Measure up or die!
There's an old adage that you cannot improve what you cannot control, and you cannot control what you cannot measure. We think, when it comes to service organisations and mobile field service personnel, it a case of measure up or die!
It surprises us that in the 21st century there are still service organisations that do not have an adequate system in place to measure the operational wins and losses of the business. A service business may have a healthy looking P&L, but if there is no systematic recording of when, where, who, why and how work orders and jobs are performed then the balance sheet probably tells a different story.
When there is no systematic recording of service activity, there is no way to accurately identify where things are not going as expected. I worked for a busy service department back in the late nineties where it was generally considered that we might be losing, at worst, 10% of the jobs "through the cracks". In other words, about one in every ten jobs performed was not being billed. After commissioning a CMMS it was an absolute shock to the management to see billing more than double.
Seat of the pants management has no place in the 21st century. Not only is it ALWAYS inaccurate, sometimes it's criminal. Today's Workplace Health & Safety (WHS) rules are both serious and unavoidable. In this litigious world, a CMMS may just save your skin.
Why do so many businesses resist installing a CMMS? Many cite the cost, but study after study has shown that a properly implemented CMMS/EAM has ROI between x4 and x16 times the cost. Is it inertia from the workshop guys who see a CMMS as just another interruption by management into their working day, scepticism from the office gals who know first hand how difficult it is to get the workshop johnnies to complete even the simplest paperwork, or the "been there, tried that, got burnt" experience of the boss?
Suffice to say, these arguments are difficult to support in the first place, but with increasing customer expectations, high employee and operational costs, and hours for owners and managers increasing, they should no longer be considered as any type of valid excuse. The one big reason for introducing a CMMS into your workshop or service organisation is to make more money, and who doesn't want to do that?
Posted by
Mark Chimes