As our industry is desperately seeking avenues to return to normality, FieldAware’s COO Steve Mason brings to the table an interesting solution...

As businesses continue to evolve their operating practices in the age of Covid-19, service organizations worldwide are resuming their operations in response to relaxed lockdown measures. In many locations, the introduction of Track and Trace protocols enables authorities to identify who a positive COVID-19 person has been in close contact. Once identified, they instruct exposed individuals to self-isolate and to get tested themselves. These new measures aggressively limit the exposure to COVID-19 and enable the suppression of uncontrolled virus breakouts.    

As part of reopening plans, many countries have successfully implemented Social Bubbles. In these “bubbles,” individuals agree to only have contact with a small group of others and practice social distancing with everyone else. The idea is to break transmission chains so that nobody within the bubble gets infected or, importantly, if somebody within the bubble is infected, the number of people to test is smaller and the virus is not transmitted into the wider population.

So, what does Track and Trace and Social Bubbles have to do with field service and service organizations? 

At the heart of field service is the delivery of work to customers at commercial facilities, private homes, or in open, often public, locations. This necessary public interaction creates an environment where field techs have a higher propensity to come into proximity with infected COVID-19 contacts. The result and impact on service organizations:

• A customer becomes infected, and the field resources that have been in close contact with that customer are part of the Track and Trace investigation.
• The tech becomes infected themselves, and the Track and Trace investigation includes other service team members and the customers they interacted with while providing service.

Either scenario creates an inevitable event that your field resources will have to self-isolate due to the evolving Track and Trace investigation protocols associated with COVID-19 exposure.

The question isn’t whether your techs will need to self-isolate. Rather, how do you reduce the number impacted at any one time and simultaneously minimize the impact on your service business?

Enter the concept of Service Bubbles. In the fight against COVID-19 service bubbles provides several key benefits:

1. For individuals, it reduces the risk of exposure and infection.
2. It provides a mechanism to manage the impact an exposure has on the available workforce for service organizations.
3. For society, it contains the exposure and potential spread of an infection to a smaller number of members in the Service Bubble.

 

How do you set up Service Bubbles?

There are three primary ways to create service bubbles, and you mix and match options depending on business demands.

• Physical Service Bubbles are created by creating small service areas and assigning individual resources and crews to work. You build up these smaller areas until you achieve complete coverage of your original service areas.
• Logical Service Bubbles are created by using permits to allocate different customers to different resources. Once configured, a pre-determined resource can only service that customer.
• Shift-based Service Bubbles are created by allocating resources to work at different times of the day. Setting the working hours for each resource to reflect their correct shift hours, and adjusting their shifts over time ensures no overlap.  

In addition to the different ways to create Service Bubbles, you can also use permits to limit further which resources can work at specific customer locations. By restricting the number of resources visiting a customer location, you minimize the resources required to self-isolate as part of a Track and Trace investigation if a customer tests positive.

The smaller team sizes require constructing teams to fully consider the skills necessary to service customers in a particular area. You want to avoid having to send experts into different Service Bubbles to resolve complex problems. Appropriately allocated experts have the benefit of keeping the integrity of your Service Bubble strategy, minimizing Track and Trace risk, while increasing first time fix rates.

Tactics used to avoid overexposing include:

• Defining Skills against all your field resources and creating a Schedule Policy to utilize these Skills Rules. Planners and the Smart Scheduler will only assign jobs to techs with prerequisite skills.  
• Ensuring knowledge management capabilities are fully enabled for field resources to have access via smartphone to provide access to customer and asset history; technical manuals; specification sheets; FAQ’s; and other artifacts to reduce the need for expert involvement.
• For advanced organizations, using Augmented Reality to give access to your experts remotely. Using smart devices and even googles for a pool of experts to see what is happening on-site remotely and guiding technicians to fix more complex problems or unfamiliar systems.   

Setting up and managing an effective Service Bubble operation can be difficult if you do not have a modern application and technology. FieldAware with its configuration flexibility, enables organizations to efficiently and effectively set up and administer Service Bubbles, increasing the team’s operational resilience and protecting against having vast numbers of the team self-isolating.  

Once suspended and Track and Trace protocols are lifted, you can revert to your original service model by merely assigning your resources back to their original service areas and removing the customer annotated permits. Once updated, your system will automatically revert to your original service model.

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Further Reading:

• Read more about Field Service and Covid-19 Recovery @ www.fieldservicenews.com/en-gb/covid-19-0
• Read more about Service Innovation and Design @ www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/service-innovation-and-design
• Read more FSN exclusive articles from the team at FieldAware @ www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/fieldaware
• Connect with Steve Mason on LinkedIN @ www.linkedin.com/in/stevemason3
• Follow FieldAware on Twitter @ twitter.com/fieldaware
• Find out more about the solutions FieldAware offer @ www.fieldaware.com

FieldAware, the leader in made-for-mobile, cloud-based field service automation solutions today announced it has been positioned on the November 2016 Magic Quadrant for Field Service Management by Gartner, the world's leading information technology research and advisory company.

