Laryssa Alexander, President of ECI's Field and IT Service Division explores how field service should be automating for success.

Managing customer relationships is critical to driving growth and securing repeat business for field service organisations. CFOs are making critical financial and risk management decisions based on data secured through manual processes which result in inaccurate reporting. This lack of information or equipment knowledge can lead to poor decision-making and can often result in selling contracts that are either over-priced in order to cover unknown costs resulting in a less than favourable position against competition; or under-priced which may help you win the business but is not profitable nor sustainable.

The Value of Data

Do you know how much data your business has at its fingertips? IDC (International Data Corporation) predicts that the collective sum of the world’s data will grow from 33 zettabytes (ZB) this year to a 174 ZB by 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 61 percent. Amassing a huge amount of data is worthless if you don’t know what to do with it.  A complete business management solution enables you to have more insight to make smarter, data-driven decisions. In fact, that is exactly how an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution is defined. In reality, it is so much more than that; it’s a solution that can dramatically simplify and streamline your operations so you can focus on your core business activities.  

Automating Contract Management

Service contracts are at the core of your business and right now, without a complete business management solution you may be using many different solutions, doing everything manually or some combination of the two. This is where automating contact management through an ERP can come in. We have identified 4 steps to improve contract management that can help drive efficiency and profitability:

1. Standardise your contract process

The solution is to eliminate the paper trail and consolidate systems into a single ERP. This will help you prevent bottlenecks by creating standard contracts with automated approvals, renewals, and billing that can be deployed to any number of customers. Data that is entered once flows through the system and is dispersed to the various teams and departments for accuracy, optimised workflow, and increased productivity.  Standardising the contract management process will result in 4 major benefits: stronger contracts, compliance and control, fast approvals and valuable business insight.

2. Provide a variety of service maintenance contract options

Once you have standardised your contract management process you can then easily allow for the inevitable variables that are unique to each customer and create more customised service contracts and options that ultimately are still profitable and fit within your desired business objectives. In most cases your customers will have complete service, support, and maintenance packages which you can easily monitor, manage, and maintain using automatic notifications and reporting. If, however they still want the option of hourly or per-service solutions you will be able to easily add them and let the system do the work so you can avoid hours of number crunching.

3. Continually monitor contract and performance

Having standardised service maintenance contracts in place doesn’t mean you can ‘sell it and forget it’ but having a robust business management solution will support every phase of the contract lifecycle from initial quoting to ongoing support and finally renewals. Ensure you enable continuous monitoring, generate regular profitability reporting and automate preventative maintenance calls at each of these stages. Additionally, at the equipment level within each service agreement you should be able to track serialised equipment on job sites, understand profitability by model or system and ensure your field technicians are fully optimising their time.

4. Be proactive with contract management

Proactive monitoring with flexible service contract arrangements allows you to protect your business from loss and address customers’ unforeseen needs and concerns as they arise. Automatically launch the renewal process with all the relevant contract performance data, accessible in one system which provides context for any negotiations or adjustments ensuring your team is prepared efficiently and effectively. This way the sales team can proactively re-engage with the customer, ward off potential competitive threats, and ideally increase customer satisfaction in the process.

Increased Visibility

Your teams don’t exist in silos, sales needs to know what service is doing and finance needs insight into both. The same is true for your business management solutions, if you’re running separate systems or working in multiple spreadsheets, you don’t have true insight in your operation. Having one integrated ERP solution means you can be confident in the data. At a glance, you will be able to know how your business is performing and will be able to make quick business decisions that will enable you to fight shrinking margins, beat your competition, and grow your business.

By collecting all data in one central place; increasing visibility and stardising the contract process with continual and automatic monitoring, field service organisations can ensure contracts are and remain profitable with limited manual intervention.

Laryssa Alexander, President of ECI's Field and IT Service Division

Augmented Reality has been widely predicted to become a fundamental aspect within field service delivery in the future. Here Jereme Pitts, COO, Librestream discusses how you can get a lead on your competitors and secure investment in AR for your field service operations today...

