ARCHIVE FOR THE ‘field-service-management’ CATEGORY

"The ability to share a technician’s location and regularly updated time of arrival will improve customer engagement and satisfaction..."

Field Service News Editor-in-Chief, Kris Oldland offers up some insight into how field service has become a core differentiator amongst competing organisations and how the trend towards advanced services is being driven by technology...

This video was originally included in a video presentation run in partnership with Salesforce.

Download the full webcast @ http://fs-ne.ws/Y8ny30lsZUR

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An open ecosystem of best-in-class technologies working seamlessly together will be at the heart of the automated transportation systems of the future.

That is the shared vision of Renovo (Renovo.auto), a mobility software technology company, and HERE Technologies (here.com), a global leader in mapping and location services. Today, the two companies announced that they have entered into a partnership to deploy open interfaces for highly and fully automated vehicles. They believe an open-standards approach will fuel greater interoperability and data exchange across the transportation ecosystem, boosting safety, efficiency and comfort for passengers.

In the first phase of their collaboration, Renovo and HERE are working on a new technology interface to maximize the utility of sensor data generated by fleets of automated vehicles in the ‘self-healing’ of highly precise maps. The companies intend to make the interface available for fleets of highly automated vehicles powered by Renovo’s AWare operating system, enabling them to provide data that can be used to update a service such as HD Live Map, the mapping service for automated vehicles from HERE. This service uses different types of sensor data to identify change in the real world and provide a highly-precise, continuously-updating map across the road network. An automated vehicle equipped with HERE HD Live Map knows exactly where it is and has a better understanding of what lies ahead and what it should do in different scenarios.

"As we build the data infrastructure required for autonomous cars, collaboration between key technology providers and across industries is mandatory..."

As we build the data infrastructure required for autonomous cars, collaboration between key technology providers and across industries is mandatory,” said Edzard Overbeek, CEO of HERE Technologies. “With AWare, Renovo has a powerful operating system for automated vehicles. Our partnership and integration into the AWare ecosystem will help expand access to data that’s vital to building automated mobility systems that people can trust.”

“HERE Technologies is a leading creator of mapping and location services with a bold Autonomous World Vision, and we are delighted to enter into this partnership with them,” said Chris Heiser CEO and Co-Founder of Renovo. “We enable our customers to develop and deploy fleets of highly automated vehicles, and these deployments are made possible by an open ecosystem of best-in-class technologies.”

HERE is a privately held company backed by several investors: Audi, BMW, Bosch, Continental, Daimler, Intel and Pioneer. With this partnership, Renovo is joining one of the largest technology ecosystems in the automotive space.

AWare is already powering highly automated vehicle fleets on public and private roads today including that of Voyage.auto. HERE is the newest addition to the rapidly growing AWare ecosystem which includes Samsung, Verizon, Velodyne LiDAR, Parsons, INRIX, Argus Cyber Security, Affectiva, Phantom Auto, Metamoto, Understand.ai, NIRA Dynamics and Bestmile.

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ERM Advanced Telematics launches StarLink Tracker with Wi-Fi, complete Connected Car unit, which integrates advanced vehicle tracking, driver behaviour monitoring, theft prevention, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and 4G capabilities in a single device...

International automotive technology provider ERM Advanced Telematics, whose products have been installed in more than 1.5 million vehicles worldwide, has launched the StarLink Tracker with Wi-Fi, a versatile telematics product that integrates advanced vehicle tracking, driver behaviour monitoring, theft prevention, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and 4G cellular capabilities in a single device. The StarLink Tracker with Wi-Fi is the first product under ERM's new Wireless Connect strategy, which aims to use wireless technologies to provide its partners – vehicle fleet management companies, vehicle manufacturers and importers and car insurance companies – with a competitive edge.

The StarLink Tracker is a modular solution that is designed for installation both in vehicles on the production line and in the aftermarket, for vehicles that have left the production line. The StarLink Tracker with Wi-Fi turns any vehicle in which it is installed into a Connected Car. The modularity of the product allows to add capabilities anytime, through the use of add-on products provided by ERM or by a third party. This can be done on demand and without any need to replace the StarLink Tracker device, which keeps functioning as the central tracking and communications unit under any such solution.

