AUTHOR ARCHIVES: Sharon Clancy

IFS, the global enterprise applications company, has announced a number of updates to its ERP enterprise software suite IFS Applications 9. New features include  in-memory capabilities,  enhanced visualisation of manufacturing processes, extended support for rental management and improved group consolidation functionality.

Part of the in-memory solution is IFS In-Memory Advisor, which helps customers apply in-memory technology to the areas of IFS Applications where it will yield maximum effect, or if so desired, run the entire application in-memory. By using in-memory, users can run analytical queries hundreds or even thousands of times faster than before. With compression ratios of three to ten times, even terabyte-sized databases are possible to run in-memory.

The release also includes significant updates to the manufacturing component, such as enhancements that let users action production issues directly from the IFS Manufacturing Visualizer. In addition, the visualiser has been equipped with new charts to optimise production planning. The IFS Quality Management module also includes several improvements such as acceptance sampling.

IFS’s rental management capability contains numerous new and improved features as well as major usability enhancements. The solution now allows users to associate specific work orders with external or internal equipment rentals.

The IFS Financials component has been updated with extended support for group consolidation, including advanced analysis of consolidated balances using IFS Business Analytics.

IFS is also launching a new support model based on quarterly updates of IFS Applications. Thanks to the new layered application architecture of IFS Applications 9, updates can be implemented quicker and easier than in previous versions. The result is that customers can benefit from the very latest product enhancements faster and at a lower cost.

“Following the successful launch of IFS Applications 9 earlier this year, we are very excited to release this first update, which includes both new and enhanced features,” IFS CTO Dan Matthews said. “Along with the feature updates, we are also happy to reveal a new update delivery system. This takes us a major step closer to our vision of providing our customers with ‘evergreen’ business applications, allowing them to enjoy the benefits of our latest and greatest software at a significantly lower cost.”

 

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Fashion, smart clothes & the future of wearables:  Uri Pintov, Product Line Director, ClickSoftware takes a look at the role Wearable Technology could play in field service.

Picture this: A customer service representative is helping an irate customer on the phone and becoming flustered and frustrated. Rather than hearing about the incident after the interaction has escalated, customer service managers are able to step in and offer assistance because they have access to the rep’s vital signs and health signals.

Or, imagine one of your fleet drivers becoming tired and falling asleep at the wheel and a fleet manager having the ability to talk him through getting to a rest area safely, thanks to having access to his health signals. All of this, and more, is possible, thanks to wearable technology.

The Rise of Wearable Technology
Wearable technology is nothing new, but its applications to the enterprise and customer service are just now being realised in a major way. A 2013 study on wearable tech from the Centre for Creative and Social Technology at Goldsmiths, University of London, showed that about 33% of U.S. and U.K. adults found that wearable tech had helped their career development. Other research from Human Cloud at Work showed that wearable tech increases job satisfaction by 3.5% and boosts employee productivity by 8.5%.

As reported for RealBusiness by Shane Schutte,  lead researcher Dr. Chris Bauer sees the results of the study showing “the potential power and application of wearable devices in the workplace from employee biometric CVs to organisational real-time executive dashboards for resource allocation…. Using data generated from the devices, organisations can learn how human behaviours impact productivity, performance, wellbeing, and job satisfaction.”

 

Wearable technology adoption will increase as people and companies see the benefits of it, including how it improves an individual’s life or a company’s performance. Nigel Beighton,  UK CTO of Rackspace, sees the need for individuals and businesses to analyse the data from wearable technology “and understand the wider context surrounding the data, such as the weather location, posture, even temperature and mood of the individual. By focusing on the data as well as the devices, wearable technologies can provide meaningful insights that can be used to improve performance and satisfaction. Essentially wearable tech and big data go hand-in-hand.”

Smart Clothes as a Tool for Business
Using smart clothing to track employees’ vital signs and health signals is a reality now. According to Wearable Technologies, 2015 is a “banner year” for the emerging smartwatch and smart clothes market. One of the most important features of smart clothes and smartwatches is their health related sensors and monitors that rack vital signs. Smart clothes provide real-time feedback of the wearers’ vitals and health and connect to apps to deliver the information to smartphones and computers. Most smart clothes can monitor heart rate, breathing rate, sleeping patterns, calories burned, intensity of activity, temperature, and heart beat.