According to The Service Council, 70% of service companies stated that within 5-10 years they will face challenges due to the retiring workforce. This fact has created an industry wide need to capture and leverage knowledge, one of the top drivers for augmented reality (AR) technologies. Compounded with this challenge are the increasingly complex assets and operations that service teams face.
After deploying AR technologies, service operations have reported strong outcomes in worker safety, increased uptime, accelerated training, and knowledge retention, employee retention and productivity gains. Over our 15 years of delivering AR solutions, we’ve seen these outcomes across our customer base.
To successfully deploy and adopt AR within an enterprise, it is important to understand which use cases will drive the highest value across your operation. These use cases will determine which form of AR solution you should focus on first. Two of the most popular AR solutions in the industry are remote expert assistance and digital work instructions. Both solutions capture and leverage knowledge and are ready-to-deploy with strong proof points in the industry.
The first solution, remote expert assistance, is the ability to connect with virtual specialists immediately by sharing live video, audio, telestration and augmented content through wearable or smart devices. This solution is making way for just-in-time training, which is the concept of giving workers the tools they need to learn on the job at the scene of an event. With the growing turn-over rate of millennial workers, taking the time and money to train a new technician is a huge investment. Just-in-time training reduces the investment in time and money and instead trains the technician when it’s needed.

"Investing in AR is proving to combat the loss of expertise and growing complexity within the field service industry
The second highest growth AR solution is digital work instructions. Digital work instructions involve transforming paper processes into digital step-bystep workflows - accessible to technicians on their wearable or smart devices. This solution provides enterprises with the opportunity to streamline processes for consistency and better accuracy across their entire operations. Creating actionable data enterprises can use to create smarter and more effective business decisions. Here are examples of benefits and outcomes our industry-leading customers have reported since deploying these two AR solutions:
• 20% accelerated time to resolution and 50% faster support calls
• 33% faster training by mentoring field technicians with live video
• 5-10% reduction in return visits with improved first-time-fix rates
• 70% time saved in total productivity hours of technicians
• Improved worker safety statistics measured by indicators such as fewer miles travelled.
After selecting the highest value use cases and type of AR solution needed, the next step is often creating a successful business case. This step is crucial to gain consensus internally for a successful deployment of the AR solution. Over the years, we’ve worked with our leading customers to compile the main requirements they recommend in building this business case. Here are three important aspects to consider:
1. Name all the important stakeholders who should be involved from the beginning. For example, who are the executive sponsors, key team members, IT and security personnel?
2. Set benchmarks for success. Create a way to measure how well the solution is performing against the ‘old’ ways to help with determining the success of the project.
3. What are your formal KPIs? Make a list of your tangible and intangible benefits and how you will collect that data. These are just a few of the key thing to consider when building a successful business case for AR. To learn more, you can read the ‘Build a Business Case’ chapter in Librestream’s Industry guide on remote expertise.
This guide includes helpful content on the entire process from selecting an AR remote expert vendor to successfully deploying and gaining adoption. 
Investing in AR is proving to combat the loss of expertise and growing complexity within the field service industry. Choosing the right AR tools and creating a strong business case are vital to the success of the deployment. As a part of many companies’ digital transformation strategies, AR is becoming the new industry standard.

Francesco Benvenuto, OverIT gives us his expert insight on AR in field service...

In the Era of Digital Transformation most businesses have begun to be acquainted with the tremendous potential of Augmented Reality (AR). As more enterprise-focused case studies are emerging proving the effectiveness of such technology, today companies are increasingly implementing AR as a strategic part of their technology stack. Enterprises are deploying Augmented, Mixed and Virtual Reality across a variety of sectors, including maintenance, repair, manufacturing, field service, and training.

Whether converting paper instructions into digital AR workflows or quickly enabling a remote technician to get the expert support needed through an AR-enabled live collaboration call, an AR solution always delivers unprecedented levels of knowledge sharing. AR products lead to improved workforce efficiency and safety, as well as reduced errors and equipment downtime. But with so many possible use cases, how can field service organizations easily get started? Field Service Managers are looking for gaining competitive advantages by deploying AR, MR and VR solutions to improve key service metrics, such as first-time fix rates, average repair time, SLAs compliance, and equipment downtime.

BENEFITS

The value of AR in the workplace is not just claimed, but proven thanks to longitudinal data coming from actual deployments. At OverIT, thanks to the SPACE1 Extended Field Solution, we have seen our customers increase productivity by as much as 43% and decrease their error rates by as much as 30%. Benefits can be seen in terms of:

Knowledge Transfer

Experienced technicians with decades of institutional knowledge are reaching retirement age and many industries are coping with a lack of younger employees.The support of a remote expert through Virtual Collaboration can therefore facilitate and accelerate the process of transferring knowledge and know-how.

Increase in efficiency and productivity

Field Service technicians and engineers frequently need to consult technical documents and manuals. Allowing them to visualize pertinent information hands-free during all phases of the work order debriefing is a key element leading to a huge increase in productivity.

Increase in first-time fix

The availability of digital and work-related information allows the user to have immediate access to the documentation needed to solve the problem, both reducing the time required to access it and increasing first-time fix rate.

