Global energy management firm Schneider Electric is rolling out ServiceMax's service management solution to 6,000 engineers across the globe as part of its One Schneider customer support strategy in which IoT will also play a key role. Marc Ambasna- Jones caught up with both companies at MaxLive Europe.

As Manish Gupta, senior vice president of Schneider Electric took the stage in the Salon Opera in the 19th Century Le Grand Paris hotel, few of the 270 attendees at MaxLive Europe would have been aware that the company at which Gupta plies his trade is in fact older than the building in which they were sitting.

Le Grand Paris and its much celebrated Café de la Paix were opened in the 1860s and played host to local literary heavyweights Emile Zola, Victor Hugo and Maupassant. Thirty years earlier, and about 317km south in Le
Creusot, two brothers named Adolphe and Eugene Schneider acquired the local mines, forges and foundries. It was the start of what is today a $25bn business.

It is of course a very different business. Schneider Electric now defines itself as a specialist in energy management and automation.  Its client list spans the globe and covers a wide range of industries including utilities, manufacturing and distribution. This has led to rapid growth in its service teams which now numbers 20,000 tech support engineers. Understandably it has built up a complex service structure to manage its resources but not without a degree of pain.

According to Gupta, growth and acquisitions have led to the company having “lots of disparate systems from multiple vendors, including Excel spreadsheets.” Schneider Electric has, to be fair, been a very acquisitive company. It has bought and integrated 17 businesses in the last five years, including a £5 billion purchase of UK engineering firm Invensys earlier this year. This acquisition trail brings its own challenges and has been a contributor to the company’s service management conundrum.

“We had different solutions across different business units as well as different countries,” says Gupta. “As part of our global program for One Schneider,  our objective is to enable consistent and accessible visibility into our customers globally. This led us to purchasing Salesforce for CRM, and then we wanted to extend that single view of the customer to our field service. ServiceMax enables an end-to-end connected experience for our customers, techs and management and was on the Force.com platform.”

 

This fits with Gupta’s and Schneider Electric’s vision for the evolving role of the service engineer. “The installed base is key,” adds Gupta, “because we want to track how customers are using our products. We want to improve products and improve the experience.”

As well as the obvious potential for upselling, Gupta sees this ability to create a two-way conversation with customers an increasingly essential skill for service engineers. The premise is that retaining and upselling existing customers is easier than finding new customers.

Schneider Electric is currently in the process of rolling out ServiceMax for 6,000 of its service engineers and plans to review its contract when rollout is complete in 2017. Although still in mid-adoption, Gupta has identified a couple of pain points.

“Governance and training have probably been our biggest challenges,” he says. "It’s not unusual. Any large software deployment will have its sticking points and getting users up to speed quickly on new software tools is not easy. It’s time consuming and never moves as quickly as you want it to."

So what are the initial thoughts on dealing with ServiceMax?

“I like that fact that it aligns with our corporate strategy on standardisation, and the partnership we have with ServiceMax allows us to contribute to their roadmap. And ServiceMax’s functionality enables us to be more dynamic and support the business.”

What could be better?

“I’d like to see more systems integrators doing training as that will drive competitive pricing in PS resources. That will come in time as ServiceMax expands.”

It’s a fair point. It’s easy to forget that ServiceMax is still relatively new in software terms and new companies generally have a lot of energy and a willingness to go the extra mile to help customers. When Gupta was on the stage with ServiceMax CEO Dave Yarnold, it was clear from the outset that there was more to this arrangement than just a bit of back scratching.

 

So what does Schneider Electric get out of it beyond the original remit for buying software to manage its service teams? “The strength of partnership we have with them is enabling greater innovation in what we are doing with our service organisation. As a company, they think strategically about the software, which empowers us to do more strategic things with our service delivery.”

The industrial internet of things

One of the more strategic things is increased automation. Schneider Electric has been a massive advocate of the Internet of Things within its various customer industries, claiming that IoT is a driver for increased efficiency as well as increased sustainability.

