Get Insights to Hit Your Budget, Boost Service, and Track Assets

Highlights  

• Budget Insights — New tool in April, try it FREE for 30 days! See at-a-glance if your spend is on track, so you can make smarter decisions to get more from your budget. Talk to your account manager to take advantage of the limited-time offer by May 31.
• Network Opportunities — New features in March! See which service providers could deliver on your biggest improvement opportunities, right in Provider Search._¹ 
• Asset Validation — New features in March!  Track your assets at every location with help from providers to reduce downtime, lower costs, and plan capital investments. 
• Additional innovations — New features in March! Stay focused on what matters with enhanced location dashboards and homepage. Get more insights from your site audit, parts, and asset data.

Watch the Spring 2024 Product Release Webinar now to learn more and see demos.

How It Works

Make smarter spending decisions to get more from your budget.

Balancing a tight budget with unpredictable expenses is a major challenge. One large bill can break your budget — and if you don’t use it, you may lose it. Coming in April, with Budget Insights you’ll be able to make confident decisions and avoid overspending by seeing at-a-glance how potential expenses fit into your budget.

• Keep your budget on track: Decide to start work now or wait until later based on how much budget you have left.
• Monitor your spend in real-time: See what’s already incurred and what’s forecasted based on work in progress.
• Take action from anywhere: Quickly review work orders and proposals on mobile to make the right call — and keep your finance team happy.

Try it FREE for 30 days! Talk to your account manager to take advantage of the limited-time offer for subscribers by May 31, 2024.

See which providers could deliver on your biggest opportunities for better service and lower costs. 

When you spend as much as 80% of your budget on external providers, the potential to save up to 30% with better vendors is a game-changer. Now in Provider Search, you’ll see a ranking of your cost-saving opportunities along with the best providers available to strengthen your network.* 

• Find your weak spots: See exactly how much you could save and improve with upgraded providers, based on unprecedented performance and pricing data from more than 70,000 providers and 220 million work orders on ServiceChannel. 
• Identify the best providers: See how much each provider could impact your performance and cost, then view their profile to see how their capabilities and metrics fit your needs.  
• Test new providers quickly: Effortlessly invite providers, ensure compliance, assign work, and monitor progress all in one place. With new opportunities every month, you can continuously improve performance. 

Plan your capital investments based on validated asset data.  

Accurately track your physical assets at every location to reduce downtime and costs—and make smarter capital planning decisions. With the Asset Validation tool, you can regularly verify the quality of your asset data across all your locations. And now your providers can help, too.

• Track your assets accurately: Capture the service history, condition, and cost insights you need for capital planning based on total cost of ownership (TCO). 
• Get help from your providers: Validate asset conditions in the field with every work order to avoid stagnant data or repeated audits. 
• Justify your investments: Proactively replace assets at the end of their useful life to reduce downtime, revenue loss, and unnecessary expenses. 

Get more value with the latest innovations.

Harness the full power of additional updates like these (see all the details in ProductChannel). 

• Your ServiceChannel landing page: Stay on top of your follow-up, with more actionable pointers for what to do next. 
• Site Planning: Enforce your brand standards with a new Analytics dashboard for your site audit data. 
• Inventory Manager: Get the right parts on order to your providers quickly. 
• Asset Manager: Get help from your providers with asset photos and meter readings. 
• Location dashboards: Automatically defer work orders based on your criteria and show planned maintenance schedules to your location staff. 

Learn more from the experts.

Check out all the innovations packed into the Spring 2024 Product Release and see all the new features in our on-demand webinar.

* Provider Search and network opportunities are available in the U.S. only and will be visible if the Provider Search feature is enabled in your account.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

How do I get started with tracking my budget in ServiceChannel?

Every ServiceChannel subscriber has access to the Budget Insight Report in Analytics, which shows how you are performing against budget targets on overall spend, with filters to drill down by trade, GL, location, region, district, and approval code. 