Lower disassembly time

Thanks to the ability to display Digital Twins and the related animations, the user can efficiently disassemble any assets. Error minimization - The availability of work instructions guiding the user step by step drastically reduces errors.

Accident prevention

For industrial operators performing complex tasks with both hands, the need for a hands-free experience is paramount. Visualizing workflows supporting them in the execution prevents accidents resulting from unnecessary and potentially dangerous activities. 
By viewing assets in 3D and configuring animations, enterprises are able to organize training sessions for employees in a safe environment. SPACE1 – Extended Field Solution goes beyond the conventional Field Service concept improving the efficiency of technicians by:

• Positively impacting recruitment, training, procedure documentation, knowledge management, resource allocation, and much more;

• Efficiently capturing and transferring service knowledge;

• Building and enhancing field operators’ knowledge and skills.

CHALLENGES

Although AR has proven benefits as well as an undiscussed potential across a wide variety of industries, there are still challenges to be addressed.

Hardware

Despite successful application, hardware volatility characterizes the AR market as new hardware emerges. Partnering with a provider who follows a hardware agnostic approach will empower your company to immediately deploy AR applications on the devices currently used.

Digital Content

In order to make the most of the full potential of AR, lots of digital content is required. The ideal product has easy-to-author workflows accessing data and content from existing integrated systems, as well as easy-tonavigate instructions allowing the video guidance and/or the remote mentor assistance. It captures the metadata related to the workflow execution, such as the technician who performed a step, the time when the step was performed and its duration, making such information accessible for Analytics and for measuring the execution compliance.

Integration

Choosing an integrated platform which is flexible and easy to connect with existing systems, such as ERP and IoT, will allow you to quickly get up and running with AR applications to start reaping the benefits such technology can offer. In order to successfully implement this game-changing technology, companies should rely on providers showing already valuable use cases and customers in their portfolio. Moreover, an experienced AR partner will always provide customers with features that are always in step with the latest technological innovations, safeguarding their investments.

THINK ABOUT THE FUTURE

AR, MR, VR are here to stay. Such technologies bring information to life and enable users in remote locations to feel like they are interacting with experts on the scene, thus helping field service companies to drive improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.

OverIT is the pioneer of enterprise-class Augmented Reality, revolutionizing the way field service companies work and collaborate thanks to an integrated AR product providing more effective and efficient knowledge-sharing to conduct complex remote tasks, employee training, product and equipment assembly, maintenance and repair, field and customer support, and much more. Leading enterprises like Cobo Group, Nice, ABS, to name just a few are employing SPACE1 to quickly scale their use of AR

 

 

F-Secure discovers security flaw with the potential to turn hundreds of thousands of load balancers into beachheads for cyber attacks.

Cyber security provider F-Secure is advising organizations using F5 Networks’ BIG-IP load balancer, which is popular amongst governments, banks, and other large corporations, to address security issues in some common configurations of the product. Adversaries can exploit these insecurely configured load balancers to penetrate networks and perform a wide variety of attacks against organizations, or individuals using web services managed by a compromised device.

 

The security issue is present in the Tcl programming language that BIG-IP’s iRules (the feature that BIG-IP uses to direct incoming web traffic) are written in. Certain coding practices allow attackers to inject arbitrary Tcl commands which could be executed in the security context of the target Tcl script.

 

Adversaries that successfully exploit such insecurely configured iRules can use the compromised BIG-IP device as a beachhead to launch further attacks, resulting in a potentially severe breach for an organization. They could also intercept and manipulate web traffic, leading to the exposure of sensitive information, including authentication credentials and application secrets, as well as allowing the users of an organization’s web services to be targeted and attacked.

 

In some cases, exploiting a vulnerable system can be as simple as submitting a command or piece of code as part of a web request, that the technology will execute for the attacker. To make matters worse, there are cases where the compromised device will not record the adversaries’ actions, meaning there would be no evidence that an attack took place. In other cases, an attacker could delete logs that contain evidence of their post-exploit activities – severely hindering any incident investigations.

 

“This configuration issue is really quite severe because it’s stealthy enough for an attacker to get in, achieve a wide variety of objectives, and then cover their tracks. Plus, many organizations aren’t prepared to find or fix issues that are buried deep in software supply chains, which adds up to a potentially big security problem,” explains F-Secure Senior Security Consultant Christoffer Jerkeby. “Unless you know what to look for, it’s tough to foresee this problem occurring, and even harder to deal with in an actual attack.”   

