Yes, great field service needs to tick the boxes for your customers, your staff, and your business.
But the reality is that field operations are costly. The expense of vehicles, fuel, tools, spare parts, and your skilled people who use them quickly mounts up. Yet many organisations still treat the field as a black box, hoping costs and customer satisfaction will somehow magically balance out.
Five things that drive up your field service costs
Primary challenges for many field service businesses include:
1. The inequality between work done and time invoiced
If you don’t know how many paid hours translate into actual billable work, then you’re potentially writing off business income and turning your field service crew into an unsustainable overhead – not a profit centre!
2. Too many spare parts just lying around!
Can’t see the real-time consumption of your inventory? Got spare parts piled up in vans “just in case”? Unused inventory is a cost that never converts to profit and gathers dust. And if you’re unaware that you’ve got an accumulation of parts, it’s all too easy to order more.
3. Fleet on the road to nowhere?
As the cost of fuel continues to rise, running a fleet that doesn’t sequence travel routes to minimise travel distance makes little sense. Poorly orchestrated fleet movements result in higher mileage, fuel, and carbon costs, as well as longer customer wait times and frustrated technicians. There’s no win-win here.
4. Sloppy SLAs that drain profits
Got SLAs you’ve negotiated and agreed to with your business-to-business customers? When you miss agreed response times, no matter how hard you’ve tried, you’re just generating credits that further erode your margins (and annoying your customers).
5. Slow billing, slow paying
When you rely on customers signing off the job costs and invoice amount on paper and then have to wait for your team to enter the details into your finance system manually, you’re pushing back payment dates – and opening up the risk of data input errors.
Five things that reduce your field service costs
With field service, every challenge overcome translates into added profits.
1. Capture every chargeable hour with a unified planning engine
The same rules that make a technician’s day easier also give your finance and operations team a clear utilisation picture. When scheduling draws on actual customer demand, overtime drops, and thumb-twiddling time shrinks.
2. Never overspend on inventory with real-time parts tracking
When every part issued to a van is recorded as an inventory transaction, consumption instantly adjusts on-hand balances and, where necessary, triggers a parts purchase or transfer. This way, your working capital stays with finance, rather than becoming a dust-collecting part languishing in the back of a service vehicle.
3. Geography-aware routing to minimise fleet travel
With a scheduling engine that looks at location as well as technician skills or certifications, miles per job will fall naturally. And fewer kilometres driven means lower fuel expenses, less wear on your fleet of vehicles, less on-the-road time for your technicians, and faster customer service.
4. SLA dashboards for on-time servicing
With a dedicated SLA dashboard, your managers can set response-time or fix-time thresholds in your system – and enable colour-coded indicators when you’re at risk of missing deadlines. This way, they can see in advance when you have at-risk SLAs, leaving time to act before penalties are applied.
5. Immediate revenue capture for instant invoicing
By digitising the job creation through to the sign-off process, all records are already in your financial solution – no manual input required. So, your finance team can create customer invoices on the same day of service, reducing your outstanding receivables list and improving cash flow immediately. All without adding to your headcount budget.
The NetSuite Field Service difference
Because it shares the NetSuite backbone, the Field Service module converts what used to be guesswork – think routes, parts, costs, and compliance - into data you can act on the same day, unlocking labour, fleet and inventory savings that flow straight to your bottom line.
The good news? Once the black box is opened, the financial gains will ripple across your entire business.
