SARA - Field Service

The today's demanding customer often obliges companies to service him on-site by dispatching field engineers to his business location or living quarters. SARA enables your organizations to successfully carry out the twin pillars of an effective and profitable field service operation: the proper and efficient scheduling of the field force, and the provision of field engineers with the detailed information that allows them to resolve problems on their first visit.

The main functionalities of SARA Field Service include:

Schedules field engineers: SARA makes possible for organizations to efficiently manage their field service operations by assigning only the best-qualified and available technicians for each service call. A feature called Schedule Board lets authorized users view each engineer's calendar and daily route, and to assign and re-assign engineers by using a simple drag-and-drop function. At the same time, each engineer's skills and qualifications are displayed, eliminating the risk that service calls can be assigned to the personnel who is not qualified for this particular job. If needed, field engineers can be assigned automatically based on the pre-defined rules.

Decreases traveling time: To coordinate the scheduling of engineers, specific geographical work zones for each service representative can be defined. The result is that each field engineers becomes responsible for a particular geographical zone, without having to frequently travel outside of it and incur large travel expenses.

Provides field engineers with the relevant information: SARA effectively solves the long-standing problem of transferring the appropriate information to the field force which can be located hundreds of miles away from the service center, by providing interfaces to wireless mobile agents. By using either a laptop computer or a wireless mobile agent, field engineers can easily receive and view their scheduled daily routes and assigned work orders. In addition, customer location, history, and comments, detailed product information and configuration data, contract/warranty coverage, and repair instructions are all available to the technician. The consequence is that a remote field engineers can be just as well informed as if he was actually present in the service center.

Requests Parts: Inventory parts required to complete the service call can be requested via the system either by the dispatcher or the field engineer using a laptop or a wireless mobile agents. The parts-ordering capability is so efficient, that the field engineer often arrives at his customer's location with the requested parts already being present on-site. The received parts subsequently become assigned to the relevant work order.

Captures billing information: In order to ensure that the field service dispatch charges are correctly calculated, SARA automatically captures the parts usage, labor time, travel time, and repair notations for each service call. The system also allows the users to define various price rates for the specific product models, product lines, inventory parts, labor time, types of repair, repair functions, individual customers, warranty /non warranty work, e.t.a. Thus, once the service is completed, the total charge is automatically calculated as SARA combines the captured data with the appropriate price rates.

Transfers field data to the headquarters: Just as field engineers can use laptops or mobile agents to access the appropriate data sent from the headquarters, so they can send their reports, completed work orders, or any other information back to the headquarters. The data is received and uploaded into the corporate system, and a paperless two-way communications route is established for improved headquarters-field interaction and efficiency.

Tracks service call status: An authorized personnel in the headquarters can view the service call status at any time. This functionality allows the management to monitor the activities of its personnel to ensure the optimal efficiency levels and measure engineer's performance/productivity. In addition, a list of work orders organized by selected categories (by a geographical zone, by a field engineer) can be pulled up from the system.