Alltel Lets Managers Be Puppet Masters

For the SMB on a budget, the new FieldMasterPro service from Alltel lets managers simplify scheduling and dispatch on Windows Mobile smartphones. It's perfect for control freaks!Any business that operates a field service organization knows what a pain in the kiester it is to set schedules and get vans dispatched to customer sites efficiently. There are a wide number of software suites available that help automate these processes (see Friday's case study), but not all of them are friendly to SMBs. If $60 a month sounds good to you and your business's budget, than Alltel has what you need.

FieldMasterPro does what other field service solutions do. It lets field technicians kill paperwork and simplify invoicing by using the Windows Mobile 5.0-powered smartphones to complete tasks. They use programmable fields to check off completed tasks, which are wirelessly synced back to the office. Appointments are automatically sent to the smartphones, telling techs where to go next. With service calls automated, managers have better visibility into the daily flow of jobs and what their techs are doing at any given moment. Lastly, it also ties into back-end solutions at the office, such as QuickBooks, to ease paperwork headaches.

"Alltel Wireless wants to make our customers' lives easier," said Wade McGill, senior VP of product management for Alltel Wireless, in a prepared statement. "With myServiceForce.com's FieldMasterPro, our small business customers can now manage their businesses instantly and efficiently, saving them valuable time and money."

For enterprise customers signed up with Alltel, rather than one of the other major carriers, this is a reasonable solution to help be in better control of your business.