Its own industrial IoT whitepaper talks about a “wrap and re-use approach” rather than a “rip and replace approach”, the idea being that this will enable greater business control through accurate machine intelligence.
This measured approach, it says, “will drive the evolution towards a smart manufacturing enterprise that is more efficient, safer, and sustainable.”

Gupta believes that IoT is a “fundamental strategy” that will significantly “change our service organisation.” In what way? “Technology is not the issue,” he says. “We can already do things quickly and efficiently. The biggest impact for us is the value we are able to give to the customer. This is where the biggest opportunity with IoT is for us – mitigating downtime, maintaining uptime and assets becoming predictive. IoT must become an operational strategy and not just be a vision. We are focused on scaling the innovation to an industrial level, not just pockets of visionaries doing isolated projects.”

As if to drive home the point, Schneider Electric also rolled out its VP of information process organisation, R&D and Innovation Efficiency. Twila Osborn, as well as having a long job title, is a mathematician. She worked on the space shuttle programme in the 1980s, using her problem solving skills on the well-publicised issues surrounding the shuttle’s heat-resistant tiles.

 

Today she works out of Boston in the US, designing processes across Schneider Electric’s data and technology platforms to ensure a lifecycle of data across the organisation. She has just finished with a proof of concept, she says, reaffirming that “R&D is relevant.”

Ground control

Her proof of concept is essentially about using automation to create a standard data flow across the organisation, “designing serviceability and scalability into the marketing attributes we need in the products from the very beginning,” she says.

“We can now look at the products and get metrics so we can develop competitive models now, looking at how we compare with rivals and plan accordingly. We can close the loop with our service team, so the engineer in the field can capture the data and look for upsell opportunities. It’s about service engineers getting the right product and parts while on site or maybe even like the Tesla, refresh the software without interrupting the user?”

She talks about value creation, not a standard phrase for a mathematician, and applies to the idea that the service technician has this increasingly important role in helping the company define its future.  “They are going to be critical in the chain,” she adds. “The speed of reaction will be huge and can alleviate customer problems quickly through the data telling you what is wrong – intelligence is becoming critical.”

So does she see service engineers selling or just good sources of raw ideas for R&D? “The automation will enable us to close the loop again with the service engineer who can see gaps in the market or problems and feed them back instantly to the product design people, so products will change based on real experiences in the field. So yes, the role of the service engineer will keep changing.” And selling?

 

ServiceMax’s Dave Hart, VP of global customer transformation steps in here. “It’s a fine line between serving and selling,” he says. “You don’t really want them to sell because they break the trusted adviser status. Empowering field service engineers to make more informed decisions thought, that’s different. A lot of companies don’t have direct sales forces anymore, so in many respects filed service is the touchpoint with the customer but not really a salesperson.”

Hart adds that if you speak to most field service leaders they will probably tell you that one of their biggest issues is data. They know it’s in there, they just can’t get it out the system in any meaningful way. “It’s usually in a bunch of disparate systems that don’t talk to each other,” he says.

And that is the problem Schneider Electric is trying to solve. It has a plan to coordinate the whole organisation; not a small task but if Osborn’s proof of concept flies you get the feeling it will be on that road relatively quickly.  She understands that you need meaningful data to glue a modern business together. It’s finding ways to make this data easily accessible and that makes Schneider, not for the first time, one to watch.

 

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Are UK field service companies keeping pace with the rest of the world? In this exclusive four-part report for Field Service News,  Bill Pollock, President & Principal Consulting Analyst, Strategies for Growth SM, explores how UK companies compare with their global counterparts.  

 

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Each year, Strategies For Growth  (SFGSM) conducts a series of Benchmark Surveys among its global outreach community.  The content of this report is derived exclusively from the UK/Europe responses to our 2015 Field Service Management (FSM) Benchmark Survey and, thereby, represents a geographically-specific universe base from which to identify key FSM usage patterns and trends. The research coverage was sponsored by Kirona.