"The StarLink Tracker with Wi-Fi took about a year to develop, and ERM Advanced Telematics has already received its first orders to supply the product from customers in the United States, India and Australia..."

The StarLink Tracker with Wi-Fi took about a year to develop, and ERM Advanced Telematics has already received its first orders to supply the product from customers in the United States, India and Australia.

Part of the competitive edge that the new product offers rests on its extended wireless capabilities and on the mere fact that it is designed to be implemented in Connected Car applications. Until now, the installation of many telematics products for vehicle tracking, analysis of various situations and events and driver behaviour diagnostics required wire hook-ups. The StarLink Tracker with Wi-Fi and products that ERM Advanced Telematics will launch in the future under its Wireless Connect strategy, can be installed using the installer's standard smartphone which communicates through Bluetooth connection in order to configure the product and perform any required adaptations. All this can be much faster compared to many other telematics devices and with much less hassle that might have arisen due to the need to hook-up and hide wires.

In addition to various wireless capabilities that help track the vehicle and other telematics functions, the StarLink Tracker with Wi-Fi is equipped with a microphone and loudspeaker to initiate and receive calls and dial emergency numbers. One application for this can be E-Call (Emergency Call), such as in the European Union or just as an Emergency Call application. When pressing the location unit's emergency button or immediately after an impact above a certain intensity, the unit will allow conversation between the vehicle's occupants and the emergency centre personnel, who can hear what is happening in the vehicle and identify events such as threats against the driver or accidents.

The product will also provide information about the driver's behaviour, including careless driving, accidents, off-road driving, acceleration during turns, speed violations and more, information that can be used by the manager to significantly improve fleet management capabilities, performance and can decrease operational expenses.

"The product will also provide information about the driver's behaviour, including careless driving, accidents, off-road driving, acceleration during turns, speed violations and more, information that can be used by the manager to significantly improve fleet management capabilities, performance and can decrease operational expenses..."

The compact product (about 120 grams) also saves installation time and costs and creates Wi-Fi hotspots in the vehicle for up to eight devices. It features 4G cellular modem, GPS/GLONASS/Galileo location module and an ability to navigate inside underground parking lots or in mines; internal antennas, emergency button support and built-in data logger. Other capabilities are internal management of up to 500 driver ID’s, remote immobilization, wireless connectivity to a wide range of additional ERM and third-party products and many other features. As the core infrastructure for Connected Car applications, the product can integrate to full range of the vehicle's internet connectivity needs, which are provided by the use of the tracking unit's SIM card without the need for any additional SIM card.

The StarLink Tracker with Wi-Fi's 4G capability will provide broadband communications for applications such as listening to online music, video consumption or surfing the web during the car ride. The product's Bluetooth capability will enable installers, drivers and end-users to connect mobile devices, receive information and set different configurations without the need for wires.

If required, it is possible to extend the solution which relies on the new product to also include CAN Bus interface and enable users to receive alerts on the information transmitted between the various sensors and the vehicle's computing units.

"One of our paramount objectives, to which we strive daily, is to provide our business partners over the globe with competitive advantages. As a leading company with unique perspective and more than 30 years' experience in the automotive field, ERM relies on its proven technological capabilities in order to provide these advantages to car manufacturers, car fleets' service providers, vehicle importers and other industry players. We help these players establish technological supremacy based on the ability to support a wide range of functionalities, and deliver high performance and operating efficiencies in any market they operate in or intend to operate in," said Eitan Kirshenboim, CMO of ERM Advanced Telematics.

"Our Wireless Connect strategy enables the industry to achieve these objectives simultaneously. The StarLink Tracker with Wi-Fi, as the pioneer product under this strategy, highlights this well. Alongside the product's impressive technological capabilities, its ability to support a growing number of sensors and telematics applications while minimizing the installation time and cost greatly helps our business partners."

Kirshenboim added: "a fleet management service provider who purchases a telematics solution, but pays much more only to install it in a long and complicated process, will find it difficult to achieve a competitive edge. To respond to these problems, the Wireless Connect strategy will strive to reduce the need to use wires during the installation process as much as possible, minimize the installation time and cost of vehicle telematics products, and generate added value to our customers and business partners."

