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Bill Pollock, President and Principal Consulting Analyst with Strategies for GrowthSM explains why Big Data isn’t the holy grail, instead focus on the quality, accuracy, accessibility and application of the data you routinely collect...

While much of the ongoing discourse in the global Information Technology (IT) community nowadays seems to center around hot topics, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) or “Big Data”, research has shown that it is not necessarily the size of the database that matters; but, rather, the quality, accuracy, accessibility and application of the relevant data that is being routinely collected, analysed and shared throughout the organisation.

In other words, data does not necessarily need to be “big”; it simply needs to be relevant, accessible and actionable, in order to be useful.

However, this is an important distinction that is missed by many!

First, let’s talk about what the “big” in “big data” really is. According to IBM, every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data – in fact, so much that 90% of the data resident in the world today has been created in just the last two years alone.

As a result, field service organisations now have access to an unprecedented amount of data about the performance of their technicians, their vehicles, the equipment they service and their business performance in general.

However, what differentiates the best practices organisations from all others is best expressed in terms of not only “how accessible is all this data?”, but, rather, “how can it be transformed into valuable information that contributes to increased revenue, reduced costs and improved customer satisfaction?”

 

Other questions are also bandied about, such as “how big is too big data?”, and “what constitutes “big enough” data?”

It is, typically, in their responses to these types of questions, where many field service organisations initially go wrong – that is, they incorrectly believe that since they have already collected mountains of data from multiple sources (i.e., service call activity records, closed call reports, technician generated utilisation and/or productivity reports, machine-to-machine communications; etc.) that they must use all of these data in as many scenarios as possible.

But, the rule of thumb is more a matter of focusing primarily on the data that you “need-to-know”,rather than collecting data that is only “nice-to-know”.

The difference between these two types of data may appear to be subtle at first glance, but it is an important distinction since data collection, in and of itself, requires a massive expenditure of time, resources and investment, both human and pound-wise; it must be gathered, analysed and disseminated through a highly organised and controlled process, with direct senior management oversight and accountability; and it must bridge virtually all areas within the organisation – both from the top-down, bottom-up, and all throughout.

This is what we call “business analytics” – not “big data”; but, rather, just “enough data”.

 

In fact, it is those services organisations that are most successful in managing their business analytics that can easily tell the difference between “big data” and “enough data”.

They are also the ones that can most easily recognise when the bar for data collection, analysis and sharing needs to be raised in order to accommodate anything from the normal evolution of the organisation’s evolving database needs, to more event-driven needs, such as to account for a new product/service launch; increases in the numbers of customers, installed base and/or field technicians; business mergers, acquisitions or consolidation; new strategic alliance partnerships; etc.).

So … how big does your data really need to be?

The answer is simple: Big enough to support the organisation’s ongoing business analytics needs and requirements in terms of the ability to collect, analyse and share all of the data that is deemed important (e.g., business-critical, or mission-critical, etc.); required as input into the organisation’s ongoing metrics, or Key Performance Indicator (KPI), program; as input to annual or other periodic planning and forecasting activities; and the like.

Whether your organisation finds itself “swimming” in a data lake of epic proportions, or simply maintaining a modest database that fully supports its front and back offices; its field technicians, customers, and partners; its management decision makers; strategic partners; or any other stakeholders within the organisation, it will still require a sound “data analytics” program in order to make it all work.

Once again, it does not need to be “big” – just “big enough”, relevant and actionable.

 

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Marina Stedman, ClickSoftware brings us the concluding part of her feature looking at the multi-faceted challenges field service managers and supervisors face and a key philosophy in how to best serve customers...

In my last article for Field Service News, I outlined how our philosophy centres around helping service organisations answer five questions – the five Ws of field service, in order to best serve their customers and touched on the first of these Who does what.

Now let’s take a look at the remaining four Ws and why they are important for field service organisations.

W#2: With What?

Our second “W” is all about the tools. What tools are needed to complete the required actions?

Sending out field technicians qualified to fix a specific issue still can’t help if they don’t have the tools needed.

Not all mobile systems are created equal. A scheduling system that can send out an alert to a field supervisor that a field technician has been double-booked isn’t much help if it also doesn’t provide the tools to deal with that issue.

According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis on mobile deployments, implementing the right mobile tools and approach to field operations improves productivity 20 to 30 percent.

 

It also was found to decrease the time needed for field operations between 5 and 7 percent, which translated into saving millions of dollars each year.

