Connect2Field

So you like what Connect2Field can do to help you with managing the work load of your service business? You have been through the 14 day trial and nows the time to signup?

But you need to convince your boss to part with his hard earned dollars? We thought we would make it easy for you to explain to your boss all the benefits of Connect2Field so we have drafted and email you can send to them.

Hi Boss,

We have been talking about improving the way the business runs for some time now and I have come across a great product that i think will make a real difference. Have a look at c2flive.wpengine.com

The system will allow us to streamline so many areas of the business, for example:

All our customers can be stored in a central database with the ability to view their job history at any time.

Jobs are all store centrally and can be easily allocated and sent to our field staffs mobile phone. This means we don't have to use any of these job sheets any more as we can do it all electronically.

What's even better is that once the job comes back into the office we can click a couple of buttons to invoice the job and it can then be downloaded into our accounting system. All that time we spend in entering in invoices will be reduced dramatically, plus we will be able to get invoices out faster which will mean our cashflow will improve.

There is lots more feautes we can explorer like inventory, quotes, purchases orders… How about we chat about this in a meeting ?

You  must be wondering how much this all costs?  It's incredable how inexpensive it is…. $65 a month per office user (So we'll need X number of those) and $10 per month for each our field workers (So we'll need X number of those) 

It certainly seems like this system is going to make a real difference to the business and worth giving this a try. The great thing is if we don't like it we can cancel at any time.

Cheers,

Star Employee

In any business large or small managing change can be one of the most difficult tasks. Change is important in allowing your business to move forward and become more successful. I've always said that if you continue doing something the same way you always have, then you will never improve. Change allows you to make improvements in your business, however if the change isn't managed correctly it can be very painful.

Here are some steps on how to make successful changes in your business:

1. Define what you want to achieve:

Work out the exact details around what you are wanting to achieve by making the change in your business, this will allow you to measure the success of the change.

The following is a good example of the type of information you should collect:
 

Change required:

Increase the speed to invoice customers from 14 Days to 2 Days.

Why:

This will increase our cashflow by customers receiving their invoice quicker and therefor paying us faster.

How:

Collect information from our field staff quicker by using technology and ability to email invoices. Ie implement a new field service management software focusing on this aspect.

Time Frame:

3 Weeks

Importance: Scale from 1-10

9

What's good about this is it allows you to put specifics around the change and makes it very measurable. During the process of implementation you may get drawn into looking at other areas for change but by reviewing the table it will allow you to focus back on your core reason for change.

2. Small Steps

Often when people start thinking about change they start to think a lot about all the areas of their business that can be changed. It's very easy to list 20 tasks that need to be changed and then very quickly start to feel overwhelmed by the change and give up.  When making changes try and break down the changes into small steps that are easy to manage and can be achieved in a matter of weeks rather than months. Creating project that require months of work to be done often means the project will become extremely complex and will also have a higher risk of failure.

Small steps will allow you to make progress and will allow you to achieve overall greater success.

3. Involve key people and provide vision from the top

Having your staff involved in change is important, but it's also important that change is driven from top down. You don't want to have change forced onto your staff, it's important you explain your vision for the change and the reasons why the change is occurring.

A good example of a poor way of handling change with your staff is by creating uncertainty..... A while a go I was at a client implementing Connect2Field. Initially they went through a tender process to implement a field service management software application (a monster project was created). They had listed a huge list of changes they wanted to implement, as part of the project the company was moving from a completely paper based system to an electronic based system.  Their top level management had decided on the change yet they had very little discussion with their staff about the specifics.

When we started the training with the staff who were actually going to be using the system I noticed there was some resistance from one of the staff members. When no one else was in the room she said to me 'look I'm very scared about this system as I can see how good it is and I'm scared that I won't have any more work to be done, then I wont have a job'. In one way this was a great complement to our software and how it helps run a business so well. It did however show that their management hadn't discussed the change with their staff and explained their vision and why they were implementing it.

There was some further discussion with the particular staff member, during which we explained that she was still going to be required by the company even with the new system and by implementing the new system it allowed her to focus on more important tasks. This would then allow the company to grow and provide better support to their customers.

