Shepherd is a large product and some additional aspects of it may appeal or benefit one customer more than another. Shepherd’s ability to personalize allows it to suit individual company needs. With that said, there are some features that are so consistently popular that they may as well be considered part of the minimum viable product (MVP) for new Shepherd customers.

Firm favorites

The Shepherd MVP differs from one customer to another, but nearly all customers implement the mobile app, service requester and planner board. In addition to the three examples above, other exceedingly popular modules or add-ons include the service “BI” tool, the Rental Planner Board, or the Technician Planner Board. 90% or more of Shepherd customers will deploy the majority of these modules.

In an earlier blog post discussing how scalability is possible once you have implemented a well-thought through and tailored CMMS solution for your company, we summarized Shepherd CMMS’ fundamental function as that of a communication tool for the automated flow of information from one department to another. But how that information can be entered, and how it can be further manipulated massively influence the scope of what Shepherd can do for a client’s operations.

For example, that BI tool lives in and only in NetSuite where it reports on native NetSuite GL postings, which means that the Shepherd tool uses the very same data that NetSuite itself uses. It starts, however, from the perspective of the asset, rental, or service manager: equipment, service contracts, service locations, individual technicians, etc. as opposed to financial periods or calendar years.

Shepherd BI Tool

Avoid limiting your options

Without the rental or technician planner boards you can easily raise service or rental orders, and bill for them, but you still won’t be able to organize your assets and staff more effectively so that you can then raise more orders and bill for more work for the same amount of time or resources.

And without the mobile app, you and your technicians will remain blind to what needs to be done and what has been done until those technicians next return to their base.

Very often, Shepherd clients come onboard because they had initially decided to address issues with their sales or accounting systems: areas where you could see solid numbers and clear problems, leading them to NetSuite. It is only later that they realize they could further improve their sales and accounting systems, and streamline their service operations in one fell swoop, by adding NetSuite-native Shepherd to their portfolio.

Initial choices are not set in stone

This progression or evolution in the thinking of a company could be seen as problematic since not all changes were considered at the outset. Fortunately, this is no great challenge for Shepherd. Whether at the time of implementation, or later when circumstances require it, adding functionalities is perfectly manageable. Much like paying a manufacturer a subscription fee to unlock greater performance in a modern luxury car, additional modules can be added to a client’s Shepherd solution at any point in the process, even once they’ve been up and running for ages.

Indeed, Shepherd will often suggest functionalities that it recognises as likely to be beneficial in the future, even if not part of a client’s own goals analysis, at which point the client can consider this recommendation or reject it. It is typically the case that the client eventually adopts those additional features later anyway (despite initially choosing not to) because their operations show their necessity. When that happens, Shepherd makes it possible.

Thinking ahead does make life easier

Planning is obviously important in order to garner the full benefits of implementing Shepherd, but a long-term business vision is by no means a prerequisite of opting for Shepherd. Some companies are small and so simply don’t have the means nor information to make far-reaching projections. For them, planning can be limited to categorizing what they have, who they have, what they do and how. Implementation will factor that in and, again, when the situation changes, any additional service that will help a company achieve its goals can be added as needed.

In fact, a company’s own goals and ambitions have been known to change and broaden simply because they’ve spoken to Shepherd and learnt the full scale of what can become possible. What they may have considered non-applicable because it was beyond them in practical terms, can now be brought back into consideration thanks to the doors Shepherd functionalities open: doors a client may not even have known existed.

These realities go a long way to explain why some companies decide to choose NetSuite just so that they can then get access to Shepherd. Although perhaps not the norm, it is far from rare.

If you want to know what doors are there for you to open, why not request a demo directly from Shepherd?

Equipment Rental

Best option using NetSuite

Read more

Share this article