Category: Visit management

Easily create maintenance equipment checklist for your field team

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checklist for preventive maintenance

Checklist for preventive maintenance on the fly

Every field service technician is familiar with maintenance equipment checklists. Let’s see why.

Every equipment under your care has a different maintenance plan. Not just schedule. Let’s take a battery, for instance.

An industrial battery requires preventative maintenance at periodic intervals. If in heavy use, then as frequently as every month. Preventive maintenance (PM) is done to ensure one does not need to come back for ad hoc maintenance/ repair for damaged batteries- basically the same principle behind PM that is followed for all equipment.

Now, every equipment that needs maintenance requires a checklist for preventive maintenance for the technicians to follow. Be it an automobile or a fuel pump or a battery. This is common sense as well as common practice. These maintenance equipment checklists can run to 5/ 6 items for simpler items like a battery vs hundred or more for an automobile.

As an example, take a look at the maintenance equipment checklist published by Alpine Power Systems.

maintenance equipment checklist for battery
Representational: maintenance equipment checklist for battery

Till recently the technicians went around with printed maintenance equipment checklists and noted their finding there.

The problem with maintenance equipment checklist so far

Committing your checklist for preventive maintenance to a paper based strategy has obviously 2 problems.

  1. Paper is tough to track, and audit. End of the day, someone needs to (or should) sit down with the sheaf of papers documenting all the PM activities that have happened that day and check if the right procedure was followed. Were the right observations made, corrective actions taken and customer feedback monitored?

In comes software. Mobile and web based. For capturing records for every maintenance activity performed. And being able to draw appropriate lessons from the past activities. So, obviously, maintenance equipment checklist should be the first to be computerized.

2. And, keeping history, maintaining records and learning from experience is near impossible unless you have a process for transcribing (error free) all the filled up maintenance equipment checklists. Regularly. And, have a software for analysing the historical records for trends to be wary about.

Challenge with computerizing maintenance equipment checklist

Then comes the challenge: do you have to have different software for maintaining, say a laptop than for maintaining a washing machine? Or for a diesel generator set? Because the preventive maintenance checklist to be used for capturing the details regarding each type of equipment is very different, as you can understand.

Or, should you custom develop- with the help of your software vendor, a checklist for preventive maintenance for the equipment that you maintain? And, look for him again when the firm needs even a minor tweak?

Not easy huh?

That’s where Saleswah CRM comes in.

Checklist for preventive maintenance: Mobile app driven totally customizable

We provide you the ability to custom design, not one, but scores of product category maintenance equipment checklist – one for each type of products you have under maintenance. Not just that; you can create custom forms for visits – as well. These checklist for preventive maintenance are available instantly to all users once designed by the admin.

But, hold on. When you have scores of forms with you on your mobile app, that’s just the same as carrying around multiple paper forms for different product types, right? Ah, no. Saleswah CRM is smarter than that. When you are attending to a an equipment under maintenance, the software will show ONLY the relevant form to you. Without your intervention. In fact, you can’t pull up a wrong form even if you tried.

All this works- without a single line of code, any need for “implementation consultants” getting involved and any spend on time and money.

If you would like to have a demo of how to create maintenance equipment checklists – contact us for a demo.

The complete CRM vision behind service CRM development

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When we built the service CRM– we had some very straightforward goals. Some have been achieved, some will be achieved down the road.

Let me do a quick roadmap sharing and also list the design objectives.

Continue reading “The complete CRM vision behind service CRM development”

Field service case study of heavy engineering equipment

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service crmSaleswah CRM is being used for field maintenance of about 35000 Diesel Generator Sets by a customer. Many of these DG sets are located in remote parts of India. They are installed in Telecom Towers for providing backup power.

A service team of about 30 managers oversee 90 service dealers who employ about 700 service technicians. The service technicians attend to field visits- for repair and preventive maintenance. They are kept supplied with spares. The service is provided under stringent SLA conditions.

See this for more details of the implementation.

The field technicians use the Saleswah CRM mobile app- for service  to update the status of the ticket from the field. The service dealers and the managers use the mobile app to stay updated on the open tickets status. They also use the web based application for more involved tasks such as approvals, audits, billing, certification and so on.

After couple of years of use, the customer shared their feedback on what their strategic and operational objectives were and how close they have come to meeting them. We put their feedback in the slide deck that follows.

Have a look at the field service case study.

[slideshare id=87521886&doc=servicecrmprsentationcasestudy-180208134101]

Visit management: spoofing your location in CRM

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Using location data in visit management for convenience and productivity

Visit management on our mobile app depends on the GPS coordinates reported by the phone hardware. The location is used to query Google maps and it makes your life simple. We wrote a fairly detailed post on the technology some time back.

Using location data in visit management in CRM

Let’s say, you are meeting a client for the first time- let’s say a retailer who you are visiting. Since he is not in your database, you would have to go through a lot of hassle to first add the retailer in the database, and then log the activity.

This wastes time.

So, on our Android app, we allow you to add an account (a customer/ dealer etc) from the mobile app – straight from logging a visit. If the account exists already, well and good- the app will simply log a visit. If the account does not exist, then Saleswah automatically fetches the street address (where you are standing) from Google and goes through with logging a visit.

In the process, it creates a new account record,complete with street address.

Saves time. And, that was all we wanted to do.

Control, convenience and spoofing

We recently got a call from a client and then we had to relook at the visit log method. Because, some folks, who did not want their whereabouts known, or worse, wanted to pretend to be on tour or in the field – had found a way to fool the app.

So, what we thought was for convenience, was being used by management for control. And the users were finding ways around it.

Apparently there are tens of such apps in the Playstore- all can spoof your location and help you pretend you are in Georgia where you might be in Georgetown.

We stopped it of course!

Many of our functionality depends on careful logging of GPS data and accurately querying Google maps. Finding distances, directions. We could not afford uncertainty over actual location data.