Field Reporting is the exhaustive practice of conducting field audits for brands, retail businesses, and product-based companies. Here, the field reporter documents his/her observations and makes an exhaustive report to analyse what needs to be done to enhance a brand’s visibility in a retail store.
In this blog post, we will discuss the top things that go into the making of field reporting, and go through the things that you can do to reduce time and cost in the company:
Areas where you spend money on Field Reporting:
Before you map out a strategy to reduce the company cost on field reporting activities, it might be necessary to understand the top areas where you’re spending money in the first place.
· Service Delivery: Here, your company may spend a considerable amount of money on travel, inventory, and customer management. Your goal here is to figure out how you can reduce the amount of time and money spent on these service delivery aspects.
· People: Field Reporting would require time and monetary investment in hiring people, training, and employee management.
· Infrastructure: This includes overhead cost, administrative cost, and cost on fixed assets.
Considering the factors mentioned above of time and monetary investment, you might want to ask yourself these questions:
· How many field reporting services do you generally schedule in one day? (new service call and follow-ups).
· What is the total travel expense incurred by your company in a day?
· What are the total number of resolved issues and follow-up trips in a day?
If you don’t think that the time and money you are spending is justifying the profit, move on to the next section to see what you can do to cut your expenses.
Practices you can implement to reduce the time and cost spent on Field Reporting:
Read on to learn the few things you can do to reduce time and cost spent on field reporting activities:
Use an employee tracking app to save time and maximise efficiency
Using an employee tracking app can be one of the best things that you can do to save both time and money. For instance, PPMS’ field reporting app has a GPS-enabled employee tracker. This way, every time an employee logs into the app, you can track where your employee is at a given time in a day.
This means that you will get your hands on important information that will show you the number of hours a field reporter is spending on a particular field. If your findings show that the reporter is spending too much time on one field, you can identify the cause, troubleshoot it, and increase productivity.
This way, you can save time and maximise your company’s field reporting efficiency.
Reward your top-performing employees to save time on hiring & training
From travelling to coordinating with the retailers to collecting samples, taking pictures, and making reports – a lot of effort goes into doing justice to field reporting.
As such, you, as a company, need to motivate your employees to do better consistently. If you don’t, your best talent will leave you for an organisation that pays more. This means that you will have to hire new people and train them all over again – which is a significant drain on your time and resources.
So to save time and money on hiring and training, give incentives to your employees. Reward them for good work. Give them benefits to make them feel valued. Make them want to stay. Doing this will ensure that you don’t have to go through the unnecessary hassle of recruitment and onboarding. Instead, you can focus on doing what you do best – being the best field reporting services provider.
Optimise inventory overstocks and update your scheduling practice.
Studies reveal that you can reduce the overall cost of inventory management by 10% by reducing the total cases of stockouts and over-stocks. To overcome this issue, manage your inventory size and dead stock with your retailers by keeping track of retail audit or the stock that is available with retailers.
Another factor that can help you increase efficiency and reduce cost is proper scheduling.
Your job here is to ensure that each field reporting job is scheduled correctly so that your employees have the time to do their job correctly for each field work they’re assigned. More efficiency means that the need for follow-up field trips reduces. Fewer follow-up trips mean less money and time spent on follow-up visits and more employee efficiency. It’s a win-win!
