Editor's Note: This post was originally published on February 24, 2016, and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
Vending operators abandoned paper forms that dispatched workers to carry out their work. Today, mobile platforms allow planners to issue work orders to the devices of workers, providing a set of workflows to support and monitor their routes.
However, in product recalls such as the one Mars faced, it is unlikely that workflows were already established and available on the mobile platform. In such unforeseen situations, returning to the old way of working may be tempting – using paper work orders to dispatch personnel to every machine throughout affected regions – but efficient alternatives currently exist to streamline the process.
Lightning-fast flexibility and vast scalability are the two main characteristics that contemporary mobile platforms should offer to handle the creation of new routes.
Lightning Flexibility
The mobile process is unavailable to enable field service workers to remove potentially affected products from vending machines promptly. So, faced with a crisis, should field service organizations solve this by returning to the old ways of paper work orders or emailed instructions? Unfortunately, no. It takes the same time – or even less – to change the standard digital process to handle extraordinary circumstances, as required to distribute paper or emailed instructions. So the choice we face is straightforward: we adapt our regular digital process to manage emergency processes.
To achieve that result, Gomocha developed the Workflow Designer. As part of FMP360, the Workflow Designer enables us to define and adapt the mobile process at lightning speed. It takes only hours, not days, to perform such tasks. Moreover, the Workflow Designer is an easy-to-use solution; our customers do not need programming skills. By simple drag-and-drop functionality, we can define or adapt a mobile process, and with a push of a button, the new or adapted process sends to a field worker’s device.
When adapting the digital process, we apply the regular operational procedures as previously defined. This suits the field worker and means we are not stuck with the heavy administrative burden of processing handwritten or emailed notes. Taking this adapted digital mobile approach also results in another advantage: scalability.
Scalability
The challenge can be overwhelming for a vending operator in a situation such as the Mars product. The chances of a vending operator succeeding in these situations – with only its existing employees and processes – are pretty limited. For example, suppose a vending operator can visit every machine within a few days using only its field workers. In that case, the company is overstaffed in its daily operating environment. More likely, the vending operator would need to hire external employees. A mobile platform should support this; adding new users is not much effort.
What can the Gomocha FMP360 offer your organization? My colleagues and I are eager to demonstrate the power of our Workflow Designer and highlight the other impressive functionality included in the Gomocha FMP360 Platform.
Gomocha’s FMP360 field service platform and mobile app allow organizations to carry out business processes quickly. So get started simplifying and streamlining your business’s operations with FMP360.