While most of the smart clothes are in the health and fitness market today, they are starting to be available for the healthcare industry for hospitals and personal care facilities and for businesses that want to monitor their employees.

Smart Clothes and the Mobile Workforce
More companies and organisations are going mobile, and there are more field workers and independent contractors than ever before relying on mobile devices and mobile apps. According to a CIO article, a recent Apperian survey of organisations found that more than 70% of respondents plan to equip more than 1,000 users with mobile apps and 1/3 are deploying mobile apps to more than 5,000 users in the next two years.

Additionally, Gartner predicts that 50% of employers will require employees to supply their own device for work and reports that 38% of companies will stop providing devices to workers by 2016. As more companies adopt bring your
own device (BYOD) policies, it becomes crucial for the mobile workforce to be able to charge their devices quickly and easily while on the go.

 

Wearable technology and smart clothes are solving this problem, as designers are becoming inspired by flexible solar panels and are creating clothing and accessories that power and accommodate handheld devices. We have found a few designers who are creating everything from shirts, to jeans, to ski jackets, to winter gloves that could make being part of a mobile workforce easier than ever before.

Wearable Solar – Dutch fashion designer Pauline van Dongen is designing lightweight wired garments that include solar panels so the wearer can charge a smartphone. Her designs charge smartphones up to 50% when worn in the sun for an hour. She collaborated with Christiaan Holland from the HAN University of Applied Sciences and
solar energy expert Gert Jan Jongerden on the Wearable Solar project, to integrate photovoltaic technology into the clothing.

WTFJeans – One company that accommodates smartphone users is WTFJeans. With smartpockets that give wearers easy access to their smartphones and clean the phone screens, WTFJeans also include EMF shields to reflect cell phone radiation.

Zegna Solar Ski Jacket  - Clothier Ermenegildo Zegna teamed with Interactive Wear to create “the world’s first ski jacket powered by solar energy.” The jacket has solar cells embedded in its collar to convert sunlight into renewable power that wearers can use to fully charge their smart phone, iPod, or other mobile device. The collar is
removable so that it can be used as a power source even when you’re not out in the elements.

Agloves – It is nearly impossible to use smartphones and tablets when wearing gloves, since typical gloves are not compatible with the touch screens on mobile devices. Agloves offer a variety of gloves, including the Grip Touch,
Sport, and Natural, that are constructed with real silver for warmth and high conductivity, so that all ten fingers are conductive for use with any touchscreen device.

 

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The very nature of their jobs means that field service employees are lone workers and safety risks are not confined to hazardous workplaces. FSN Editor Sharon Clancy looks at some of the strategies for making ensuring your employees stay safe.

Many service employees are working alone or in environments that make them vulnerable. The potential safety risks are present not just in hazardous workplaces such as oil installations or construction sites; workers can be at risk working unsocial hours in office building or on emergency call outs to domestic properties, too, for example.

Safety policies and guidelines should reflect the specific risks of mobile workers, demonstrate that steps have been taken to minimise those risks and that management systems are in place to monitor compliance with safety rules.

For mobile service technicians, those risks include driving their vehicles between jobs. “If people in your company use vehicles for work, then you have a legal responsibility to ensure their safety, points out Giles Margerison, UK sales director, TomTom Telematics. “The law is really clear if someone is driving for business purposes, regardless of who provides the vehicle – whether it’s their own vehicle, hire, rented, leased, bought, or bought by the company. Once you have given someone an instruction for work, whether it’s just popping down the shops for a pint of milk or to an appointment or a job or a site, you are responsible for their safety and their behaviour.”

Duty of Care: legal obligations
Employer's  legal obligation on Duty-of-Care and Health and Safety will vary from country-to-country. In the UK, for example, the 2007 Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act introduced in addition to corporate liability the concept of personal liability of directors and board members for any proven negligence, part of an EU-wide initiative to improve worker safety.

Other legislation such as the EU Working Time Directive also impacts on duty-of-care obligations.

 

For service organisations there are two key areas of duty of care: one is lone worker protection; the other is risk management of inappropriate of employee behaviour.

Lone worker monitoring
Any mobile application or device by default offers more protection to the mobile worker than a paper system where there is no contact with the office between jobs or even all day. Mobile workers equipped with telephones can also be tracked using cell ID.

