Automating jobs is a broad subject. Partial answers can be found in earlier articles about customer information and about entering jobs into the system. Here, though, I want to look at the question as a whole.

Automation really begins the moment a job is accepted. The dispatcher enters the new customer details, picks the right field worker and the job type. The system can assign the job its own pre-programmed tasks, pull up the equipment details if a unit is assigned to that customer, and so on. Even at this stage you can see how much happens by itself and how much time it saves.

Many service companies manage to automate even that first stage of intake to the point where the whole process needs nothing more than the dispatcher’s final approval. The customer sends a service request through a form on your website, the system enters the data itself and simply waits for the dispatcher to confirm the job is complete, for instance that the customer has sent every document needed to start.

Automation also covers watching the calendar. Say you have a customer you have worked with for a long time, carrying out regular inspections. You can of course prepare those jobs by hand, but if you know you will be visiting every three months for the next five years, you can programme the system to prepare the job for the right technician in good time and notify them automatically. And that is not the end of it. Configured properly, the system can also remind the customer, sending an email or a text saying that your technician will be there on Thursday at eleven.

Finally, mobility is part of automation too. There are plenty of service management solutions on the market that have no mobile app for technicians. In that case you have only partial automation. What good is a system that remembers the job, and perhaps even creates it, if there is no communication between the system and the person in the field? Without that detail you cannot really talk about automating service processes. It is worth keeping in mind while testing what is available. Of course, if you run a workshop-based tyre-fitting business, a mobile app may not be your priority, but the moment that business starts offering tyre changes at the customer site, the mobile app becomes a significant improvement to the whole process.