AUTHOR ARCHIVES: Paul Adams

Mobile app design has come a long way. Paul Adams, Marketing & Development Director at Solarvista Software, talks about the change in conceptual approach.

At Solarvista, we launched our first mobile app way back in 2002, called Mobile Worker.  It was designed to operate as field service mobile application with our existing field service management back office ERP suite. It did it very well.

But… that’s all it did. Yes, you could receive jobs. Yes, you could order parts. Yes, you could capture signatures, take pictures etc. And it worked offline as well as online. In fact it did all of the things that we could think that service technicians wanted to do.

It was (and still is) a great application. In fact, it’s used to this day for thousands of users. But times change. And architectural practices have improved beyond all recognition in the last decade.

Whilst our Mobile Worker app is flexible, it’s flexible within constraints. The reason for this is that the application was specifically designed to do specific functions in a specific way. It was designed to work with existing Solarvista ERP back office applications and, practically speaking, only those applications.

For our next generation of mobile apps, we didn’t want ANY constraints… at all. We didn’t want specificity in any shape or form. The days of “hard-coding” were over.

Our conclusion?

We wanted to build a PLATFORM, not an application, which we then applied to business problems to deliver elegant solutions.

These apps could do anything at all, and be driven by configuration, not hard coding. Simple text files that defined what they did, how they did it and when they did it.

 

Oh… and in 2015, we need to support “Bring Your Own Device” too, so it needs to work on ALL platforms… Android, iOS and Windows. And we mustn’t forget offline working too.

It was quite an ambition. Especially when we consider the need to build for three different environments.  Of course, we would use the platform to create apps for field service personnel operating in organisations that ran Solarvista ERP suites. But we also wanted an app that would work with everything else too.

We had lots of prototypes that we ended up throwing away. Each one took a different architectural approach but there was always a snag. Eventually, after three years development, we produced Solarvista LIVE Mobile… a PLATFORM not just an app.

It’s not a platform in the sense of development environments from the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Google… no one is going to compete with those guys. But it is a platform in the sense of building mobile apps for people who have work to do in the field.

In the old days, we would create a function by “hard coding” programs and providing another version. Now, we just create a text file that defines what the app should do, when and how. Workflow, texts, labels, logic, validation etc...
All done in a file updated over the airwaves in seconds. In fact, our customers can soon create e-forms to do anything using a simple web-based tool.

So, yes it does all the things that the original did and to most users it just feels like a normal app. But underneath, it’s a platform… and that means it’s ready for the future.

Users can get started easily with standard features/ functions that just work. But when needs change… as they always do… the platform can adapt in flash.

 

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Solarvista’s Paul Adams explains why pre-project preparation is perhaps the most important stage of any software implementation...

OK so you’ve made the case to your board that your field service operation will be more efficient and cost effective if you can move to a new software system. Finally you get the green light to go ahead select and your software and then before you know it your facing managing a huge change to the way your business operates.

Getting the implementation of this software right or wrong could be the difference between your company flourishing or floundering and if it was you that put the case together for this software, then the same may likely apply to your career as well!

So what are the biggest risks and most common pitfalls companies face with enterprise software implementation?

Well perhaps one of the biggest risks around the implementation of field service management software, or indeed any enterprise grade software, is simply understanding and managing expectations. What expectations do you have of your software supplier: i.e. are they just to supply the software or is there an element of change management to be undertaken by them as well?

Software providers can give as little or as much assistance and guidance as you need, but remember we have to know exactly what it is you need before we can agree to do it!

 

It’s absolutely key to discuss with your software provider exactly what your expectations are and through open and honest dialogue you and your provider will be able to agree clear goals and also make sure all expectations are both realistic and easily measured.

Often it is the work that goes on in the pre-project phase that will define how successful an implementation is. It may be natural for some companies, especially larger organisations, to be assessing their processes on a semi-ongoing basis.

However, for many, especially those companies that are going through a rapid period of growth or expansion, this may not be the case. Often the strategic, forward looking stuff can be tricky simply because the number one focus of satisfying customers dominates absolutely everything.

