Fracto Field: Leadtime for medical device service.

A medical device service company

Let us show you a typical service company for medical technology. With a network of technicians, it looks after hospitals across Germany: it carries out electrical safety and metrological checks, and handles repairs, commissioning and training. In most companies, this runs on Excel, Outlook and paper today. Assigning technicians, recording time, documentation: every break between tools costs time. We will show you how it all comes together in Fracto Field.

Master data

First, the master data. Fracto Field covers not just the customer list but the whole world of a service company: hospitals as customers, plus manufacturers, partners and suppliers, grouped by type. Let's open a customer. The overview sums up the key information: master data, contact details, and whether the hospital belongs to a group. Under “Members” you keep the contact people at the hospital. Contacts can also sync with the address book on your smartphone.

Devices

Under “Objects” are this customer's devices. In Fracto Field, objects are the things you look after, here medical devices, with type, status and serial number. Let's open a device. At the top: manufacturer, model and serial number. Below: the basic information and your own fields, for example inventory number, year of manufacture, device class, and the dates of the last and next electrical safety check. On the right are the tasks that have ever run on this device. When the hospital calls and says the ventilator in operating room three is acting up, you see all appointments, all technicians and all jobs of recent years at a glance. In the journal, the back office notes what does not belong in an inspection report: contract changes, a new contact at the customer, unusual incidents. And under “Files” you keep reports, inspection records, manuals and data sheets right on the device.

Framework contracts

Customer relationships are called projects in Fracto Field. There are one-off projects and ongoing projects. Ongoing projects map the framework contracts that are common in this industry. A framework contract holds the devices, the contacts, the contract documents, perhaps dedicated service teams, and above all the billing. You decide very flexibly how to bill. First: fixed price subscriptions, a monthly or yearly fee, for example for service availability. Second: variable subscriptions, billed per device under care. As the installed base grows, so does the invoice. Third: product subscriptions with included packages. A safety check package for ventilators, for example, includes two electrical safety checks per year. Alongside these, you agree support allowances. The customer buys, say, a set number of service hours per year at a package price. Once it is used up, the regular hourly rate applies. Fracto Field keeps track of how much has been used.

Dispatch

So there are customers with projects, devices attached to them, and jobs on top. Complexity grows fast, and dispatch has to keep the overview. For that there are configurable views, for example Kanban boards. This one groups jobs by type: maintenance and inspection, repair, commissioning, training. You can group by status just as well: received, quoted, scheduled, in progress, done, billed. This view is filtered to the eastern region, so you can plan for a single team. You save grouping, filters and sorting as your own view, and it is there the next time you sign in. Job types, statuses and workflows are yours to define.

Automations

Recurring jobs are typical in medical technology: inspections at fixed intervals, service contracts coming up for renewal, monthly collective invoices. With Excel and Outlook that is laborious and error-prone. Fracto Field handles this with automations run by an AI agent. An automation has a trigger, for example every Monday at nine. You write what the agent should do in plain language, not code. Here, for example: find all devices whose inspection is due in the next thirty days, and create a task for each one in the customer's project. Other automations react to events. As soon as a new job comes in, the agent assesses it. And on the first working day of the month, it checks whether completed jobs are missing time, records or products. Every run is logged.

A job from an email

Now let's follow one job from start to finish. A hospital in Berlin reports a pressure-drop alarm on a ventilator during an operation. The report came by email, to the helpdesk address you set up for each customer. The email automatically became a task, in the right project, with the default status and priority. If you like, the sender gets a confirmation of receipt. The description holds the complete email, exactly as the hospital wrote it. On the right: project, type, status, priority and who is responsible. Plus your own fields for the job: location, start and end. You decide which fields each job type has. A repair needs different fields from a training session. And the agent has already assessed the report: it rated the urgency, suggested a technician from the region and estimated the effort. The result sits as a comment on the task. From the task, you create an express quotation in one click. The recipient is the contact at the customer, and the line item comes from the effort estimate. The quotation goes out by email as a PDF with your letterhead, and the customer accepts it via a link.

Scheduling technicians

Now the job needs a technician. Who is free, who is nearby? Dispatch often plans not only its own staff but also subcontractors, freelance technicians and temporary help for peak times. That means coordinating by email and phone, and it does not scale. In Fracto Field, every employee, permanent or freelance, connects their Google, Outlook or iCal calendar. Whatever is planned in the pipeline appears in their calendar automatically, with device, address, contact and time slot. The technician needs no extra app in the morning; the calendar on their phone is enough. The other way round, everything in their personal calendar shows up as blocked time in the pipeline: holidays, private appointments, a job for another client. So dispatch cannot double-book anyone by mistake. Planning happens in the pipeline. Technicians on the left, days along the top. Each bar is a scheduled job. There are three views: an overview for the week, a detailed view for planning by the hour, and a calendar for each technician. You drag jobs from the sidebar onto a free slot.

Field work and report

This is what a job looks like once it is done. The repair is complete, and the four hours are booked. The comment holds the technician's log with times: arrival, diagnosis, parts replaced, function test, handover. And this is the structured record: a repair report as a form, with fault description, diagnosis, parts replaced, function test, remaining defects and photos. You maintain the templates for these forms yourself, by drag and drop. Job done, hours booked.

Billing

Now to billing. Invoicing automatically collects every billable item, per customer and month: fixed fees, per-device billing, included packages and jobs outside the contract. Exactly the routine work that eats time today, and where mistakes get expensive. One click opens a draft with every line item. “Create invoice” turns it into the invoice: numbered in sequence, with your letterhead, tax rules and payment terms, as an e-invoice in ZUGFeRD or XRechnung format. Issued invoices land in receivables management. Here, for example, is the invoice that bills the repair together with the month's fixed fees. From here you send invoices, check incoming payments and send reminders when needed. That was the whole flow: contract, incoming job, dispatch, field work and billing. All in one place, in Fracto Field.