In difficult or hostile environments managers need confirmation at regular intervals that the employee is safe and well. Some lone-worker systems are linked to 24-hour monitoring centres - individuals who find themselves in a dangerous situation simply press a red alert button on their device. This additional protection for lone workers can be a user buy-in when selling a technology switch to mobile workers, especially in heavily-unionised sectors.

In less dangerous situations, the risk assessment may be that compliance can be demonstrated by tracking personnel around a site, setting up pre-set intervals when a response is required. The interval can be set automatically and varied between locations and tasks.

In some systems the worker is sent an SMS message requiring a response confirming everything is OK or arrival. The latest technology even removes the onus on the employee to confirm they are safe. Instead, RFID and NFC technology utilised for proof-of-attendance and compliance with service-level agreements can also be used for duty-of-care monitoring.

 

"It's considered more reliable because the monitoring process starts automatically when the worker arrives on site or at a particular area of the site or building - there's no need for them to send a message to confirm this ," comments Paul Ridden, managing director for Skillweb. "Alarms can be raised if a worker fails to arrive at or leave a customer site or complete a task. Specific safety compliance information for that task or site can be incorporated in the RFID tags. "

Risk management
Service organisations employ engineers and technicians, not drivers. However, that does not mean that you can ignore their behaviour at the wheel when driving between jobs. Potentially unsafe driving behaviour should be part of a risk assessment strategy.

Meeting your Duty of Care does not need to be a burden, points out, Margerison. . “It just requires processes to be in place that monitors aspects of your mobile workforce, giving you the data you need so you can foresee any issues."This is not as hard as it sounds with modern fleet management and telematics systems, and you might also be surprised by the bottom line benefits it could bring to your business, he goes on. “The use of technology really helps because we can manage driver behaviour. Other methods can be used, of course, but technology makes that really very simple, and gives you the right data when you need it.

Telematics captures data on vehicle speeds, distances and driving time, as well as hazardous behaviour such as harsh braking and acceleration. Fed back into the service management software, team leaders can build a picture of each driver's behaviour, trends within a group of workers and persistence offenders, all without increasing administration costs.

 

Basic driver behaviour telematics data such as speed and harsh deceleration can even be captured from a mobile device with a GPS and an accelerometer or with a plug-in device - there's no need for a vehicle installation.
The result is a safer, more efficient workforce and a significantly reduced risk profile. Margerison points out that the ability to demonstrate driver improvements to an insurer could also mean a reversal of the current trend of higher  premium costs.

Keep it simple
Skillweb’s Paul Ridden thinks awareness of risks to mobile workers still has some way to go to penetrate those lower-skilled service jobs typically found in facilities management companies. “With the introduction of the Living Wage, those workers are going to cost more, so ensuring, they are as productive as possible, will be key to maintaining profit levels.”

Technology costs have also been a barrier, but smartphones make deploying mobile apps to these workers affordable. Simple apps can help them complete the tasks in the right order and safely. You can prove where they are but you can also use it to monitor their safety. Are cleaners using hazardous chemicals in a safe manner. Using appropriate safety equipment can mean something as simple as using rubber gloves when using cleaning chemicals.”
Monitoring the safety of these employees can have other benefits, he points out Monitoring that only trained employees are allowed to use equipment such as motorised floor polishers correctly, also helps you keep tabs on asset utilisation, he points point.

Geoff Ball, MD of Matrix Telematics said: “The definition of a lone worker has changed dramatically. From social workers to delivery drivers, postmen to pest control; lone workers make up almost a quarter of the UK’s working population, but the nature of their job leaves them open to a unique set of risks that employers need to be aware of.

“While most lone workers will hopefully never experience any problems, to have the peace of mind that there’s someone just at the other end of the line should they need it is a big reassurance for employees and a sensible precaution for employers to take.”

Lone worker monitoring doesn’t have to be complicated, says Ridden.“Even proactively status checks can be done without it seeming intrusive or Big Brother. You can send a message, and all the worker does is to tap in a pin number to confirm they are OK. Workers do appreciate that it is for their safety. From the manager’s viewpoint, its more reliable than waiting for a remote worker to call in at hourly intervals to confirm they are OK and its documented evidence that health and safety policies have been adhered to.

 

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ServicePower Technologies Plc has joined the ThingWorx partner program as a certified partner. ThingWorx is a leading rapid application development platform for the Internet of Things.  ServicePower will use the platform to build applications that help its customers reduce costs, improve services and ultimately achieve competitive advantage.