Understand your processes

However it is crucial that before even getting a software vendor involved you make the time to identify exactly what your current ‘as-is’ processes are. What do you and your team do at the ground level day in and day out?

Here it’s all about understanding those nuances and where efficiencies can be made. Understanding where bureaucratic processes have evolved into some monstrous beast and inefficient processes are not questioned simply because they’ve just always been done like that.

Really having a good understanding of your day-to-day business processes is something that any company can do and having this insight is one thing that will massively help further down the line.

When it comes to the actual implementation very rarely is software implementation project just a software implementation project.

Software is generally implemented to automate manual process, and by automating manual process you’re effectively doing someone’s job for them. Therefore it’s natural if you get a lot of fear at user level during such a project. If your team don’t know what is going on this can be even further exaggerated. There may be whispers around the office of forthcoming job cuts as systems become automated when more often than not the investment in software is a clear indication of the company’s future growth and prosperity.

 

So there is a massive element of change management to be considered as part of the wider project plan. Again setting expectations is key.

It’s vital you outline the reasoning for bringing in the new software, what that means in terms of changing processes and then what that in turn means for the individual end-users - how will the change will benefit them?

And whilst the responsibility for managing this process of course ultimately lies with your company, a software provider can certainly offer guidance and expertise in not just implementing software but also in implementing projects. We can help guide you through the transition and help you manage expectations of both the executive board and the user base.

At Solarvista we often play a big part in the project management as when implementing software we typically go through the business process analysis stages with our customers. We work alongside our customers to understand their processes so we can outline where automation can improve the workflow. In that sense a software provider becomes absolutely integral to the whole change management process, and again a clear understanding of where you are currently and where you see yourselves post implementation will make the whole project run much more efficiently

Ultimately the key factor is knowing your scope, knowing what you want and understanding your expectations. It’s an often-heard phrase in project management that people don’t know they want it until they’ve not got it.

Unless at the start of the process you know exactly what you want, your expectations may well be different from reality. This could then have a serious impact on the success of the project as it could potentially cause delays and additional costs.

Understanding the scope of the project at the outset and really getting to the nitty-gritty of that understanding is therefore key.

 

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Paul Adams of Solarvista looks at one of the most important, yet often mis-managed areas of field service, inventory management...

Leading edge practitioners have long recognised that effective visible inventory management and stock control are very different from simple inventory reduction. As a result of a sophisticated inventory management system, a world class cost-effective service operation can differentiate itself from the competition, lower costs and drive up customer satisfaction.

There is continued pressure for service to produce the right part in the right place at the right time and to do so at the lowest possible cost to the business. Consequently this effective inventory management has become a fundamental issue in achieving the right level of customer service and paramount to competing effectively in a fiercely competitive market.

 

As the true value of accurate and effective inventory management becomes apparent however, many companies have realised that a totally effective logistics operation is difficult to establish without the proper mechanisms in place.

The right approach.

The traditional tools and skills are struggling in some businesses to meet the service level demands of customers; with the financial imperatives faced by all businesses, more must inevitably be done with less.

One of the most important factors when considering managing your business’s inventory is to know how to achieve equilibrium between having enough inventory and yet not having too much.

Inventory is an expensive part of any business and not just accounting for the purchase cost but all other associated costs such as storage, handling and insurance. Reducing stock also reduces the risk of damage, obsolescence, theft and deterioration, which could potentially become expensive.

By ensuring that the business has a fully competent system that can order appropriate quantities required for specific jobs, it is therefore reducing these costs as well as the risks associated with carrying surplus stock.

Technology, technology…

Operational strategies supported by effective technology solutions, processes and infrastructure will allow the service organisation to deliver cost efficiently, while improving margins and increasing the resilience of the operation to face up to any potential market difficulties. Offering optimum levels of service and providing competitively priced services will position the business to take advantage of upturns in the market. The business should be able to live up to the promises made on its behalf, and deliver cost-effectively increasing customer satisfaction, retention and margins.

