In this month’s update:
- Discovering the Equipment Planner Board. An intro to the planner board, but with a twist. A must feature (and one already available) for anyone who needs to see the field from the perspective of their equipment rather than their team.
- SuiteWorld: feedback from the booth. Read about NetSuite’s annual Las Vegas convention.
- The case for case studies. A reminder of why being part of Shepherd’s growing community of case studies is not just interesting, it can be a valuable promotional tool for your own operations.
When your business is Equipment, make Equipment your business
With the majority of newsletter recipients having read our email about version 3 of the standard Planner Board, a lot of the concepts in this piece will make sense and sound familiar. This month, we take a closer look at the Equipment Planner Board. As with other similar features of Shepherd’s solution, it is already in the most recent Shepherd release and needs only activation to become available and ready to use.
Of course, there is an exception to this recommendation: avoid this new Equipment Planner Board if you enjoy moving through multiple tabs and records before finding the information you need. Why? Because all files and records are accessible directly from the Equipment Planner Board itself.
Read on, or check out these introductory slides:
First, let’s make some distinctions: the Planner Board we covered a few weeks back makes your technicians the focus of operations. Who’s free, and who isn’t. From the allocation of Service Orders to the team members best placed, or best qualified to do it. Meanwhile, the Equipment Planner Board focuses on your equipment instead.
This might apply to rental equipment or assets used within your own operations. Whether based on information received through the Internet of Things, or through on-site reports and diagnostics. That piece of equipment exists as a tile on the planner board, where clicking on the tile takes you straight to its record in NetSuite if needed. You can also generate a service order from this view that is then available for technician allocation.
Similarly, rather than handing over the whole process to the service manager who has enough to deal with, a technician on site with the equipment in question can raise a Service Order themselves through the web or mobile app. That Service Order will then appear in the Equipment Planner Board for that particular piece of equipment, in real time, for the service manager to allocate accordingly.
Essentially, it’s the condition of the equipment, and not only contracts, servicing schedules, or preventative maintenance plans, that decides when a service order is raised. Choosing where to create a service order, be it the regular planner board or the equipment planner board, simply depends on where your priorities lie and which filtering method best suits your operation.
Although focused on the machine, rather than the person working on it, the information you can access remains broad. One such aid is the Resource Plan, which will show how many hours each technician can work each day. As their availability changes, so do the results of the resource plan, so you know exactly how much time a given technician has in a given week. No underusing your team, no over-promising to your customers. As is often the case, the filters can help reduce your list further, showing only technicians with time to spare, for example.
There’s no point having a fantastic maintenance system, brimming with efficiency, if the production line manager is totally in the dark: downtime is a reality of working with machines, and the equipment planner lets you plot and plan for that. If equipment is down for maintenance, for example, a tile on that equipment’s line will inform you, so that, on the one hand, you will have technicians who know where to be, and product managers, or customers who know they will have to find capacity elsewhere during that time.
You may also be glad to know that a Downtime KPI will be available by year end, too, so don’t be surprised if that comes up in a future newsletter, too.
If you need a technician to work, it’s because you have a service order to meet. For that reason, it makes sense to make certain information available on the screen about those service orders. A service order can show a small chip with hours under it that a user can configure to be off, show standard hours, or show labor hours. If “off”, the chip is not displayed, but with standard hours, we show the number of hours it is estimated to finish the service. If labor hours are the choice, you get a more thorough breakdown of what is needed to finish the service, such as technicians with different skills, or a different amount of time needed for each step.
There is also a chip for parts status, so you will know if you should expect delays, or seek contingencies, or if everything is moving along as planned. Similarly, you show different fields on the technician’s planner board card. You can add some more important information that you want to have accessible at a glance. This might be a technician’s service zones, their skillset, contact info, etc.
As mentioned, the equipment focus doesn’t mean other impactful factors are ignored, such as a technician grouping functionality, where each user can create groups for technicians they are working with. The result is that the equipment needs you identify in the equipment planner can be readily satisfied by finding the right people for the job. For example, a technician group for field service, another for electricians, etc.
Want to apply filters to your technician force? Use the Technician Planner Board. Prefer to filter based on equipment specs and characteristics? Go with the Equipment Planner Board. It’s that easy.
And if you run an operation that is equipment-heavy, there’s no better day than today to get your system admin to activate the Equipment Planner Board in your NetSuite-native Shepherd environment.
SuiteWorld 2025: news from the floor
It may be you’ve seen the LinkedIn posts and so on, but if you haven’t and you’re curious, suffice to say that SuiteWorld was a grand success. Hard work, with a bit of frantic thrown in, as usual, but well worth the trip for Shepherd and those we spoke to.
This year’s event saw encouraging chats with partners, eager to learn how much Shepherd has evolved, as well as a surge in interest from company representatives wanting to boost the field service potential and profitability.
One notable trend the team noticed this year was an uptick in the number of inquiries from company owners and representatives. The reason? Many were looking to get a clearer understanding of where FSM ends, and where CMMS and EAM begin, and were left pleasantly surprised by the range of possibilities an EAM solution makes available.
Become a case study for Shepherd, and enjoy independent coverage of your company
All too often, advertising underperforms, and a lot of “broadcasting” gets lost in the noise. Well, one way around that is getting coverage that isn’t clearly self-serving, but comes from an independent source. In this case, let Shepherd sing your company’s praises by covering what you do and why you’ve succeeded through the medium of a case study.
Feed your own channels
Naturally, such a case study includes how Shepherd’s solution fits into that picture, but since choosing Shepherd means you value accuracy, efficiency, and customer satisfaction, that can only be a good thing for your prospects to read. On top of that, you can quote or adapt what’s written for your own channels, knowing that it is all genuinely true and representative of what you do and how you work.
Prioritizing your time and control
On top of that, a case study’s footprint on your working day is very small. One interview, with perhaps a couple of follow-up emails to clarify what’s what, and you’ll have a draft to approve or comment on. You are welcome to supply images too, to showcase your people or your products. Better still, why not both?
And we’re not worried about the outcomes: whether it’s what we write about you, or ourselves, you get to say what goes in before it goes up online. We have ten companies that have taken up the opportunity. Have a look at our website to see for yourself what your case study could look like. Just get in touch with us at newsletter@shepherdcmms.com to start the ball rolling.