We’ve already established that a mobile tool has to provide the functionality for a field supervisor to complete back-end and field tasks - all the “What”s of the field supervisor’s job. However, to achieve the kinds of operational improvements and cost savings possible, the right mobile tool has to meet two more criteria:

• Scope and speed to provide real time data. A field supervisor can only complete managerial and paperwork tasks remotely if they have reliable, up-to-the-minute data.The opposite is also true. They can only control field operations from the office if they can see what’s happening in the field.Accurate, real time information gives the field supervisor visibility into what’s happening on the ground. They can see that a field technician isn’t where the schedule says he should be and they can contact that field technician immediately. There are no more blind spots.
• Easy to learn; easy to use. One of the biggest reasons new software rollouts fail is lack of adoption by the end users. Much has been written about the consumerisation of B2B applications, and with good reason.Both field supervisors and technicians need their mobile apps to just work, or they won’t use them. Or at least, won’t use them well enough for the company to realise the expected benefits of having a mobile system.

W#3 and #4: When and Where?

These questions are the golden eggs of mobile because the right answers are “Whenever” and “Wherever.” Information or decisions needed in any given moment can be accessed or made in that moment. A speedy, full-function mobile app releases the field supervisor’s bottleneck in two ways:

1. The distinction between “field” and “office” tasks becomes obliterated. Location no longer restricts what the field supervisor can do
2. Because location no longer constricts the field supervisor, the field supervisor is no longer the bottleneck preventing other people from completing their tasks efficiently.

That holiday request? Once approved by the field supervisor on their mobile device, the system is updated in real time so the schedulers back at the office are aware of the change in capacity for that day.

An emergency service request comes into the office. The mobile field supervisor sees it, and can assign it to an available technician already nearby.

Now the customer gets same day service, and your company gets maximum utilisation out of a field technician who is kept fully scheduled during the day.

W#5: for Whom?

There are numerous stakeholders relying on field supervisors being able to stay on top of all their tasks and demands but for a service organisation, the most important “Who” is always the customer.

And who is the lynchpin between the field supervisor and the customer – the field technician.

By erasing the boundary between office and field tasks, the field supervisor gains time to spend on the most critical task: mentoring the field technicians. Whether it’s more time side by side with a field technician on a call, or being available to answer questions via text, chat or video camera, a field supervisor can better serve technicians once freed from the desk.

 

When the field supervisor has more time to train and mentor the field technicians, you get happier, more qualified people. As their skills grow, they can complete more complex tasks and finish simple tasks faster, so you’re increasing your field utilisation potential without major increases in labour costs or staffing. Best of all, your field supervisors can spend more time mentoring field technicians without falling behind on the operational and managerial tasks the back-end stakeholders rely on.

Fast pace and high pressure make mobile the release valve

Applying the Five Ws of customer service for field supervisors means using mobile to empower them to carry out all their responsibilities regardless of location.

They need the ability to monitor and act in real time. When field supervisors don’t have to choose between sitting at a desk or being in the field, they can more efficiently carry out their roles by allocating their time and energy where it provides the highest return: mentoring and assisting field technicians to deliver enterprise -quality customer service.

 

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In our latest research project we’ve teamed up with rugged tablet manufacturer Xplore Technologies to find out what are the tools field service companies are investing in to ensure that they are giving their field service engineers every chance to ensure they are delivering service excellence...

 

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There is also an exclusive research report available for download that contains even further insight and analysis of these research findings. Download your copy of the findings here

 

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As technologies such as the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality dominate the headlines in field service it is perhaps a bit too easy to forget just how recently field service operations were being revolutionised by the emergence of mobile computing.

The improvements that come with the digitization of a field engineer’s workflow are well documented from more efficient processes, greater customer service delivery to even simple straightforward cost savings via the sheer volume of paper forms no longer being used.

Yet whilst for some companies the move to a modern mobility solution happened over a decade ago and they are now exploring their third, fourth or even fifth iteration of mobile hardware, there also still some companies that have yet to move away from pen and paper.

At the same time, the options for field service companies looking to invest in a mobile computing solution for their service engineers, whether it be for the first time or an upgrade of their existing system, are ever more complex.

For a start, the lines between rugged and consumer devices are becoming more blurred with  companies such as Samsung making a play for what is seen to be a growing and lucrative market with semi-ruggedised versions of their consumer products such as the Galaxy Tab Active.

