GPS Insight, a leading provider of SaaS-based fleet management software and complementary solutions in the United States and Canada, today announced the acquisition of FieldAware, the leader in made-for-mobile, cloud-based field service solutions.

The acquisition advances field services and fleet tracking capabilities for GPS Insight, allowing them to better serve customers of all sizes through a more robust and comprehensive digital platform with capabilities to achieve operational insights and cost savings.

THIS PARTNERSHIP MOVES FIELDAWARE CLOSER TO FULLY DIGITIZING AND AUTOMATING A MADE-FOR-MOBILE FIELD OPERATIONS EXPERIENCE

"GPS Insight is thrilled to provide even better solutions for our customers through this partnership with FieldAware, while at the same time extending our competitive advantage across the field service and fleet management landscape," said Gary Fitzgerald, CEO at GPS Insight. "We're committed to creating tools for businesses to operate with more efficiency," Fitzgerald adds, "and bringing together these two platforms will provide an unparalleled synergy to guarantee high-quality, reliable service that drives bottom-line profitability, while enabling our customers to deliver a superior end-to-end service experience for their customers."

The acquisition will better position GPS Insight to expand its field service solutions to meet the unique digital field service challenges of mid-market and enterprise service organizations across core industries, such as industrial and commercial equipment, solar and renewable energy, facility and property management, waste management, construction, HVAC, electrical, and plumbing, while ensuring fleet performance—along with driver safety and compliance—to a customer base of more than 250,000 vehicles combined.

"This is an exciting time for FieldAware to join forces with GPS Insight. This partnership moves FieldAware closer to realizing our vision of fully digitizing and automating a comprehensive, made-for-mobile field operations experience," said Steve Mason, COO at FieldAware. "Existing and new customers can expect to see benefits immediately as we take our solutions and innovation to a new level to expand the impact of all types of assets in the field."

"FieldAware's history of digital innovation has been transforming field service organizations since 2011," continued Fitzgerald. "By integrating their field-first service suite with the industry-leading telematics, video telematics, and field service management solutions from GPS Insight, we'll be able to complement each other's unique strengths and market positioning—expanding our go-to-market channels and cross-selling opportunities. This acquisition not only grows the GPS Insight product portfolio, but also reinforces our commitment to helping companies realize the promise of fully digital field operation transformation."

For more information, please visit gpsinsight.com

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Further Reading:

• Read more about Digital Transformation @ www.fieldservicenews.com/digital-transformation
• Read more about Service Innovation @ www.fieldservicenews.com/service-innovation
• Read more about FieldAware on Field Service News @ www.fieldservicenews.com/fieldaware
• Learn more about FieldAware @ www.fieldaware.com
• Find out more about GPS Insights @ gpsinsight.com
• Follow FieldAware on Twitter @ twitter.com/fieldaware

 

In this final feature from a recent white paper we published in partnership with FieldAware, we discuss if customer satisfaction metrics are suitable to identify a measure of success in a servitized or customer success-based service model.

In this new feature from a recent white paper we published in partnership with FieldAware, we discuss the proper technological infrastructure to ensure that the service operation can operate at maximum efficiency.

In the second feature from a recent white paper we published in partnership with FieldAware, we analyse the need of a shift in management structure for service organisations with a customer success focused model.

In the first feature from a recent white paper we published in partnership with FieldAware, we look closely at the difference between driving customer satisfaction and driving customer success for field service organizations.

Marc Tatarsky, SVP Marketing, FieldAware, reflects on the findings of a major research project undertaken in partnership with Field Service News and asks whether the trends that study appears to reveal will become a permanent part of the new normal as we look to a post-pandemic world...

As we come to the end of a tumultuous 2020, the speed of change in the field service sector continues to evolve at what feels like a speed of light pace. And the change is still happening - more so than many of us would prefer or could have predicted.

While there is an overarching optimism in the field service sector, the world is still grappling with getting past recovering from the pandemic and working to move into a full restoration mode.

With vaccines on the horizon, the focus is on establishing the new operating normal and paving the way for growth.

At FieldAware, we look to stay in tune with customer needs and market trends. As I reflect on our market view through 2018-19, we saw early adopters and visionaries defining the “what” of new best-in-class services and offerings such as IoT and remote assist.

As we initially encountered the global pandemic in March, we engaged in a research program with the late Bill Pollock, from Strategies for Growth, to establish a baseline of the impact the crisis would have on these services. As the pandemic’s magnitude continued to evolve, our research immediately shifted focus to measure the crisis’s repercussions and establish a Year Zero/New Normal benchmark.

The ripple effects have been more pronounced and long-lasting than anyone initially anticipated.

Yet, our research with Field Service News revealed optimism biased towards growth with three quarters (76%) of field service companies focusing  on growth rather than survival.

