If you have a mobile workforce, you already know what some of the biggest challenges to managing it are. For starters, you need to build the most efficient schedule for workers possible. You need to ensure that your workforce is arriving with all the supplies needed to complete the job. You must also ensure that they are taking the most efficient route to and from each job, which saves time and allows more service calls per day.

Most importantly, you need to ensure that you are effectively communicating with your mobile workforce, exchanging vital and helpful information that can help them do their jobs better. 

Chances are, your organization could stand to gain some improvements or efficiencies in some or all of these tasks. If you’re like most companies, you still limp through the process with a patchwork of solutions and old-fashioned tools like spreadsheets, paper schedules and lots of phone calls. Given the number of variables that can occur in the field – number and location of jobs, delays and unforeseen issues, absences by personnel, customer needs – managing the complex needs of field personnel with manual methods is impossible to do well.

The most you can hope for is to be able to put out fires before they affect the company’s bottom line too much.

According to a recent e-book published by ClickSoftware (News - Alert), even if you were able to make a “perfect” schedule manually, what happens after that is critical.

“Even if a schedule was able to be created that placed your mobile resources at the required jobs at the required time what would happen to that static schedule once unforeseen complications arose? How quickly and accurately could it be adjusted?”

Cloud-based mobile workforce solutions can help companies in two ways: they can help them build better, more accurate schedules in the first place; and they can alter and adjust those schedules to cover unforeseen variations in the schedule, should an employee call in sick or leave early – or if an appointment runs overtime.

Cloud-based end-to-end solutions, such as one offered by ClickSoftware called “ClickExpress,” optimize schedules before the start of the day, and then allow companies to make changes on the fly and as needed. They allow for data importing to increase the knowledge the schedule building component has to draw from, can be linked to customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, enable the “bring your own device” (BYOD) model thanks to device-agnostic HTML5, and offer flexible dispatching processes – including street-level routing and appointment booking.

The cloud nature of the solutions allow for little to no upfront capital investment, rapid deployment and free upgrades to the product.

The results of an optimized mobile workforce management solution are multifold. They can benefit the company by allowing for better, tighter schedules that allow the mobile workforce to get more done in less time. They benefit customers by raising the quality of service, and they benefit the mobile workforce by making their jobs easier, cutting out wasted idle time and excessive travel.

For more information about how a mobile workforce management solution can benefit your organization, find ClickSoftware’s e-book here on TMCnet.