Welcome to the heavy-weight service management software showdown—the definitive rundown of all the ways BuildOps stacks up against the rest. When you find yourself in the market for professional service software, there’s a mess of different options. Searching for the perfect solution to fit your business is a daunting task by itself. Throw in the crushing weight of 30 to 40 options to choose from, and what you’re left with is one gigantic headache.
The best way to start is by mapping your business needs and matching them with available features from some of the top-performing field service management software in today’s market. You have defined business needs; you need your software to service those needs. But relying on a company’s website sales pitch simply isn’t enough. After you’ve selected a handful of top contenders, you have to ‘get under the hood’ and really dig for details. From disjointed workflows to missing project management modules, or a basic lack of industry-specific functionality, even some of the biggest names fall short of being an ideal solution.
BuildOps is the pound-for-pound all-in-one solution that stands out above the rest. What sets our platform apart is a full, end-to-end experience that’s specifically outfitted to fit the needs of your service business. But, don’t just take our word for it. Below, we’re about to outline 5 key points where BuildOps wins—even up against the stiffest competition.
Customer-First Mentality
We’ve been developing this platform for over five years. And over the course of those five years, we’ve learned a lot. In fact, we’ve learned so much that our platform barely resembles the product we originally started with. Why? Because we listen to our customers. We’ve gone through iteration after iteration, constantly improving to best fit the needs of our customers.
Where BuildOps Wins
It was developed specifically to streamline day-to-day workflows for MEP and fire life & safety commercial service organizations. The platform was designed with personalization in mind and was built from the ground up with workflow templates created to service the direct needs of your commercial service company—so you’re not trying to reinvent the wheel on your most frequent jobs.
Where the competition falls short
Many industry competitors have a platform built entirely off disconnected systems that were acquired separately to address the gaps in an incomplete product. The result of which is often a modular solution that forces you, the customer, to work outside of the main platform, adding extra steps, processes, and time to your already busy day.
Out of The Box Solutions—Simple, But Not Ideal
Skipping the growing pains of implementation might sound attractive, but the number of customers we’ve seen backtracking to our sales reps after sacrificing quality for convenience is staggering. Getting things up and running fast is great, but remember; speed leads to mistakes, and mistakes inevitably lead to dissatisfaction with the product.
Where BuildOps Wins
Don’t look at implementation as a burden, think of it as an opportunity to get your house in order. BuildOps will send an implementation team right to your virtual doorstep to make sure processes are running properly before ever making it into the hands of your technicians. They’ll help you map out your workflow, so you can expect a smooth start and rapid adoption from your back-office staff and field technicians.
Where the competition falls short
When it comes to out-of-the-box solutions, implementation is left entirely up to you and your IT department. And that can be great, but tweaking all the bells and whistles to fit the specific needs of your service shop takes a keen eye that’s best handled by a professional who can identify all the gritty details that need to be woven into your platform integration.
Superior Reporting Modules
It all comes down to the numbers. Increasing the efficiency of your business is one thing, but the ability to maintain a full account of your close rates, quotes issued, most valuable customers, overall profitability—and everything in between—is invaluable. This data can then be used to identify new revenue streams and improve job performance across your service company. Proper reporting allows your service organization to be proactive instead of reactive. With BuildOps, you’ll never be caught on your heels. Here’s how BuildOps does it better.
Where BuildOps wins
Our reporting features allow you to create custom dashboards that give you a top-to-bottom view of your entire business—accessible to anyone you choose, from management to service, operations, and finance. Gain key business insights into who your most effective technicians are for each different job type, mitigate risk for lost margin, and keep a close eye on which invoices have and haven’t been paid—ensuring that your cash flow is running smoothly and on time.
Where the Competition Falls Short
While data reporting features exist within our competitors’ platforms, some users have found that this data remains extremely difficult to mine. On top of that, access to that data only comes at an additional fee and rarely produces the desired results (i.e., tech performance, most profitable projects, etc.). Some users found that even when the features do work as intended, they produce inaccurate results that become detrimental to their businesses.
