Connect Field Service and ERP to Drive Revenue and Delight Customers 

Integrating field service management and ERP can help you ease many routine tasks and ensure efficient, secure data flows. It may also allow you to take field service to a new level of profitability and efficiency while increasing customer satisfaction. What’s more, it may serve as a model for successful, transformative projects that optimize technology to help your business thrive and outperform the competition. Below, we consider the main advantages of field service and ERP integration. 

Many good reasons to integrate field service management and ERP 

Does your business use a purpose-built software solution to manage field service operations? If so, you have probably noticed a number of positive differences compared to when you ran field service as a set of manual processes or relied on general productivity software, like a spreadsheet program. The right software can make managing field service technicians, parts and materials, financials, service contracts, dispatching, routing, and other aspects of service delivery more efficient, flexible, and profitable. 

When you integrate a modern, richly featured field service solution—for instance, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service from Sikich—with your ERP system, you remove needless operational and technical boundaries that might get in the way of fast-moving, customer-centric processes. An organic integration of field service management and ERP can yield tangible benefits that are comparable to what you accomplished when you first implemented your ERP or field service software. Sikich teams often plan and perform integrations of field service technology with various ERP systems, including Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.  

Integration brings new life to data and processes 

As soon as you integrate field service management and ERP, you can streamline and accelerate certain workflows and accomplish more with the information in either system. Together, these two fundamental changes can greatly improve important business processes and team productivity. 

To begin with, field service technicians and managers, the finance team, customer-facing employees, and others no longer have to enter information in two systems. Employees save time and eliminate a source of distraction and errors. Once data is recorded, it is available wherever it matters in field service and business management. Your employees can look up information without having to wonder where it might live. For example, service technicians can on their own, anytime and anywhere, review customer account histories, warranties, contracts, service records, and documentation regarding the equipment, machinery, or other assets on which they work. In addition, your data analytics and reporting can easily span the integrated environment and quickly deliver business insight and decision enablement. You can review the state of the field service business and plan improvements based on a complete view of current conditions and history. 

Below, we highlight typical outcomes which Sikich clients achieve as a consequence of integrating field service and ERP. All these changes can take place simply because data can flow freely and processes are no longer disjointed but rather connected. Our data analytics experts and data scientists can help you gather, process, analyze, share, secure, and understand your field service, equipment-related, and ERP data in order to drive transformations in your business. 

Predictive, data-powered maintenance 

For many businesses, predictive maintenance is the most direct and effective route to increasing the ROI from investments in equipment, fleets, machinery, and field service. By offering reliable predictive maintenance, companies selling, leasing, or renting equipment to customers can enhance the quality of the customer experience, improve equipment uptime, increase the value of equipment assets, and drive more service revenue. 

If you equip service assets with IoT-connected sensors and make the resulting data streams available to your integrated ERP and field service systems, they become a key element in enabling equipment analytics, performance management, and timely maintenance long before any breakdown occurs. You can set alerts to trigger service actions when equipment performance begins to flag, wear and tear approaches critical thresholds, or power consumption falls out of range, avoiding costly breakdowns and disruptions. Drawing on the same data together with records of maintenance activities, procurement can keep the parts inventory at the right levels to avoid shortages, and finance can promptly manage any needed purchases as well as process maintenance-related invoicing. 

Empowered, productive field service technicians and teams 

When field service technicians no longer need to spend time recording or retrieving information, they have more hours available for serving customers and delivering profitable services. At customer sites, they can access complete, current equipment and customer records on their mobile devices instead of asking the customer questions or looking for help from service managers or colleagues in sales or finance teams. 

Drawing on customer and equipment details in ERP and using the latest updates on technicians’ qualifications, software tools can automatically determine the best technician fit, determine the shortest travel routes, and schedule service appointments at the best available time. By the same token, you can rely on your connected ERP and field service solutions to help you assess technicians’ skills and help them grow professionally by offering individualized learning paths with targeted training and certifications. Field service management that makes best use of technicians’ skills and interests can also make service employees happier, resulting in lower turnover and reduced costs for recruiting and hiring. Your business can become an employer of choice that attracts highly motivated, talented people who share your service values. 

Fast-moving, customer-focused finance management 

With seamless data flows between field service management and ERP, financial information entered by service technicians, finance managers, and others is immediately reflected throughout the technology environment. If, for instance, a service tech records parts, materials, or hourly labor charges while at a customer site, these are immediately invoiceable. As a result, the finance team can book service revenue in near real time as opposed to waiting for delayed data entry. Work hours entered by field service employees can promptly be reflected in the company’s payroll, without requiring an extra recording step, potentially reducing the time between team members performing work and getting paid for it. 

Thanks to field service and ERP integration, finance management can become more closely aligned with a company’s service ethics and goals. In interactions with customers, finance managers can easily answer questions regarding service delivery and contracts. In coordination with account managers, they can propose helpful payment options, harmonize lease and rental agreements, and design competitive, advantageous terms for customers. 

Customer experience transformations 

ERP and field service management integration allows customer-driven businesses to put their values into practice and boost the quality of the customer experience. From the customer perspective, the mentioned advantages of ERP and field service management integration may mean that receiving equipment services from a company turns into something you look forward to. Timely and proactive communications, reliable scheduling, effective service delivery, well-informed employees, and accurate invoicing can greatly help increase customer satisfaction, retention, referrals, and repeat business. Customers receiving this level of service may also start thinking of the service provider as more of a trustworthy business partner. They may want to learn about the company’s solutions and services they are not yet familiar with. 

Take the next step 

Sikich integrates Microsoft Field Service with a variety of ERP solutions, including Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. As we deploy and configure either ERP and field service, or both, we help you modernize your technology environment and chart a smooth path from manual field management and business processes to digital enablement and automation. Adopting comprehensive equipment lifecycle management can be part of your initial implementation and integration project, or come at another time. 

To learn more or move forward, you can: 

• Find out how Sikich helps you integrate ERP and field service management. 
• Contact us. 
• Learn about Sikich ERP services. 
• See which ERP solutions we support.