This optimism appears to be bolstered by accelerated investment in digitization and the enablement of the best-in-class services required to deliver essential services in the new operating environment.

 

Best-in-class service and capabilities - the New Normal - how did we get here?

As my colleague, Steve Mason, COO at FieldAware, likes to say, “Gradually…Then Suddenly”, referring to a great Hemingway quote from the classic novel, The Sun Also Rises. This sediment perfectly surmises how several critical best-in-class services have rapidly become the “New Normal.”

Sure, the pandemic has accelerated our need or faster adoption, but we have been plodding away at the core components of these best-in-class services like remote assist for years. As a workforce, we have been getting comfortable with remote interactions, building a knowledge library of best practices and likely responses, and mobile advancements have helped to shepherd these advanced technologies into our everyday lives and activities.

What the pandemic did was to mandate remote-work commonplace for EVERYONE, not just those that were early adopters/visionaries. And so, it is, suddenly, best-in-class services like remote monitoring/assist and IoT sensing are now the “New Normal.” Not just some nice-to-have if you have time to tap into it, but a staple in today’s field service environment.

Marc Tatarsky, SVP Marketing, FieldAware, reflects on the findings of a major research project undertaken in partnership with Field Service News and asks whether the trends that study appears to reveal will become a permanent part of the new normal as we look to a post-pandemic world...

 

Is The Hybrid-model Here To Stay?

I don’t think this is a fad at all. There is no question that physical intervention as the first line of defense for field service will be a thing of the past even once COVID passes. However, I think the emphasis on hybrid is key to its longevity and success.

Our research indicated that almost half (48%) of respondents stated that they believe their customers will still perceive a greater value in face-to-face service calls, while only 13% believed that their customers would see greater value in remote services alone and just over a third (39%) state that they believe their customers will see equal value in both (fig 1)

So, the challenge remains, if a hybrid-model is the New Normal, how do we make it accessible and affordable to organizations of all sizes?

These shifting trends led FieldAware down a path towards a new approach to thinking about and package our platform as a field service hub. The hub approach involves expanding and strengthening the depth of our solution’s “core” field service capabilities to create a system-of-record for all field service activities (robust technician enablement, advanced scheduling & optimization, workforce management, etc.).

It also requires broader exploiting our open API/architecture to expand back-office connectivity and build embedded capabilities to tap into best-of-breed technologies to easily and affordably provide access to these best-in-class solutions.

The service hub is a different approach. It enables service providers to establish new best-in-class service delivery models by building upon the digital field service infrastructure that FieldAware provides.

This is achieved by enabling best-of-breed specialist point solutions to be quickly and affordably integrated into the service hub to form an integral part of a new service delivery model workflow. Providing field service providers the ability to quickly ramp-up or expand their service delivery capabilities to meet new market demands.

As Kris Oldland wrote in our study summary, “We truly are on the cusp of a new era of field service, our industry has slowly been building the blocks of evolution across the last decade. COVID-19 has simply put us all on the same page.”

The infrastructure for connected service has been built. The thinking for advanced services has been considered. Now, as a result of necessity, the digital transformation required has been accelerated.

This powerful combination of events and solution evolution paves the way for the success of a hybrid model that delivers value and helps drive additional growth.

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Further Reading:

• Read more News and Features from FieldAware @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/fieldaware
• Visit FieldAware's website @ www.fieldaware.com
• Read more by Marc Tatarsky @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/marctatartsky
• Read more about digital transformation in service @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/digitaltransformation
• Read more about field service strategies @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/strategy
• Read more about technology adoption in service @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/technologyadoption

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's Field Service hub extends best-in-class customer engagement.

 

FieldAware, the leader in made-for-mobile, cloud-based field service hub solutions, and Localz, the leader in real-time customer communications and service tracking solutions, has announced a partnership to bring day-of-service communications to field service organizations.

To build better service experiences, FieldAware has partnered with Localz to expand its cloud-based field service management hub offerings. Localz On My Way complements and extends the functionality of the FieldAware offering to include automated customer communications, real-time service tracking and feedback capabilities to existing workflows.

Automated Field Service Workflows

The partnership uses FieldAware job data seamlessly integrated with Localz technology to trigger automated customer communication workflows before and on the day of service. Combining fully integrated, automated field service workflows with real-time technician tracking and post-appointment feedback reduces costly truck-rolls, improves service efficiency and increases first-time access. This powerful combination delivers double-digit improvements in customer satisfaction and profitability for service-based organizations across industries.

"Partnering with Localz allows our clients to quickly digitize their day of service operations and deliver customer experiences similar to the likes of Uber and Amazon," said Steve Mason, COO at FieldAware. "As a cutting-edge field service hub enabling field service companies of all sizes to automate processes and streamline operations, it was a natural step to incorporate a best-in-breed customer engagement solution."

