| | MARCH 20228CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONBy Mo Dastagir, Chief Information Officer, Cresco Labs FIELD MANAGEMENT SERVICES (FSM)The FSM tool was something we used to identify the open spots on the Technician's Schedule and book jobs that keep productivity and customer satisfaction high.Additionally, we were able to see dramatic improvements in some of our core metrics such as Customer Satisfaction, First Time Complete, On-time Arrival of Technicians, Reduction in Travel Time between Jobs, and Improvement of Productivity.Why is FMS more relevant today than ever before?With the stakes high and most businesses being survival mode, it's important to determine how you're going to operate your limited workforce to meet the varied demand from the customers. Customers are moving away from being able to visit restaurants and retail stores to order for pick-up or curbside delivery. This is where FSM platforms come in. There are usually SaaS platforms, that are very easy to deploy, plug, and play for Small-Medium Businesses and they take a ton of the guesswork out of the equation.For integrations to Sales Order Platforms & Point of Sales Systems or to Enterprise Platforms such as CRM & ERP Systems, most FSM tools come with modern API structures that allow you to integrate fairly quickly.As the world navigates through the COVID19 pandemic, dealing with the complexities of Social Distancing and operating a business, the Field Management Services (FSM) topic has become increasingly important. Having a robust set of solutions that allows you to deliver product and services to Customers while most of the country continues to stay in quarantine has become table stakes. Whether you have a product being delivered to your doorstep, an online order being picked up at curbside or you're requesting for a service technician for your home appliances, you're interacting with some form of a Field Management Services Platform.What is FSM?In a sense, it's the technology platform that runs the engine to connect Orders and Service Request platforms to the people who fulfill them. Everything from assigning work orders to your workforce to dispatching, scheduling, and tracking inventory or people can be done by an FSM tool.The best part of most FSM tools is the rich data and analytics that they provide for you to determine where and what you can optimize in your Workforce Structure to service your customers or how to connect demand information to supply. They allow you to plan your workforce capacity by day, by hour, by specialty of job, by job duration, and in some cases, availability of certain components need to get the job done.The FSM tool can also be used to locate your assets such as Trucks & Tools or manage tasks such as Invoicing, Accounting, Service Order processing. Where have I seen it work well?When I was a CTO at Sears Home Services, we had 7000 Appliance Repair Technicians, Nationally, on our payroll that we managed through an FSM Tool. Additionally, we had another 3000 Technicians that were available through our contractor network. We've used both Service Max and CLICK at Sears Home Services through the years and these tools allowed us to Schedule, Route, and Dispatch (SRD) support to our Technicians. The tools allowed identify and isolate our network's Technician availability / capacity down to a zip code level and allowed us to match it to Market Demand. Paired with location tracking software we could monitor where our Technicians were and we could use the FSM tool to provide turn by turn navigation support to our Techs.The tool also allowed us to manage our network capacity at the most optimal level where the tool would set the schedules for Technicians the day before based on Availability of the Technicians against a Geographic code, Job Type Specialization (Washer / Dryer, Refrigerator, Cook Top, Dishwasher), Brand Type, Job Code Repair Duration, Availability of Certain Parts and tools based on Job Code as some of the many factors that went into the planning software.Mo Dastagir
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