I was recently at a conference where the question was asked “What is your greatest resource?”. Service based organizations need to stay focused on the answer to this question in order to stay viable. The answer of course is “our people” and right now as we evaluate our business’s, decisions about our people are in clear focus and linked to our future success. We implicitly know this as the answer, yet when purchasing a computer system to help us run our service organization do we look to a system that helps our “greatest resources” to be better and happier? In 25 years of helping companies to buy enterprise wide systems – I can tell you that this is NOT the case. Most companies when looking at ERP systems are focused on admin, dispatch and customer experience, not their own people. In my view, this is a case of looking at the “good” not the “best”.

A typical scenario in many service companies, is the call comes in and in smaller companies the decision of which service resource is made up front by the owner or a dispatcher. Some of the elements going into that decision are availability, geography, experience, skill set including certifications and now with Covid 19 perhaps “risk level” both for the job and what our technician might be comfortable with. Overall this works well when service organizations are smaller, but even in this environment how many times do we hear “Why did I get given this job?” I don’t have “the certification”, I don’t have “the experience”, I don’t have “the right tools/parts with me”? None of us as people like being reminded of the things “we can’t do”. Service technicians in my experience are especially sensitive to being asked to work in or on something they aren’t sure they can be successful at. Wouldn’t it be great if we evaluated a new ERP system based on helping our service personnel’s needs? What if the system could track a service persons qualifications and certifications so they would only be dispatched to jobs that they could or have worked on? What if the computer system could help the company remind the service people to stay current on their “certifications”? What if the computer system could help the service person increase the likelihood of having the right parts in the truck for the job? What if the computer system increasingly could make it easier for dispatchers to give a more accurate time estimate for each job, increasing the likelihood of meeting customer expectations without “asking your service people to work late again?”.

All of this is about helping our service people be set up for success to meeting customer expectations. This also achieves a happier, more confident service person working with our clients, especially in these times when our clients have additional covid stresses in their lives. Imagine having my service company as having the reputation that we look after our service people the best! Now, the challenges of meeting client expectations are a by-product of our decision to prioritize our service people. The best way to help our service people is to have a computer system that prioritizes our greatest resource, our people. Does your computer system help you do that? If not, Mibusoft’s technical services team are ready to help. Feel free to drop a question into one of our online forms and we will be happy to help you. It’s what we do.