Mobile workforce management is the set of practices and tools a company uses to schedule, dispatch, communicate with and measure employees who work at customer locations instead of a fixed site, such as field technicians, installers and inspectors.
How a mobile workforce is measured
The difference from managing an office team is travel. A technician's paid day splits three ways:
Paid hours = Wrench time + Drive time + Other time (shop, breaks, waiting)
Utilization = Wrench time ÷ Paid hours
Say a technician is paid for 9 hours, spends 5.5 on jobs, 2.5 driving and 1 at the shop or waiting. Utilization is 5.5 ÷ 9 = 61%. The 2.5 hours of windshield time is the cost an office team never has. More on the ratio in technician utilization rate.
Why it matters
A mobile workforce is harder to see. You cannot walk past a desk to check on progress, so you rely on the schedule, check-ins and whatever records come back from the field. The usual pieces of mobile workforce management are:
- Scheduling and dispatch: who goes where, in what order.
- Communication: job details out to the field, status back to the office.
- Time and location records: many companies use GPS or telematics here.
- Field records: photos, forms and signatures, often collected on a mobile app.
- People management: training, safety and retention, covered in the managing field technicians guide.
Many products, often sold as field service management suites, cover several of these.
CrewLink covers one slice: scheduling and dispatch. It does not offer a mobile app, GPS or telematics tracking, or messaging. What it does is check travel from where each truck will actually be before a slot is offered, so the drive is planned rather than discovered. See technician scheduling software.
A common mistake
Trying to fix a planning problem with tracking. Watching dots on a map shows that trucks are driving too much, but the drives were set when the jobs were booked. If the schedule puts back-to-back jobs on opposite sides of town, no amount of monitoring will shorten the drive.
Related terms
- Windshield time is the paid drive time a mobile workforce carries.
- Dispatching is the daily assignment of jobs to people.
- Field technician is the most common mobile worker in service trades.
Common questions
Is mobile workforce management the same as field service management?
They overlap heavily. Field service management usually includes the job and billing side; mobile workforce management focuses on the people in the field.
Do you need an app to manage a mobile workforce?
Many companies use one, but the core problems, who goes where and when, are scheduling decisions made before anyone leaves the shop.
What should you measure first?
Drive time per job and utilization. They show how much of the paid day turns into billable work.