Companies that commonly send team members out for service calls have a great deal to gain by building their own field service management (FSM) apps. The problem is, there are so many options for customizable existing FSM systems, and so many platforms enabling the development of new ones, that it can be extremely difficult to identify the best solution for you.

How to Build a Mobile Field Service Management App

Regardless of the solution you ultimately choose, there are a few criteria we believe are especially important in virtually all cases. If you want to create a next-generation, and future-proof, field service management app using a development platform, it makes sense to pick one that has the following key features.

Maximum Mobility and Compatibility

In order to be truly mobile, your FSM needs to operate seamlessly even when it can’t connect to your servers. Wifi and mobile data access to the internet is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, but there are always times when connecting simply isn’t an option. You shouldn’t let these situations hold your field agents back from updating the system. This is why the best FSMs will continue to work offline and sync later : to let users go about their business uninterrupted.

Your organization might have a “bring your own device” (BYOD) policy, or your field agents may be using company-owned smartphones and tablets. You might want an app that’s web-based, or you might want it to work on a specific operating system. Your data might be stored in your offices, or it could be in the cloud. What’s more, any one of these parameters might change at some point in the future.

Whatever platform you select for building a FSM solution needs to have the flexibility to easily handle options like these and to adapt along with you.

Code-Free Yet Powerful DIY

Some app development platforms, programming languages and frameworks are so complex that only a niche expert in the solution at hand would think about touching it. Others make major compromises to platform capabilities in order to appeal to “citizen developers,” the stakeholders with strong vision for how the product should look and work : but aren’t programmers by trade.

You want to find the happy medium, a solution that is accessible enough to the less technical among us but is still powered by building blocks with an enterprise-worthy back end and functionality.

While much software is developed with lengthy processes of identifying requirements, documenting product specifications, designing and only then coding, a superior approach is to perfect one aspect at a time and move on.

“Model-driven” app development allows team members to think about their apps in terms of what types of records it needs to manage, focusing on these as the bases for everything else involved with the project. How will dispatchers and field agents actually be using your app? What information will they need to work with, in what way, at what phases of their business processes?

It makes a lot of sense to let your answers to these questions drive the entire development flow.

Never Set in Stone

While your mobile FSM is being built, it can be helpful to track development and design progress using a fully integrated project management system, which better app platforms do offer. All the better if this system also allows project managers to administer user roles and permissions from the same dashboard, an extremely useful feature once you launch.

However, getting your app ready to ship is just one part of the process. The best platforms enable managers to track app use and issues as they come up. They’ll also allow for continuing development after each deployment, so you can roll out new features and tweaks on an agile basis.

Rock-Solid Security

Data security is one of the hottest issues that apps face nowadays. It seems that nearly every day there’s another big news story about a newly unearthed vulnerability flaw in a component that powers many extremely popular apps, or a breach that hackers perpetrated on a high-profile brand’s database.

When developing for mobile access and cloud-based information systems, the challenges become even greater, as many app platforms haven’t yet found comprehensive solutions for securing these emerging technologies. Make sure the platform you work with supports key security features.

Plays Nicely with Existing Systems

Unless your company was founded recently, you’re probably already using some sort of system for field service management. You might have invested a lot of time and money in acquiring software licenses and customizing your database to suit the specific needs of your organization.

So why reinvent the wheel?

Superior app development tools will allow you to seamlessly integrate your legacy management system with your new mobile app, for minimum transition headaches and costs. Some even allow you to build custom adapters using third-party tools that are made specifically for cross-platform accessibility libraries of APIs.

The Best Solution for You

Every organization is different, and every field service team has different needs, so no solution for building a mobile field service management app will be the perfect fit for everyone.

Before you commit to a specific framework, developer or tool, we recommend that you map out the business processes your app needs to support, along with the specific functionality necessary for enabling those processes. Most FSM apps need to work with asset management tools, cross-team dispatch scheduling and customer information databases, but there are other criteria to consider.

We also recommend that you find an app development solution that integrates easily with your legacy system, offers full app lifecycle and governance management, will keep your data secure, supports all of the devices that your team needs, and works with pre-developed modules controlled via an intuitive drag-n-drop editor.

At appsFreedom, we’ve invested heavily in providing a solution that meets these requirements. We think our innovative platform is the best solution out there for enterprise mobile FSM development. Ultimately, the most important thing is to find the solution that is best for you.

If you would like to take the appsFreedom platform for a test drive, you can do so here.