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We've all know it for a long time, field service management is a rocking sector. Now Bill Pollock provides us with the evidence - rock on...

Whenever one of your service customers hollers “Help”, you not only need to respond quickly, you also need to Get It Right the First Time – because you certainly won’t want to waste the time and expense of having one of your field technicians Truckin’ to the customer site unnecessarily – and you also won’t want to have to Do It Again later! If you’re not careful, it will all be Wasted Time!

By the way, this is why many of the leading services organisations are incorporating Augmented Reality (AR) into their Field Service Management (FSM) solutions – because Every Picture Tells a Story, don’t it? With all of this “new” technology being integrated into FSM solutions supporting the global field services community, The Times They Are a Changin’, for sure!

For a majority of users, the decision as to which type and brand of equipment to acquire is based more on the quality of service that will be provided after the purchase, rather than on the acquisition of the piece of equipment itself. Plus, it’s not only based on Money, Money, Money – it’s more often than not based on things including Promises, Honesty and A Matter of Trust!

However, once selected, after the services provider asks the user to “Take a Chance on Me”, it will need to, first, make sure that its new customer has a Peaceful Easy Feeling, and that it hasn’t spent a whole lot of Money for Nothing (or you could end up in Dire Straights)!

"After the services provider asks the user to “Take a Chance on Me”, it will need to, first, make sure that its new customer has a Peaceful Easy Feeling, and that it hasn’t spent a whole lot of Money for Nothing (or you could end up in Dire Straights)!"

Further, whether the customer’s equipment is located in Allentown or Katmandu, the services provider must be sure that there Ain’t No Mountain High Enough to keep it away from delivering the services that have been promised. If you cannot cover all of the geographic areas where your customers’ (and prospects’) equipment is located, you may end up with an unhappy customer in Massachusetts, requiring your field techs to work weekends on Tulsa Time, finding a suitable contractor in Sweet Home Alabama, being stuck in Lodi (again), authorizing a costly flight to Kokomo, Going to California yourself – or even worse – having to deal with a Panic in Detroit! One way or the other, you’ll never want to hear one of your Colorado customers tell you to “Get Out of Denver”!

Communications is also a critical component of any services relationship – and the last thing you will ever need to experience with your customers is a Communications Breakdown! Customers will want you to be their “Nights in White Satin”, consistently being able to provide them with what they want, “Any Way You Want It”, so they will always feel Glad All Over.

Customers hate it when they call their services provider and get No Reply! There’s a Fine Line between being only casually responsive and treating your customers with a full measure of Respect – and you don’t want to cross that line the wrong way, otherwise, your customer will feel like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and end up in Misery!

If you get your communications right with your customers, you’ll find that The Winner Takes It All (i.e., your services organization); but if you Try Too Hard, you might end up just Livin’ on a Prayer, waiting for another opportunity to make it up to them – and they may simply tell you, “Not a Second Time”! It’s also important to remember that even if your customers have already asked you 65 or 66 questions, you will still need to be prepared to answer Questions 67 and 68!

So, … if you consistently deliver the expected – and desired – levels of service to your customers, and your field technicians remain Cool, Calm and Collected with respect to managing their customer relationships, then you may be in it for The Long Run! If so, then Long May You Run (that is, in circles around your competitors)!

However, for every services organization that actually “gets it”, there are probably a dozen or so more that don’t! That’s why it is so important to make sure you properly train – and arm – your field techs (i.e., with mobile tools and accompanying technology, etc.) with everything they need All Down the Line, so they can satisfy their customers consistently, and go home every day after their last call feeling Free as a Bird and ready to Rock and Roll All Nite!

Bill Pollock, is President of Strategies for GrowthSM

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Surefire, a UK provider of fire safety systems, is starting to reap the rewards of Tesseract, an Asolvi product, which it chose to replace a popular vertical solution...

