Crew Managers might well be seen by some as the unsung heroes of the service department as they take on quite a few tasks for the good of the team. As a result of that, it’s unsurprising that Shepherd aims to make the options available to crew managers as helpful as possible. This blog covers one of them: the ability for crew managers to create time entries for team members.
Those who are paying close attention might be leaping to point out that this function already existed. Yes, true, but only in the bulk-edit sense. This version is a bit more surgical in its precision.
Reduced input means increased efficiency
Imagine a situation with 3 crew members out on a field service. The crew manager will be responsible for that job. At this point, it is worth remembering that Shepherd is there to ease the communication of what a technician does during a service for billing and maintenance record purposes. It’s not there to hold the hands of the technicians as they work their magic.
That means all members accessing and updating Shepherd records may be too many chefs spoiling the broth. One person taking care of record keeping is enough. It might also be that not all crew members are as comfortable with Shepherd’s app, preferring a spanner or diagnostic tool to a tablet. Whatever the reason, they need not be involved with the Shepherd solution, as long as someone is.
In these cases, a crew manager can enter their own time entries in the system but also enter those of their fellow team members. And this need not be a bulk edit, but can be on a case-by-case basis.
No one left out
None of this locks out the other technicians, though. They can still see, edit and approve their own time entries, after checking what the manager entered. This might be particularly important where overtime rates might apply and someone would probably want to double-check that those minutes were accurately counted too.
Technician entry confirmation is just a question of configuration: applicable in organizations that want it, or solely the responsibility of the manager in organizations that don’t. Whichever option is chosen, the chances of delays in data entry grow with the more people involved. Your ability to bill could be held up by a single technician who forgot to do it at the end of the shift, went home for the weekend, and hasn’t logged in since. Now, that’s no longer a delay.
Custom entry where necessary
In fact, a given crew manager can now enter their own times in one tab, switch to another tab, and there all crew members will be listed. A tick box feature will let the manager select those whose time sheet they want to input. And the times entered need not be the same for them all: that technician who arrived 30 minutes before the rest to ready the field will have that time recognized too.
A faster way of ensuring that the invoicing department has all the relevant information as soon as possible, without suffering from anyone’s dislike of admin. Likewise, the number of users needing access can be kept to a minimum, and all the while individual team members can have as much or as little oversight and input in the process as the servicing department sees necessary: maximum flexibility, maximum efficiency, minimum confusion.