By developing new applications that connect machines using IoT and integrating them into its workforce management, enterprise mobility, and analytics technology, ServicePower will enable its clients to optimise performance by uniting their workforces with assets in the field.

Using sensors in assets in the field coupled with new applications developed on ThingWorx, clients will be able to detect problems as they occur and, using ServicePower’s workforce optimisation solutions, mobilise their repair crews before there is a disruption to services.

ServicePower will offer the new IoT applications through the ThingWorx Marketplace, as well as directly through its global sales channels. Joining the ThingWorx ecosystem underlines the growing momentum of ServicePower’s partner strategy and its aim to use scalable and innovative technology. Specifically it builds upon other recent IoT partnerships with Bosch Software Innovations and Concirrus.

Marne Martin, CEO of ServicePower commented. “ServicePower already supplies the most innovative and complete service management platform on the market. We work with companies that operate assets in the field such as utility and cable providers, facilities managers and contractors; they can all now benefit from a step-change in technology that will deliver unprecedented levels of asset visibility. Valuable asset information extracted using ThingWorx can be fed into ServicePower’s existing service management platform so that our clients can deploy resources faster and where they are most needed. This technology will enable them to transform their operations and maybe even entire sectors.”

 

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Best practices for knowledge sharing in field service are understood but too few companies are allocating the necessary resources, warns John Ragsdale, vice president of technology and social research at the US's Technical Services Industry Association

Ragsdale was revealing the findings in the  TSIA's  annual research: The State of Knowledge Management: 2015.  “It is frustrating when  best practices for knowledge management, such as knowledge-centred support are understood, but companies refuse to allocate the necessary resources. I continue to hear companies struggling with problems we know how to solve, but there isn’t support from executives to provide the funding, staffing and cultural support required to be successful."

But there’s hope as some companies are building modern knowledge-sharing platforms to help techs access the best information available, from any device. Here, Ragsdale explains to Derek Korte, editor of Field Service Digital, how to build a next-gen knowledge base that techs will actually use.

Whose job is it to build a digital, “virtual” knowledge base?
Ragsdale: That may depend on who has the “intelligent search religion” in your company. Some very large companies are hiring a new position —knowledge czar — who reports to the CIO and ensures each department captures and shares knowledge amount peers.

But full-time resources are rare within support and field service companies, so multiple employees dedicate time to nurture the knowledge program. The starting point is to identify all of the content sources across your enterprise — and across the Web — with valuable content to include in the search indexing, then prioritise each source for inclusion.[quote float="left"]The starting point is to identify all of the content sources across your enterprise — and across the Web.

 

Isn’t that complex?
Ragsdale: A simple way to do this is to ask service techs which content sources they find valuable. Field service leaders will likely be surprised at the variety of sources employees use. Look at the search platform analytics to identify content and to find articles that need to be updated or removed. Then, use relevancy analysis to understand the most-used content. Some search products may be able to index everything at once, while others may require some custom filters or integrations to access every repository.

What companies have successfully put this plan into action?
Ragsdale: During my recent Technology Services World presentation, I highlighted three TSIA member companies that have embraced this concept with great results: Tricentis,which sells software testing tools; Broadsoft, a provider of unified communications and collaboration software and services; and Informatica, which delivers enterprise data integration and management software powering analytics for big data and cloud services.

Each company offers an elegant user interface with a single search field that retrieves content from multiple sources. They also offer filtering options to help employees find exactly what they need. It’s a much better option that scrolling through pages of results. In general, once the virtual knowledge base approach is implemented, users will respond. Employees will conduct more searches, access and download more documents, and spend more time overall on the site. That not only helps employees become more productive, but it also streamlines customer self-service, which has huge cost savings implications.

Is a smart knowledge management strategy the best lever at a manager’s disposal to fight against the looming talent gap?
Ragsdale: I think service managers have a few levers to pull (scheduling automation, mobile devices, remote access, among others), but knowledge is definitely a critical element. We continue to hear that large numbers of senior techs are retiring in the next two to three years, so now is the time to proactively begin capturing their hard-earned knowledge any way possible.

