Technician Job Notes Done Right
By: Brian Rhodes, Published on Aug 27, 2014Login to read this IPVM report.
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Comments (7)
J. A. 'Cal' Calcaterra
Anyone willing to share software aps PC, MAC, tablet, smart phones, they use to help with the documentaion suggested?
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John Bazyk
We use Zoho; it works well. Techs can add notes in the field or have our guys in the office do it. They have apps for iphone and android, techs can also take photos right from the app, every time someone else on the job messes something of ours up with like to document it and send it to the customer before we invoice them. Its nice for the techs as they can see all of the notes from all technical support calls and previous service right from their phone. We also have all of the parts numbers used for the customer in the system.
It makes it easy for us to run reports and see which customers are having the most problems, keep track of installation notes and market to our customers. For example, I can run a report of all our cusotmers who have Fire and Burg Bosch systems but no Access, then I can send a customized email to all of them advertising acess control.
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Ari Erenthal
Anecdotes and 'war stories' are often dismissed as informal chatter, but job notes often carry weight when sharpening business intelligence.
This bears repeating.
Remember, there is no such as useless information. There is only creative and uncreative useage of information.
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Pat Villerot
I have to agree with the premise of this article. Project deliverables are a challenge for smaller companies to realize the importance of. Work orders allow for capturing many of these notes. I have seen some small companies not make use of work orders at all. This would make it quite challenging for them to ensure the work was actually completed, the date, and what work was performed.
A review of various ticket tracking and business management tools for small businesses would be a good article, though perhaps beyond the scope of IPVM.
Excellent article as always IPVM.
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Glynn Thomas
We use Smarttrade (Smarttrade Essential with Accounting connection and Ultimate remote). This allows us to load jobs in the office (track progress, product inventory against that job, including costings, quoting, measuring what was quote against actual end result (including labour hrs/cost)), interfaces directly with our accounting package- invoices from our accountng package- no double handling, timesheets on our tech's mobile phones- they log live on the hours, parts etc against the job allocated to them and a whole lot more.
We can review each techs hours easily. Can also use the Ultimate remote to track where techs are- we don't have the need to.
We now book/allocate jobs directly to the smarttrade scheduling- creating the job, allocating to a particular tech, booking it to a day/date/time with allocated timeframe- with live update directly to the techs calendar on their phone (via Google Calendar). This means the tech can see what jobs are coming up over any given period, can look back at previous jobs, can click on the job booking and get all the details-who, where, what, job number, order numbers and details etc.
We run 12 techicians off it- it works very very well. Not expensive either.
I have just set up 4 large LCD screens in our office, showing each techs schedule for the upcoming period, so the whole office can see who's doing what, where and when at a glance.
Probably sounds like I work for Smarttrade etc- I don't, the Smarttrade software is the single biggest business improvement we have done in the last 24months.
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Ricardo Souza
I use Evernote app for Android. Really useful to take notes on the smartphone and set reminders, also share with someone or just e-mail the notes to you to help compose a more formal report.
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