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At Smart Service Cloud, we define “equipment” as customer-owned equipment. Tracking equipment is an essential part of Cloud for customers who work with or repair customer-owned items such as HVAC systems, fire extinguishers, or generators, just to name a few.
So why invest time in tracking equipment? Well, knowing what to expect when visiting a customer’s site so you have the right parts and tools, as well as knowing the age and technical information of a particular unit will make your technicians more efficient and cognizant of the customer’s situation and needs. Also, you’ll be able to track repairs unique to that equipment record. Lastly, tracking equipment will give you visibility to items that need to be serviced or replaced.
Creating Equipment RecordsThese equipment records can be found on customer records, quotes, and work orders. When you create equipment (from any of these levels) that record becomes part of the customer and is available on their future quotes and work orders.
You have the option to create equipment in several places, but let’s start with the most common, a work order. While creating a work order you can scroll down to the equipment section to see all of the equipment records you’ve created for this customer thus far. You can see that we have serviced this customer’s air conditioner unit in the past. We can also add a new equipment record by clicking "New Equipment".
When you create an equipment record, enter all available information, starting with the Details Section.
In the "Location" field, Smart Service Cloud might auto-fill your GPS location during this process so we can record the exact location of the equipment. Or, you could write in a custom location to describe the placement of the furnace.
In the "Status" field, you can click on the arrow to select or create your own statuses. Also, you can create and manage these statuses by going to Administration > Equipment Statuses.
The Dates Section contains a field for the installation date, warranty expiration date, the last time you serviced the equipment, and the next time you plan to service the equipment.
Later, we’ll go over the option to view a list of all customer equipment and recommend services based on this information.
Next up is our User Fields Section. Smart Service Cloud provides the standard fields we can anticipate that you will be using but we also provided the option for you to customize what additional industry-specific information you would like to store for your equipment records.
If you’d like to add user fields such as the “filter” you can do so under Administration > System Settings. Then, click on edit and scroll down to the Equipment User Fields Section. Here, you can add more user fields. Be sure to click "save".
Now that you have added your own Equipment User Fields, you can add info to those fields in the Equipment Record.
In the Picture Section, you can also upload a photo of the equipment or take a photo using the camera on your device.
Now that we have an Equipment Record, let’s discuss how the Fill Equipment feature can be used to track repairs to the equipment. In the Work Order go to the Items Section and click on "Tools". Click on “Fill Equipment” and you’ll be given the option to select an item from your items list to apply to your equipment records.
Once you’ve finished selecting your item, click okay at the bottom of your screen. You will see that not only was the item added to the Work Order, but the work order item description contains the details of your Equipment Record.
Using this feature will also automatically adjust the “last service date” field on the Equipment Record with the date of the Work Order.
Let’s take a look at how you can view and filter a list of all the equipment records you’ve created thus far. Hover over the Customers Center at the top of your screen. you will see an option for equipment. This list contains all of the equipment records you have on file from every customer.
Using the column headers you could filter the list by the date of installation, warranty expiration date, last service date, or next service date for example. This way, you can find old equipment that needs to be replaced with newer models, giving you more sales leads.
