Having enough resources to get work done on deadline is a challenge companies consistently face, through both periods of profit and loss.

With the current worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, this challenge is exponentially more profound.

Many employees are simply not available due to regional lockdowns and quarantines, leaving companies looking for ways to maximize the staff they have available in order to ensure the availability of essential services to the public.

As such, correct work prioritization and organizational efficiency have become even more critical, along with ensuring the safety of employees and customers.

While many organizations are already using their facilities management software to ensure the safety of employees within their facilities, there are still many field workers who are at risk.

Accruent’s vx Field is helping organizations maintain field operations to keep essential services available while also ensuring the safety of their mobile workforce.

Here are some of the ways our customers are using the key functionality of vx Field to ensure critical services remain available to the public while also protecting the health and safety of their mobile workforce during the COVID-19 situation and beyond.

Planning routes based on priority to ensure completion of critical tasks first.

vx Field allows organizations to plan optimized routes based on the locations of jobs and available resources, as well as based on job priority and the time constraints of delivery.

This prioritization for correct route planning can ensure that critical, high-priority tasks – like repairing supermarket freezers or restoring power outages to hospitals – will be done first, before fixing less essential equipment. This is done in conjunction with remote monitoring and automatic work order creation — all before any potential equipment failures.

By automating this process in vx Field, organizations are ensuring the most important tasks – the ones that keep essential services like hospitals and grocery stores up and running – are being handled first without the need for manual prioritization.

Team insights and GPS location visualization for faster response.

vx Field can display field employees' real-time location and work orders on a map, providing full visibility into service personnel's current geographic location and planned routes. Using this, organizations can quickly determine the closest employee available to respond to an urgent issue that may arise. This ability to provide an immediate response and priority shift can also ensure high-priority tasks are completed with as little delay as necessary.

In addition, employee skill sets and available time slot information, enabling a fast response by the field employee who is most suited to do the work.

vx Field also allows organizations to closely track the GPS routes of all mobile technicians while they are out in the field and after they have returned, to monitor whether they have been in a high-risk area for potential virus exposure and may need to be quarantined.

Communication with field resources.

With vx Field, organizations can communicate with their field techs quickly when rapid updates are necessary. Organizations can also alert field teams to schedule changes using text messages, in-app messaging or e-mail, as well as through mobile push notifications, ensuring that techs have the latest real-time information.

This may be especially necessary when updating techs about which locations have become quarantined, or if a job has been recalled for any reason.

Updated view on current capacity.

With uncertainty around the availability of employees or contractors due to shelter-in-place orders, quarantines or illness, having updated information on your organization’s current resource capacity is critical.

vx Field allows companies to react quickly and plan accordingly to shifting resource availability, whether that means adjusting schedules, reprioritizing efforts or moving work between different areas of the organization.

A capacity monitoring dashboard shows resource availability in real-time by resource type and skillset and compares it to the assigned and unassigned work orders and customer appointments by geographic coverage.

Functionality going forward.

The functionality highlighted above is provided as part of the broader benefits from Accruent’s vx Field to support optimal planning and improved visibility across the mobile service organization. These features have allowed companies to better handle the current COVID-19 situation, as well as provide better customer service to ensure maximum efficiency.

Learn more about Accruent’s vx Field solution.

Are you a vx Maintain customer? Check out our blog post, Best Practices for Using vx Maintain to Manage Your Response to COVID-19.