Founded in 1990, Surefire began locally, providing systems in London and the South-East via a handful of engineers. Today it designs, installs and maintains full-scale fire protection solutions up and down the country for offices, financial institutions, facilities management companies, hospitals, prisons and schools. It also manufactures, sells and maintains the UltraGuard system for the residential market. A portable misting unit that detects and suppresses fire at an early stage, UltraGuard is a more intelligent, more versatile and more effective alternative to your basic, fixed sprinkler system. It is designed to protect the vulnerable in our communities and Surefire reports that it saves around ten lives every year.

Out with the old...

Surefire’s old service management system was developed and customised specifically for fire and security systems providers. Asolvi’s Tesseract solution, on the other hand, is much broader, its usefulness extending across a wide range of markets, from lifts and escalators to commercial lighting to industrial cleaning equipment. But why was this better for Surefire?

Joanna Hawkins, Surefire’s office manager, explains, “Our old system was too basic, too inflexible. Its functions were limited and it was very difficult to elicit information from it. Reporting was non-existent. Asset lists weren’t integrated, which made it impossible to see their productivity and profitability without lifting the data manually and inputting it into a spreadsheet.”

"Inflexibility is a common problem across field service management (FSM) solutions designed for particular markets..."

Inflexibility is a common problem across field service management (FSM) solutions designed for particular markets. Sometimes the basics of an FSM system get forgotten about in favour of market-specific customisations. Horizontal software like Tesseract is concerned with getting the basics right first, i.e. call control, contract management, asset management, scheduling, mobile working, invoicing and reporting. In other words: the fundamental elements of FSM regardless of the industry you’re in.

“The old system was only useful to a point,” says Joanna. “A lot of the basics were missing. That’s why we decided to go with Tesseract. We wanted a system that would streamline our call control, scheduling and contract management processes, speed up invoicing and give us a better overall view of our assets. Tesseract fitted the bill. The enhanced visibility of the new system has already improved our reporting capabilities dramatically, and we’re able to track our profitability in a way we simply couldn’t before. We’ve also seen a big reduction in admin and paperwork.”

Things have improved for Surefire’s sales teams, too. In addition to Tesseract’s call control, assets and invoicing modules, Surefire is using Tesseract’s Quote Centre. This sophisticated quoting engine streamlines the generation, management and approval of quotes and automatically converts them into ready-made contracts. “We use Quote Centre for everything,” says Joanna. “New service contracts, one-off projects, remedial work, parts—it all goes through Quote Centre. It’s a faster, more transparent system than we had before.”

An incremental approach to implementation

Surefire has decided that the best thing for the company and its people is a gentler, more incremental approach to implementation, streamlining one part of its service chain at a time. Having successfully overhauled its contract and asset management, Surefire is looking to improve the performance of its engineers by implementing Tesseract’s mobile working solution: Remote Engineer Access (REA). REA lets engineers generate live service reports, look up asset and customer information, order parts, close down jobs and obtain customer signatures—all from a phone, tablet or laptop.

"A few of our engineers are already using Tesseract on their iPads and the results have been very positive..."

“A few of our engineers are already using Tesseract on their iPads and the results have been very positive,” says Joanna. “They now have all the information they need when they arrive on site, and if they don’t, they’re able to get it directly from the system without having to call the office. REA enables them to work better and by extension give our customers a better service.”

Joanna adds, “We’re also seeing the benefits of our engineers inputting job information directly onto the system in real time instead of filling in service reports and posting them to the office. It reduces admin for them while improving efficiency and accuracy for us.”

Moving forward

After a successful trial, Surefire is set to roll out REA to all of its engineers by the end of the month. At that point it will start seeing the benefits of live job data, radically reduced paperwork, and same-day invoicing. Next, Surefire will turn its attention to spare parts management and implement Tesseract’s Parts Centre. This multi-location stock control platform lets you view stock quantities, raise parts requests, make purchases, and track all parts bought, sold, used, changed, moved or sent for repair.

“Asolvi has helped us open our eyes, scrutinise our processes and look closely at how we can improve them,” says Joanna. “Thanks to the Tesseract system and Asolvi’s support—particularly Graham and Chris, who’ve been superb—we have more control over our service operation than we’ve ever had. There’s more to come, too. We’re moving forward in leaps and bounds every day.”

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In this excerpt from an exclusive fieldservicenews.com webcast Scott Flatman, Regional Sales Director, Salesforce about how technology is enabling field service companies to bridge the gap between their customers and the mobile workforce.

