Mobile Apps in the Fields: What is the Future?

Imagine you went to bed and woke up to a working day where there is no internet, no mobile phones, no desktop/laptop on your workstation but only files, papers and a pen to work in an old-fashioned office. How would you feel? What would you think has changed the most?

Today, the process, the structure and the content of working in offices have drastically transformed from rigid and tight schedules to:

■ Multiple job roles
■ Flexible working hours
■ Mobile working
■ More client-centric
■ More personalized
■ Technically advanced
■ Remote working

In the last few years, the proliferation of mobile apps has demonstrated how businesses and organizations can leverage the power of mobile methods anywhere anytime, not only for customers and clients but also for their organizational purposes.

After the concepts of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and Bring Your Own App in enterprises, business owners have become more adaptable to current trends in order to create a favorable work environment for employees in all departments. Tech trends have changed the way companies are working presently.

Field service businesses, like plumbing, television and household repairs, telecom repair, order delivery, contract-based maintenance, inspection and other jobs that manage technicians working at site locations, have advanced to a whole new level with mobile technology. They are now highly reliant on mobile apps for keeping up with the workforce and achieving high productivity and business gains.

While it’s not easy to track the progress, work performance and site location of the employees who are out in the field, app developers have developed brilliant mobile solutions to access everything from anywhere, anytime.

Be it oil and gas, medicine, package delivery, domestic repair, transportation and construction, eCommerce or any other industry, mobility is now the necessity. Since the work is often done remotely, employers and employees require a management system for recording everything that’s done, pending and in progress.

A recent study declares that by 2018, 70% of the mobile workers are expected to use a tablet or a hybrid (mobile) device that has tablet-like characteristics.

One of the popular field mobile apps developed by our team is Time Clock. The app is a complete clock in and clock out management system to feed the work status updates in the app so that it can be managed and tracked from the office by the concerned authorities. Instead of manually mapping out the site location and the employee’s route, the GPS- enabled map shows the technician’s correct and specific location. Users can pay through credit card and can fill in the feedback for the service they received. Such feedbacks are later accounted for an employee’s performance and appraisal by the Manager. It works efficiently with more than 100 workers in the field.

So, the future of field services is evidently mobile-ready and app-focused.

Here are a few ways of how businesses and organizations can increase their productivity with these mobile apps:

■ Streamlining work tracking and order delivering.
■ Excellent cloud solutions for managing jobs, tracking time, quoting, invoicing and inventory control.
■ Easy location recording as the technician moves through different job locations.
■ Technician’s work progress can be recorded by recently completed jobs.
■ Payroll and invoicing can be done through an employee’s successfully completed jobs in a month.
■ Workers have the liberty to punch and punch out from their mobile phones, without getting troubled by going to the office and then to the site location. This saves a lot of time and effort.
■ Organizations and business owners can analyze the real-time performance and accomplishments of their staff.
■ Workforce ensures more efficiency in their work as they are regularly reminded of their pending tasks and approaching due dates.
■ The technicians can prioritize their tasks as per requirements and urgency and thus, manage their work more effectively.
■ Scheduling work and allocating resources become easy, quick and transparent for the organizations.
■ Seamless project management with real-time interactions with individuals in the field.
■For any situational emergency, the worker can inform the team and they can immediately reach to the site.
■ Flexible working for field workers guarantee more productivity and profitability.
■ An integrated system is always more efficient and beneficial.