A guide to data-driven decision-making for field service management

Because of digital technology, your field service business can access more real-time data and information than ever before. No matter your industry, you can use data to identify processes yielding results and find efficiencies hampering performance. With a wealth of information at your fingertips, you can make data-driven decisions to meet your objectives more successfully rather than making critical business decisions based on decisions you've made in the past or your assumptions.

What is data-driven decision-making?

Data-driven decision-making is collecting and using data to guide your decision-making process to ensure you make informed decisions, rather than relying on previous experience or intuition.

The advantages of using data to make decisions

Your field service business can reap several benefits by adopting a data-driven approach to decision-making.

Streamlines your decision-making process

When your decision-making process is slow, you may miss out on opportunities to grow your business or implement innovative business processes to be more competitive. With access to accurate data, you can make smart decisions quickly.

It helps you make informed decisions

Poor decision-making can lead to costly mistakes or damage your reputation, so using accurate information to reach your business goals is crucial. When you use data to make decisions, you can stop stakeholders from making biased decisions that could cost your business and find objective solutions. It's also easier to explain to your team why you made certain decisions when you can back up your actions with data.

It improves transparency in your business

With a data-driven approach, you can measure the success of your decisions. You can track your data to determine whether your decisions have produced the desired results or if you need to adjust them to reach your objectives. You can use data to back up whether a decision helped your business achieve a goal or not and share this with your team to improve transparency in your organisation. When strategic plans and decisions are shared with your staff, there's a better chance they'll want to contribute to the success of new processes.

It helps you optimise business processes

When you review data, you can identify processes that need to be improved and create an action plan to enhance the way you do business to boost productivity. A field service company that sticks to the same methods because that's what’s always worked will struggle to keep up with customer needs and stay competitive.

How to make data-driven decisions

To help you get started, we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to data-driven decisions.

Identify your goals

Before you can start collecting, analysing, and using data to form decisions, you must define your business goals. Once you know what your business is working towards, you can find data to support your objectives. For example, if your goal is to increase productivity, you may want to track your team's average task completion time to determine how quickly your team completes jobs. Collecting relevant data streamlines your data-driven decision-making process to save time and avoid wasting resources.

Collect relevant data

Once you've identified your business goals, you can start collecting relevant data. Start by identifying your data sources. Ensure your sources are reliable and offer accurate data so you can confidently use the information to make decisions for your business. Poor data quality could negatively affect decision-making, and you'll spend more time and money trying to fix mistakes.

Analyse the data

The next step is to analyse the data to reveal what the information means and discover insights you can use to make decisions. To simplify data analysis, you can use ERP Software to generate reports and data visualisations to compare all the information you've gathered. The advantage of using cloud-based ERP Software is that you can access all your data in one place, and anyone in your team with access to the system can view the reports.

Use data to support your decisions

You can now use what you've learned to make your decisions. The process, however, doesn't stop here. For data-driven decision-making to be effective, you must measure the success of your decisions and make changes if you aren’t seeing results. Data-driven decision-making is a never-ending process that requires ongoing data collection and analysis. You can't collect data once and use the information to make all your decisions. The field service industry is constantly changing, and if you want to find new ways to grow and improve performance and productivity, you must continuously collect and review data.