Purchasing Management Software - Selecting Software To Help You Run Your Business

Selecting software to help you run your service and maintenance business can be quite daunting.

PA, PA (prHWY.com) November 10, 2012 - PA, Nov 10, 2012 - Selecting software to help you run your service and maintenance business can be quite daunting. There are so many issues to consider. Each service company shares a lot of common ground with other service based businesses but equally there are distinct differences in day to day operation with specific trade and company size being major factors.

Purchasing Management Software - Service Management Software is normally comprised of two major components which we can refer to as back office and mobile. The back office component is normally broken down into modules which aim to streamline the administration of a service delivery operation. For example a back office user will require functions such as call logging, job scheduling, job costing and sales invoicing. The mobile component connects the field operatives to the back office by providing a real time link between the database and mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. The mobile application usually enables a field operative to receive job information and alerts whilst allowing the operative to send back useful updates such as notes, photos, time sheets, status changes and customer signatures.

A Service Management System will typically have a central database for storing libraries of useful information. This will include customers, customer sites, suppliers, parts and operatives.

There will be a service desk function that enables office users to log calls, track calls by status, allocate calls to operatives normally via a diary interface and monitor service level agreements (SLAs) with customers such as response times.

Enquiries can usually be classified under two broad areas. The first is where the enquiry is the first contact. A typical scenario is a customer enquiring about the price for an installation of equipment. In this case an enquiry will be logged into the system and a quotation sent out to the customer. This enquiry will be tracked by status and will hopefully become an order. Once the customer places an order the service management system will turn the enquiry into a live job for scheduling.

The second scenario is where an operative has already visited site on an existing job but has identified that further work is required. In this case the enquiry and quotation would be raised of the back of the live job and would be linked to this job for reporting and auditing purposes. There may be further consideration here such as whether to bill the initial call out fee or to include it in the quote for additional work.

Some service companies will require a planned maintenance module. This is for companies that offer preventative visits to customer sites to perform scheduled maintenance on equipment or simply to carry out tasks that need to be done on a regular basis.

The planned maintenance module will allow users to create a schedule that then generates jobs into the Service Management System for deployment to field operatives at the appropriate time. Jobs are either auto-generated or generated by the user on batch to be scheduled in the diary.

Expense Management - A diary interface will enable back office users to plan work to their field operatives whilst seeing the current workload. It will allow them to plan work by geography and job type ensuring that the correct operative is assigned whilst taking into account factors such as response times or appointment slots.

Ideally the diary will be integrated to the operative's tablet or smartphone to allow for a electronic deployment and a graphical representation of the visit status. For example an operative may have updated his visit status to 'travelling to site'. This could be represented by an icon of a car in the diary so that the back office user can recognise the status instantly



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Purchasing Management Software - ExpenseWatch.com delivers expense control products & services for businesses that automate manual, time consuming paper-based processes while enabling visibility and control of all company spending.

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