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Automated assignment planning, service quality boost, and more efficient field management and control.

Planado helped one of the biggest dealers selling John Deere agricultural and forestry machinery in Eastern Europe. The company has 600+ employees working in offices in 20 regions. Many of them are service engineers working in the field to help set up and service the equipment.
Challenges: Inefficient planning and lack of control

Historically, the company did not have an all-in-one solution for field management and workload planning — this led to a range of issues, including poor planning and control. Technicians serving the John Deere machines working in the field could not fill the assignments’ data to the accounting software (1C).

The company needed a tool to solve this task and simplify the reporting by integrating with a 1C system and mobile devices. The main challenges were:

•     Control of the execution of the field assignments.
•     A correct estimate of the employees’ productivity.
•     Ensuring the highest quality of the work and compliance to corporate standards.
•     Speeding up the document flow and optimizing reporting.

The company’s management team wanted to make the fieldwork more transparent and make reports on completed assignments available to managers in the office immediately after the job is done. The information should include images of a completed job and copies of the copies of accounting documents right after completing an assignment.
Solution: Planado and CRM integration bundle

The client’s management team compared available field management solutions and decided to use Planado to boost the field service effectiveness. The project team at Planado has developed and implemented a custom installation of the app and the integration with the CRM system used by a client.

During the project, the client purchased 220 licenses for field employees and management staff. The implementation project took two months and was divided into several stages:

•     In the beginning, the demo version testing was conducted (two weeks).
•     Later, the 1C integration was implemented by the team at Planado (two weeks).
•     After the integration release, the pilot implementation project took place (20 seats, one month).
•     The solution was rolled out to production on the pilot project completion, 200 additional seats were automated.

Now, the client can get all documentation related to the specific assignment even before the field technician returns to the office. This allows managers to generate invoices or form procurement orders for spare parts on the go.
Project results

The implementation of Planado allowed the company to:

•     Reduce the time needed for daily field service assignment planning.
•     Automate planning for future works.
•     Control execution of the field service assignments by employees.
•     Reduce risks of losing important information related to the field service projects.
•     Speed up the initial information collection and processing.
•     Ensure high quality of the work and compliance to corporate standards.
•     Get an opportunity to control employees’ routes for higher efficiency.
•     Boost ROI and increase revenues of the field service department.