A simple 15-30 minute meeting with staff prior to going down the path of implementing the system would have allowed for a far more successful process in making changes to their business. This would have allowed any questions or concerns to be answered and then allowed everyone to focus on making the change successfully.

4. Don't wait till it's perfect

This may sound strange but often business owners are perfectionists. It's actually better to implement a new change that solves 80% of your problems and work towards getting it to 100% rather than not implementing anything at all. It's better to implement a change that you can adjust and work with to see how the change actually works in the real world. Adjusting the change so it works better in the real world means you will be able to get it near-perfect. If you always wait for something to be perfect prior to implementing, you may find that once the change is in the real world it won't actually be perfect.
 

The old-school method of change management was to design a whole massive project, make sure everything is perfect, build massive documentation and then take 12 months to implement. This methodology is a thing of the past. Small steps are the way to go in making successful changes in your business in a matter of days or weeks rather than months.

Start making changes to your business today!

 

Today we would officially like to welcome on board Ben Kepes onto the Connect2Field Advisory Board. Ben has a wealth of experience in the Cloud Computing, Software as a Service space and will assist us in our next round of growth globally.

Ben is an analyst, an entrepreneur, a commentator and a board member. His business interests  include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and as an extensive blogger. He sits on the boards of a number of organisations, both commercial and not-for-profit. Ben is well connected having spoken at length with the vast majority of SaaS players in existence. His focus is on the application of technology in the real world, and this user-centric perspective will help Connect2Field focus on product development and go-to-market strategies.
 

At Connect2Field our team has a number of soccer fans in it. So making time to watch and enjoy the soccer is important. What different about our Connect2Field is that our offices span the globe and so we all manage to get to watch different games.

Our headoffice is in Australia so all the games have been out of office hours and played either late at night or in the early hours of the morning. We have roster allowing for the team members to have a late start on the following morning after a big night of soccer.

For our European team members, it is a different storey all together. The world cup games are played throughout the day; we are faced with the problem of either restricting team from enjoying the world cup. So we have made an arrangement with our team. Everyone knows what work that has to be done and our company motto is 'it's all about the customer' however some of work we do doesn't matter if its done right now or in a few hours time. We give this flexability to our team to work out when they can take time out to watch some or all of a game during work hours. We have found that giving our team choice has proven to be very successful in the past. We think by odopting a strategy like everyone has the choice. 

With all this being said and done, we have spent years building a rewarding culture here at Connect2Field, which allows our team to be more flexible with their work hours, as long as they hit their targets and KPIs. We find our team is more positive and productive when giving this flexibility.

And on that note... Go the Socceroor's... :)
 

Over the past few months we have been working hard on some major updates on Connect2Field. We mentioned in an earlier blog post how we have moved our software to Windows Azure, we thought it would be a good idea to give you some more information on why using Windows Azure for Connect2Field was such a good choice.

From a customers point of view the move to Windows Azure will mean even better reliability of Connect2Field, faster access and less downtimes when we release upgrades!


Here are our top reasons why we moved to Windows Azure:

Built in SQL replication & High Avaliability: This was a key point for us in knowing our customer's data is always protected.

Scalability: We wanted to be able to scale up as our customers required us to.

Server Maintenance Eliminated: We didn't want to have our staff having to worry about running software updates, hardware problems etc we wanted this to be taken care of. So we can focus on delivering the best Job Management Scheduling application.

Simple Migration: We wanted to move our application across without too much effort.

Content Distribution Network: It was important to be able to have a built in easy 'on' CDN allowing us to have points of presence in all the major countries around the world.

Painless Upgrades: Now when we want to release a new feature we just simply load it onto a test environment and once out test is completed we click one button to load it into live. This means we only have a couple of minutes worth of downtime rather than 30min which we previously had.

Because our application is an ASP.Net application using a Microsoft SQL database Windows Azure was a natural choice. Since moving to Windows Azure we can now focus all our resources on delivering the worlds best Job Management and Dispatch Application, we don't have to worry about our server infrastructure.