Those who have grown up with siblings will know the frustration of wanting to use something at home, only to find a brother or sister is hogging it. This same can occur in the maintenance and services sectors where specialist tools are too expensive to acquire in surplus. Shepherd has the solution for service departments if not for families.
Tool use, scheduling, and service order allocation can be handled by Shepherd’s solution meaning a technician and their manager will know when the tools needed are available, and therefore when a job is feasible, all of which is the topic of this blog piece.
A record for tools, like any other asset
To be clear from the outset, the feature being discussed here is not one typically applied to the humble claw hammer, although you could if inclined to. This is rather for those specialist tools that have a hefty price tag meaning you may only have a limited supply for several staff. Customers’ constant struggle with double bookings and a lack of clarity over tool availability had meant those same customers were losing money and credibility.
As already hinted, that limited supply means that only so many jobs involving those tools can be carried out at any given time. A system that allows these tools to be tracked, and reserved also means that a company will be able to function the smallest number necessary to ensure they don’t have redundant examples, or jobs they can’t fulfill. In other words, knowing how many units to buy in order to function, without over-spending.
That sweet spot needs information on how often the tool is needed, by how many people, and for how long— all the information that Shepherd’s Tool Management functionality provides.
Benefits, put in context
For the purposes of illustrating this, let’s pick an example tool: a remote-operated vehicle, or ROV. To the uninitiated, this is typically an underwater device that can be used to reach, monitor, and interact with equipment in hazardous, underwater environments, saving employees the risk of doing so, and the company the additional expense in precautions— so a good investment, but all the same pricey.
So now this expensive subaquatic asset can have its own record in Shepherd where it can be allocated to service orders, helping gauge whether or not it is profitable to own in the long term. On that same service order, you can specify technician qualifications to ensure that only those who can pilot it will have access to it.
Tracking Costs, Maintenance, and Compliance
The tool record itself also allows you to track its costs in terms of servicing, or its calibration schedule (if the ROV has a sensitive instrument on board). Imagine the embarrassment of sending a technician out to measure a crucial apparatus below the waves only to find the readings are invalid due to calibration being out of date by a month or a dozen hours of extra work time. Shepherd helps eliminate that risk when used to its fullest potential.
Similarly, a bill prepared in anticipation of a job being done, perhaps as part of a service contract might go out despite the fact that, on the day, the tool required was not available. The bill goes out, and the customer is charged for work not done. This would then require all manner of accounting fixes, credits, or refunds to resolve. The scheduling feature of Tool Management addresses this potential problem, too.
A customer’s home-baked precursors to this may have been calendars or spreadsheets, all of which are prone to mistakes and omissions given that the information they hold being spread around instead of just in one place.
Not limited to customer satisfaction
Tools are not just bits of tech required to satisfy a client’s needs. They can equally be items to satisfy a Shepherd user’s legal obligations. Companies need to ensure their crews’ safety and having robust Health and Safety processes help do this.
If the Health and Safety protocol requires that the crew have specific breathing apparatus or oxygen meters as part of their kit, the tool record for each of these can ensure they are there, in the kit room, ready to be taken out on the day they are needed. The tool also allows the service manager to ensure that filters are replaced as needed, again based on the information stored in the tool management functionality.
If a Shepherd customer chooses to capitalize such a tool, they can use NetSuite’s depreciation functions to keep track of purchase price and service costs versus revenue gained and resale value to calculate what is a tool’s viable lifespan within the company, and how profitable it is.
The Tool Management feature of Shepherd’s solution helps eliminate so many potential pitfalls otherwise likely to cost money and time. And if not needed now, the functionality remains available within the system until the day when a company’s operations make this sort of tracking necessary. If these pain points sound familiar, or you prefer to address them before they do, get in touch with Shepherd and organize a demo to learn more.
