Hi FSM team,

I've come across an FSM limitation I wanted to share for improvement.

I'm currently configuring FSM for a client who provides heating system install and maintenance services.

The are often sub contracted by building management companies to perform maintenance services for residents.

When creating a Work Order, the Building Management company is the "Company" and the "Billing Address". The "Contact" and "Service Address" belongs to the resident.

My client will only be provided with the service address, but they will build up the database of residential contacts over time as they perform services.

The challenge is that my client is only given a list of properties which require servicing, and not the contact information. So when creating a Work Order, they will not know which Contact to select (or if that contact is missing from the system)

I also have other clients who I was not able to recommend FSM to partially for this reason. Both of those companies provide medical devices and the hospital trusts would be the customer, but the hospitals themselves would be the service address and each service address would have a specific contact... but the person creating the Work Order would not know who the contact is, as the assumption is that a service address will have a contact person.

In an ideal scenario, when selecting the Service Address, there would be an option to auto populate or at least pick Contacts who are associated with that service address.

A couple of ways this could be addressed.

As a workaround we're going to need to put the property reference in the First Name of the Contacts and the full name in the Last Name field, but this is a bit messy and still a workaround.

I'm happy to provide more information if it would help you address this sub contractor scenario.

Regards,

Ashley

UPDATE

Every property my customer services has a unique reference, so by adding that reference to the First Name field of the contact it was searchable by property reference and you wouldn't need to know the name of the customer (just the property ref). This also seems to populate the correct service address as the contact has their own addresses related list.

This is still a workaround and not every business will have a property reference. They may just know the service address. This is also still problematic for my client as they will be building the list of residential contacts as they go, so they will need to have all the properties listed in the Service Address field under a dummy contact and then create a new contact and address each time they make contact with a resident who is due a service. Because each Service Address record is unique, when the contact is changed the Service Address field is cleared and the engineer will need to re-enter the address again. This is frustrating and also creating a duplicate Service Address.

Another improvement which would be beneficial would be if the Contact records had a Reference No. field (like customer number in Zoho Books) and this would be included in the query when entering text into the Contact lookup field.

 

This is just not a slick process at all and things like this make FSM really hard to recommend, which is disappointing as I really want to be able to promote the too.