One of the most important requirements for your field service department is the Fast and efficient handling of work orders. Customers expect high-quality service from your technicians, but they also expect to be helped quickly and at low cost. This requires a good design of the processes in the service department. The principle of "management by exception" can help.
What is management by exception?
In the case of management by exception, tasks are left by managers to their employees without controlling them or intervening, as long as the results meet predetermined objectives. Thus, management will intervene only "by exception. Often, the initiative to inform or engage management is also left to the employees. The idea behind management of exception is that it does not make sense to spend time monitoring things that are running smoothly. It is only when something abnormal or surprising happens that it is important as a manager to be aware of it and make adjustments if necessary. Think of it as an assembly line with packages; only the ones that fall off are going to be looked at.
Why apply this in field service?
In a field service department with a few mechanics, it is still possible to keep an overview without the help of automation. But with dozens or even hundreds of mechanics, that becomes impossible. Together they work on large numbers of service jobs that you organize as well as possible with your processes, supported by software tools. When you set that up properly, the vast majority of work orders run flawlessly from start to finish.
And so it doesn't make sense to then check every service report and every invoice. It's better to focus on where things go wrong or "deviate." For example, a customer who has a complaint, a discussion about an invoice, a service job that took much longer than expected or a mechanic who has been stuck in a traffic jam for hours. As a manager, it is much more important to put your attention into that and come up with an appropriate solution than to waste your time checking a pile of invoices from service jobs that were completed smoothly and as expected.
People get happy about this!
Actually, the most important reason to use the principle of management by exception in your field service department: your own people and your customers will be happy about it! It is nice for service managers to be able to concentrate fully on the real problems. For engineers, it's nice to be able to perform their work without being caught off guard and to be able to call in the service manager in special situations. And for the customer, it is nice to be helped quickly and well in case of complaints or problems, by people who give them the time and attention they deserve.
Arend Jan Boersma is Senior Consultant at Dysel and a specialist in automating the (field) service department.
