SmartTrade Blog

Smart devices revolutionise the SME field service business model

By Matthew McGann,

Sales manager, software house SmartTrade Ltd

May 2014

Matthew McGann from SmartTrade talks about the impact affordable consumer grade smart devices and improved mobile internet connectivity are having on the world of SME field service providers. The field service sector includes a host of business types offering installation and/or maintenance services. Statistics in the table below illustrate the growth in the smart device market.

There would be few if any business models with more to gain from the smart device phenomenon than the SME field service providers. Until relatively recently sophisticated field service mobility solutions were largely the preserve of the larger corporations who could afford expensive IT solutions. Mobile phones didn’t have sufficient smarts to allow the smaller players to effectively manage their workflow from the field. As a result they were pretty much limited to using the voice and text functionalities on their mobile phones to communicate with their customers and suppliers. The emergence of affordable consumer grade smart devices with reasonable processor capacity and vastly improved internet connectivity is revolutionising the way SME field service providers manage their businesses. It helps if the smart devices come with a ruggedized case!

Job management solutions hosted on smart devices expand the growth opportunities for the SME field service providers by enabling them to compete more effectively in the marketplace. This in turn is an enabler for progressive SMEs navigating the chasm of death from being small to big businesses.

There are a number of simple job management apps appearing in the market. An effective job management solution needs to be feature rich plus have excellent help desk support, the field service providers are using it every working day all day! Simple apps lacking a help desk don’t cut the ice!

A contributing factor is societal change. The first of the Gen Y’ers , the generation brought up with computers, are now in their early 30’s. They will increasingly make their presence felt in terms business ownership and management, plus in the field service game the techs tend to be young, mobile and computer savvy. A state-of-the-art smart device will often be an important part of the Gen Y’er’s persona! They will often happily employ their personal smart devices at work (the BYOD factor).

It doesn’t take an Einstein to work out that if your employees are linked at the hip with a productivity tool one would be foolish not to catch the wave!

In response job management software developers such as SmartTrade are increasingly tailoring our software products to work on smart devices. SmartTrade has superseded our earlier PDA based mobile products with solutions specifically designed for the Android and iOS platforms.

We have also developed Smeedi®, a document exchange platform, offering increased office productivity by automating the exchange of invoices between supplier and customer.

Smart device statistics

For the statistically inclined the following data demonstrates why smart devices are becoming truly ubiquitous.

• 2013 was the first year smartphone sales exceeded 50% of all mobile phones sold!
• 2013 was the first year the number of internet connection instances from smart devices exceeded those from desktop PCs!
• More than 1.5 billion smart devices were shipped in 2013, dominated by 1 billion smartphones!

The trends are clear to see:

➤ Consumers are moving to smart devices at the expense of desktop PCs (and fixed landlines).
➤ Consumers are increasingly using their smart devices to surf the net.

This is far from a first world phenomenon. Some indicative estimates:

• The International Telecommunications Union (May 2014) estimates there are nearly 7 billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide.
• Ericsson (February 2014) estimates 6.7 billion subscriptions worldwide with 4.5 billion unique mobile phone users once customers with more than one subscription and inactive accounts are factored out.
• Ericsson estimates there will be 5.6 billion smartphone subscriptions by 2019 with most of the market growth coming from the developing nations.

By all measures the worldwide uptake of smart devices is extraordinary!

About SmartTrade

SmartTrade is an Auckland based software house, we began developing job management software for SMEs in 1999, starting with back office solutions designed primarily for tradees.

While SmartTrade’s office solution is now used by a wide range of SME’s the most common user is a field service business with two or three administrative staff receiving and scheduling jobs on our office solution. They then dispatch the jobs to a team of technicians in the field via our mobile solutions for smart devices, the techs return the job to the office once completed.

Our largest New Zealand customer has more than 150 staff using SmartTrade in the office and the field to manage their workflows.

http://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats/a

Cyber Attack Alert

Summary

Many of our customers around the world and the critical systems they depend on have been victims of malicious “WannaCrypt” software. We are using the MSRC blog - Customer Guidance for WannaCrypt attacks to post information and resources in one place, to help customers respond to this latest threat.

The first and most important piece of guidance is to immediately deploy the security update associated with Microsoft Security Bulletin MS17-010, if you have not done so already. Customers that have automatic updates enabled or have deployed this update are already protected from the vulnerability these attacks are trying to exploit.

Malware Detection

Windows Defender, System Center Endpoint Protection, and Forefront Endpoint Protection detect this threat family as Ransom:Win32/WannaCrypt.

In addition, the free Microsoft Safety Scanner http://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/ is designed to detect this threat as well as many others.

Recommendations

Review the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) blog at Customer Guidance for WannaCrypt Attacks for an overview of the issue, details of the malware, suggested actions, and links to additional resources.

Keep systems up-to-date. Specifically, for this issue, ensure Microsoft Security Bulletin MS17-010 Security Update for Microsoft Windows SMB Server is installed.

Customers who believe they are affected can contact Customer Service and Support by using any method found at this location: https://support.microsoft.com/gp/contactus81?Audience=Commercial.

