Subcontracting is an excellent way for field service organizations to grow quickly while maintaining top-notch services for customers. Many subcontractors are highly skilled in various areas, so they help your company complete projects that lead to satisfied customers.
Below, Bastiaan Pierhagen, Gomocha’s Global Onboarding Manager, shares the benefits of hiring subcontractors for your organization and how Gomocha can help you optimize these benefits:
Help Your Company Scale Quickly
Working with subcontractors gives your organization the edge to scale fast and avoid the complex process of hiring and training in-house team members. You can hire more subcontractors during peak seasons to meet customer demands quickly.
Gomocha empowers back-office managers and third parties to manage subcontractor activities and processes. With Gomocha, you can set rates per subcontractor. Bastiaan explains that by dragging and dropping to a subcontractor, you can see their pricing, so you don’t have to calculate their fee manually. This enables your company to hire subcontractors for projects quickly to help you scale rapidly and efficiently.
Offer Specialized Skills
Many subcontractors have expertise and specialized skills that your in-house staff members don’t possess. This can help your organization elevate its field service solutions to exceed customer expectations.
Gomocha gives subcontractors more confidence to deliver service excellence and maximize their skills. With the field service app, you can quickly search and submit work orders to top third-party companies, accept bids, easily onboard subcontractors, and push new and additional work orders through Gomocha to ensure service-level agreement compliance and delivery.
Are a Cost-Effective Investment
Working with subcontractors is typically more cost-effective than hiring employees. With subcontractors, you can avoid the extra expenses from salaries, training, and benefits like health insurance and 401(k)s that you have with in-house staff.
With Gomocha, you have everything you need to manage your subcontractors in one program, making hiring them even more cost-effective, Bastiaan emphasizes. Because you can quickly view subcontractor rates, you can choose the least expensive and best fit for the job.
Help Mitigate Risks
When you hire permanent employees, you have less flexibility with employment arrangements. However, working with subcontractors enables you to alter your subcontracting agreements based on market conditions, mitigating risks associated with economic instability or shifting demands.
Gomocha allows organizations to set an agreed-upon price for the work that a subcontractor will complete. If the subcontractor finds they need additional work, they must first ask for approval. The amount of money the subcontractor will make from the project is visible in the Gomocha app. This feature establishes a “handshake agreement” between the subcontractor and organization, as well as the end-customer and organization, so each party knows the exact work the subcontractor will complete and the price the organization will pay. Bastiaan says this Gomocha capability is crucial in mitigating risks associated with hiring subcontractors.
Provide Flexibility with Geographic Coverage
Subcontractors can give your organization great flexibility to cover wider geographical areas. You can easily deploy subcontractors in locations where your organization doesn’t have a physical presence, helping to expand your service delivery.
Gomocha lets you see subcontractor rates and locations, helping you expand your services to other areas and further scale your field service business.
While there are several benefits to hiring subcontractors, there can also be challenges associated with this strategy. The right technology to streamline the subcontracting process is imperative and can significantly reduce those challenges. Gomocha offers valuable subcontracting features that empower companies to manage and observe subcontractor activities. Below, Bastiaan highlights subcontracting challenges that field service organizations face and explains how Gomocha can solve them.
Maintaining Effective Communication and Coordination
Ensuring strong communication between your in-house team and subcontractors can be difficult, especially when subcontractors are in different locations. This can result in slower response times, affecting customer satisfaction.
In Gomocha, you can divide projects between several subcontractors, and then Gomocha or the subcontractors can plan. Using the app, the foreman can assign which specific technicians in his team will execute the project, establishing seamless communication and coordination, Bastiaan explains.
Ensuring Quality Control
Consistently providing high-quality services can be more challenging when working with subcontractors than an in-house team. Establishing streamlined processes is vital to help subcontractors comply with the same standards and uphold the same values.
Gomocha enables companies to link multiple versions of the app to create a streamlined Gomocha ecosystem.
Bastiaan shares an example of this valuable feature: Say one of our customers is using Gomocha, and then one of their subcontractors also starts using Gomocha but a different app portal. We can link those two so that information is shared back and forth. If our client sends orders to that subcontractor within their Gomocha platform, they can start assigning them as if they were their own. Once the orders are completed in the second Gomocha platform, data is sent back to the original Gomocha portal. All the information is on the same centralized knowledge system.
Further, subcontractors can receive multiple orders from organizations using Gomocha. Say a subcontractor works with three different companies using the field service platform. Each company’s work orders can be sent to that subcontractor via the app.
Finding the Best Subcontractors for the Job
When working with subcontractors, it can be hard to determine the ones who will be the best fit for the project. If you have a large network of subcontractors, it isn’t easy to look through all of them to find the one who is the most cost-effective for the specific work you need completed.
Gomocha eliminates this challenge, Bastiaan says. Say you have ten subcontractors, and one has a fixed fee to install the door. Another one charges an hourly rate, and another specializes in specific doors. Gomocha will tell you how much each subcontractor would charge if you assigned a specific task, eliminating guessing games and making finding the least expensive, qualified subcontractor easy.
Managing Legal and Compliance Issues
Legal and compliance issues can arise when working with subcontractors if you don’t have the proper systems in place. Issues like contract disputes and the subcontractor’s failure to comply with regulations can result in legal challenges.
With Gomocha, you can enable your subcontractors to generate new work orders for follow-ups and allow planners to determine the maximum cost-per-work-order and implement workflows. The “handshake agreement” between service companies and subcontractors that Gomocha facilitates utilizes the latter’s request for extra work. Once the service organization receives contractual approval from the end-customer for the additional work, assign the subcontractor to the work order via Gomocha, and they immediately begin the project.
One of the most significant benefits of this Gomocha feature for subcontractors is they know what they will earn for the project before the job begins. Bastiaan explains that they now have all that information at their fingertips, preventing a guessing game and eliminating possible legal complications.
Tracking Subcontractor Expenses
Many subcontractors have expenses related to equipment, tools, and parking tickets incurred during the workday that your organization must reimburse.
Gomocha allows subcontractors to add their expenses in the app, Bastiaan says. They can also take pictures of supporting expense documents and store them in the app for easy access. This enables your field service company to reimburse subcontractors for the expenses quickly.
Hiring subcontractors can be a cost-effective way to scale your field service organization with the help of highly skilled workers. However, companies must overcome some challenges related to communication, quality control, tracking subcontractor expenses, and more.
Fortunately, Gomocha is here to help your field service organization optimize the benefits of hiring subcontractors, navigate the obstacles, and develop a successful subcontracting strategy. With features like the ability to assign subcontractors to projects quickly, link multiple portals of Gomocha for smooth data sharing, and easily track subcontractor expenses, the platform is a must for any field service organization that works with subcontractors. At Gomocha, we’re committed to helping our customers streamline and optimize their subcontracting processes with our innovative technology.
Would you like to learn more about Gomocha’s powerful subcontracting features? View our subcontracting functionality datasheet.