For example UK/Europe survey respondents identify the following as the top factors, or challenges, currently driving their desire to optimise field service performance (compared to the overall global results):

• 56% Customer demand for quicker response time (up from 52% overall)
• 47% Need to improve workforce utilisation & productivity (up from 43% overall)
• 47% Need to improve service process efficiencies (up from 40% overall)
• 41% Customer demand for improved asset availability (up from 35% overall)

Thus, the data clearly reflects that UK/Europe Field Service Organisations (FSOs) appear to place somewhat more emphasis on each of these key market drivers, focusing on customer demand and workforce utilisation, productivity and efficiency, than their worldwide respondent counterparts.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that they are also planning to invest more in mobile tools in support of their respective field forces than other global geographies represented in the overall survey universe.

However, in order to effectively address these key challenges – and strive to attain Best Practices status – UK/Europe respondents then cite the following as the top strategic actions they are currently taking:

• 64% Develop / improve metrics, or KPIs, used to measure field service performance (up from 52% overall)
• 49% Invest in mobile tools to provide field technicians with real-time access to required data and information in the field (up from 42% overall)
• 35% Integrate new technologies into existing field service operations (i.e., iPads, Tablets or other devices, etc. (up from 34% overall)

The big difference reflected in the UK/Europe survey results is in the percentage of services organisations that are currently developing and/ or improving the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) they use to measure performance -  cited as a top strategic action by 64% of UK/ Europe respondents, compared to only 52% overall.

 

In fact, the percentage of UK/Europe FSOs currently developing/improving their respective KPIs, at 64%, is higher than the 62% cited by the survey’s Best Practices respondents (i.e., those attaining at least 90% Customer Satisfaction and 30% Services Profitability).

The remainder of this report provides insight into each of these and other related areas that may be influencing your organisation’s quest to attain Best Practices, as well as highlighting those resources that the leading UK/Europe organisations already have in place – or are planning to implement in the next 12 months.

Field service as profit centres

The survey results reveal that 65% of UK/Europe respondent organisations currently operate service as an independent profit centre (or as a pure, third-party service company), similar to the 66% reflected among the overall survey respondents, but far fewer than the 81% cited among Best Practices organisations.

Even so, there are still more than a third (35%) that operate as cost centres in support of product sales.

While there appears to be some consistency or continuity in these percentages from other surveys conducted by SFG℠ over the past few years, this nearly 2:1 ratio strongly validates the fact that profit centres now represent the dominant business model within the UK/Europe services community and, based on responses from other questions in the survey, this trend is likely to grow even stronger over time.

It is noted, however, that the percentage of organisations running service as an independent profit centre varies – sometimes significantly – by size of organisation (based on annual revenue or turnover).

The overall survey findings indicate that US$1 billion-plus organisations come in at 74%, while SMBs (i.e., Small and Medium-sized Businesses) report only 55%.

 

Not surprisingly, organisations reporting total annual service profits of greater than 30% come in at 76% – one of the highest levels charted among all of the segments covered in the survey.

As such, they are not only operating service as a profit centre – they’re actually making a significant profit by doing so!

Bespoke or out-of-the-box

More importantly, the UK/Europe respondent base clearly confirms that the predominant mode of Field Service Management (FSM) solutions currently being deployed is mainly off-the-shelf, either with some customisation (53%; compared with only 37% overall), or basically right out-of-the-box with no customisation (2%; compared with 6% overall), comprising more than half (55%) of the respondent base in total.

This figure is 9% higher than that cited by global Best Practices organisations (i.e., 46%)

Roughly one-quarter of UK/Europe respondents are either using home-grown, or internally-developed automated systems (15%), or bespoke solutions developed by a systems integrator (9%).

As such, UK/Europe organisations are far less likely to deploy a bespoke solution either internally, or by a systems integrator, compared with the overall survey respondents, but are far more likely to deploy an off-the-shelf solution and, then, have the specific types of customisation they require built-in to tailor it to their organisation’s requirements.

