Top 5 Metrics to Gauge Your Field Operational Success

Big picture indicators of success – profit, client retention, etc. – are easy to determine. You’ve got a bank account balance and a client list to verify that. What’s more difficult to judge is the ins and outs of your business’s efficacy and efficiency. 

That’s powered by your field operations. You can determine how well those function by tracking certain variables and analyzing them. Once you monitor those vigilantly, you’ll know better than ever what’s working and what could use some retooling. 

That retooling could be a digital restructuring, a new software, or a partner to improve your efficiency. Incyte developed Spearhead, a workflow optimization tool, for just that. 

Choose a variable to track, communicate it to your teams, and analyze those results. Spearhead can give you the inside track on valuable variables to assess and how those results impact your business’s success.

How to Gauge Success 

A CEO has a different definition of success than a field agent does. One fuels the other, but how do you gauge success if everyone is working with a different idea?

When everyone understands the parameters for success, your business is better equipped to achieve it. Follow these steps: 

1. Establish which key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor so everyone is aware of the benchmarks and what they’re accountable for. 

2. Communicate those KPIs to everyone that plays a role in that KPI’s collection. 

3. Determine a time frame – this will set the goal posts for analysis. 

Use these steps to analyze the KPIs and set strategies with those KPIs in mind. There are hundreds of KPIs you can monitor. Which ones are the most valuable depends on your business and its objectives.

No matter the nature of your business, tracking KPIs can be a significant asset for strategy and performance. Track KPIs with an intuitive workflow software like Spearhead for visibility and accurate analysis.  

Take a closer look at these Top 5 KPIs and how they can demonstrate success or room for improvement. 

First-Time Fix Rate

There’s no such thing as perfection in field operations. The trick isn’t being free of problems – it’s about how your team deals with them when they occur. First-time fix rate (FTFR) reflects how often your techs get it right on the first try. 

If your FTFR is low, it indicates that your field agents aren’t equipped to fix the problem without recurring trips. Whether it’s a lack of suitable personnel or equipment, those returns to site cost each time. Mileage, labor hours, and potential delays in output can add up fast. 

A low FTFR can be the result of several factors: delayed communications between field techs and decision-makers in the backoffice, or unclear job specifications that get lost in translation. 

Keep your FTFR high and the trips low with Spearhead. Open up those communication channels, facilitate cross-departmental decisions, and keep instructions and job details in a centralized place for easy reference. 

Technician Utilization

Techs are your most valuable resource in field ops. They, plus the equipment they use, can also be the most costly. Each tech’s utilization rate (UR) is a reflection of how much of their total time is billable directly to jobs or clients. 

You want each tech’s UR to be around 70-80% for peak efficiency. If you find a technician’s rate anywhere below or above that, take a closer look at how their time is being used. 

A suboptimal UR can be a reflection of inefficient travel routes, disrupted flows of information, or recurring rework on jobs. If keeping a standardized UR across the board is a struggle, consider these options: 

1. Deploy your techs more efficiently with proximity data, using it to send techs to jobs that are close or on multi-job routes that are nearby with Spearhead’s job scheduling capabilities. 
2. Use business intelligence tools to examine a team or employee’s productivity and performance on particular types of jobs. See what the hold up is and address it as needed with Spearhead. 
3. Enable automated report generation with Spearhead and use easy time tracking to keep non-billable time down. 

Job Completion Rate

How long does it take to get the job done? From dispatch to completion, turnaround times are a great KPI to track the health of your field ops. Everything from preparing the job’s work order, distributing it, and the trips to see it through falls under this umbrella.  

Tracking your job completion rate sheds light on problem tasks or jobs that are slowing down your workflow. This allows you to communicate, manage, and adapt expectations on recurring tasks. 

If you notice issues in a job completion rate, pivot to analysis and ask these questions: 

1. Is there a problem in the system that creates and supports this task that causes delays? 
2. How many attempts are made before the task is completed?
3. Do the delays in this job’s completion cause delays in dependent tasks? 

Get to the bottom of what’s consuming productivity and make strategic pivots to solidify your field ops. Use Spearhead’s dashboards by job site, employee, or organization to find the anomalies in your workflow to pave a more efficient way going forward. 

Costs Per Job 

Overtime, expenses, travel and mileage – what does a job cost? Business intelligence tools can take expense and labor data and break it down into reports to reveal small hurdles that add up to high costs.

Leverage insight into how your operations consume and earn money to improve profitability, streamline employee management, and keep costs down. By analyzing the productivity of your agents, your teams, and the facilitators behind the scenes you can better distribute your resources. 

Spearhead’s analytical tools identify which costs are too high, identifying revenue leakage that may otherwise go unnoticed. Conversely, you can detect jobs that are too low – representing potential inaccuracies or outliers to ensure better books. 

Turnover 

A high employee turnover rate is a high cost. Loyalty and employee retention are integral to keeping hiring costs down. Plus, it’s a good indicator of how stable employees feel at work. 

Completely stable employee retention is not feasible, but a high turnover rate could be a symptom of a larger problem. 

1. Overworked: An employee that feels spread too thin can be an indicator of inefficient tech distribution out in the field. 
2. Dissatisfaction: This can be a reflection of inefficient systems or overly complex processes. 

Common frustrations are complicated systems, redundancy, and constant back and forth in communications. Spearhead can alleviate the strain that puts on your business and the valuable people that support it.

Seize the Benefits by Measuring KPIs

Monitor performance with KPIs and use the results to set and maintain expectations between leadership and your field teams. With these steps in mind, you’ll see boosts in the following: 

Timeliness

When you have clear expectations and guidelines to stick to, job turnaround times can only improve. Watch as your team functions like a well-oiled machine between the back office managers and the agents out in the field. 

Productivity

With clear guideposts for success set up for your business, you’ll be in a better spot to analyze your productivity. Use business intelligence tools to sort by job site, employee, or even organization to see where all the time and money is going within your company. 

Client Satisfaction

When the trains run on time and the job gets done, you’ll see a marked difference in client satisfaction. Identifying small areas for improvement in communication, productivity, or expenses can make all the difference to promote loyalty and retention. 

Speed up your workflow, cut down redundancy, and clarify channels of communication by monitoring KPIs. Spearhead can boost all these metrics while taking advantage of the infrastructure and operations you have in place. 

Streamline Your Operations with Success in Mind

Equip yourself with a premium workflow tool to track and analyze your KPIs for optimum performance with Spearhead: 

1. Real-time review and approvals allow you to keep an eye on all facets of your operations. 
2. Intuitive workflows are designed to seamlessly integrate with your current digital infrastructure with little disruptions, cutting down on delays and slow turnarounds. 
3. Dashboards make it easy to see which jobs, techs, and teams are performing at an ideal UR or where improvements can be made. 

Determine which KPIs are best for tracking and analyzing, then get to it! Once you’ve established these and communicated them, you’re in a great position to align your goals with those who help you meet them.