It seems today everyone has a cell phone (or even two). A device that was once the plaything of the rich is now a part of everyday life, both personal and professional.

The question then is should there be a line between how cell phones are used for business and personal matters? It makes sense to carry one device, to receive calls from your spouse and your boss on the same phone, but is it a good idea to rely on your technicians to use their own cell phones to receive dispatches and business information or is it better to have your technicians carry company phones to do use to do business.

One obvious question is information security. It might be wise to have your technicians use company phones if they’re downloading price books or customer details that you would want returned and secured if they are fired or quit. If that information is on the tech’s own phone it may be difficult to secure that information. However, if they’re using a work phone, that would get turned in along with their truck and keys at the end of their tenure.

On the other hand, if the work related information is not downloaded to their phone, but simply accessed through the internet, it doesn’t seem to make as much of a difference if they use their own phone or a work phone. In this scenario, it’s not the device that holds the information but the login credentials that grant access to the information. Under these circumstances, if the tech is no longer working for you, you change their login codes so they can no longer access your company information. This way it doesn’t matter that they used their personal phone to access your business information or if you issued them a company phone.

Many technicians might want to use their personal phone for business if only to avoid having to carry more than one phone with them at a time. Also, keeping contacts’ phone numbers synced across two devices might be more trouble than it’s worth. Others may want to have a better separation of their work and personal phone numbers, making it easier to switch off on the weekends and after quitting time.

Do your techs use personal phones for business or do they get company phones, and why?

Have you ever wanted to store vital information about a piece of equipment only to find that ESC does not have a field for it?  How about grouping equipment by a piece of information?  Or finding all customers that have equipment in poor condition?  If so, ESC has the perfect solution for this: custom fields.

Not only can custom fields help you do all these things it also gives you the following abilities:

• Custom fields can be easily viewed from the Qualification screen in ESC.
• Equipment reports can be filtered by custom fields.
• Custom fields can be configured to print on dispatch tickets.
• Custom fields can be seen on all mobile devices.

To set up a custom field go to the File pull-down menu and selectSetup Custom Fields followed by Equipment. You can then define up to eight custom equipment fields.  To create one, enter the name of the custom field in the Field Label column. Use the fields to the right to populate a drop down list that can be selected when this field is used.

In this example I have setup a custom field called Condition that we will use to track the shape of our customer’s equipment.  We have added 5 items to the pull-down menu: Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor and Bad.

Note that any setups and changes to these fields on this screen will affect all equipment for all customers.  The fields that are set up here, and the List Items that are defined for each of those Field Labels, will appear on ALL customers’ equipment screens.

The custom fields you define will now appear on the Enter/Modify Equipment screen.  To use custom fields, simply recall a piece of equipment and select the value from the drop down list in the field you created. If the value you want to use doesn’t exist in the list you can manually enter the information directly into this field instead. For ease of searching and consistency, we suggest using the defined list items whenever possible.

As noted earlier, custom fields can be viewed from the Customer Qualification screen.  This is extremely useful as the Customer Qualification screen is the crux of ESC and provides useful information for whatever Customer/Location you choose.  The Equipment section can be found starting halfway down the screen and has a series of columns that help you organize information about customer equipment.  Custom fields are located on the far right of this list, but can be moved to a more prominent location by dragging the title of the chosen Custom Equipment Field to wherever you would like it to be.  This change will be reflected on every screen where equipment is displayed.

By Justin Egan