 

At the same time rugged manufacturers have become aware for the growing desire from their client base for more consumer looking designs in the rugged space and as such products like the Motion R12 have begun to emerge which combine the sleek, cleaner lines of a consumer tablet in a rugged device that can fully withstand the rigours of the field.

However, rugged versus consumer is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the many, many factors to be considered when selecting the right device for your field service engineers.

What about form factor? Has the rugged handheld that was all prevalent not so long ago been surpassed by the smart phone?

Are tablets, which can bring the mobility of a smart phone to the table, but with greater processing power (on a par with high end laptops in some aspects) becoming the go to tools?

And of course then there are the considerations around peripherals - is a keyboard required for large amounts of manual data entry perhaps? How about vehicle docking? Or even carry straps and cases?

To find out more about the latest trends within the industry we decided to return to this topic (having explored it some 12 months previously to see what trends were emerging or evolving when it comes to the devices being selected by field service organisations for their engineers and technicians.

With additional expert input into the survey design provided by rugged specialists and partners with us on this project Xplore Technologies, the survey took in the responses of around 150 field service professionals from a wide range of industry verticals including manufacturing, telcos, engineering, HVAC, and many more.

There was also a wide representation of companies of differing sizes with some respondents having as few as 10 or less engineers in their workforce whilst many had over 800 or more engineers in their teams.

Dual digitality

One of the key findings of the 2015 study was that many companies are now providing their field service engineers with more than one digital device for use in the field.

However, when reviewing the questions from the previous study we felt that perhaps the meaning of this question could have been slightly ambiguous, so in this year’s study we wanted to refine this notion further by including the response “Multiple digital devices – e.g. smart phone and laptop etc used equally for field work simultaneously” as an option to the question “Which devices are your field engineers currently using as their primary device for field work?”

And it seems that this digital duality that we uncovered last year remains very much a key trend for field service organisations with one in five companies now providing their field service engineer with at least two devices to undertake their work in the field.

However, one of the perhaps most interesting findings of this year’s survey was the amount of companies who are providing their engineers and technicians with laptops as a primary device for work in the field.

Whilst the response group across the two surveys  was different - meaning that direct year on year analysis is always at risk of being slightly skewed - both surveys had a sizeable enough response set to provide a fairly reliable snapshot of the industry sentiment to allow for some meaningful comparison.

With this in mind it was interesting to note that amongst this year’s respondents laptops were the most prevalent of devices being given to field service engineers with a third (33%) of companies seeing them as the best device for their field service engineers compared to a fifth (20%) of companies opting for smart phones whilst 15% opted for tablets.

In comparison to last year this would indicate that despite the claims in some analysts’ quarters of tablets emerging to eventually replace the laptop, the laptop remains a regular tool amongst field service engineers.

One reason for this could be simply a cost decision as when we look deeper into the research findings we see that of those companies that provided their field service engineers with laptops the majority (61%) had opted for consumer based devices. This is compared to just 11% who were providing their engineers with rugged laptops.

Further to this within, this group almost two thirds (64%) stated they opted for consumer devices because of a cheaper cost per unit.

 

However, when we look at those respondents who indicated that they are providing their field service engineers with tablets we saw a much greater parity between those who were providing their engineers with rugged devices versus those providing consumer grade products.

In fact the split between the two was exactly even with 40% of respondents opting for rugged and 40% opting for consumer whilst 20% provided as mix of both rugged and consumer.

Indeed, when we look at the data from only those respondents who provided their field service engineers with rugged devices a completely different picture emerges entirely.

Amongst this respondent group the most common device deployed amongst field engineers was the tablet by some margin with just under half of companies (44%) selecting them as the right tool for their field engineers.

In comparison rugged laptops and rugged PDAs/Handheld computers were the next commonly used devices with a just over a fifth (22%) of companies opting to implement these devices, whilst 11% of companies provided two or more rugged devices.

What is clear from this initial view of the data is that whilst the laptop and smart phone are regularly deployed as mobile computing tools for field service engineers, amongst those companies who see the need for and benefits of ruggedised tools for their engineers it is the tablet that has become the dominant form factor.

 

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Want to know more? Download the exclusive research report for further analysis and insight from these research findings

 

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Look out for the next part of this series where we look at the whether consumer or rugged devices are ruling the roost plus the importance of operating systems when it comes to device selection....

