Enabling Data-Driven Decision Making with Field Service Reports

By now, the popular phrase Data-Driven Decision Making is part of most business conversations. Still, there is often a misconception of what it actually means and how to implement it. This post will dig into the meaning of Data-Driven Decision Making (DDDM), discuss how it relates to digital transformation in the field service industry, and explain how leveraging intelligent field service reporting and analytics can enable you to adopt Data-Driven Decision Making in your field service company. 

What is Data-Driven Decision Making?

Data-driven decision-making is defined as using facts, metrics, and data to guide strategic business decisions that align with your specific goals, objectives, and initiatives. This includes creating a work culture that fosters critical thinking and curiosity and encourages data-driven insights across all job levels and departments.

Data-Driven Decision-Making in the Field Service Industry

The transition to digital solutions is not enough on its own to enable Data-Driven Decision Making in the field service industry. Data-driven decision-making requires the ability to accurately manipulate and extract value from your data to provide meaningful insights into the state of your field service company in real time. With operational decisions impacting the success and future of your business, accurately wrangling this data to inform your decision-making is certainly not where you want to cut corners or end up confused. 

As a field service company adapting to the digital transformation, you will start gaining access to troves of data that you have never seen or dealt with before. And this abundance of data isn’t going to help inform your decision-making unless your entire company knows how to manipulate it properly and extract clear value. In fact, research tells us that 70% of digital transformation initiatives will not reach their goals due to mismanagement, including siloed business units and a lack of an authoritative source of truth. 

That’s why you want field service reporting and analytics software that wrangles the data for you, transforming your data into actionable and reliable business intelligence that is visible across your entire organization. This includes the use of real-time KPIs that act as a source of truth, easily accessible configurable dashboards, valuable trend analysis, and accurate forecasting and planning insights. 

Field Service Reports and Analytics

By extracting genuine value from your data, field service reporting and analytics software is critical to enabling Data-Driven Decision Making in your field service company. With real-time and accurate data packaged in a user-friendly interface, you can rest assured that the success and future of your company will not be subjected to manual errors, mismanagement, or get siloed in a specific department. Leveraging intelligent field service reporting can benefit your company in the following ways:

Increases Visibility

Historically, field service departments are siloed. This means that information remains isolated within specific departments, and inhibits innovative cross-departmental collaboration. Without open lines of communication, departments can make isolated decisions that affect the whole company's future and result in a negative customer experience. That’s a serious price to pay when an intelligent solution already exists. 

Accessing information is essential in enabling Data-Driven Decision Making, and that includes cross-department visibility. Field service reporting provides universal visibility into operations performance, breaking down the information bottleneck caused by siloed departments. With unified reporting from multiple locations, there is a consistent source of truth and accountability across departments. The field service app makes this information available from anywhere, and custom notifications based on identified thresholds and SLAs ensure that you can always access the information you want exactly when it's available, wherever you are. 

Improves Operational Efficiency

Operational efficiency is key to the success of a field service company. However, identifying, tracking, and changing inefficient processes can be time-consuming and difficult to complete manually or even with complex data. This can lead to inaccurate cuts that worsen productivity, inefficient spending, or even foster a negative customer experience. 

Intelligent field service reporting expertly uncovers service cost inefficiencies and even fraud. This allows field service providers to look to the data for the answers, instead of taking a high-risk shot in the dark. With access to real-time operations including customer workforce metrics, field service managers can analyze performance accurately and understand what areas actually need improvement. By improving service operations with reporting software, field service companies can spend money on planning for innovative future operations, instead of paying extra for work done inefficiently or fraud. 

Enhances Forecasting and Planning

Forecasting and planning done well help a company grow and can secure success in the future, however, “poor forecasting leads to poor business decisions and can lead to catastrophic results.” Manual forecasting methods are limited in scope, inherently limiting your ability to use all of the information available. With multiple workers approaching forecasting, there is also a lack of standardization which can result in significant financial implications down the line. When the future of your company is at stake, you want to know that your forecasting method is using standardized metrics across the company and that it has the capacity to process all of the available data at hand. 

Intelligent forecasting and planning do just that. By utilizing historical data from employed, contracted, and hybrid workforces, job and sales information, and claims and service history, intelligent software can compile a comprehensive analysis that accurately predicts future demand. Demand in the field service industry can fluctuate greatly, and intelligent forecasting can help make sure that your company is ready to scale when demand does, instead of playing catch up. With enhanced forecasting and planning, field service companies are enabled to feel confident in making important decisions about the future, and they have the data to back up their choices. By following the data, your company will be poised to capture more revenue and reap the benefits of digital transformation. After all, it’s said that data is the new revenue generator. 

Adapting to Data-Driven Decision Making 

Adapting to digital transformation requires the creation of a data culture and a working knowledge of Data-Driven Decision Making across your entire field service company. And the stakes are high. In the modern field service industry, data-driven business decisions make or break companies. While this can be intimidating at first, there are tools to help your organization make this transition successfully. For instance, intelligent field service reporting and analytics software enable you to pursue Data-Driven Decision Making across your entire organization. This is accomplished by establishing KPIs that align with your business goals act as an authoritative source of truth and create cross-departmental visibility from anywhere, anytime. 

By leveraging an intelligent analytics tool, your field service company can enable informed Data-Driven decision-making across all departments, improve operational efficiencies, and foster more revenue through accurate demand forecasting and planning. At the end of the day, your ability to adapt to digital transformation will determine your success in the field service industry, so make sure your company invests in intelligent software that is experienced in enabling Data-Driven Decision Making with proven success. 

Experience configurable dashboards, real-time business intelligence, insightful trend analysis, and accurate forecasting for yourself with a custom demo.