However, the most perplexing statistic may be the fact that nearly one-in-four UK/Europe organisations (22%) are still running their field service operations basically via a series of manual processes (and spreadsheets) – higher than the 18% attributable to the overall respondent base!

 

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Download the full report! Click here to download it now!

 

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Watch out for Part 2 , where Bill Pollock reveals the key drivers for European and UK field service organisations.

 

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In the above video you'll find the Q&A session from our most recent webinar run in partnership with service management software specialists IFS where Field Service News Editor-in-Chief, Kris Oldland spoke with scheduling expert Daryl Dudey of IFS.

 

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If you'd like to download the full webinar you can do so by clicking the button below:

Click Here to Download Webinar

By downloading the webinar you consent to the T&C's outlined here 

 

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If you'd like to take part in the free field service health check discussed above then click here!

 

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Smarter customer engagement, an interactive customer service hub and streamlined knowledge management are some of the enhancements Microsoft will introduce to its Dynamics CRM platform in 2016. Microsoft Dynamics General Manager Bill Patterson gave Field Service News Editor-in-Chief  Kris Oldland the low down on the innovations .

Having spent 2015 focusing on productivity improvements in Microsfot Dynamics, Microsoft is turning to customer service experience enhancements in 2016.  "It has probably been one of the most significant areas in innovation and investment we've been making in Microsoft," Patterson states.  "We see that organisations today are operating still like they were ten years ago. They are still trying to compete on the basis of price or on the strength of their product or service that they have for their offerings. But key data is really beginning to emerge that a lot of consumers today are largely beginning to stay with brands due to the customer experience and we see customer service playing a huge role in that realm of differentiation."

We have all been part of good customer services experiences but those that we remember oftentimes are the most extremely bad ones. What we are trying to do for enterprises today is really help them understand their customers, help them engage with their customers and help them empower their employees to really drive and centre that degree of engagement."

"While organisations may understand this dichotomy, the reality that they find themselves in today is that a lot of their tooling is dated, a lot of their systems have not been modernised to keep up with the needs of their customers and they are struggling with the proliferation and explosion of channels in the digitalisation of the service experience like never before."

Indeed,  in the modern world of the empowered consumer building a cohesive customer experience that translates across the multitude of different touch points with your organisation is critical. "This notion of digitalisation and the empowered consumer really is creating a juxtoposition with the enterprise, because the agent today is mostly dealing with technology and screens that were built for the last decade of computing."

 

This presents one of two key challenges for today's service-oriented organisations.  While the challenge to deliver the level of service excellence is spread across a growing number of channels, simultaneously there is the challenge of overcoming high employee churn rates within customer service roles which Microsoft analysis of labour statistics around the customer service role both in the US and the UK has revealed as worryingly high at around 27%. "If you think that one in four of your team is turning over every twelve months increasingly it's a really struggling proposition to keep employees engaged and empowered to ultimately to deal with customers. "

"And that meta-trend - the ability to engage with customers and to empower employees - is really what's driving Microsoft, what's driving our innovation force behind our set of releases."

With their latest roll out their Dynamics platform, Microsoft is looking to resolve these challenges with three new elements that Patterson describes as being at the centre of that employee empowerment and customer engagement problem set for an organisation. Perhaps the biggest of these changes, and one that is likely the headline grabbing development, is a complete overhaul of the user experience.

"Most CRM systems have been built over time with this notion of the relationship and relationships take time to emerge and unfold for an organisation," explains Patterson. "So it's s oftentimes that a CRM system is designed with lots of data, lots of forms and lots of views. For organisations who need to keep up with high scale but low amount of data within an interaction there was a dichotomy between the optimised user experience and the user experience we find today in most CRM systems."

"So we went back to the drawing board and back to the core of the user experience itself and designed what we think is the most productive user experience for customer service agents on the planet."

A bold statement indeed.  So what is the detail behind the hyperbole?