 

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By downloding the report you are consenting to the T&Cs listed here

 

 

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Resource Type: eBook
Published by:  Telogis
Title: Shorten Service Windows and Provide Better Customer Service
Download: Click here to Download the full ebook

By downloading you agree to the T&Cs listed available here

Synopsis

Almost all field service engineers have mobile phones, and 80 to 90 percent of them use smartphones. This puts convenient Internet access and a powerful computing device in the field. Smartphones equipped with advanced mobile/location intelligence apps help workers in the field be more efficient and shorten that window from event/customer request to resolution. This eBook covers some of the ways mobile technology is helping improve customer service satisfaction and  reduce costs.

Overview

All mobile service professionals work toward two main goals: making service more predictive and more proactive. The current business model relies heavily on break-fix occurrences, where a failure has occurred and the customer engagement is entirely reactive. By that time, the customer experience has started out negatively.

The not-too-distant future will bring us HVAC and other building components/appliances that talk directly to service providers who can address mechanical issues before they grow into bigger failures (much like heavy equipment and vehicle fleet managers do today). That level of proactivity is near as everything becomes more connected.

Sharing Information/Filing Resources:

Smartphones are for more than Facebook and Instagram – they enable real-time research and information sharing with colleagues and back-office personnel.

This could be as simple as a web search or communicating through the text messaging capabilities of the phone, or as advanced as the incorporation of a work order management app that provides access to important documents. This can include paperless forms, service agreements, customer profiles, instructional material, how-to videos or graphics, parts catalogues – anything that will make life a little easier for the field engineer.

Connecting to Other Mobile Workers

Knowing the location and status of other mobile workers (and their vehicles) in the field can significantly improve customer service. Mobile fleet management apps can relay information on what parts and tools are on a vehicle, and the skill-set of the driver. In the past, if a field engineer was missing a part or a tool, they would travel back to their shop or to the nearest supply store.

Now – with a connected workforce – that field engineer can pull up the real-time location and activity of colleagues in the area, locate the needed part or tool on one of their vehicles, and get back to work sooner.

[quote float="left"]In the past, if a field engineer was missing a part or a tool, they would travel back to their shop or to the nearest supply store. Now – with a connected workforce – that field engineer can pull up the real-time location and activity of colleagues in the area, locate the needed part or tool on one of their vehicles, and get back to work sooner.

 

Navigate and Route Better

Today’s professional navigation and routing applications take into account real-time feeds of traffic and weather information.

This can provide benefits as simple as avoiding major congestion or accidents and routing to the next job in the fastest way possible, or it can help the engineer reorder their day based on the weather.

Dynamic Job Planning/Delivery

We live in an ever-changing, decentralised work environment.

Work order management applications can deliver new plans and jobs directly to the field service engineer without requiring them to return to the office.

Progress

Much of customer service satisfaction is based on expediency. No one likes hearing that help will arrive in a window between noon and 5:00 PM.

Location-based fleet management technology can notify the back office when an engineer has left one job and is on their way to the next, which then allows them to notify the customer that an engineer is on their way and their ETA.

The Future

These are just a few ways that current mobile and location-based technologies help shorten the service window and help businesses provide better service to their customers.

 

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Click here to Download the full ebook

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The above infographic is based on the findings of the Strategies for GrowthSM 2015 benchmarking report. Click the image to see full screen version

 

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Want to know more? Download our webinar featuring an exclusive presentation of the findings of this benchmarking project from Bill Pollock plus how scheduling technology can help you achieve best-in-class service standards by Nick Shipton

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Resource Type: White Paper
Published by:  Field Service News (sponsored by Exel Computer Systems)
Title: The helping hands of field service management
Download: Click here to download white paper

By downloading you agree to the T&Cs listed available here

Synopsis

How to stay ahead of the ever-changing suite of Field Service Management (FSM) tools, including a focus on exactly what is the latest development of Assisted Scheduling?

Overview

The need for companies to employ some form of scheduling engine is clear, the benefits of adopting such an approach are thoroughly documented and clearly tangible. Introducing some level of automation will certainly deliver improvement in field service efficiency and productivity.

Indeed, the introduction of any level of optimisation within the dispatch role will inevitably lead to the reduction of fuel consumption costs that can make a compelling argument for implementation, for even the most cautious of financial directors.

The pile of case studies available to read extolling the benefits of scheduling are stacked high and readily available – each of them stuffed with positive examples and statistics to back up the claims FSM providers make, including how quickly companies have seen a return on their investment.