"Now more than ever, B2B and B2C customers alike demand transparency and clear communication around service appointments. Our partnership with FieldAware allows us to make processes even easier for companies to get back to business while delivering frictionless experiences for end-customers," said Tim Andrew, CEO of Localz.

For more information, please contact: marc.tatarsky@fieldaware.com 

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• To find out more about FieldAware click here.
• To find out more about Localz click here.
• Read more about customer communication in service @ www.fieldservicenews.com/customerservice 

Steve Mason from FieldAware outlines the importance of technology evolution in your service offering.

As a company’s overall field service maturity evolves, one way to move operational maturity to the next level is to invest in technology. Organizations setting out to implement a field service management solution either for the first time or upgrading an existing solution do so to achieve strategic, operational gains. 

While many operational benefits are achieved from different aspects of a field service management project, arguably automated scheduling and optimization deliver group productivity that significantly moves the operational performance needle.  

The gains that drive companies to implement these solutions include:

• Dramatically improving service quality to the end customer by ensuring the right resource(s) arrive at the right location(s) at the right time with the right parts and equipment.
• Increased operational productivity resulting in completing more jobs per day by the same number of field resources.
• Increased first-time fix rates and reduced repeat visits.
• Lowering greenhouse gases emissions and travel costs by reducing the average miles driven per job.
• Improved staff morale by providing a modern and productive working environment. 

While delivering these results is transformative to the way an organization supports its customers and competes in the market, many companies fail to achieve full potential.  We’ll outline an Evolutionary deployment approach that, when combined with an innovative technology solution, addresses common change management barriers and breaks a decades-old mould.

 

Field Service is Always Evolving

There are two main approaches to implementing scheduling and optimization - Big Bang or Evolutionary. 

Big Bang focuses on designing and building an entirely new service offline and then introducing it in a short-focused transformation program.  It historically worked well in enterprise-wide programs where all the gains are achieved once the project is live and the new operating model is not prone to change.

Evolutionary is an “agile” methodology enabling the introduction of smaller incremental improvements that form a series of steps towards achieving defined business goals. The company achieves incremental ROI with each step and progressively aligns the organization to the evolving new business model.

Traditional scheduling and optimization systems operate by immediately publishing their results live into the field service management solution.   It takes time to configure and model the solution in a safe environment before introducing it and works best in a Big Bang project.  New innovative capabilities provide a fully functional “what-if” environment where planners can work safely, make tweaks, and then publish schedules when they are satisfied with the results.  This new capability allows the Evolutionary approach to be successfully introduced.

Both models require leaders to design how the business will operate at the end of the program.  FieldAware finds the Evolutionary model provides for faster implementation and better adoption by following this approach:

 

Phase 1 

Implement a baseline solution with just the core system parameters configured The objective is to establish a minimum viable production solution to go live as quickly as possible.   Planners, dispatchers, and field resources use the system to manually schedule and deliver service using defined data plus tacit local knowledge.  While the business may be working very similarly to how it did before the project, the operational transparency achieved through the visibility of resources, jobs, and customers on a scheduling Gantt chart, real-time visual maps, and system reports brings a lift to productivity and quality of service.

Phase 2 

Document and capture tacit or tribal knowledge from the planning team and transform the information into system parameters.  This knowledge transfer enables the implementation of semi-automated scheduling, where planners make decisions with system guidance to take into account the rules and constraints that were defined.  Productivity and service quality improves through more compliant decision making.  The data is further refined based on feedback from the teams. 

Phase 3

Semi-automated scheduling and optimization, introduce business scheduling objectives such as minimizing travel time or balancing work across the team into the system configurations.  Planners and dispatchers can use a safe “what-if” planning environment to interact with the optimizer’s calculated results and refine the schedule iteratively.  They dispatch jobs only when the best results are achieved.  During this period, planners refine the optimization engine for various regions and business requirements, improving optimization performance, and improving result quality.

Phase 4

Achieving fully automated scheduling and optimization.  The planning team has transferred all tacit and tribal knowledge into the optimization settings and parameters.  There is complete adoption because they have engaged throughout the change program. The repetitive tasks of planning and scheduling are automated, freeing up resources to address the higher value work that differentiates the business and drives it forward.

The evolutionary journey approach, when combined with advanced systems that contain “what-if” planning capabilities, break down the change management barriers.  Planners and the field resources are part of the change program and contribute to its success.  Each phase, has wins for every stakeholder, and centrally the company benefits include:

1. Increased customer satisfaction
2. Increased bottom line through group productivity improvements
3. Improved working environment for service delivery teams
4. Reduce greenhouse gas emissions

 

Further Reading:

• Read further articles and news from Steve and his colleagues at FieldAware here
• Find out more about the solutions offered by FieldAware here
• Follow Steve Mason on Twitter @stevegmason