The Field Service Management (FSM) Magic Quadrant recognizes companies based on criteria which includes their ability to execute and the completeness of their vision.

“We are delighted to be recognized in Gartner’s FSM Magic Quadrant for the first time,” said Steve Mason, CRO of FieldAware. “We believe we have focused on bringing a new, dynamic edge to field service, so to be recognized in the Gartner Magic Quadrant is fantastic.

 

“Our goal is to simplify field service management. We want businesses to get the most value out of our solution, quickly, without having to worry about lengthy implementation and adoption. Our mobility and integration capabilities have been instrumental in our momentum and we believe that Gartner’s recognition is further proof of our approach.”

To find out more on how FieldAware is simplifying field service with innovative field service solutions – join one of our 30-minute webinars by clicking here

To access the 2016 FSM Magic Quadrant click here

 

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As we continue our series on end-to-end field service we're pleased to bring you an excellent interview with Field Aware's Shirlene Spillers that first appeared on findaccountingsoftware.com

The link between a mobile workforce empowered by digital technology and delivering service excellence has become well and truly proven over the last few years, there still remain a great number of variables when it comes to ensuring that the choice of mobile device is the right one for your company.

Lets face facts, there are plenty of questions to grapple with before we make the right choice of mobile device that will benefit your mobile workforce most effectively.

Should we be looking at tablets, laptops or smartphones?  What OS to select? Rugged devices or consumer grade devices? Should we consider BYOD? Should we deploy mobile web or mobile apps?

The team at findaccountingsoftware.com recently took the opportunity to put some of these questions to Shirlene Spillers, Vice President of Product Management with software provider Field Aware.

Given Spillers position developing software for the field service industry she is able to provide great insight into what the hardware will work best for companies looking to bring their mobile workforce into the digital revolution, whether they are upgrading legacy systems or taking their first steps away from out-dated manual processes.

We’re pleased to be able to share this interview with you courtesy of findaccountingsoftware.com

What’s the best way to go: smartphones, tablets, or laptops?

We recommend that companies purchase smartphones when:

• Technicians use the smartphone as a true phone most of the time
• Send a limited number of email messages
• Are not required to enter large amounts of data (point and click applications)
• Require access to web-based information intermittently
• Do not use downloaded video for training and troubleshooting
• Require limited amounts of data downloaded from the company and/or suppliers/unordered_list]

We recommend tablets when technicians:

• Make very few voice calls
• Send multiple email messages every day
• Enter significant amounts of data (where a larger keyboard would save time)
• Use the web to acquire and download company and/or supplier data
• Use video for training, troubleshooting and communication (ex: Apple’s FaceTime video)[/unordered_list]

Laptops are only necessary when technicians often have limited or no access to a network and require access to data intensive office applications (i.e. Microsoft Word, Excel, Adobe products, etc.) Use of laptops is rapidly declining.

Do you recommend Android, iOS, or Windows operating system devices?

We recommend Android or iOS simply because they are the most prevalent operating systems – and therefore most familiar to the majority of field workers (reduced training requirements).

For organizations thinking about a bring-your-own-device approach (BYOD), what are the most important considerations?

Employees often want to use their personal devices at work-–and for work-–as well. This provides both possible benefits and real dangers as well. It’s important that enterprises understand the challenges that BYOD creates and the policies and systems that should be in place before field technician-owned devices are incorporated into an organization’s technical ecosystem.

We actually wrote a white paper on the subject but, generally, companies need to look at four major areas of consideration: security, regulatory compliance, device support and end user support. Once the decision is made to allow personal devices to be used for company work, BYOD policies have to be developed and it usually makes sense to bring in some kind of mobile device management system (depending on the size of the company).

When are “ruggedised” devices worth the extra investment?

Most of our customers use ruggedised tablets only when they work in hazardous chemical or gas environments that require Class 1 Division 2 devices. We’ve found that in other environments, standard tablets and smartphones with protective cases are just as effective and durable.

Do you suggest GPS hardware? What other hardware should service companies consider?

We do not recommend GPS hardware for vehicles. Tablet and smartphone apps (like Google Maps) are just as, if not more efficient, in proving navigation information and can easily be mounted (just like the GPS hardware) in the vehicle. Our suggestion is that the company chooses one device (smartphone or tablet) that serves multiple functions at a lower overall cost.

In terms of other hardware, there are some really simple things like batteries, USB vehicle chargers, stylii, cases that are highly protective and can “stand up” for easy data entry. Since our app supports signature capture on the device, we don’t feel signature pads are necessary.

Can you weigh in on the mobile web versus native mobile app usage debate?

We believe in native mobile apps for a couple of very simple reasons:

•  Better performance. They take advantage of the native capabilities of the operating system – making it easy to integrate capabilities like photo/video capture and voice recognition.
• Ability to work offline (can be done with HTML5 caching, but not as elegantly)
• User interfaces that are more user-friendly and engaging[/unordered_list]

Want to know more about end-to-end field service management. Field Service News Editor, Kris Oldland will be taking part in a panel debate on this subject live at Field Service Europe. Click here for more information