Nearly half of field service respondents said a 20-30 percent improvement would be possible, while more than a quarter pegged improvement at 30 percent or more. The results from our latest research, The State of Knowledge Management: 2015, make clear that employees and managers understand the potential value of knowledge.

Why isn’t that potential realised?
Ragsdale: In my report, I talk about the key obstacles to realising this potential, including insufficient resources, broken or outdated processes, and the lack of a sharing culture. I also talk about how to incorporate some key knowledge metrics into executive operational reviews, to at least introduce the subject and hopefully place it on the exec’s radar.

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This feature first appeared on the US Field Service Digital  website and is republished here with kind permission

It’s time the importance of vans to the UK economy was more widely recognised and that all companies, including service organisations, paid more attention to safety, quality and compliance, says Mark Cartwright, head of the Van Excellence programme at the UK’s Freight Transport Association.

The economic and social value of van LCVs, or van fleets, in delivering both GDP and essential services, and the way in which LCV users shape and enhance modern life in the UK is undervalued, says Cartwright. The Freight Transport Association has been campaigning to raise awareness of these vital tools in the UK economy since 2010, with its Van Excellence scheme.

Some interesting statistics emerged in the FTA’s 2015 Van Excellence Report. There are 3.6 million vans in the UK in 2015: 1.63 million are registered to companies, and 1.8 million to individuals. Van use in the UK is expected to almost double by 2040 compared to 2010.

Van ownership is diffuse, with only 9% of vehicles in the hands of the biggest operators. Hence, while the largest fleets in the market belong to those companies at the pinnacle of each sector, much of each sector’s work is done by progressively smaller sub-contractor fleets.

Many sectors in the UK economy, incuding field service are van-dependent - their principal economic activities could not be conducted without the use of vans. While LCVs are not therefore a direct source of wealth generation, they are a key facilitator of wealth generation.

 

The largest van-dependent sectors in the UK economy are construction, engineering and utilities, whose activities very often overlap in the development and maintenance of the national infrastructure; and the postal and parcels sector.

Only 205,000 people identify as ‘van driver’ in the UK’s Office of National Statistics on employment figures. Most van drivers identify with their core trade or activity and not as professional drivers. Nonetheless, driving is an essential part of their job and their skill set.

Regulation is not lacking in this area, but understanding and professionalism is. More regulation would be ill-suited to the extremely diverse range of operations in this market and the agility and versatility they require.

Operational challenges

All fleets suffer to some extent from the public perception of ‘white van man’. Few fleet managers feel there is any national or public recognition of the vital services carried out by their drivers, nor the economic and social value
underpinned by the vehicles they operate

LCVs are primarily used in non-transport businesses. This gives rise to many challenges for the business, the fleet departments involved, and the general public.

It is incumbent upon those running van fleets to protect the public safety and to fulfil their duty-of-care obligations to their employees. Driving is often the biggest work-related risk that their employees face.

To put this in context, police officers and fire fighters in the UK are less likely to die in the line of duty than they are on their journey into work each morning. This road risk extends, of course, to all road users, whether professional drivers or not. By training those who drive for work in roadworthiness and safe-driving practice, employers extend that greater safety into the wider community.

 

Major compliance challenges include:

• a lack of transport understanding among staff
• a lack of transport awareness among decision-makers
•   the failure of those highly aware of risk in another field to recognise
  driving as a work-related risk;
• the difficulties of managing a geographically dispersed fleet;
• a lack of recognition that driving is a professional activity.

Commercial challenges include:

• an intense focus on cost, exacerbated by the fact that the fleet is usually a cost centre and not a profit centre;
• the risk to their vehicles from fraudulent insurance claims;
• the difficulty in maintaining training benefits in sectors with a high turnover of drivers.[/unordered_list]

Despite the high standards of many van fleets, the UK van parc overall suffers from a lack of legal compliance, and from owners, managers and drivers who show a poor understanding of their responsibilities. Vans stopped by the Government’s DVSA enforcement agency show an 89% overloading rate, and a 50% first-time failure rate in the annual vehicle safety test.

Unlike the heavily regulated HGV sector, professional fleet-management is generally only found in the largest of van fleets. Without a statutory framework for management and without transport backgrounds or relationships, many
businesses are not aware of their compliance responsibilities.