And of course the benefits of improved scheduling go far beyond the elements that are so clearly identified on a P&L. Customer satisfaction levels are often dramatically increased with the introduction of such tools.

The field service manager’s mantra is to get the right engineer to the right place at the right time, when this is achieved the customer of course feels the benefit of minimal interruption to their own workflow.

 

With customer satisfaction becoming one of the key differentiators between you and your competition in this current age of information, the investment in a good scheduling engine that can empower your team to deliver top tier service could appear to be ever more vital.

Imagine if every person within your team could effectively schedule a service call...

This white paper takes a look at the on-going evolution of field service scheduling systems from manual solutions through to fully dynamic and automated optimised solutions, exploring some of the benefits and challenges of each.

It also then takes a closer look at the latest type of solution appearing 'assisted scheduling' and assesses whether this approach found in a number of next-gen solutions bridges the gap between those scheduling engines which are sometimes seen as prohibitively complex and expensive and those that offer little in the way of true optimisation.

Do assisted scheduling solutions offer a perfect balance for smaller and mid-sized organisation between the efficiency improvements of a high end solution and the human intuition of an expert dispatch agent? Finally the white paper touches on some of the other factors within a wider field service management system that can enable companies to truly take advantage of their scheduling system- be it manual, assisted or fully dynamic.

 

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Click here to download the white paper now!

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Nick Frank, Founding Partner at Si2 Partners, discusses the importance of understanding the metrics you are measuring to asses both internal performance and external perceptions of your service delivery in the eyes of your customers, and how the two are closely aligned...

As a Field Service manager, imagine having one Key Performance Indicator in your business that could predict how your customers will experience your equipment. One simple measure that your teams could use as a focus for their primary mission; to ensure customers remain satisfied, loyal and profitable. The limitations of most measures of customer satisfaction and loyalty are that they look in the rear view mirror, in that they ask questions after the fact. Far better to create a leading indicator, but how?

To get a better feel for customer satisfaction, many managers spend time in the field talking to customers and their teams.

Some will create rafts of measures to monitor and improve their operations. Their logic being a great performing team is more likely to have loyal customers. However there is a temptation to measure everything, which can start to confuse teams.

To overcome this managers bring focus through introducing key performance indicator’s (KPI’s) and dashboards to make it easier to see the issues and take action. More sophisticated businesses look towards the Balanced Score Card methodology in which a more holistic view is taken of the operation. They not only examine financial and processes efficiency, but also consider organisational capacity and customers in relation to their strategic goals.

 

This balanced approach is pretty sensible, but a can be too ‘management speak’ for the people at the sharp end of the business.

The key challenge is to create measures that drive the right behaviours and culture, and not ones where people start to find ways of working around. So it is not quite as simple as many make out. From my own experiences of managing a european service operation, I always felt it would be extremely beneficial to develop a simple measure that was:

1. Easily understood by everyone.
2. That gave us a forward view that a particular piece of equipment was potentially going to lead to severe customer irritation and dissatisfaction.

Our business was injection molding systems, and we knew that something was going wrong in the customer when the spare parts spend of the machine increased, fault reporting was high and the same problem re-occurred over a 12 month period. We created a ratio of these 3 indicators and found that at a machine level, we could start to rank problem systems and identify those that were likely to turn into an irate customer.

Our thinking was that not only could this be used by the local teams to bring focus to a specific customer issue, it also gave an indications of how well teams were managing their installed base. Unfortunately for a number of reasons we were unable to operationalize this strategy and I often wondered how effective it would have been.

Recently I heard Mark Noble, Customer Support Director at Inca speak at a Service Community meeting in the UK. Inca design and manufacture digital printers and gave themselves the goal to improve the equipment productivity and hence satisfaction of their customer base. For their technology, it is the performance of the print head that controls up to 256 ink delivery nozzles, which is critical to uptime.

By combining 3 key performance parameters of the machine, alarms, nozzle deviations and productivity, Inca could rank their equipment in terms of the likelihood to cause customer dissatisfaction. They created simple dashboards that clearly identified the priority machines to be working on.

This allowed them to identify faults before they became critical therefore reducing costs, enabling their customer support centre to identify issues more effectively, maintaining better print quality and improving the planning of engineer visits around customers production runs.

 

A second example of this approach is at Peak-Service, part of the Qiagen corporation, a €1Bn technical services supplier for medical, analytical and industrial equipment. As part of their transformation journey, they created a customer experience indicator which aggregated measures of machine utilisation, revisits, call response time and call completion time.