Normally the challenge to achieving this type of operating solution is that most service companies are working within an existing infrastructure where they are continually changing “on the run” to keep up with the shifting environment. Using a fully integrated service management solution enables a business to create an infrastructure that is designed to be able to accommodate continual refinement, and able to keep up with the shifting environment, at times even anticipating it to allow positioning ahead of the competition.

 

The improved use of communications should be seen by the business and customers as a positive move to provide better information about customer needs and requirements to both. The target is to minimise the fixed cost element of the operation keeping it variable where possible minimising overheads and creating high flexibility to deliver customer satisfaction.

Conclusion

Through systems integration the business is able to support the customer requirements by understanding customer requirements and providing support across the whole operation.

The ability to out-do competitors and sell cost effective solutions to customers requires differentiators, and these will come from an integrated systems solution enabling the business to have in-depth knowledge of customer requirements provided by top quality staff throughout an effective operation supported by a fully integrated technology solution.

There are a number of inventory management systems, although it is worth conducting some research and being sure to choose a package that is right for your business; the benefits of such a system will far outweigh the costs.

 

“Effective inventory management will give businesses in any industry a distinct competitive advantage over their competitors.” Chris Welsh, Solarvista

 

 

 

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The great BYOD debate is one that has been raging in field service for some time and it shows no sign of abating. Here Paul Adams of Solarvista takes a look at both sides of the discussion... 

The BYOD (“Bring Your Own Device”) debate is one that has received much coverage in recent months with some in the service sector as well as other industries arguing that BYOD is the only way forward for businesses looking to compete effectively and offer the most efficient customer service and increased employee satisfaction. But what is BYOD? What is the impact on the business, the workers, and the customers?

A complete move to BYOD is not going to be right for every business in every service sector, but a lot of businesses may already be partaking in some kind of BYOD scheme without even realising. For example, if employees have access to company emails on their personal mobile phone or tablet or another device then this is, in effect, BYOD. In fact research has found that globally 60% of full-time employees use BYOD to some extent. (Gabriel, 2013)

So what actually is BYOD?

Simply, “Bring Your Own Device” refers to employees having the ability to connect their own technical devices such as smart phones, laptops and tablets to the company’s network instead of using a device owned by the company. Recent years have seen an influx of workers bringing their own personal devices into their work environment and using them in their everyday jobs (Millard, 2011). In fact, 95% of employees have used their own device in work (Gens et al, 2013) and the majority already use their own personal device for a variety of work-related tasks, including communication, content creation and admin (Ellis et al, 2012).

What are the advantages and disadvantages?

There are a number of advantages to BYOD for both the user of the device and the company employing that user. However, the other side of the debate – the potential pitfalls that a company may face because of BYOD – tend to be less obvious. Below are some examples, but not an exhaustive list, both from the user and business perspective.

Advantages

• Personal choice
• Better work life balance
• Improved productivity
• No cost for equipment
• Decreased support and training costs

Disadvantages

• Financial responsibility
• “Always available”
• Loss, theft or damage
• Information and network security
• Increased support costs

[quote]58% of IT security and audit experts view employee-owned devices as a security risk to the enterprise.

 

Conclusion

BYOD represents the tipping point from corporate-led IT to consumer-driven IT; corporate IT now significantly lags behind the consumer market (Millard, 2011) and this has had a dramatic effect on the desire of employees to use their own devices at work. It is a trend that is set to continue throughout 2014 and beyond.

Over the last couple of years, these devices have become integrated into everyday life for most people as result of the ‘always on’ nature of social media and the 24/7 online world. With the lightning speed at which technology is progressing it is maybe neither cost-effective nor practical for businesses to update their employees’ technological devices as often as both the company and the employee might wish. Therefore, BYOD has become the natural solution to this problem.

However, there are a number of key considerations when implementing any kind of BYOD scheme in the workplace. Most notably these are around security; of your company’s data and networks, of access to your systems and around confidentiality. The use of industrial-strength security approaches, such as Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory, is important to deliver this with confidence.

