Our team is continually thinking of new ways to solve business challenges and help you deliver high-quality field service outcomes. To this end, ProntoForms is excited to announce our latest feature, Teamwork – adding more field service collaboration capabilities to optimize form routing, dispatching, and workflow management.
Field service collaboration is the end goal and with this new feature, technicians, business leaders, and dispatchers can better coordinate with each other to deliver work that provides an exceptional customer experience. ProntoForms Teamwork also enables operational visibility into all work that’s been performed, giving dispatchers and team leads added insight to take action including dispatch management and workflow management.
A launchpad for field service collaboration
It’s not always possible to have the same technician complete work during an entire visit themselves, from start to finish. Even if a technician is available, they may not be well-suited to perform the work given. For example, perhaps the job requires a senior or specialized employee who is more skilled in tackling a specific aspect of the work scope. This leads to incomplete forms and site visits by additional technicians without access to the previous forms in progress.
Previously, it wasn’t possible to share tasks in a form between technicians who could then collaborate on the work. Dispatchers and team leads could only assign a form for one technician to complete. Not being able to transfer or offload work in progress made it difficult to resolve issues related to unforeseen conflicts or scheduling opportunities. There was no way to pass work back and forth between technicians.
Teamwork to the rescue
ProntoForms Teamwork counteracts the issues faced when an organization has a large team, highly complex tasks, or complex assets that require servicing.
Teamwork introduces several new ways technicians in the field can complete forms. Instead of saving a draft locally for incomplete work or being forced to submit work only as complete, field service technicians can now, via the ProntoForms mobile app, submit mobile forms as incomplete—even if there are required questions that haven’t been answered. All of the information for the work in progress is captured, automatically preserved, and available for another field service technician to claim to resume the job using the same form.
Supervisors and team leads now have complete visibility into all incomplete work submitted from the field and up-to-date information on the status of service calls in the ProntoForms Web Portal. This information is used to drill down further into work that’s in progress; what has been completed, by who, and when; and what remains to be done. Work can be prioritized and assigned/unassigned by supervisors and team leads using the portal and accessed, reviewed, and claimed by technicians via their mobile devices.
Let’s walk through what a Teamwork-enabled workflow might look like. One technician may be assigned to a site to carry out basic maintenance work and assessment of a wind turbine. They perform the basic work but don’t have the skills to tackle the more technical parts of the inspection. They submit the incomplete form and the same form is dispatched by a team lead to a senior technician with years of experience servicing wind turbines. This is done using ‘Reassign.’ Enabling the ProntoForms’ Teamwork feature on an existing or new form ensures the technician can submit the partially completed form, and the second tech can complete their part of the job.
If the experienced technician was unavailable, the younger tech could leave the form unassigned for another available technician to pick up using ‘Search’ and ‘Claim.’ It’s also possible for supervisors to proactively remove previously reassigned work using ‘Unassign.’
How does Teamwork, well, work?
The Teamwork workflow can be enabled/disabled on each form individually. Toggling the option requires deploying a new version of the form. New rules for submissions take effect when Teamwork is enabled for a form. Each Teamwork enabled form has the added option of allowing a mobile user to search for and claim from their device.
All information is readily available via the ProntoForms portal with data flowing from Teamwork-enabled forms to existing integrations via our data destinations and REST API. Supervisors, team leads, and your systems of record are now kept up to date with work in progress.
As usual, data destinations can be triggered on ‘complete’ or ‘dispatch declined’ form submissions and with a Teamwork-enabled form you can now trigger a data destination on an ‘incomplete’ form submission. This enables specific users or systems to be updated with work in progress details. This improvement adds new value to our existing workflow reporting capabilities; for example, if a company needs daily work in progress reports, they can now be automatically generated and routed to the appropriate supervisors or team leads.
Stay on the same page with version control for forms
ProntoForms’ Teamwork creates a new form submission version each time form data is submitted. Form submission versions provide team leads and supervisors with a way to review what data has changed and identify the user who changed it. All changes that occur in a form are always preserved, providing organizations with traceability long after the work has been completed. Full visibility into the state and details of each submission can be viewed within the ProntoForms Web Portal.
ProntoForms Teamwork’s impact on routing, dispatching, and workflow management
- Teamwork dramatically reshapes how crew resources are used in the field and facilitates the delivery of commitments for improved asset-based service uptime.
- This latest feature provides increased flexibility in solving complex service scheduling challenges, be it swapping out technicians midway through a task, accommodating complex asset availability, scheduling opportunities, unexpected personnel changes, and last-minute customer updates to service requests.
- Both dispatchers and technicians now have a way to manage service work dynamically and ensure technicians are being leveraged as efficiently as possible.
- Service tasks are completed faster and non-intrusively thanks to increased field service team collaboration.
- Teamwork encourages increased customer satisfaction. Work gets done efficiently and without downtime.
Want in on the action?
For a deep dive into Teamwork, sign up for our upcoming webinar on February 3rd at 1 pm featuring ProntoForms product gurus Glenn Chenier and Natalie Tallon. During this event, you’ll discover how to make the most of ProntoForms’ new field service collaboration capabilities to optimize form routing, dispatching, and workflow management.
Our new feature is available to our Enterprise Tier customers. If you’re not on this tier, we can accommodate you by setting you up with a trial team on Enterprise to use to try out Teamwork’s new capabilities.