FTA believes the sheer diversity of the business and operational models that vans support makes regulation an unwieldy tool for furthering safety. There is already comprehensive regulation which outlines the standards of roadworthiness, driver capability and driving practice in the UK, including statutory instruments such as the domestic drivers’ hours regulations, or the guidelines and mandatory rules of the Highway Code.

Corporate responsibility

The issue is not a lack of regulation but rather a frequent lack of operator awareness and understanding. Corporate fleet departments can also be isolated and misunderstood by the core businesses they serve. Professional fleet managers within non-transport environments make the following observations:

• The business, often from board level to drivers, lacks an understanding of legal compliance regarding vehicles.
• Many drivers have been trained in risk assessment for their core craft but do not recognise driving as a work-related risk.
• Drivers do not see driving as an important or skilled part of their job.
• Fleets are under extreme cost scrutiny, but often cannot convey to financial controllers the necessity of examining whole-life costs, efficiency or safety implications.
• LCV operations, however professional, also suffer the stigma of ‘white van man’ and a lack of public appreciation of their critical role in the UK economy and UK communities.

Modern life is brought to you by vans; safety, quality and compliance is delivered by Van Excellence.
Van Excellence is an industry-led audit scheme run by FTA on behalf of all LCV operators. The audit includes standards and methods of fleet management which its major members consider best practice. Van Excellence now has 103 accredited companies, covering 125,000 vehicles.

 

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Seamless integration between sales and service together with productivity improvement tools are two of the key enhancements in Microsoft's new cloud-based Dynamics CRM 2016, which the company calls “game-changing”

Microsoft's Dynamics CRM 2016 includes advancements in intelligence, mobility and service and is said to be the most comprehensive ever upgrade of the company's CRM  solution. The new enhancements are designed to increase productivity in three key ways: by providing a simple and seamless experience across Dynamics CRM and other applications; delivering an enhanced mobile experience for the worker on the go, and providing enriched data and analytics.

“Microsoft’s obsession with customer success is rooted in our ambition to reinvent productivity and business processes,” said Bob Stutz, corporate vice president, Microsoft Dynamics CRM. “Dynamics CRM 2016 is designed from the ground up to deliver core capabilities all in a single system to eliminate distractions, to make it easier to get things done, and to dramatically increase productivity so our customers can spend more time serving their customers.”

The new interactive service hub incorporates real-time dashboards that provide a single view of the workload, giving organisations and agents the flexibility to choose the order of case resolution. Interactive charts provide a visual representation of the work items and can be used as visual filters that allow agents to slice and dice the data, view what is most important, see the next action and focus on faster resolutions.  The Unified Service Desk gives agents access to Skype and Yammer so they can engage customers and peers via chat for service resolution and collaboration.

Turning data into intelligent action is a cornerstone of business transformation and productivity, and the new Dynamics CRM release includes data management and advanced analytics capabilities powered by the Cortana Analytics Suite. Azure Machine Learning capabilities are incorporated, enabling organisations to continually learn from the problems and solutions that they are encountering so that patterns can be identified, speeding time to resolution and continuously improving performance over time.

The new version of Dynamics CRM provides full offline capabilities for service professionals on phones and tablets and across all major mobile platforms (Android, iOS and Windows). The release also introduces the ability to create task-centered mobile apps to streamline the completion of activities on the go.

The new version of Dynamics CRM closes the customer relationship loop by providing an end-to-end solution for customer service across self-service, assisted service and field service. It captures the signals communicated in various channels in the market, and empowering the agent to provide meaningful feedback and leverages social channels to instantly track and analyse relevant sentiment and engage directly with customers on social channels such as Twitter and Facebook.

 

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Rugged technology designer and manufacturer Getac has launched a rugged tablet targeted at the field service sector and developed using the principle of "marginal gains" - an approach adopted by Britain's all-conquering Olympic cycling team, explains UK President Peter Molyenux.

The Getac RX10 is a lightweight tablet with  features aimed at shaving minutes off field service worker tasks, meaning more work can be done, more reliably, resulting in increased time efficiency in a number of challenging working environments.

The RX10 specifications include an integral "grab-and-go" carry-handle, a 10.1in 800 nits  Lumibond HD screen incorporating sunlight readable technology, HD webcam, 8M pixel rear facing auto focus camera, smartcard reader , 3D antenna and integral GPS.  Computing power is provided by an Intel M vPro processor with up to 1.2Ghz, or 2.9Ghx with Intel Turbo Boos with 4MB Intel Smart Cache and up to 256MB SSD.  Windows 10 is pre-installed.