[quote]One size increasingly doesn’t fit all in terms of tools and technologies for work. The challenge is for the IT department to ensure their business is secure.

 

Also, there are a number of functionality and cost implications worth noting. If you need particular functionality from your devices that is only available on expensive corporate hardware, then BYOD may not even be applicable at the moment. Here at Solarvista, our new line of cross-device mobile apps offers a good feature set but it will be mid-2015 before the sheer volume of functionality is available on all platforms. There are big challenges ahead in ensuring the business remains secure whilst also adopting working methods that are becoming ever more prevalent and popular. It is important to know that BYOD, according to the experts, isn’t going anywhere. Therefore there should be no rush to implement it without giving proper consideration to all the ways it will affect your business, your employees and ultimately your customers.

Paul Adams, Marketing and development manager at Solarvista looks at why no two field service companies are ever quite the same and what that means when choosing service management software...

 'At Solarvista, we have implemented hundreds of service management and workforce mobilisation systems over the years. And the biggest thing we have learned over that time is that everyone in service management does everything differently… even in the same industry sectors!

This issue became quite a big problem for us. We’d be approached by a prospective user in the same industry sector as current customers (they were often referred to us by them) and we’d think, “Great, we have a service management solution off the shelf for you”. Then, we’d find out that they did just about everything differently! Ouch.

We’d pitch modifications that required the use of developers going into the core product and making changes to meet those needs. In itself, quite a workable proposition and we’d done this successfully for many years. But as we grew, managing this code change became more costly to us, and sometimes to the customer. And it’s fair to say that developers don’t come cheap.

The ‘gaps’ that we normally address with specific modifications or code usually are categorised as:

1. Missing functionality
2. Integration to legacy systems
3. Logic or business logic modifications/additions

 

To our customers, these gaps needed to be filled to ensure a successful, efficient solution was implemented. But, deep down, it often felt risky to them… they couldn’t see what they were getting until the latter stages of the project, when maximum resource exposure occurred. It doesn’t matter how good we are as developers, it’s only natural to feel anxious about such risks.

We needed to do something that enabled us to address the (mostly) totally different needs of each customer without resorting to changing or modifying our product.

I’ve written in previous articles about our R&D effort in cloud based services and some of the answers came as a result of this research. In cloud systems, one of the key cost reduction drivers is “one version of software for all customers”. But we knew that this was contra to what service management systems need. After some deep thinking by our best developers, we managed to find a solution.

Firstly, we re-architected many parts of our software to offer, what we call, Extensibility. This means that we can add completely new client-side features, 100% integrated with the core product, without needing to modify a single line of the underlying product code. In other words, one version of software BUT with new functionality added specifically for the customer needs, which operates as if it’s part of the existing product (the user wouldn’t realise). Not only that, the feature can be added in (literally) hours or days (not weeks) and with no requirement to regression test the underlying product. This enabled us to address Missing Functionality and Business Logic Change issues.

This didn’t solve the problem of connecting to ever increasing legacy and partner systems however. Often we would need to read customer data from a corporate system, or update a third-party system of a partner company. In fact, we often built 30+ interfaces in one system! How could we do this without needing expensive development?

The answer came again from our R&D into cloud architecture. We thought about power supply adapters and how they could be “plugged” together to achieve a whole unit. From this we built something we call a Dynamic Adapter operating via our Service Bus system that allows us to connect as many systems together without needing to code a single line. Once again, one version of software, but implemented doing very (very) different things.

The results have been impressive. In fact, we have recently addressed the service management needs of a very famous coffee shop company using Extensibility and Bus/Adapter technology alone without needing any core changes to our products. Another, in the automotive sector, that had pulled out of a service management project with a competitor, has had 35 ‘gaps’ filled with this same technology.

Service management software is often standard. But this doesn’t mean you cannot have exactly what you want.

 

How an enterprise-class service management software vendor embraces the new world of cloud and devices whilst keeping existing customers happy.

