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As ServiceTitan becomes the go-to field service software for residential service providers, the organization aims to continue its strategic pivot to construction and commercial industries, with the goal of becoming the true operating system of the trades.
In a 2023 Pantheon session titled “Power Up Your Construction Projects,” host Jade Vasun, ServiceTitan’s Senior Product Manager, Jobs & Products, kicked off the presentation by sharing ServiceTitan’s mission statement and drivers for building these new features.
“No longer an afterthought. Provide our construction customers the tools needed for them to efficiently run their short- and long-term projects/jobs, so they no longer feel like ServiceTitan is just a residential service software.”
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Vasun’s session provides a sneak peek into new and upcoming features for construction companies on the ServiceTitan product roadmap.
Project Portfolio
Vasun kicked off the walk-through by introducing ServiceTitan’s Project Portfolio, a new feature slowly being rolled out to construction companies.
“Basically, the Project Portfolio is your home base for all things projects,” Vasun says. “The main problem we're trying to solve is: ‘How do I see a high-level view of the health of all my projects, and also create projects with ease?’”
In short, the Project Portfolio feature provides a comprehensive snapshot of all projects and their progress, including real-time insights as to which projects require attention. Users can filter or group projects based on status, customer, or project manager.
With our solution, you’ll be able to easily access all of your projects from the top navigation with just one click. You’ll have the ability to customize your projects so you can see any data point you want.”
“Right now, in order to find projects, you have to sift through various reports and type in an exact match when you're trying to filter by project attributes,” Vasun says. “If you imagine typing in ‘in progress’ or ‘completed’ or filtering by multiple statuses, it can be quite cumbersome. We hope to solve some of those problems.”
Vasun says current filters don’t provide enough context about the true status of a project, and users can’t customize their views or add additional data points.
“With our solution, you’ll be able to easily access all of your projects from the top navigation with just one click,” Vasun says. “You’ll have the ability to customize your projects so you can see any data point you want. Then, depending on your role, you might have different use cases, different data you need, different searches you have to run to do your job efficiently. Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to reapply filters every single time? We're going to allow you to save your configurations.”
Users will also be able to update projects in bulk, rather than manually clicking into each project individually, and create new projects separate from the call-booking screen. In early 2024, Vasun says, ServiceTitan will release a Gantt chart timeline view within the Project Portfolio.
“You’ll be able to see how many projects are running concurrently, including a timeline of your phases as well,” Vasun says. “For example, you'd be able to see your rough-ins, broken up by the time period, and you can use the information for forecasting in terms of your crews and availability. It also makes it easier to visualize if everything's running on schedule.”
Parent Projects
Next, Vasun talked about how the upcoming Parent Projects feature will enable construction companies to better manage large-scale projects by grouping smaller jobs together under a larger parent project. It provides users with a single dashboard view of all jobs, tasks, and dependencies across multiple project phases.
“Does anybody here do production home building or tract homes?” Vasun asked. “Parent Projects was designed for this use case. It's a way to basically group all your homes or projects together into one higher-level hierarchy and easily bulk-create projects for homes within that group.”
Vasun says it’s currently tedious to try and track a multi-home project under one main parent in ServiceTitan, a process he says involves creating and assigning custom fields to each project phase or component. For a large neighborhood build, Vasun says you currently need to manually enter the same information for hundreds of homes, wasting valuable time and resources.
“With our solution, you’ll be able to see all project records such as financials, jobs, purchase orders, etc.,” Vasun says. “We also want to enable you to bulk create projects within the parent project. So, when you set this up, any project that you create after will automatically inherit all these details.”
Project Plan
Complex construction projects typically require multiple stages and dependencies, each which must occur in the right order. Vasun says the Project Plan feature makes it easier to keep track of tasks and jobs that need to be completed in a specific sequence to move from one phase to the next, and also know when projects run behind schedule.
“I've seen businesses try a lot of solutions, such as Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and whiteboards,” Vasun says. “I've also seen project management tools such as Trello or Microsoft Projects—they all work fine—but the main issue is you're using multiple apps. So, you're constantly jumping between different applications and they don't always talk to each other. We want to make it so you're able to track and manage your projects within ServiceTitan.”
The Project Plan allows users to create a timeline view of all required jobs, subtasks, and phases within a larger project. You can assign timelines or due dates to each task or phase, making it easier to determine if a project component is on time or running behind schedule. You can also set dependencies within ServiceTitan, meaning each task or phase must be closed out before moving on to the next.
“For example, say you need to get a permit before the first job of rough-in can start,” Vasun says. “We can make it so once the user pulls the permit and marks the task complete, the system automatically assigns the next task to schedule the rough-in.”
Vasun says the feature will also simplify billing, especially for construction companies that bill in project phases. Using the same example, you can set up a task and notification to send out an invoice after completing the rough-in phase.
As the presentation drew to a close, Vason mentioned how ServiceTitan plans to roll out construction features over the next year, starting with Project Portfolio and updated filters.
