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Skedulo, which specializes in new-gen mobile workforce management for small to midange-size businesses, has launched a new stand-alone version of its platform for operations teams and their mobile-first workers.
The 2-year-old San Francisco-based startup has been building its business by running on both Salesforce and ServiceNow clouds and will continue to do so. But as of March 14, the company is enabling its enterprise users to better manage the movement of their workers and meet customer service and support expectations by working directly with them in a separate cloud service.
Skedulo’s new, independent platform expands the company’s product offering to a native solution beyond Salesforce and ServiceNow, making the service available to companies with field-service management needs outside of those ecosystems. It can connect to any system of record.
CEO: Market Lacked a Dedicated Platform
“One of the frustrations that we’ve seen is that there really has been a lack of a platform for this problem specifically,” CEO and co-founder Matt Fairhurst told eWEEK. “IT managers have spent a lot of time thinking about CRM and ERP, marketing tech and all those back-office applications that are so fundamental to organizations, but the workforce in the field that’s actually getting business-critical work done and making them money, are the people that have been left out. Until now.”
International Data Corporation (IDC) forecast that by 2020, mobile workers in the U.S. will surpass 105 million, accounting for almost 75 percent of the total workforce. Manual scheduling process of complex work environments has created problems, including delays on delivering or receiving critical business information, pain and inefficiency managing employee schedules against customer needs, and excessive costs.
An example of how Skedulo’s service works involves AWP, a company that contracts more than 5,000 traffic controllers nationally for road and building constructions sites, Fairhurst said. The daily scheduling, location directing and computation of hourly wages and travel allowances for all these field workers is a nightmare; it can take up to eight physical pages of information each day to produce and file for each flagger, he said.
Skedulo makes all the data available in the cloud to be accessed on tablets or smartphones, and only incremental update information needs to be added after the initial order. Forget all the paper.
What Skedulo Offers
The functionality enables managers to:
- easily and intelligently manage all the details involving a mobile workforce, including individuals’ profiles, skills, certifications, territories, and locations;
- use business logic and automation to match the best qualified among available workers to jobs and shifts, including regularly or irregularly recurring schedules;
- use Skedulo’s recommendation and optimization engine, Mastermind, to intelligently balance complex schedules against multiple business priorities, including reducing costs and inefficiencies while increasing customer and worker satisfaction;
- dispatch schedules and updates to smartphones via SMS or notification;
- provide in the moment guidance and support to mobile workers as they interface with customers on-site, even when offline; and
- seamlessly connect their mobile workforce management platform to any CRM or ERP.
“Skedulo is the first company to explore and comprehensively address the challenges of the modern mobile workforce beyond traditional industries that fit within the field service technology category of manufacturers and heavy industry and solve entire mobile workforce management lifecycles,” Fairhurst said.
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