Even when you build a great field servicing workforce and perform brilliant marketing campaigns – having your necessary breakdown when required will stop you from providing exemplary service. 

That's how critical it is for a field service business to maintain inventory by keeping their tools, materials, and equipment in shape.

To ensure your equipment is available when required, it is important that you take care of it and maintain adequate usage levels. Adopting the practice of preventive maintenance is what helps you deliver consistent field service – read more to learn how.

What is field service management software?

Field service management software is a crucial tool for businesses engaged in field service activities, facilitating the efficient management of various resources. This software aids managers and technicians in processing job orders, automating scheduling and dispatch, monitoring service and repair tasks, handling customer service contracts, processing payments, and more.

The capabilities of field service management are diverse, encompassing a range of software and solutions.

• Mobile Field Service Management Software: Certain field service management software platforms offer cloud and mobile functionalities, enabling real-time communication and keeping technicians connected to vital information and support while on the field. Mobile capabilities empower field service technicians to capture images on their devices, access data from remote assets and digital twins to diagnose the root causes of issues. Additionally, these platforms often integrate AI and AR capabilities to enhance collaboration, a trend that is becoming increasingly standard.
• Enterprise Asset Management Software: Enterprise asset management (EAM) software is instrumental in helping companies maintain and control their operational assets and equipment, whether located on or off-premises. By centralizing asset information and incorporating AI-powered remote monitoring and analytics, maintenance managers can optimize asset utilization, increase productive uptime, and reduce operational costs.
• Inventory Management System: An inventory management system plays a pivotal role in optimizing maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) inventory for companies. It provides an accurate and granular view of MRO inventory performance, offering optimized recommendations for inventory levels and reorder points for each stocked item.

Challenges of field service management

Maintenance technician leaders encounter numerous challenges, from the struggle to attract and retain talent in a shrinking labor pool to dealing with underskilled workforces, escalating operational costs, and a lack of technology for managing complex assets and expanding service demands. Addressing these challenges requires the implementation of software capable of automating tasks, thereby alleviating the strain on the workforce, facilitating knowledge transfer, and furnishing features that support technicians in the field.

Mobile service technicians grapple with issues such as scheduling conflicts, difficulties in accessing essential data, miscommunication regarding job tasks, and the need for return trips. To surmount these challenges, it is imperative to extend comprehensive CMMS capabilities to phones and tablets. This includes the ability to review asset maintenance histories, access detailed technical specifications and GIS-location data, scrutinize work order information, process billing, and engage in real-time communication.

Many companies have adopted disparate solutions over time, resulting in multiple tools that do not seamlessly integrate. For efficient field service management, it is crucial to have unified, integrated, end-to-end solutions that are user-friendly for field teams and offer dashboards providing enterprise-wide visibility into a company's resources.

What is preventive maintenance?

Preventive maintenance helps you keep a regular check on equipment and materials stored in the inventory. It provides you with standard operating procedures to ensure best practices of asset management for handling the inventory goods are being followed.

Thus, by implementing preventive maintenance, you are making sure your equipment, tools, and materials get fixed before they face any downtime.

The problem with reactive maintenance is that it causes delays in executing your work orders. It increases the bench time for your workers too as they wait for their tools and equipment to take up assigned jobs even when they are available. Also, it increases the cost of repairing the assets – further increasing your business operating costs.

Reactive maintenance also impacts your field service business's reputation in front of your customers – making you look unprepared, unpredictable, and inefficient.

The use of Software for implement preventive maintenance practices?

Implementing preventive maintenance practices is crucial for ensuring the longevity and efficiency of equipment and assets in various industries. The use of software plays a pivotal role in streamlining and enhancing these preventive maintenance efforts. Software solutions dedicated to preventive maintenance enable organizations to schedule regular inspections, automate routine tasks, and monitor equipment health in a systematic manner. 

These tools provide a centralized platform for managing maintenance schedules, tracking historical data, and generating reports, facilitating a proactive approach to equipment upkeep. By leveraging software for preventive maintenance practices, businesses can optimize resource allocation, minimize downtime, and extend the lifespan of their assets, ultimately contributing to improved operational reliability and cost-effectiveness.

Having asset management software helps you remotely manage your property and other equipment. For this, using comprehensive field service management software is useful so that you can integrate data from your preventive maintenance to scheduling and dispatching work.

Typical features of property or field service management software for preventive maintenance include:

• Manage energy needs: it is possible to track how much electricity your equipment or tool takes in order to complete a job. Tracking this information helps you catch and repair the equipment when it is taking more than usual energy to operate.
• Checklists: having inspection checklists is handy to enable remote field service technicians to take care of equipment from time to time.
• Track servicing history: knowing service history data helps understand your equipment better and predict required maintenance more accurately.
• Create work orders: for this reason, having FSM software is useful as it will include work order management features. This helps you create work orders for maintenance tasks and assign them immediately for execution.
• Reminders: choose a property management software that includes automated reminders for upcoming maintenance tasks so that your field service teams are ready and dispatched accordingly.
• Tracking compliance: by taking care of equipment health, you ensure the safety of your workers who are using them to carry out their jobs. Such features may be required in specific locations that have laws that require the submission of equipment compliance reports.
• Mobile access: having mobile device access on Android or iOS helps your workers know in real time about resource allocation status so that they can accept or reject jobs.
• IoT integration: by tracking equipment temperature, vibrations, radiations, etc it is possible to adjust maintenance schedules to avoid failures.
• Reserve funding tracking: FSM software should be able to track how much funds are available to carry out preventive maintenance tasks.
• Create reports: make sure your software can generate reports and insights on equipment usage, failure rates, downtime frequency, and maintenance schedules successfully carried out.

The impact of FSM software for preventive maintenance reduce costs and downtime rates? 

Field service management software helps with task allocation, execution, reporting, and invoicing activities in conjunction with carrying out preventive maintenance. This helps you reduce costs for purchasing new software for those tasks.

Having property management software or FSM software with preventive maintenance features helps reduce costs and downtime as follows:

• Optimizes energy efficiency to reduce electricity consumption
• Increases the lifespan of the equipment rented or purchased
• Optimizes labor costs so that you avoid any need for frequent repair work
• Improves how your field service teams manage spare parts in inventory
• Reduces any lost revenues due to time lost in servicing customers due to equipment downtime.

Field service management software can help preventive maintenance program for your equipment and inventory management.