Is Time Money?

The old cliché is that "Time is Money". But is it? Maybe it's time to examine the facts and decide for ourselves.

Service companies sell time, in one way or the other. Whether they work on contract, or on 'time and materials', they still sell time. And they'll tell you that time is the ultimate perishable product. Once an hour is gone, you can't get it back. It doesn't matter how hard you work later that day, you can't go back in time and redo it.

Service Managers know this truth. They have to get the most out of their people all time, every hour of every day. And that's made harder if they don't know where their people are.

So how big is this problem? Let's look at the trends in the UK. The UK Statistics Department is a wealth of information (www.statistics.gov.uk)
"Financial and business services now account for about one in five jobs in the UK, compared with about one in ten in 1981.

Now consider the effects of applying computer technology. It is proven that "investment in computers and software by firms, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and internet use by employees are associated with higher value added per worker.

Hardware and software capital in UK firms increases productivity right across the service industries, after taking account of other factors. In addition to the effect of investment, the use of computers, communications and e-commerce also has a positive association with productivity across UK industry."

The Aberdeen Group, a well respected American research organisation reported in their Mobile Field Service Solution Selection Report, Stategy and Technology Selection Handbook (2005) that:

88% of best-in-class service organisations view shoring up the connection between the field and back office as a top strategic priority.

Companies that have deployed mobile field service solutions have realised, on average:

27% improvement in worker productivity,

19% increase in customer satisfaction/retention,

17% increase in overall profitability, and

13% increase in service revenues.

Again, the UK Statistics Department comes to our aid. If we look just at the firms that fix office machinery, we find 1,900 firms turning over in excess of 1.1Billion pounds. Just 1% savings is work over 10 Million pounds each year.

So why do so many of these firm's use paper for recording time?

They use paper because they are comfortable with it. But they don't gain the productivity benefits they could. They have more field staff, doing less work. To turn that around, they need is "smart paper". They need a mobility solution that's as flexible as paper but gives the service manager the immediate real time visibility of where their staff are.

This is where the Activiser Field Service Automation solution delivers the "Smart paper concept", that allows these firms to realise some of that additional 10 Million pounds bottom line profit each year.

To read more about the research conducted by Abeerdeen, click here.

To see activiser in action, click here.

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