7 things that delay your Medical Device Maintenance Jobs

Here’s a few things to look out for to avoid unnecessary delays when completing your Medical Device Maintenance jobs.

Time is tight, let’s not waste it.

How your Medical Device Servicing team spends their time

The average field service professional spends around 6 hours a week completing admin tasks. That’s a considerable amount of time taken up by activities that won’t directly benefit your customer or grow your business.

Sure, there’s some admin you can’t avoid such as:

• Completing checks on the jobs
• Gathering details for a customer report
• Updating the team on part usage
• Raising Invoices

However, what more business owners of Medical Device Maintenance businesses are realising is there’s a better way and that’s using Job Management Software.

You can spend significantly less time gathering together job details to send to engineers, typing up notes and duplicating details from paperwork for invoicing by using an all-in-one job management system.

7 things that delay your Medical Device Maintenance Jobs

Here’s a list of the things that will hinder your ability to complete your jobs and create poor experiences for your customers.

1. Double Bookings

How can you be in two places at once? The dreaded double booking happens more often than it should. Service businesses without a collective, single source of information that both the field teams and back office share are prone to miscommunication and inefficient job scheduling.

It’s frustrating for your Medical Equipment Service Technicians and even more so for your customers who could face missing a service. In the Medical sector this is unacceptable as equipment without a routine service conducted has the chance of being non-compliant and unusable, thus affecting patient care.

Cloud Based Job Management Software has provided the answer to double bookings. Having a shared, real time view of jobs, always available to the team in the office and the team in the field removes the risk of double bookings.

2. Missed Appointments

If you’re unable to immediately see at a glance which of your customers’ assets require a service over the next few days and weeks then it’s possible you’ll miss an appointment and an opportunity to bill for the work. Medical Device Maintenance businesses use Job Management Software to instantly see their upcoming due services and they build out their work schedule around it.

3. Inefficient Route Planning

Rising fuel prices is making inefficient job routing even more expensive. Sending the right person to the job based on their location and skill sets can save you from burning your profits on diesel. Job Management Software with intelligent job routing helps ensure your team has instant access to the best route via their app and your back office team can send the right person on the job.

4. Poor inventory Management

Poor management of your inventory has two direct consequences.

1. It reduces your ability to fix a Medical Device the first time you’re required to do so, impacting your First Time Fix Rate.
2. Holding onto stock that you don’t need means you’ve got revenue tied up in something you’re likely to lose money on.

So what can you do about it? The key to better inventory management is found in merging your job, finances and inventory functions into one system. Allocate stock to jobs ensuring your team always has what they need and factor the cost of the items you have into quotes for jobs so you can ensure profitability.

5. Mistakes on paperwork

Messy writing, lost or tattered paperwork and not collecting customer signature approval at the end of a job wastes a lot of time. Not gathering what you need or having to return to the customer will delay getting to the next job, fewer jobs mean fewer invoices and that means less revenue.

Digitalise your paperwork with Job Management Software. No mistakes. No lost paperwork and when the work is complete your field team can collect the customer signature on their smartphone. Everything your back office team needs to raise an invoice is instantly synced back to them when your field team completes the job on their app.

6. Availability of your customers

Why ring around to see when your client is free for a service?

Empower your customers with a Client Portal. This is a self service portal allowing your customers to log on and request work. This will mean fewer distractions with phone calls and emails.

7. ‘We didn’t know you were coming!’

The modern customer expects to have an Uber-like experience from their suppliers and service partners. How many times have your field team arrived on site and the client wasn’t prepared for them or even at the location?

Automated Customer Communications change all of this by sending bespoke communications informing them when their job is booked, who is arriving and when the work is complete.

No more crossed wires or blank faces when you arrive on site.