Let’s get 2020 started with some good news from MYOB Advanced. Already widely used and appreciated by multiple businesses across New Zealand, Advanced is soon to introduce a new module which will have benefits for many of our existing customers. Field Service Management.
There’s more detail in this blog by MYOB Australia ERP Sales Manager Steve Victor.
Those in the transport and logistics, hospitality, construction, food and beverage, aged care and almost certainly many other industries who are using (or who are interested in using) MYOB Advanced are likely sitting up very interested at this point.
After all, a good FSM solution provides a toolset which reaches right out into the workplace and goes along with your representatives as an electronic companion that helps get the job done accurately, with minimum friction, while keeping the agent and the company tightly connected.
If you need a definition, and you probably don’t, Gartner describes FSM as including ‘the detection of a field service need (through remote monitoring or other means, inspection or a customer detecting a fault), field technician scheduling and optimization, dispatching, parts information delivery to the field, and process support of field technician interactions’.
A bit dry, but that means managing your resources and workforce, including technicians, salespeople or ‘man in a van’ employees, who work offsite or routinely visit and perform tasks at their customer’s location. Almost anyone not in an office, in other words.
As you’ll appreciate, these workers still need to access ERP services, whether to update stock, enter and allocate hours worked, for ordering spares or other equipment required, and so on. The ‘old’ ways of doing this generally involve paper, a telephone, or some unwieldy combination of the two.
More modern means might include an app or a separate FSM solution, which while fine enough, then might require integration work if it is to synchronise easily with the ERP system. Or, horror of horrors, it may involve rekeying data from paper into the ERP application, or so-called ‘swivel chain integration’ where some poor soul has to transfer information from one computer into another. The kind of work, in other words, that nobody likes and in 2020, nobody should be doing.
Now, with FSM fully integrated into Advanced, you can do all of this and more with ease, as it effectively extends the ERP system directly to the point at which your people find themselves working.
And, of course, because it’s a native part of MYOB, there’s no hassles with integration, data exchange, or any of that other nonsense.
With this in mind, the intent behind implementing field service scheduling software is enabling companies to meet – and hopefully, exceed – customer’s expectations in terms of efficiency, timeliness, cost, and satisfaction.
If you’re an existing user and FSM sounds like a useful idea, do get in touch with your account manager and we’ll be very happy to help.
If you’re looking at a new ERP implementation, then the availability of FSM as an MYOB Advanced Module is sure to further strengthen the value proposition for this highly popular mid-range solution. Here’s of course, we’d also be very happy to engage – including providing unbiased advice on whether or not MYOB is a good fit for your organisation in the first place (we offer an independent ERP suitability assessment service, as it happens).
Either way, we’re excited at the possibilities offered by a Field Service Module, because we have a good idea of how it can accelerate your business. Get in touch and let’s explore the possibilities.
