What is mobile workforce management software?

Digital transformation has seen many businesses turn to technology to enhance productivity, operational efficiency, and productivity. One such technological solution is the use of Mobile Workforce Management software. Below, we deep dive into what you can expect from this specialised software solution, what to look out for when choosing the right solution for your business, and help identify what features are required for the solution to work effectively.

What Is Mobile Workforce Management Software?

Mobile Workforce Management software is a workforce management tool that has been specifically developed to manage staff and employees who work outside of a business’s physical office location. This kind of workforce is often referred to as field teams and is popular within the security industry, where security guards are deployed across several locations. 

This specialised workforce manager software often has many different functionalities that can be managed using mobile devices, mobile apps and PC applications. This functionality can include employee tracking, productivity management, logging, dispatch, and other forms of communication which effectively enable you, as an employer, to track and optimise workforce inefficiencies and increase productivity. 

How Mobile Workforce Management Software Can Benefit Your Business?

From the above, it is clear that Mobile Workforce Management software fulfils an essential role in assisting security companies in managing a workforce by monitoring their employee’s productivity, movements, actions, and more, aiming to improve labour efficiency, save wage costs, and increase revenue. Other benefits of utilising this kind of workforce management system for attendance management include:

• Simplifying the complexities of workforce scheduling to save time and resources. 
• Tracking employee movements and job productivity to identify problems, issues, or opportunities for improvement. 
• Communicating in real-time with employees and receiving quick updates on jobs.
• Effectively forecasting predicted workloads ahead of time to plan schedule and labour requirements efficiently.
• Tracking the amount of time taken to complete jobs to bill clients effectively.
• Measuring employee performance against client feedback.
• Helping employees manage their leave and attendance to streamline all labour requirements for the jobs required.

Essential Features of a Mobile Workforce Management Software

There is no doubt, from the above, that workforce management tools, like mobile workforce management software, have many benefits for a security company. But finding the right system for your needs is critical. With so many different workforce management solutions on the market, choosing the right one is often tricky, which is why we have put together several features for you to look for when selecting a workforce management software for your business. These features include: 

• Contract management – Details regarding each job site or location should be captured and maintained in the system. When roster and attendance hours or shifts are registered for a particular site, they should be compared to the requirements of the contract or site. This will provide you with a bird’s eye view of all jobs and their operational requirements. 
• Personnel management – Details regarding each employee should be captured, managed, and maintained in the system. This will allow you to choose and assess the right employees for the project, site, or job. 
• Staff scheduling per location – Scheduling (rostering) of personnel shifts can be done per location and may be done manually or automatically. This will allow you to ensure that the right employees are at the right locations and will enable you to track and get overtime alerts, monitor non-productive time, and provide sales data that you can use to determine the profit per site/location. 
• Time and attendance per location – The capturing of actual attendance details should be done per location and may be done manually or automatically. This will allow you to pull reports and make the necessary adjustments to attendance to ensure that sites are correctly covered and that wage costs are kept to a minimum.
• Minimise wage costs through reporting –This software should provide reports that highlight incorrect rostering and attendance regarding the number and grades of personnel rostered or posted at a site, projected and actual wage costs, overtime, non-productive time, site profitability etc. This will enable an operations manager to keep day-to-day real-time control of operations and ensure that costs are kept to a minimum, and personnel requirements are precisely met.
• Flexible business rules – the right software solution should be customisable and flexible, allowing for customised business rules according to your requirements, including shift type definitions, wage rules, grades/rank, allowances, earnings, and more.

How Can The EasyRoster Workforce Manager Software Help You With Your Workforce Management?

One workforce management solution that covers all the features mentioned above is Adapt IT’s EasyRoster Workforce Manager solution. This solution has been specifically designed with security companies and their needs in mind. This fit for purpose workforce management software enables you to:

• Optimise your operational efficiency with automatic scheduling capabilities. 
• Based on the roster, forecast wage costs, including overtime, non-productive time, allowances, etc., per guard and per site.
• Control attendance exceptions, such as absenteeism, leave, train, suspensions etc., quickly and efficiently so that it doesn’t interfere with productivity.
• Easily calculate the number of spares guards required to meet job needs due to absenteeism, illness, temporary contract requirements etc. You can also ensure that spare guards are used effectively and efficiently to minimise wage costs.
• Export attendance details to various payroll systems removing the need for manual calculation of overtime and all other categories of hours which takes up a lot of time. This way of doing things also limits input mistakes, so that pay queries are kept to a minimum.

Conclusion

As a security business grows, there is more and more pressure to manage the working number of employees, their schedules, locations, and productivity. If this is not managed efficiently, the business could suffer. This is where workforce management solutions fill a specific need. Adapt IT’s EasyRoster software puts you in control of employee attendance and scheduling by automating and streamlining these processes to enhance efficiency, reduce costs and ultimately increase productivity. For more on EasyRoster’s features and benefits, click here