From a consultant perspective, I'm frequently asked how Sharepoint 3 can be utilised in specific business contexts; both existing and prospective customers have wildly varying business processes that can benefit from the system. I'd like to take a second to detail a common scenario that can be configured within this powerful piece of software and propose how we can help our customers bin the paper based method in favour of a secure, reliable and accessible online medium.
Field Job Management
One area of your business that may be reliant on a manual paper-phone-text method is that of job tracking and communication with field technicians, for example. Currently a large proportion of businesses utilise their Outlook calendar to create appointments which are then either printed out or sent via email to engineers in the field.
Sharepoint can:
* Offer a one-stop business management system, with an online calendar directly linked to user tasks and job tracking sheets
* Directly link to your current Outlook client to integrate with your current appointment system
* Help you create a form template, that once completed kicks off a workflow informing both engineer and managers that a new job has been created
* Inform users via email, calendar, text directly to most modern mobile phones of pending jobs and appointments - no paper job sheet required
* Email the client with a proposed appointment time
* Send a digital map directly to the user in the field
The field engineer can then mark any job as 'completed' on their mobile or laptop (connected to Sharepoint) which can then trigger an invoice workflow.
In summary, Sharepoint can be configured to save time, money and resources as well as being able to offer clients the reliability and scalability inherent in a Hosted Service. Please contact us to discuss your requirements.
Pete Baughan
Level 3 Service Desk Administrator
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