It’s fair to say that we are living in times where the rate of change in information technology is faster than at any time in the past. Internet connectivity is becoming ubiquitous. People own multiple devices… phone, tablet, laptop, PC etc. They expect ‘apps’ now, not just applications (apps being instantly available software the installs in a click). And cloud computing promises to drive costs down and availability up.

Great. But… what about the investment made already in the existing systems? What about keeping data secure? What about all those customisations that we spent a lot of time perfecting?

The future is indeed exciting but how on earth do we get there without significant disruption (not least the costs)?

At Solarvista, we have been developing our software application suite for 25 years and through that time, it’s been through several sea-changes (DOS, Windows, mobile etc.). As a software developer, we knew that we were facing another sea-change and that this one could be bigger than all the previous ones. We also knew that the last sea-changes were not always easy for our customers.

So, the question was, how do we develop our products to embrace new technology without forcing our customers through ‘hoops and hurdles’ to get there?

We established a dedicated team to research the options. After nine months hard work, we had a design solution that would enable our customers to keep their existing investment in Solarvista intact, yet allow them to move forward progressively. In fact, our solution also had a great side effect… system integration to third party systems. This side effect is actually something that we have really embraced at Solarvista now and intend this to be one of our key unique selling points (USPs).

With all this change ahead, we also decided that we needed a new fresh brand identity. Our ‘old’ identity had been in place since 2000, so was 14 years old. And it was looking tired. It was, too multi-coloured. It didn’t suit the digital age. We couldn’t fit into a Twitter icon for example. We needed a new brand that was fresh, digital ready and an image that we could design into our applications so users knew instantly they were “in Solarvista”.

The resulting journey has been a big one.

Product-wise, we now have two new whole product categories, having spent the last 20 years with just one! That’s a 200% increase in product base in less than three years! A modern airliner has approximately 750K lines of code. We’ve added 1.5 million in one product category alone!

Brand-wise, we have a fresh, new identity that’s ready for the new age and capable of reflecting our technologies. An ‘S’ made up of dots reflects the move upwards into the sky. And always purple and orange. It’s applied throughout our products and in all our communications of course. This has been no small feat… its involved updating thousands of pages of information and hundreds of web pages.

The first of our new product categories is Solarvista NET. This technology solves the problem of connecting existing systems together without the need for coding and development. In particular, it’s based around Service Oriented Architecture (“SOA”), a proven design used by the very largest systems in the world, including famous social media sites. This significantly reduces cost, time and risk (something that’s always high in system integration).

The second of our new product categories is Solarvista LIVE. To deliver new applications that can operate securely out there in the cloud requires a security model that’s rock solid and proven. That security model is claims-based federated security. You can’t build secure apps without building this in from the start and it being there in every piece of code at the base level. Adding it in afterwards doesn’t cut it.

Solarvista LIVE will initially surface as a new style of mobile app that connects via Solarvista NET and enables full use of Solarvista 8. It also allows Solarvista LIVE apps to be used on other systems, even in scenarios where our flagship solution isn’t even in place. All of this delivered via a cloud-based account that managed for you by us, thus removing the overhead of managing remote servers.

Many systems out there are not true SaaS. They are often web servers hosted in a data centre. Whist this “appears” the same; it isn’t. It’s not scalable; can be vulnerable to attack, and not the most cost effective. Solarvista LIVE is true SaaS. It is delivered in small pieces. So much so that you can just buy what you need and no more/no less. A good example is our non-SaaS product for mobile, Mobile Worker. In the Solarvista LIVE, this one product is broken down into 20 smaller pieces, meaning you can just buy say, 2 or 3 pieces of it to start with. Then 2 or 3 more at a later date. You don’t need to buy the whole application.

We’re excited about the future and look forward to taking all our customers forward as well as attracting new customers in new markets.

Solarvista will be demonstrating their new software at this years Service Management Expo, where you will also find Paul Adams giving a presentation in the Field Service Solutions Theatre hosted by Field Service News. 

To get a free exhibition pass for all three days simply click this link and enter Field Service News in the promotional code box