A recent blog piece talked about the time saved (excuse the pun) with the existence of the Shepherd mobile app where technicians can record the time they have spent, which then automatically gets fed into a system that will crosscheck all relevant information sources that can impact who that time is used for business intelligence, reporting, billing, and so on.

This blog will look at how that same system can help companies see exactly how their investment in their staff is paying off.

Shepherd’s mobile app does a number of things when it comes to giving the Shepherd user information about their operations. It informs you of what parts are logged out and on board a given technician’s vehicle. It can allow technicians to be proactive and self-assign relevant jobs themselves so that customer time is not lost on downtime any more than needed.

Being in a mobile device it can also track. 

The sad reality is that, while you read about it and hear about it, you probably prefer not to entertain the notion that your own employees are not always as diligent as you’d like. Indeed, some might actually be negligent of their duties.

Tracking Technicians for Accountability

You will be paying your technicians for doing a job. You’ll be billing your customers for that job too. Inaccuracies in the information used for either of those two processes spell trouble in one form or another. With Shepherd you will have time logs of when a technician started a job and when they finished—presumably in order to meet their contractual obligations to you.

You can also see where and when those entries were made. Exact locations and exact times. That means you can confirm any claim by a less-than-professional technician that they were on site when the job was “started.” If that claim proves false, you can take the remedial steps needed to ensure fraudulent, opaque timekeeping no longer happens.

The technician enters times, the system records location. What was done, when and where is now recorded in Netsuite, and cannot be edited.

Indisputable Data at Your Disposal

The system also “triangulates” information, letting the user know when a job notification reaches a technician’s device, when they open it, and where they were when they did so. This leaves nowhere to hide for employees who are not honoring their employment contracts, hoping ignorance of the circumstances will disarm their employer.

Similarly, that information can be used to refute a customer’s claims that a job was not performed since they are not all immune from the temptation of trying to get something for nothing either. In such cases, your diligent technician will be vindicated, and your customer billed according to the contract. In doing so, they will need to pay—also according to the contract.

The technician’s mobile device shows an alert, the system records where and when it was opened, eliminating any chance for technicians, or customers, to make unsupported claims. 

There needn’t be some underhanded motive behind the need to have a clear idea of what is and what is not. Service Level Agreements have criteria for what is deemed work delivered as promised and what is not, as well as requirements regarding how long the client need wait before a technician arrives. Any dispute there can cost a lot in terms of legal fees if it gets that far, whereas the data Shepherd provides can highlight very effectively if deliverables were met, whether it be the frequency of services, duration, location, and so on.

Using Time Data to Identify Performance Gaps

Sometimes the benefits of this transparent time logging are not related to unscrupulous behaviors among staff or customers, but simply to see who is working efficiently and who needs further training. If you have a team of technicians all of whom manage to perform a given service in four hours, but you have two others who need closer to six, there’s clearly a need for some kind of intervention.

Easy comparisons of reports within the team can highlight training deficits or performance increases.

Knowing they take 50% more time for the same job, you can start to investigate where the problem is. You may even find that the main group is not faster, but has been missing a step due to inadequate documentation—something that would have remained hidden without the times logged in the Shepherd app for reference.

In many respects, the information captured by the Shepherd time and Materials function goes beyond the day-to-day processes of invoicing, job assignment, and stock oversight. It is an insurance policy against misunderstandings, and misinformation, the coincidental and the intentional. It can shed light on imbalances in performance and knowledge within the organization and helps highlight discrepancies in the work done, and the work required.

Those uses alone, make Shepherd’s Time and Materials a feature worth having even before taking into account the hours of work it saves, and the potential mistakes it eliminates. For more information, get in touch with Shepherd and ask for a demo.

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