The 2D barcode scanner is located for ease of us while the clearer screen,  slightly better camera resolution, higher rugged rating, better ease of cleaning and  hot-swappable battery all add up to improve productivity, says Molyneux.

"On the face of it, RX10 is marginally better an offering than current-market specialist tablet products. But that's the key, it doesn't need to be that much different. It is the slight changes and enhancements in each feature over and above the current benchmark that make the difference, and means that workers dependent upon such technology can accrue a series of 'marginal gains' in time as their day goes on - ultimately adding up to completing more work in a typical shift, thereby saving money.

 

"If every feature contributes to an accrued tiny percentage improvement or gain in performance of a worker from a time-efficiency perspective, then it means, for instance, a single engineer or technician or using a tablet on a typical - but probably unscheduled - ten-hour shift will gain five or six minutes.  A great deal can be accomplished by somebody in the field in six minutes: an equipment check, surveying a snag, uploading a report, a key component change.

"For instance, the 3D antenna means communication and data downloading is slightly faster; it also means that communication can be sustained in areas where coverage is patchy. The processor does not need a cooling fan., meaning less draw on power, but, importantly, avoiding the consequences of the tablet overheating and shutting down for ten minutes. The grab-and-go handle means potentially fewer drops.

Rugged  credentials include certification to MIL-STD-810G and IP65  and the RX10 comes with a three-year warranty. "While rugged tech is often labelled expensive, in reality the gap is closing between something like RX10 and a consumer-market adapted tablet with rugged case."

"The extra few metres of communications provided by the 3D aerial can mean better coverage or faster data flow. Aligned with discrete built-in GPS that can mean a field-service operative is better able to locate equipment or infrastructure on a site visit. If it is an emergency repair, then that could impact, for instance, how quickly a building, industrial plant or even a town is reconnected to essential services.

 

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The UK not-for-profit group The Service Community, run by service professionals with the simple aim of sharing knowledge within the community,  continues to go from strength to strength. Their latest conference held at Aston Business School, discussed Big Data.  Community member Chris Farnarth of Allocate Software reports on the day's presentations.

The Service Community’s Aston University Special Event focused on “Big Data” attracted over thirty guests to participate in a lively forum of discussion with a range of academic and practitioner based perspectives. The host for this Big Data themed event was Aston University, enerously made available to us by Community favourite Professor Tim Baines and Jill Forrest.

The Community continues to thrive with over 140 registered members and each event drives more involvement and new participation. Four key note presentations were delivered offering insight into the ubiquitous subject matter of Big Data.

Aston Business School’s Dr Andreas Schroeder opened with a truly engaging and interactive keynote presentation that reviewed the role that data plays in developing basic, intermediate and advanced services, in particular the technical, organisational and strategic considerations a company should consider.

In the second keynote presentation, Andrew Harrison explained that big data is a cost to Rolls Royce and is only turned to value through knowledge by contributing to three areas of their business:[ordered_list style="decimal"]

1. Creating value potential in the design of a product
2. Maximising value in the use of product
3. Refreshing value a product’s life and recovering value its end of life

The audience by this stage were truly engaged, challenging perspectives and generating a liely interaction.

 

Andy Reid energised us further with another perspective of Big Data and how Pitney Bowes has used it with great effect.

Andy set the scene explaining the “4 V’s” of Big Data; Volume, Velocity, Variety and Veracity and went on to demonstrate how Pitney Bowes is developing infrastructure to make its own operations more efficient through its use of data, as well as offering location services that can help the company monetize their big data.

Our final key note was presented by Mark Noble of Inca Digital who told his story of how using the data already generated by their high tech digital printers, they were able to dramatically improve the productivity of their Service organisation.

The key lesson being it’s not the quantity of data that is important, but knowing what to do with it!

For example he showed how by combining 3 key indicators of machine performance, his team were able to prioritise service actions on the worst performing machines.

Thus saving money and improving customer satisfaction.

Once again, The Service Community delivered on its objectives. The content of the meetings is the life-blood of The Community, followed closely by the generosity of participants to offer facilities and key skills such as PR, marketing promotion or other services that will keep The Service Community alive.

To this point, the next event is proposed for March 2016 – date and location to be confirmed.

 

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