 

Jerkeby discovered over 300,000 active BIG-IP implementations on the internet during the course of his research, but due to methodological limitations, suspects the real number could be higher. Approximately 60 percent of the BIG-IP instances he found were in the United States.  

 

The coding flaw and class of vulnerability is not novel and has been known, along with other command injection vulnerabilities in other popular languages, for some time. Not everyone using BIG-IP will be affected, but the load balancer’s popularity amongst banks, governments, and other entities that provide online services to large numbers of people, combined with the relative obscurity of the underlying security issues with Tcl, means any organization using BIG-IP needs to investigate and assess their exposure.

 

“Unless an organization has done an in-depth investigation of this technology, there’s a strong chance they’ve got this problem,” continues Jerkeby. “Even someone incredibly knowledgeable about security that works at a well-resourced company can make this mistake. So, spreading awareness about the issue is really important if we want to help organizations better protect themselves from a potential breach scenario.”

 

Russ Fadel, CEO and Co-Founder, Augmentir outlines why the next wave of AR implementations in our sector must harness Artificial Intelligence as well...

Much has been said and written about Augmented Reality (AR) and its benefits n the field service arena – from improved field technician performance to reductions in field service operating costs. However, these early success stories masked the reality of Enterprise AR in the industrial sector – companies have been slow to adopt this technology and have had difficulty moving beyond the experimentation and pilot phase

The first wave of vendors in the Enterprise AR space were overly focused on wearable technology, believing the early predictions that there would be millions of sets of smart glasses deployed in the enterprise by 2018. This directed their efforts to getting work instructions running on a variety of wearables, and many also invested solely in using AR to present information to technicians in the field with rich content and 3D CAD overlays.

It has become clear that these investments have not delivered the value expected to the enterprise, which is reflected in the lack of mainstream adoption. What has been overlooked is the real opportunity of leveraging the new found connectivity to service workers to create sustainable value throughout the organization.  Not only by delivering personalized information to each worker, in the ideal format, but also using artificial intelligence and machine learning to augment the intelligence of the organization relative to how it engages, empowers, and continually improves its human workforce.

This is the beginning of a new era, an era not of Enterprise Augmented Reality, but of Augmented Operations where AR is but one of many ways to present data, support, and guide field workers. Augmented Operations has the opportunity to transform human worker productivity much like automation has done in the past 30 years.  

This transformation is driven by the combination of two key technology trends – Enterprise AR and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning.

 

Why is Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Important?

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) has been around for a long time and has historically been applied against external data sets. A recent trend is to embed AI in software platforms, and have it act on the internal data, eliminating the estimated 80% of AI/ML project efforts around labelling and cleansing external data. This is frequently being applied to solutions focused on improving outcomes in business processes where the human worker is at the center. Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) is ideally suited to understanding patterns in the noisy data sets generated by humans workers.

At Augmentir, we are using our AI engine to identify patterns in the data generated by field technicians and highlight areas that can then be used to improve overall worker performance, as well as act in real-time to provide personalized procedures based on the proficiency of each worker. The AI engine is able to help continually deliver insights and recommendations based on that human worker data – this is valuable intelligence that can be used to help drive continuous improvement across the entire organization – from operations to training to quality. 

• AI can help each worker perform at their peak – dynamically changing the instruction to one that allows each worker to perform their job as fast as possible, while meeting quality and safety targets;

• AI understands the patterns and outliers in the vast instruction/job execution data to identify the largest capturable opportunities in the areas of: productivity,. worker effectiveness, training materials effectiveness, and instruction effectiveness – and provide insights and recommendations on how to capture these opportunities. This is the only way to deliver the actionable information required for industrial organizations to drive continuous improvement on a year-over-year basis;

• With AI, companies can optimize troubleshooting/ diagnostic procedures by observing the attempts and results of technicians in the field;

• With AI, companies will be able to capture tribal knowledge from participating in the interactions between Experts and frontline workers, over time making the expertise/tribal knowledge a scalable corporate asset.

With this concept of Augmented Operations (using AI/ML to deliver intelligence across the organization from your augmented workforce), we are seeing a step change in how organizations are making informed decisions, empowering workers, and improving the productivity of humans in the workplace.

Augmenting the Service Workforce of the Future

Despite some early momentum, Enterprise AR alone isn’t enough to deliver sustainable value in the field service sector.
What has been ignored is a real opportunity to create sustainable value throughout the organization – not only giving workers the ability to consume information and apply knowledge, but also augmenting the intelligence of the organization relative to how it engages empowers, and continually improves its human workforce. At Augmentir, we are calling this Augmented Operations, and we believe that this will transform the service workforce of the future.

