Many of our customers are in the business of HVAC Field Service Management. Recent trend in this domain has been the increase in use of mobile technologies, including tablets and Smartphones bringing in efficiency and accuracy in the process.

HVAC stands for Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning. Regular HVAC maintenance is essential to ensure that HVAC units do not break down and that they operate at maximum efficiency. Field technicians are assigned the service jobs by the main office which they execute at the customer’s premise (house, office etc).

A typical situation is like this. A service call is received from a customer. Staff at the main office dispatches the job to an appropriate field technician. The technician visits the site, performs his job and updates the jobs status as soon as it is completed. Staff sends the invoice to the customer and the transaction is completed.

Use of technology increases the efficiency of the field technicians and reduces manual errors that are introduced by paper-based process. Say a technician is using an Android tablet with a field service application. Office staff can easily dispatch the job to the technician over the air. Technician sees a job notification on his tablet. The job is picked. As soon as the job is finished, the technician updates the job status as "completed" on his tablet. The new job status is transferred to the back office in real-time where accounting system automatically generates an invoice for the customer.

There are enormous advantages for using mobile technologies in the area of field service management. Technicians quickly receive all the information they need including job history before they start their work. Field force can be easily tracked on the map using GPS which allows the office staff to efficiently allocate new tasks to the technicians out there.

Our products SureLock and SureFox provide and environment for secure and effective deployment of field management software on mobile devices including tablets and smartphones. To learn more about SureLock and SureFox, please visit http://www.42gears.com.

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