If you run a repair and maintenance business (Field Service, Building Maintenance…), you need to have the right tools and systems in place to help you consistently deliver high-quality services. One of these systems is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform. An ERP system helps your business run more smoothly and efficiently, thus increasing overall productivity and customer satisfaction.
An ERP solution, such as SAP S/4 HANA, automates and integrates your business processes and related data to improve workflows as well as the administration of labor-intensive processes and projects. Before you implement an ERP solution in your company, make sure it’s properly aligned with your business. For example, an ERP system for repair and maintenance is configured differently from ERP for management consulting companies or ERP for research and development firms.
So, how do you choose the right ERP system for your repair and maintenance business? Each ERP system comes with unique features and capabilities that are tailored to specific fields or industries. A repair and maintenance ERP system comes with numerous distinctive capabilities designed to automate and simplify your project-based repair and maintenance processes.
Here are the main considerations you need to keep in mind when choosing an ERP system for your repair and maintenance business:
Management of Orders
As your business grows, you’ll receive numerous repair and maintenance orders. Without the right order management system in place, some of these orders will get misplaced or go unnoticed. An ERP system will allow you to organize projects, record tasks and prioritize orders systematically so that nothing slips through the cracks.
This will help you to schedule and optimize project delivery fulfilling all of your orders promptly and according to their order of priority, keeping your clients satisfied. Your ERP system will enable you to register a repair and maintenance order whenever a client makes a request. It will also help you track order fulfillment activities so that you can know the progress of every project. Choose an ERP solution that allows you automate the processes to document and track your projects saves time and decreases errors.
Efficient Tracking of Orders
Many repair and maintenance companies don’t have the ability to efficiently track projects–this can lead to project delays and unfulfilled orders. With the right ERP solution, you can easily track all your projects, making sure that each order is completed in good time so your customers are satisfied and employee productivity is maximized.
With a specialized ERP system, you can create repair requests by adding details to the platform. This will allow you to easily confirm how many projects have been completed and how many are ongoing, all from a trusted single source of information. When your repair and maintenance team completes a project, it marks it in the project management tool for easier tracking.
You will be able to access all the orders and their progress status with a single click. If you need to cancel a project, your ERP system will make it possible, to adjust and quickly reorganize and assign project teams.
Integration With Other Systems
A good ERP solution should integrate seamlessly with the existing best of bread point solutions your company already uses, minimizing major disruptions in your workflow or spending additional large amounts of money replacing your current infrastructure. Fortunately, many ERP solutions are designed to work flawlessly with numerous other systems, allowing for repair and maintenance companies to upgrade to a new digital core ERP while still extending their sales, procurement, and accounting tools with field service and equipment maintenance modules.
If your ERP solution doesn’t support invoice generation, it should at least be compatible with common invoicing tools so you can generate invoices promptly. A robust ERP solution will offer robotic automation for invoice generation, invoice address management, and payment gateway integration capabilities.
In Conclusion
The ERP system you choose for your repair and maintenance business should automate as many of your business operations and processes to allow you to consistently deliver high-quality services. It should easily integrate with existing infrastructure to avoid major disruptions in your workflow—and offer tools and capabilities to track and manage your projects for the timely fulfillment of orders.