Microsoft Malware Detection and Removal Tools

Use the following free Microsoft tools to detect and remove this threat:

• Windows Defender: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-defender
• Microsoft Safety Scanner: http://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/

Additional Resources

• Microsoft Security Response Center Blog: http://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/msrc
• Microsoft Malware Protection Center Blog: http://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/mmpc
• Microsoft Safety and Security Center webpage: http://www.microsoft.com/security/default.aspx

Regarding Information Consistency

We strive to provide you with accurate information in static (this mail) and dynamic (web-based) content. Microsoft’s security content posted to the web is occasionally updated to reflect late-breaking information. If this results in an inconsistency between the information here and the information in Microsoft’s web-based security content, the information in Microsoft’s web-based security content is authoritative.

Support - it's super critical for any job management solution!

Never underestimate the importance of software support, it’s super critical!

When our customers encounter a problem it usually happens on the job so they don’t want to look up a manual, or log an email or online help ticket and then wait for a response! Many of our competitors think they can employ email or online ticketing systems to minimise their support overhead, this simply doesn’t work for field service providers!

When you call our support team on our toll-free phone numbers you get to talk to one of our support staff, if we can’t solve the problem immediately we will strive to get back to you as soon as possible.

We believe support is a SmartTrade No 1 point of difference, we value our reputation for support excellence, we always try to go the extra yard!

While we can’t claim our support is perfect, the large number of compliments and very few complaints we receive points to a high level of customer satisfaction.

We recently received the following email from Wendy Davids at Pearmans Electrical Services in Perth.

Subject: Thank you!

Importance: High

I would love the opportunity to say what a wonderful team you have there.

They are patient, understanding and very helpful. When my call is first answered I get a fabulous person on the other end sounding bright and happy to be taking my call. They are ever so helpful and when they are unable to be of an assistance, they do their best to get me to the right person as quickly as possible. I can be a bit demanding when I want things done and they proceed with such grace.

They have been wonderful beyond all measures going back years. When I first started here and tried to get my head around SmartTrade they were very helpful , they taught me to get so more out of SmartTrade by giving me new pointers. All this with patience.

Then we have Kevin putting up with all my demands for new forms and how I want to do certain things. He keeps coming back telling me it can be done, easy as that. There were times I did get “no it can't be done”, but we overcame those hiccups and went about it a different way. And I would like to finish with some little facts:

• Phar Lap may have been born in New Zealand but he had to come to Australia to be great. Like so many others, that there are too many to mention them all.
• The Pavlova is Australian, but I'll let you have it as your own as long as you acknowledge that we make it better.

I look forward to continuing our wonderful relationship.

Kind Regards

Wendy Davids

Pearmans Electrical Services, Perth WA

Many thanks to Wendy for the glowing complement, also for giving us permission to publish it in this newsletter and on our website.

We’re always striving to improve our support service so if you have some thoughts about it, good or bad, we’d love to hear from you.

Tips for successfully mobilising your business

Tips for successfully mobilising your business

Example of mobile device agreement (obtain advice from your lawyer)

1. We may:

1. For reasonable business purposes monitor email, messaging systems and data on Devices.
2. GPS track Devices during work hours.
http://www.smartsoftwareltd.com/administrator/index.php?option=com_easyblog&view=blog&blogid=50#wf-editor-preview

2. You consent to us monitoring email, messaging systems and data on Devices.

3. You must in respect of each Device, depending on whether or not we own it:

4. This document forms part of your employment agreement with us

_______________________________             _______________________________

Signed by or on behalf of UsSigned by You

Date: __________________________Date: __________________________

How to streamline your payroll operation using SmartTrade Mobile’s timesheet feature together with SmartTrade Essential or Ultimate’s payroll export feature!

Many SmartTrade users already use SmartTrade’s payroll export feature to export their employee timesheet data directly to their payroll package.

Employees using SmartTrade Mobile can enter timesheets easily on their mobile device using SmartTrade Mobile, or the simpler SmartTime timesheet app, and return the timesheet data to SmartTrade in the office.

It’s then a simple step to export the timesheet data from SmartTrade into your payroll package making it a seamless operation! Even if you manually enter your timesheet data into SmartTrade there are significant benefits in exporting the data to your payroll system.

SmartTrade currently supports the following payroll packages:

• IMS Payroll
• iPayroll
• MYOB 
• Ace Payroll

If you have another payroll system provided it allows data to be imported then it’s very likely we can design an Advanced Report to enable timesheet information captured in SmartTrade to be exported to your payroll package

Just imagine the time and double data entry saved by having your field staff enter their own timesheets and then being able to export the data from SmartTrade into your payroll package!

Lee Sarson of Rhino Fire & Security Ltd summed up the benefits:

❌ “We used to get technicians into the office on Wednesday morning to hand-in hand written jobs sheets
           and timesheets!”

❌ “We used to have 30-45 minutes down time per tech each Wednesday filling out bits of paper and trying
           to find the ones they lost!”

❌ “We then manually transferred the hours to large project job sheets and tried to decipher the technicians’
           hand writing!”

❌ “The process took admin staff the entire day!”

✓ “We now have the job done by 9.30am!"

✓ “Time sheets are filled out by techs as they go from job to job, no more problems with techs trying to
           recall what they did a few days ago becausethey lost some paper work!”

✓ "Job information is loaded into the system as soon as a job is completed, allowing the invoice to be
          generated and sent same day, this improves cash flow!"

✓ "Now time spent returning job information is billed to clients!"

✓ "Filing in the office has dropped 95%!"

✓ "I can’t believe we used to work with such outdated systems, the change was dramatic and instant!"

Please don’t hesitate to call our support team to discuss what’s possible in terms of streamlining your timesheet and payroll workflow activity!

Return to home page