Product Features Fit for a King
Your platform is nothing without the ability to manage your service and projects with little impact to your team. The whole point of an all-in-one field service management software is to make life easier for your team in the back office—and your technicians on the job site. So, you want your chosen platform to come correct with a robust set of features that optimize operations for your service company. Let’s take a look at some of the features where BuildOps shines brightest.
Where BuildOps Wins
There are 4 sets of features that set BuildOps apart from even the sternest competition:
Project management: The platform’s construction project management tools are intuitive and easy to navigate. You’ll be able to track and manage RFIs right from your email—making communication seemingly effortless. Change orders help encourage transparency by integrating quotes to minimize any effects on your budget. Plus, submittals can all be batched together, emailed, and approved all at once—creating faster turnaround times across the board.
And our real-time construction project management dashboard helps track and display KPIs that are critical for your business. It helps customers forecast accurate timelines, precise budgets, and projected profit margins for their ongoing jobs.
Service agreement management: Simplify the process of creating and tracking complicated preventative maintenance agreements with our tools that help customers define their scope of work to ensure their clients’ assets and equipment are well maintained on a predetermined schedule. Your technicians will benefit from easy-to-follow, predefined maintenance checklists, and even help enable bulk procurement for parts—allowing for discounted prices and increased profit margins. BuildOps can handle multiple assets at multiple locations. If you can do the work, BuildOps can track and schedule the process.
Custom forms and gated workflows: Ensure the highest quality by creating a standard, repeatable process for your field technicians. Define your own custom fields to fit the information you need from your technicians. Pair that with gated workflows that require your techs to fill out specific fields in order to move on in the process. This ensures that your technicians fill out every piece of information necessary before moving on to the next task—increasing quality control and avoiding costly mistakes in the field. Custom forms and gated workflows deployed and adopted successfully actually lead to quicker turnaround times.
Where The Competition Falls Short
For many of our competitors, these features don’t even exist. Project management functionality is all but non-existent, or comes nowhere near to the robust set of features you’ll get when you go with BuildOps. There are generally no gated workflows and very little support for managing service agreements or identifying pull-through work when out in the field.
A User Experience as Simple as Candy Crush
We’ve always said that there’s no point in having software if your team isn’t going to use it. And if your desktop and mobile experiences aren’t both simple and intuitive, that’s exactly what you’ll have—a costly investment that sits on a shelf.
Where BuildOps Wins
Our user experience is best in class, built by a team of product designers that actually communicate with our customers. Our dispatch board was specifically designed to destress back office personnel, while our mobile experience was carefully vetted through a team of our toughest field technicians. Your team will be able to complete work orders, receive live updates, access plans or equipment manuals, collect customer signatures, and even add photo and video documentation—right there on the job site. Plus, optical character recognition (OCR) helps simplify the lives of your technicians by allowing them to pull equipment info directly from scanning its data plate.
Where The Competition Falls Short
Not every platform has a mobile app associated with its service management software. And the ones who do? Often provide users with a glitchy, unreliable experience coupled with a clunky UI that often requires you to operate two apps simultaneously. Some users have even described their experience with competitor apps to be cumbersome and tedious. Not to mention that we’ve seen many apps lacking even the most basic features. Word to the wise? Always have your team use software that was designed with their workflow in mind. Forcing your team to use a platform ill-fitted to their needs will diminish employee trust and jeopardize your credibility, which is a tough pill to swallow as the trades continue to struggle with an ongoing labor shortage.
When you go with BuildOps, you go with quality and a business with a passion for customer satisfaction. Our customers mean the world to us, and every decision we make is based on how our product can serve you best. If you think any of the above could help with some of the roadblocks you’re experiencing with your commercial contracting business, give us a call and book a demo today.