Interactive Service Hub

The UX Microsoft has introduced is called the interactive service hub. It has the ability to handle large screens of information, and to take a screen and easily turn it into an interaction. It's a technology that many will be familiar with in social solutions, Patterson readily admits. However bringing it into the customer service team at large to help them engage across all the digital channel - web, social email and so on - could be a very powerful tool.

"There is also a focus on building much tighter integration between what Microsoft refer to as Tier One agents (those who have to deal with the most volume) and Tier Two agents (those who have to deal with the escalations coming from the tier one team).  This could prove an important aid in increasing efficiency resulting in speedier resolutions for customers.

 

That interplay between tier one and tier two today for most organisations is where you see the highest degree of latency in closing a business operation. It is our belief that if we can bring the tier one and tier two teams together in a way that information is continuous and seamless throughout a service funnel, then we could help teams react, respond and resolve issues much easier than before.

Smarter customer engagement

2016 will see the release of what Microsoft calls smarter customer engagement.  It's an interesting concept that builds upon their own social engagement technology while addressing what is perhaps a key flaw. "What sentiment and social screens have proven is that it's a signal, a belief at a point in time but it may not get to the full unearthing of a customer perspective on things," Patterson begins. "So in addition to some advances we're making in the social engagement side we're introducing our Voice of Customer solution." This is based on some tech acquired last spring to go to the next level of voice-of-the-customer and feedback as part of the business process."

"When you combine the sentiment analytics with the enriched information on an interaction or on a survey perhaps, organisations can further understand their customers in a way that's not just only a point in time or what they might have said on a social network. The combination of these two is how we see organisations truly coming together to engage in new ways with their customers."

Knowledge capture and management

The third of the new developments particularly caught my attention as it is a tool capable of helping tackle a significant issue being faced by many, many field service companies: the challenge of capturing the knowledge, locked away in the heads of a workforce rapidly set to walk away from the business as they reach retirement age.

Again the challenge is two-fold, firstly there is the capture of this knowledge to ensure it remains in the organisation and secondly there is the need to make this knowledge easily accessible.

 

Microsoft's knowledge capture platform incorporates a WYSISYG designer to allow for simple and easy creation of content, as you'd expect, but perhaps more importantly they have also included social collaboration tools which allow companies to bring teams of people together to work in tandem on the creation of an article.

The upshot of this is that either each article becomes less disputed or you create fewer articles authored by individual experts who have distinct points of view. Either way it makes for a more streamlined approach to developing a knowledge bank and when the aim is to help deliver quicker understanding to your workforce and swifter resolution to customer problems, then quality should always trump quantity.

This is also something that Microsoft are acutely aware, says Patterson, pointing out that most knowledge management solutions have been built more as knowledge aggregators which end up taking in so much volume and so much data that agents really get lost in the cloud of information.

"Often what happens is an organisation will spend so much time indexing and not enough time thinking about the meaningful information that helps drive an interaction to a resolution.  Over time the knowledge index becomes less and less trusted by the customer service team."

"So our focus was putting the knowledge into the core hands of the agents and the experts inside an organisation who can put the right information into the hands of the customer service interaction team so it can become a more thoughtful and ambient experience for an agent."

Supported by a powerful machine learning engine, the knowledge management tool analyses the content of what an interaction is about and pro actively surfaces and pushes the right knowledge into the hands of the agent whilst they are taking the call. This ability to place focused content intelligently in the right place at the right time could hugely improve resolution times within a service centre. However, the magic doesn't end there as the system essentially continues to refine itself through each interaction.

"Once that intersection between knowledge and interaction come together that binding, that fusion if you will, actually tunes the machine learning engine even further and enriches it even further this article solves this problem," enthuses Patterson.

Each of these developments are exciting in their own right but together it looks like Microsoft Dynamics 2016 is certainly shaping up to be an impressive update to the platform.

