accounting software so that your team can enjoy automated quoting and invoicing, auto-charging and payment collection, and on-site digital payments via the mobile component.
6. Prime Integrations and Business Oversight
Integration with leading apps aligns customer and job details with job scheduling and dispatch for end-to-end operational management. Zuper integrates with over 30 apps, including CRM, customer service, and accounting applications. This enables your customer support agents to schedule field service tickets directly from your helpdesk app for maximized productivity. It also allows sales staff and back-office staff to seamlessly sync leads, deals, and contacts between your CRM and Zuper.
Additionally, Zuper’s advanced analytics and reporting grant your executive staff the project oversight they need to identify stalled workflows that may be impacting profitability. They can monitor job details and field staff performance and make adjustments. Teams are also able to make better recommendations about long-term business strategy.
Best in-Class Customer Experience
Your installation and service processes may require intensive planning and precise support so that your teams adhere to budget and project scope. For commercial customers, you likely work within their production schedules to minimize workflow disruptions. When your field techs demonstrate excellence during installation, you have a much better chance of upselling preventative maintenance plans as well. Plus, you end up nurturing that all-important reputation as a trustworthy and reliable business that guarantees a convenient, personalized customer experience.
The Zuper field service management platform gives your office and field teams precisely what they need to provide a best-in-class customer experience for installations, monitoring, and service calls. This fosters fruitful relationships over the long term.
For generations, manufacturing has been a bedrock of strength for our country’s economy. State-of-the-art technology can keep manufacturers operating from that position of strength, fielding industry challenges and scaling comfortably. And Zuper is just the right platform for the job.
To learn more about Zuper’s capabilities, schedule a demo with us today!
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