They used this to help focus their teams and people on the drivers of customer experience as they moved through a transformation programme. This gave them one measure, which was easy to action and could be used to demonstrate results.

This thinking shows that by using operational data that already exists in most businesses, it is possible to create leading measures that drive action. The analytical techniques are in fact relatively simple, it is more having the right mind-set to try a different approach which is the challenge.

As products become connected through the IoT, so the opportunities to gain greater insight into customer experience and satisfaction will expand. Some might call this predictive and others a big data opportunity, but the name is not important. The critical insight we gain from these examples is that these companies are applying their deep know-how of their equipment and customers business, to identify problems before they happen.

Fore-armed is fore-warned!

If you would like to enter into a deeper discussion on this topic and others, why not join other industry professionals at the Service In Industry blog.

 

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Welcome to the latest edition of the Field Service Podcast.

This month we change the format slightly as we bring you a selection of the conversation highlights from a discussion group held with CLickSoftware that featured a number of senior field service executive leaders discussing the importance of Cloud computing as a platform for field service management solutions.

 

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Click here to download the full version of this podcast

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Click here to download a PDF briefing report from the roundtable discussion

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Field Service News Editor-in-Chief Kris Oldland looks asks whether too many field service companies are taking the easier short term options that will ultimately lead to greater costs in the longer term...

 

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Click here to download a digital version of Field Service News issue 11 now!

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Is x,y or z fit for purpose? It’s a question that we should be asking ourselves on a regular basis but unfortunately human nature tends to prefer a make do and muddle through attitude rather than face the tougher option of re-evaluating our choices...

Of course this isn’t always true, if it were there would be no innovation in the world and as anyone who reads this column regularly can attest innovation is one thing that gets me excited.

And in fairness in our industry it is all around us, my only fear is that perhaps such examples of smart out of the box thinking are sometimes the exception rather than the rule.

A point in case is to be found within our latest research project where our findings point to so many companies taking the easy options when it comes to device selection for their field service engineers.

In their defence they will likely point to the fact that it was the cheaper option, but all to the often what appears to be the cheapest option up front can ultimately be a more costly choice further down the line. Indeed the Total Cost of Ownership argument that many rugged manufacturers or distributors will put forward is based around facts and figures that support this exact notion.

However, for me the issue is not thinking the choice through in terms of how these devices will genuinely fit into an engineer’s workflow. For example of the 59% of companies that opted for consumer devices to empower there engineers in the field, 71% stated that ideally the devices for field service should have barcode scanning capability.

Now whilst I know the camera on a consumer tablet or smart phone is capable of handling barcodes, but it’s a cumbersome process whereas so many industrial devices are designed to incorporate this functionality with a dedicated button to make our engineers lives easier.

 

Basically one product is fit for purpose and the other is not.

Yet the overwhelming majority of companies opt for the device that isn’t fit for purpose because of an initial lower cost per unit. It is a short-sighted approach that leads to potential efficiency improvements being missed, which in turn could see potential additional profits melt away.

OK I may be being a bit melodramatic but I’m sure you get the point.

Considering what is fit for purpose and taking the time to make considered decisions - whether it be around hardware, software or even processes is, in my humble opinion at least, the key to long term success.

In fact this issue is full of examples who questioned if what was the accepted norm was in fact actually fit for purpose or not.

Take Dr. Bart Guthrie, neurosurgeon and founder of Help Lightning to begin with. Ultimately it was his acceptance that the standard means of communicating remotely in the medical sector, i.e. the telephone, wasn’t really fit for purpose anymore that led to the creation of mobile merged reality and Help Lightning which is shaping up to be a significant game changer in both the clinical and field service sectors alike.

Then there is Kony.

A mobile app development platform who have identified the fact that the functionality of many traditional FSM solutions is constrictive and in the context of a digital mobile worlds not fit for purpose.

Or how about IFS’s Tom Bowe.

In our interview he makes a great point about beginning to define new processes today in preparation for the oncoming sea change that will be mass adoption of the Internet of Things.

Very simply Bowe argues that the SLAs currently in place and the processes to support those SLAs will soon no longer be fit for purpose as ultimately technology will make them obsolete.

It is only by challenging ourselves and our decision that we can continuously improve. And the question ‘is it fit for purpose’ is therefore a handy one to keep tucked in our head to help us achieve that.

 

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Click here to download a digital version of Field Service News issue 11 now!

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