You can add and update your budget at any time using a self-service template, and you can set custom fiscal periods to match your fiscal calendar. 

To enable Budget Insights on work orders and proposals, contact your Account Manager for more information. 

What types of budgets can be tracked?

You can track budgets on ServiceChannel by trade, category, GL code, location, region, district, and approval code. 

How do you calculate forecasted costs and accruals?

Forecasted costs include in-progress and completed work orders not yet invoiced, using the scheduled completion date and the average invoice amount of similar completed work orders.  

Incurred costs are based on completed work orders that have been invoiced. 

How frequently are Budget Insights updated?

Your budget status is updated in real-time whenever you click on the Budget button. 

How are multiple currencies handled?

If you have invoices in multiple currencies, then Budget Insights will consolidate your status into a single currency for reporting, which you can select. 

How is the ServiceChannel Marketplace different from other ways of sourcing vendors?

The ServiceChannel Service Provider Marketplace is different than other sourcing methods in three key ways: 

• Objective performance scores. With Marketplace data, you can make confident sourcing decisions, because all providers are scored using the same objective KPIs. You can compare their results and see their actual performance for other clients like you.  
• Unbiased rankings. Providers cannot pay to be promoted ahead of others. The only way for a provider to be discovered in the Marketplace is by delivering services to existing clients on the ServiceChannel Platform.  
• Direct relationships. ServiceChannel is not a middleman between you and your providers. Providers sourced from the Marketplace work for you directly, so you can build long-term, strategic relationships.  

How do you measure provider performance?

Provider performance is evaluated across four key dimensions of service: Speed, Quality, Price, and Engagement Scores. Each score is calculated from a weighted set of KPI inputs and is updated monthly. 

The scores and metrics in Provider Search network opportunities align directly with those in your Contractor Scorecard.  

What's the benefit of working with providers with good performance scores?

Provider scores are the best way to spot opportunities to reduce the time to repair, get better outcomes for your customer and employee experience, and boost your profitability. Higher scores reflect great service by the provider, giving you the industry’s best way to identify and retain the right new providers to optimize your network. 

How do you estimate the potential cost savings from network opportunities?

By comparing the typical invoice prices across providers for the same work, trades, and geography, and combining that with your historical invoice volume, we calculate the potential cost savings you could realize by switching providers. Our analysis shows that the estimates are strong indicators of actual results.

Why is it important to validate asset data?

Validating your asset data helps you realize the full potential of asset management. With accurate and complete data, you can confidently make proactive asset and capital planning decisions. 

Installed assets are continually changing, with new assets being added, outdated assets being retired, and assets moving from one location to another. Regularly validating your asset data ensures you record the complete service history and avoids the cost of repeated asset audits. 

Asset Validation streamlines the workflow of validating the data in your asset register within the ServiceChannel Platform. 

What are the different ways to validate assets?

There are two primary workflows for validating assets in the field that are built into ServiceChannel mobile apps. 

1) Asset work order validation 

• Providers can validate a single asset that is linked to their assigned work order during a regular service visit. 
• They are asked to confirm which asset they serviced before checking out of the work order. If the wrong asset is linked, then they can update the work order. 
• This way, you can ensure you’re accurately tracking service costs for each asset to calculate the accurate total cost of ownership (TCO). 

2) Asset register validation  

• You can empower providers to help manage your asset register by validating multiple asset in one visit. 
• This avoids the need for you to repeatedly conduct costly asset audits to preserve the accuracy of your asset register. 
• Providers receive a planned maintenance (PM) work order with all the assets linked that they need to validate onsite. 
• During validation, they can update, move, and create new asset records. 

Do my assets need to be tagged to validate them?

While asset tags are not required, they simplify asset management and validation by increasing efficiency and accuracy. 

Who can perform asset validation?

Both internal technicians and external providers can perform asset validation in the ServiceChannel Provider app, once permissions are granted. 

Any employee with a ServiceChannel account can also do asset validation in the ServiceChannel Mobile app, once permissions are granted.  

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