However, when it is bundled together with Office 365, Microsoft’s productivity suite, for a cost of between £40 and £95 depending on your own configurations, this becomes a platform offering fantastic value. Long may it continue.

 

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What should field service companies focus on in 2016? Tom Bowe,  Industry Director, Enterprise Service Management, IFS, provides his expert insight

The holiday season is upon us, and beyond that, just around the corner, lies another year. You may already be suffering from a bombardment of messaging around “predictions for field service in 2016” or “top trends for field service in 2016.”

Truth be told, it is an exciting time to be in field service.

The world is changing rapidly, the profile of your average consumer is ever evolving, and technology is changing the service landscape along with expectations, the market, and more.

Trends like augmented reality, IoT, wearable technology, and 3D printing are poised to change the entire approach to field service, rocking the fundamental structures and foundations of service delivery that have taken years to develop.

So how does an organisation brace for all this and navigate through the messaging to begin the path to a successful 2016?

 

We have sifted through all the messaging this year for you; surveys, industry articles, field service forums, and customer feedback, and boiled it down to four tips to help you achieve service delivery excellence next year.

Consider using these tips as a beacon to help you achieve customer delight while gaining market share and maximising service margin in 2016.

Establish a Baseline

Whether you are lacking in the analytics department or you have analytics coming out of your ears, the end of the year is a good time to conduct an audit of your service processes. Map out your service lifecycle and pinpoint where your strengths and weaknesses are. Here are some things that are always good to evaluate at the end of the year:

• Employees: Which of your customer facing employees are consistently performing above average? Are they being incentivised to continue their good work? What about those below average? Is there something in place to help them improve?
• Processes: Which parts of your service operations are working well and which aren’t? Are the process issues manual or software related? Where are there holes in your automation or lags in efficiency?
• Systems: How solid are your integrations? Is data being lost or corrupted between systems? Is everything talking to each other the way it should?

If evaluating your current operations and establishing a baseline is harder than you would like it to be, consider investing in enterprise operational intelligence software. The ability to visualise your entire operation and use real-time analytics to directly impact processes and solve issues will help drive intelligent decision making in 2016.

Go Back to the Basics

New field service trends like IoT have the potential to completely eliminate reactive service and save millions in operational costs, but if you don’t have efficient processes in place before adopting these trends, their potential will never be achieved.

It’s no good to have a piece of equipment out in the field triggering an urgent request for service if you don’t have the means to get the right technician, with the right skills and the right equipment there in a timely fashion.

Start with the Customer

Steve Jobs famously said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.”

Listening to your customers is more important than ever. Customer surveys and other forms of communication with your customer base are vital to helping you deliver the best customer service possible.

Let them tell you what they want and adjust your service delivery standards accordingly. It’s always important to remember that the escalator of service is always moving.

What might have been customer delight (unbelievable service) last year may be considered basic now. Keeping up with customer expectation and the scale of service will help you deliver continued service excellence.

Pick a Uniquely Inspired Future Path

Perhaps the most important tip that we can offer is don’t get swept up in the hype. Every service organisation is on a unique path with unique offerings and ultimately unique goals.

Service delivery excellence is best achieved when a balance is found between listening to your customers, keeping up with changing technology and its effect on the market, and operating your service centre as a profit centre.

Predictions and top trends for 2016 are only good on paper if they don’t fit your organisation’s vision. Don’t let that hold your innovation hostage…let your desire to provide your customers with unique, inspiring experience carve your path to service excellence in 2016.

Good luck and season’s greetings from IFS.

 

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The latest developments in remote workforce management are helping companies to get more from their field service teams, explains Paul Ridden, CEO, SmartTask .

For field service companies that provide contracted, scheduled staff to client sites, workforce costs are a significant overhead, especially when you consider the constant pressure on margins and the need to provide innovative services to win new contracts.

Remote workforce management has been around for some time, helping companies to capture proof of time, attendance and work completed, enabling them to monitor the status of their teams centrally. Now systems are emerging that bring all of these components in to a single package along with the other key back office functions required to effectively manage field service teams. As a result, they can now provide complete peace of mind that personnel are safe while ensuring they are delivering the services agreed.