Want to know more? The full webcast is available for fieldservicenews.com subscribers. If you are a field service professional you may well qualify for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription and if you apply for your subscription using the link below you will receive instant access to the full webcast.

Click here to apply and access the full webcast now

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Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News talks to nick Frank, Founding Partner, Si2 Partners, about some of the key findings of a recent research project recently undertaken by the two companies that explored emerging trends in the recruitment and development of both field service engineers as well as service managers across a wide range of industry verticals.

Find more from Nick Frank @ Si2Partners

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If there is one industry that should be leveraging data in every way possible, it’s telecommunications. The telecommunications industry services billions of people each day, generating massive amounts of data. Though not many telecom companies are leveraging this data, the introduction of data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in this industry are inevitable.

A study by McKinsey, Telcos: The Untapped Promise of Big Data, based on a survey of leaders from 273 telecom organizations, found that most companies had not yet seriously leveraged the data at their disposal to increase profits. And only 30 per cent say they have already made investments in big data.

So while there is certainly debate within telecom companies about whether the return on investment is worthwhile, there is no doubt that data science, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) are inevitable when it comes to the industry’s future. Those that figure out how to leverage these techniques and technologies will thrive; those that don’t will be left behind.

By using data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence strategies, telecommunication companies can improve four areas of their services.

The importance of data science, ML, and AI to the telecom industry will likely present itself in these four areas in particular, which this paper will take a look at individually:

1. Troubleshooting:

One of the major challenges for telecom providers is being able to guarantee quality service to subscribers. Analyzing call detail records (CDR) generated by subscribers at any given moment of the day is key to troubleshooting. However, CDRs are challenging to work with because the volume of data gets massive and unwieldy quickly. For example, the largest telecommunication companies can collect six billion CDRs per day.

With data science, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI), companies can instantaneously parse through millions of CDRs in real-time, identify patterns, create scalable data visualizations, and predict future problems.

2. Fraud Detection: 

Verizon estimated in 2014 that fraud costs the telecom industry upwards of $4 billion a year. However, the faster that telecom companies analyze large amounts of data, the better off they are in identifying suspicious call patterns that correlate with fraudulent activity.

Cutting-edge ML and AI strategies like advanced anomaly detection make it much easier for telecommunication companies to identify “true party” fraud quickly.

3. Marketing:

The high churn rate in telecommunications, estimated at between 20-40% annually, is the greatest challenge for telecom companies. Telecommunication companies can use data to build better profiles of customers, figure out how to best win their loyalty (in the most scalable and automated way), and adequately allocate a marketing budget. With improved data architecture, they are able to harvest and store a greater diversity of data that provide insights into each customer such as demographics, location, devices used, the frequency of purchases, and usage patterns. By combining data from other sources like social media, they can have a stronger understanding of their customers.

Using machine learning gives a more accurate picture of which channels are most responsible for customer conversions for better ad buying as well.

4. Customer Experience: 

Telecommunication companies can enhance their services by analyzing the millions of customer complaints they get every year to figure out which types of improvements will have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction and thereby increase customer retention. They can also leverage data at a larger and more automated scale to gain insights into the performance of their technicians.

The more that telecommunication companies can analyze data on customer calls, the more they can begin to recognize which types of problems are most likely to lead to unwarranted “truck rolls” and put in place measures to prevent those calls. Given the number of calls and the depth of analysis required, this necessarily dictates a machine learning approach - more specifically, a deep learning approach. Because analyzing the calls themselves means dealing with lots of unstructured data, it’s the perfect place to expand into ML and deep learning for big gains.

The future of data in the telecom industry

Data science is already a big part of the telecommunications industry, and as big data tools become more available and sophisticated, data science, ML, and AI will all continue to grow in this space.

In the coming years, companies that succeed will be those that figure out how to best use the massive number of data points that are flowing both through their network and around it to reduce labor costs, develop better technology and, to better understand what the seven billion potential customers around the world want to do with their smartphones and computers.

To learn more, download the whitepaper White Paper: Top 4 Growth Areas of Machine Learning in Telecommunications.

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