Kevin Little from logistics firm PiVAL International outlines three ways to keep on top of your supply chain.

It seems that as every day goes by, the supply chain becomes immensely more complex to understand. It could be due to the rise of technology increasing visibility to the supply chain, the fact that it’s more process-driven due to the need to minimize the costs, and that it has become the highest priority to ensure successful business management.

So with all of these factors creating the supply chain complexities, how do you go about it?

 

three ways to stay on track of the supply chain

First and foremost, understanding the supply chain’s efficiency is difficult to master, which is why there are service industries that assist with some of the distribution of services. But how can you stay on track of the supply chain? Here are three tips that we use, that are beneficial when wanting to stay on top of the curve. 

#1. Adapt to Your Customer Demand and Go Mobile

 

To ensure you are staying on track of the supply chain, make sure you are able to adapt to customers' demands. Living in a digital world, customers now demand that all technologies associated in the field are intolerant of failure. Technology is one of the greatest liberators when it comes to your sales force. Utilizing this advancement means your company has more time acquiring and retaining customers instead of focusing on paperwork and waiting for responses.

#2. Outsource an External Partner

 

When your company decides to outsource an external partner, you are allowing yourself to focus more on your company’s core strengths and values. Thus, remaining ahead and on track of any trends relating to the supply chain. Instead of maintaining in-house infrastructure and expertise to manage every operation in your business, companies should consider outsourcing supply chain partners. By outsourcing a third party logistics company, you will be improving your business by speeding up service and improving your customer service. Additionally, the business will be saving both time and money. 

#3. Increase or Maintain Your Visibility

 

The term ‘Supply Chain Visibility’ refers to your company’s ability to track every component and touchpoint the product has undergone, from the suppliers’ hands to yours. 

 

You can obtain good visibility to your customers by giving your suppliers the ability to check your inventory in real-time, in order for them to gain a better understanding of current stock and plan ahead for future demand. Having a supply chain partner that presents good visibility and allows your team members to access details about your counts allows them to strategize freely, without risking too much distraction back-and-forth. 

 

Allowing colleagues, customers and suppliers the power of visibility relieves pressure regarding communication and inventory planning for the future. Your supply must be responsible to stay optimized for many different market and supply conditions. Think redundancy and multi-channel supply chains.

 

Kevin Little is VP, Sales and Marketing at PiVAL International.

 

IBASE, a provider of embedded products for IoT has released its AGS100T/AGS102T IoT gateways.
Powered by Intel’s Apollo Lake Atom™ x7/x5 series, Pentium® N4200, and Celeron® N3350 SoCs, the systems enable seamless and secure data flow to the cloud in IoT-focused applications with enterprise-grade security, and easy manageability.

 

The AGS100T/AGS102T compact fanless platforms offer maximum reliability and longevity support, featuring wide-range operating temperature of up to -40°C ~ 70°C and dimensions of 160 x 110 x 44mm. Both models are suitable for space-constrained applications in harsh environments that require devices equipped with Trusted Platform Module (TPM) technology.

 

“Our AGS100T/AGS102T gateways come with an extra advanced security TPM 2.0 chip to provide a high level of hardware-based security,” said Wilson Lin, Director of IBASE Product Planning Department. “By using TPM together with Windows 10, these devices carry out cryptographic operations for access control and authentication. TPM enables integrity measurements during system boot and makes TPM-based key unavailable outside the TPM to prevent phishing attacks and authorization value guesses.”

 

The rugged AGS100T features 4GB DDR3L-1866 DO-DIMM, a 64GB MLC industrial-grade mSATA SSD, dual display ports (DVI-I and DisplayPort), 4x USB 3.0, 2x GbE, 2x COM, a DC-in terminal block for 9V~36V input and over/under/reverse voltage protection. Expansion is available with a full-size Mini PCI-E, a 2230 M.2 E-Key socket for WLAN & BT, a 3042 M.2 B-Key socket for WWAN & SSD, an mSATA socket (Mini PCI-E), and a 2242 M.2 B-Key socket for mSATA SSD. The AGS102T has two extra serial ports for COM3/COM4 and GPIO 4-in & 4-out multi-purpose interface.

 

British Safety Council welcomes regulator's guidance on working in hot weather and looks forward to its advice for outdoor employees working in polluted urban air.

Furthermore, King’s College London, which draws on and analyses the data from the London Air Quality Network (LAQN), has recently reported that in hot weather the ozone levels in London are rising rapidly which has further adverse health implications.