In this blog, we look at a company in the North East of the continental US delivering a crucial service for its clients in ensuring that their medical equipment remains in good working order. This maintenance ensures the diagnosis, treatment and care for patients is not impacted.
This Shepherd user has both increased its efficiency and reduced its risks by making full use of Shepherd’s planner board and mobile app.
The planner board gives the administrator a full view of the status of jobs and technicians in real time and allows for the creation, allocation, and conclusion of service orders making coordination far easier and accurate for any maintenance manager.
The real-time map puts all clients and technicians on a map view, making it possible to see exactly who is available to tend to a customer’s needs and how far they are from reaching that customer.
The mobile app is the field technician’s lifeline, essentially giving them access to their company’s ERP out in the field. Accessing information, accepting service requests, reporting on work done, and confirming services completed: it’s all at their fingertips.
Prepared for the unexpected
Unlike many industries, the nature of the medical profession means you simply don’t know which issue will need your attention and when. All that means you need your full array of tools and equipment working correctly at all times. Failing that, you need contingency plans so that when something is taken offline, there is a backup available so those in need are not adversely affected.
The company in question does field maintenance for emergency repairs and needs to adhere to quick turnaround and response times to avoid putting patients at risk and incurring costly penalties for breaching their service level agreements with those client institutions.
Meeting clients’ needs using the planner board
Having a clear overview of where technicians are, what they have on board in the way of tools and parts, and whether they can be at a site within the time required are all essential insights to making the operation a success. Otherwise, time would be lost finding out exactly who can do the repairs rather than that time being spent getting to the site in question.
Shepherd’s planner board addresses this very elegantly. This company can see all of its technicians on one screen and instantly know who is available, who soon will be, and who is too tied up to help. Using the real-time map feature, they can also see who is where and in a fraction of the time otherwise needed, a technician can be assigned to the job, and that customer is a step closer to a resolution.
The planner board can also be configured to display competencies so that a technician who has just completed the maintenance course for that x-ray machine may be a better choice even if they are 15 minutes further away than another worker who lacks the ideal training.
The Shepherd mobile app can also allow technicians themselves to self-assign jobs too if head offices are short-staffed or have other issues to deal with.
Applying this solution to the management challenge greatly reduces the chances of not meeting the service-level agreement commitments and the penalties that would go with that failure.
Maintenance management
This company also does in-house servicing: equipment can be sent in for scheduled servicing where specialist tools might be needed. This company has loaner equipment available as part of the service; offering their customers a replacement machine for the duration that their own property is off-site for repairs.
In this situation, the same solution that rental companies use to manage their own assets on other people’s premises tells them exactly who has what and for how long. This allows subsequent jobs requiring loaner machines to be scheduled as soon as possible without risking delays or broken commitments.
Buy, fix, sell, and track the costs
Shepherd’s In-fleeting lets their client acquire old equipment, bring it onto their books, record refurbishment costs and then sell it on as fully-functional, used goods. Buying, doing up, and reselling is a well-known business model, but being able to say when something belongs to your company, how much it has cost to fix, and record its sale in a way that helps tell you if it has made you a profit or not, is actually a pretty complex task involving different departments. With Shepherd, that task is infinitely easier, with all the related costs feeding straight into NetSuite.
Greater efficiency delivered
As with all Shepherd customers, the benefits of swift and accurate billing generated thanks to the free flow of data between Shepherd and NetSuite have helped this customer earn money by billing correctly and save money by doing so effortlessly and quickly.
Despite the initial investment needed to move from old, outdated, and cumbersome spreadsheet-based management to full NetSuite and Shepherd implementation, this client has felt the advantages almost immediately, making Shepherd, once more, an investment, not an expense.
Do you work in a servicing sector, medical or otherwise? Do you want to see these same improvements for your operation? Call for a Shepherd demo and start the process for your company too.
