Shepherd mobile location services give service planners and dispatchers detailed insight into the whereabouts of their field staff. When you enable location services and the technician service order acceptance functionality you are able to see both when and where the technician was when confirming given service assignments.
Easy-to-read icons make oversight clearer
If you also decide to enable the advanced time feature, you will find that technician interaction with the mobile device in the field makes its way to your planner board so that schedulers and dispatchers can understand service delivery status at a glance. When a technician indicates that he or she has left for the site, for example, Shepherd shows a “Departed” chip to the tile representing that service order on the planner board. That “Departed” chip replaces, of course, the “Not Started” chip that was there before.
Once the technician indicates that he or she has arrived on site the tile will turn to an “Arrived” chip whereas, if the technician does not arrive on time the tile will receive a “Late” designation, which can allow you to warn the customer of a delay if needed. Once the technician has completed the work on that service order’s tile will inform the viewer with a “Done” chip. So not only is a job’s status updated in real time, it is also displayed in easy to recognise symbols to share the information in an easily-understood way.
Not limited to technician progress: clear job status also possible
A parallel suite of chips will inform the user of the status of associated purchase orders. Are those purchase orders received? Partially received? And what about associated Return Merchandise Authorizations? Are they still pending receipts? Are they approved or even canceled?
This design communicates clearly and quickly using colors and icons to pass on enough information for a scheduler or dispatcher to identify any problems and/or actions that they must take.
For those accounts that use simple time without the timestamp buttons, Shepherd can still identify if a technician has or hasn’t yet traveled to site and if the work remains incomplete after its scheduled completion time. The information that Shepherd chips can communicate is not as rich under the simple time regime but is still very valuable.
No-lag information thanks to Netsuite native design
From an administration perspective, the most powerful feature is the ability to observe how actions on the planner board register on the mobile via PUSH and vice versa. As the Shepherd planner board and mobile app are both native to NetSuite all PUSH and POST requests process directly in NetSuite before arriving on the destination application. The data is current then for NetSuite browsers as well: no data duplication and zero synchronization! Reading and writing occur directly in NetSuite. This way you know that what you see has already been registered and taken into account in any number or areas that you have linked to this task within NetSuite.
There is simply no better way to have up to the minute operational data, apart from being there yourself. To have the same flexibility at your fingertips, contact your regional Shepherd sales manager to learn more.
