Shepherd built its Planner Board to be a comfortable, intuitive interface for its users. That is possible thanks to “Angular” technology which allows for acceleration through background request processing and for far better design flexibility. The result is a pleasant and responsive experience. What service managers do with the planner, however, varies widely from one Shepherd subscriber to the next.
An intuitive design to make management easier
Using its capabilities can save your organisation time and therefore money. This includes how technicians’ work hours are used to best effect. Enable Advanced Time with start and end timestamps, and your technicians will indicate that they have departed for site, arrived on site, begun work, paused work, and finally finished work. Upon receiving each update on trip and work status from the technician, Shepherd updates that trip on the Planner with a different ‘chip’ communicating to the service manager that update.
At a glance your organisation can see if the service offered is being delivered to the customer as planned or not: the manager responsible for field service management may understand the status of each trip for his or her team.
Because each trip also has a start time, Shepherd will alert the service manager if any technicians are late. The Shepherd Planner Board knows if a technician is late since the mobile devices deployed in the field send all of their data to NetSuite where the Planner Board may read it as soon as it arrives.
Allocate and change status of you different activities as they develop
Likewise Shepherd has built in chips whose purpose is to communicate the status of associated Purchase Orders and Return Authorizations. Shepherd has knowledge of the status of these related transactions because it lives inside NetSuite. The goal is that same ease of use and intuitive understanding of what is happening, where and when.
Where they are using Advanced Time or Simple Time, nearly all service managers use the Planner Board to load-balance their technicians’ work. Every asset in your organisation, be they human or artificial, needs to be deployed effectively. Underusing a resource is a waste, whilst over-burdening is counterproductive.
Since the Planner Board depicts work start and end times as well as dates, the visual workday depiction communicates to the service manager whether a technician is over or under scheduled. Shifting an assignment from one technician to another is as simple as dragging and dropping the service order to another technician.
Simplified workflow for workload and invoice oversight
The Shepherd Planner Board also allows your system administrator to configure service order color-coding based on any field present on the service order. The most common configuration is to have Shepherd paint each service assignment with a color that represents that service order’s work-flow status: Scheduled, Service Report Due, Process T&M Ready, Completed, etc. This allows for swifter invoicing and balancing of the books for a given job.
Service Managers may build a list of favorited technicians whom they manage every day (see the image above). The Planner Board also allows for a filter of service orders as well as technicians by any field present on either record excluding, of course, fields of type free-form text.
Everywhere the Planner Board content allows for personalization, which is the hallmark of the NetSuite experience. An advantage the NetSuite lends to Shepherd because Shepherd is native to NetSuite.
If you use NetSuite, why do your planning anywhere else but inside NetSuite?
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