Salesforce field service to cash integration reduces revenue leakage

Our client is a construction services company that provides geological testing of job sites before and during construction projects. The company works primarily on commercial projects and performs critical, on-site services to ensure the safety and regulatory compliance of construction projects. 

Typical of many fast-growing companies, the business was outgrowing their front-, middle- and back-office infrastructure. On-site services were planned, conducted and invoiced through many disparate systems that were also becoming outdated and were not effectively managing growth. The company determined that streamlining and scaling field service to cash operations would greatly increase efficiency, decrease revenue leakage and significantly improve the business’s valuation. 

The challenge 

The company was seeing fast growth following a private equity investment to capture new market opportunities. Multiple systems and databases were used to handle sales, manage projects and keep track of customer data, requiring triple entry of data. Because many disparate systems were used, having a single source of truth for data was difficult, and inconsistencies resulted in data duplication and inaccuracies that caused employees not to trust the data fully. Ultimately, the quality of data reporting on the business was deeply affected. 

On-site services are at the heart of the company, and working with customers directly to schedule work orders, conduct services, solve their problems and quickly create invoices for their work represents the field service to the cash life cycle. Due to their quick growth, they had not yet migrated from their QuickBooks accounting system and planned to modernize those processes in the future. However, in the meantime, performing work and inputting necessary data became extremely time-consuming and error-prone.

The need to copy data into their financial systems once employees returned to the office resulted in long lags between dispatch and invoice. The effort required to input the data also resulted in revenue leakage, as some services were not fully captured in the system at the time of service. For example, trip charges, overtime charges and expenses for consumables were often missed. 

The solution 

RSM worked with the company to design and build a full-service technology stack to automate many of their processes while providing a single source of truth data layer for full business transparency. 

Salesforce Service Cloud and Field Service provided the foundation for all process controls, automation and analytics, unifying data and creating a unified customer view​ with the Salesforce Customer 360 approach. Field technicians could plan, dispatch, conduct and complete their on-site projects with much greater ease and efficiency.  

With Salesforce in place, dispatch operations were automated, including wizards to schedule recurring appointments. Project scope and budgeting were provided on employees’ mobile devices so field technicians could better achieve on-target billing, resulting in higher customer satisfaction. 

As their on-site job effectiveness increased, field technicians could proactively add more field lab tests while on-site. They could seamlessly order, sign for and invoice for additional services, which resulted in increased revenues. Because additional services and invoicing could be initiated on-site and billing rules were fully automated, even as these downstream changes occurred, the speed of getting paid improved. 

The takeaway 

The client’s field service to cash operations was successfully automated in Salesforce to increase efficiency significantly across the geographically dispersed organization. Because of the connected approach, a single source of truth was established, providing accurate reporting, even across integrations to other systems.

By empowering the field technicians, from dispatch to work order completion, they could proactively provide more value-added services to the customer and capture all revenue events while also getting paid faster. These improvements ultimately helped enhance the valuation of the business. The client had a very successful exit a year after the project's completion.