Salesforce Field Service Review
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
To track, manage, deploy the crews for construction. Over 200 construction crews covering seven states and I used them to deploy them and track them and help manage their completion and their day to day.
Pros
- A lot of it consolidates our information and stores it in a virtual filing cabinet is what I like to call it. And the fact that I don't have to have my foreman, go to multiple different apps. They can go to one spot for sign in. Those other apps can potentially be linked to it and they can still use them, but that information is now pulled into Salesforce and so it's viable information for any kind of data analytics that we want to be able to do.
- When we have put a little bit of customization on it makes it very filled friendly. I don't know that I would agree that right out of the box it's super filled friendly for my guys and it's right out of the box. It's more of the, I like to call it the cable repair guy model, where you have techs that potentially are going to do five or six different stops throughout a day and then just rinse and repeat day over day. Our work orders tend to span from two hours to two months, and so we have to do a little customization, but it is customizable. So that's a great additive.
Cons
- It seems like when they do bring another one of these companies and there's thousands of them here trying to buy for a position to bolt onto Salesforce, that it's a little bit clunky at first. And I wish that was not quite. So some of the apps that we're using in field services are kind of crucial to our day to day that it's not really built into the field service. It's just a bolt-on. And so it creates some navigation issues for my foreman in the field where they have to log out of one to get into it. Now they're linked and they speak to each other, but if I can reduce the amount of clicks in a given day, that's just more time for my foreman to be doing what I need them to do instead of navigating through apps. So I would like to see that integration between systems and Salesforce to be a little cleaner on that front side. Probably that, that's probably about it. I mean, they know a lot more about this than I do, that's for sure.
Return on Investment
- It is a real challenge because it's really challenging. My group and my workforce is not really open to change and that's not necessarily really into a lot of technology. I mean that's quite honestly why a lot of them probably decided to pursue a career in the construction industry. And so not super tech savvy. I do have a few, I don't want to paint them all that way, but they are very concerned with who's moving their chiefs. And so, it's a challenge trying to do the change management with a bunch of old sticks in the mud and I am one of those. If I don't buy in on it, I'm going to be the biggest resistor there is, but I do buy in on this.
