Oneserve, field service management software specialist based in Exeter, UK has announced a key strategic partnership with machine learning and predictive analytics specialist BiG Consultancy. The partnership will see the companies enhance and accelerate Oneserve Infinite, Oneserve’s Predictive Service Management offering.

Whilst many continue to talk around the prospects and future potential of machine learning and predictive analytics, this partnership make it a reality.

Chris Proctor, CEO at Oneserve,  who was listed in the Field Service News #FSN20 list of key influencers this year, explains more: “Today we live in a world where our cost palatability is decreasingly rapidly, whilst customer expectations of service delivery are increasing at a seismic pace, driven largely by technology and innovations in our ‘consumer’ lives.

Initially the Oneserve team looked into the potential of IoT, but found that whilst it provided a decent tool as an edge based trigger, essentially customers could be told that there was a problem without being able to do much about it; there was still going to be a significant downtime, but with perhaps just more time to try and work out how to manage it.

It was when in 2016 that Oneserve began to see what the alignment of a holy trinity of technologies, Big Data, IoT and Artificial Intelligence, could mean to customers that the true potential of a solution began to become clear.

“We’ve used Artificial Intelligence within our current scheduling engine for some time,” explained Proctor.

“However, combining the three provided the ability to look much wider and understand the relationships between failures and the contributing factor. This in turn, provided capabilities that could predict failure months in advance, a hugely significant step for us. In some industries, the costs associated with a responsive breakdown repair job can be as much as 20 times higher than the planned job.”

Partnering with BiG was a key part in Oneserve’s strategy to accelerate developments in this area and develop meaningful, real-world use cases where it could deliver significant advantages to customers. BiG has worked successfully with high profile customers in the past in this type of area including the likes of CrowdCube, The MoD, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programme and Microsoft.

“It’s a superb use case for IoT and Machine Learning technology showing tangible and measureable benefits. Once you’ve seen it in action you wish you’d done this sooner,” McNicol concluded.

“So far we’ve been working to predict failures using our system to prevent them and to use deep learning within our existing product to optimise ‘job’ success,” commented Proctor. “Providing users with the ability to know when a given task is going to fail and why, allows for changes to be made pre-emptively. However, we have huge plans at harnessing the power of Oneserve Infinite and Deep Learning in an increasing number of ways and BiG will be critical part of that.”

Oneserve Infinite is able to provide customers with:

• A system that can autonomously recognise a ‘failure event’ with significantly more warning, ensuring that the relevant teams are notified and operatives are scheduled efficiently to undertake planned maintenance to prevent downtime.
• Detailed maintenance schedules of work that will be required over a given time
• ‘Asset Commercial Viability’ projections to help companies understand the remaining useful lifespan on their assets
• On a Service Management platform this technology transforms ‘Responsive Breakdown Repairs’ into ‘Planned Maintenance Events, offering customers, and indeed, theirs, with vast cost efficiencies and a level of service excellence that will set the benchmark for the future

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