Such tools can work alongside systems including payroll, invoicing and rostering, using real-time data to verify timesheets, provide accurate proof of work and overcome scheduling challenges. This is helping to maximise profitability of contracts using the most appropriate employees, billing correctly and not overpaying. Meanwhile, it is possible to integrate intelligent rostering and control room to automate and streamline operational processes as well as reduce office-based administration costs.

 

Based on a framework of electronic proof and attendance it is becoming possible for existing staff located at client sites to effectively take on additional tasks such as inspections or audits, enabling organisations to provide areas of differentiation to clients and make best use of resources to boost profitability. There is also an opportunity to provide a tool to register an operational issue or risk, irrespective of the remote worker’s core function, with an effective process included to encourage and simplify such an action.

Using smart forms, via a mobile application, an employee can quickly complete and submit an incident report, which triggers an email escalation process sent to the appropriate department so they can deal with the problem immediately. This means supervisors and managers can have a live-view of any issues, failures or wastage with details electronically captured including photographic evidence where appropriate. A copy of the incident can also be sent to an online portal where it can be monitored and managed through its lifecycle while providing data for trend analysis via the management information generated.

These flexible smart forms can be configured for a wide range of uses including alerts, inspections, audits, requests, job acceptance and job completion. In particular, it is possible to implement an electronic compliance solution for health and safety, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), COSHH hazardous substance procedures. These checks can replace existing manual processes to achieve immediate workplace compliance, while streamlining administration and saving money.

Typically, a paper-based solution is not only time consuming and costly to manage across multiple sites, but is easy to falsely or fraudulently complete. In contrast, a smart form registers the exact time it was completed and with signature capture shows which employee undertook the check. Furthermore, all the data is delivered to the online portal, so it is collected electronically in real-time without having to post hard copies and have someone collate manually.

The latest developments in remote workforce management is evolving beyond simply proof of attendance. It is providing the potential to enhance business performance and help overcome some of the operational challenges faced by companies in the field service marketplace in terms of revenue growth, customer satisfaction and compliance.

 

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Over 300 service companies are now using its paperless 3-in-1 JobWatch field service solution, reports UK mobile workforce management solutions BigChange.

Launched three years ago, JobWatch was developed to give field service businesses of any size everything they need to plan, manage, schedule and track their mobile workforce. The easy to use, simple to implement system combines back-office, mobile app and real-time vehicle and resource tracking in a single cloud based solution.  It provides end-to-end management of the entire service process from quotation all the way through to invoice including intelligent planning and scheduling. A whole mountain of paperwork is replaced with automated workflows on the JobWatch app that guides mobile engineers or drivers through all their tasks.

According to BigChange’s CEO and founder Martin Port, JobWatch aims to bring mobile workforce management technology to the thousands of small, medium and large businesses that still operate using manual paper based processes:

“Historically this technology has been out of reach for SMEs given the cost and perceived complexity. JobWatch is a game-changer for these businesses, giving them the power of a ‘big enterprise’ system but with incredible simplicity, affordability and customisability.”

Among the users are nationwide hire companies Nixon and Elliott Hire who are using JobWatch to streamline the servicing of equipment and portable toilets  across the UK. The Forestry arm of Komatsu uses JobWatch to manage the servicing of huge timber felling and processing machinery.

JobWatch is proving to be a growth catalyst for startups such as waste and recycling specialist Clearabee who adopted the system back in 2013 when they had a single vehicle. Their business has grown rapidly and the company now serves over 30,000 nationwide clients across 15 sites with a team of 50 employees.

The return-on-investment for users is significant, says Port. “A perfect example is dp Doors.  JobWatch has brought their business 25% more revenue each month, thanks to smarter scheduling and greater productivity across their 23 strong field service team. This equates to an extra 4 jobs per engineer per week. Admin in their back office has been reduced by 15% and this time saved is being dedicated to value-adding sales and marketing activities. Failed jobs have been reduced by 50%. Their annual fuel savings from JobWatch are in excess of £5000 and this saving alone is paying for their JobWatch system.”

 

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Enterprise mobility company Kony Inc. has launched a mobile solution with SAP-Certified Integration to help companies modernise their field service processes for mobile devices, IoT and wearables.

The Kony Mobile Field Service solution for SAP Business Suite is a set of three new apps and implementation services designed to help businesses move away from a paper-based field service operation to a completely mobilised environment within 30 days.

“We are seeing more organisations turn to mobility to streamline processes and increase productivity; however, many are still held back by expensive upgrades and limited resources,” said Dave Shirk, president, Product, Strategy and Marketing for Kony. “With Kony Mobile Field Service solution, enterprises using SAP Business Suite can now quickly mobilise the field team without investing in expensive upgrades to their SAP systems, or having to rip and replace their entire backend infrastructure. With mobility, they can now process more work orders, improve their service levels and first time fix rates; and ultimately increase revenue by introducing the ability for technicians to upsell and process payments in the field.”

The solution is a single integrated suite that optimises the entire field service business process. This enables businesses to maximise efficiency while processing notification, planning and tracking, and executing work orders all in a single integrated app suite.  It is built on the Kony Mobile Platform, and extensive experience and expertise based on helping global companies and brands mobilise their field service business processes.

One of the first users to deploy the solution is Irish utility company ESB.  "Servicing more than two million customers, we needed a mobile solution that our field technicians could rely on to help streamline work orders and improve overall efficiency,” said Eugene O’Sullivan, Networks Mobile programme manager, ESB. “We turned to Kony to help mobilise our field services because data is very important in our industry and Kony’s solutions offered the data synchronisation we needed. With our Mobile Work Order solution, technicians have the ability to view work order details, see location maps, review meter details, and record data to complete the work orders.”

Kony is a silver partner in the SAP PartnerEdge program and provides enterprises using SAP systems the flexibility and agility they need to use these apps as is or they can customise the front-end application design and integrations with their back-end systems to fit their requirements. In addition to SAP, Kony can also mobilise other enterprise applications such as Oracle, Microsoft, Siebel, and Salesforce to drive process improvements.

 

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Commercial catering and refrigeration equipment service provider Serviceline has transformed its field service operations with the Maxoptra dynamic scheduling and planning system from Magenta Technologies.

Serviceline has completed stage one of the project to streamline its operations by providing better visibility of its mobile resources and availability of service engineers’ time.  By automating 90% of field service tasks, the company now has time to focus on enhancing customer service.

Serviceline has 120 engineers collectively possessing more than 400 different skill sets. Planning, matching and allocating work to the best qualified service engineer is very challenging, especially when new jobs come in during the day, which continually changes priorities.

“We had this vision of what we wanted the business to achieve. For us, customer service is key. It’s all about communication, the relationship you build and maintain with your customers. We always had a belief that if we could automate the planning and scheduling process to quickly provide the information our people needed to make the best decisions, then they would have more time to talk to customers,” said Steve Elliott, Managing Director of Serviceline.

“Maxoptra is the embodiment of that concept. It is the first and only dynamic scheduling and planning system that we have found which does that, where there is the programming functionality to take away 90 percent of what our staff had to do manually.”

Elliot continued: “It used to take six months for a new planner or dispatcher to learn fully how to use the two booking systems we used to manage the complexity. Now we have complete visibility of where our engineers are and the status of each job. This allows us to consider options and make the best routing and planning decisions quickly.”

The software is fully integrated with the existing SaaS telematics platform, to provide a map-based real-time display of vehicle location, job status and work schedule. Serviceline can now have optimised schedules from Maxoptra sent directly to in-cab terminals, allowing the field engineers to navigate to their jobs and report their progress in real time. The system also highlights variances from plan.

 

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