Durabook Introduces New Advanced Z14I Fully-Rugged Laptop

Jul 28, 2021 • Hardware • News • Rugged laptops • durabook • GLOBAL • Z14I

Durabook, the global rugged mobile solutions brand owned by Twinhead International Corporation, announced today the introduction of its dramatically upgraded Z14I fully-rugged laptop.

The device is 1.6x faster than its predecessor thanks to the inclusions of the 11th Gen. Intel® Core™ processor. This exceptional performance, combined with other new features, makes the Durabook Z14I the world’s toughest fully-rugged laptop.

What the Manufacturers Say:

“Our new advanced Z14I laptop goes above and beyond the standard requirements to elevate the user experience,” said Twinhead CEO Fred Kao. “This fully rugged laptop solution with its endless customisation capability through its unique expansion box design fits perfectly in professional services and military/government applications such as mapping/dispatching, recording systems, CAD, assets management, and maintenance diagnostics. Additionally, as strong as they come, the unit is the best laptop in the market for outdoor usage.”

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The feature set has been included to specifically support data-intensive fieldwork, where there may be challenging conditions - from rain, drops, dust and extreme temperatures. Its ultra-long battery life of 16 hours, with five minutes of bridge time, ensures data loss and downtime are non-issues. It also allows extensive expansion options so that a single device can be used for multiple applications both in the field and in the command centre. Z14i features including the latest Thunderbolt™ 4, NVMe PCIe SSD drive, 14” FHD 1,000 nits display with proprietary DynaVue® sunlight-readable technology, fanless and hot-swappable battery design, MIL-STD-810H and MIL-STD-461G certifications, and ANSI/ISA 12.12.01-2000, CI/D2 classification.

Faster Computing Power

Equipped with the Tiger Lake mobile processor – 11th Gen. Intel Core i5-1135G7 (2.4GHz -4.2GHz)/i7-1165G7 (2.8GHz -4.7GHz) – the Z14I is up to 1.2x faster than the 10th generation version and 1.6x faster than the 8th gen (used in the previous model), a significant CPU upgrade. In addition, the device supports the Intel vPro platform, bringing together business-class performance, hardware-enhanced security features, modern remote manageability, and PC-fleet stability.

Storage

Equipped with the latest NVMe PCIe SSD technology, the Z14I provides up to 1TB of storage and R/W speeds of up to 2500MB/s, 4x faster than SATA III SSD. It also can accommodate two more internal SSD SATA III drives to maximise onboard storage, providing one each: NVMe PCIe SSD, SATA III SSD, and media bay SATA III SSD. In addition, if more storage is needed, the Z14I can be turned into a rugged portable server by adding a RAID storage extension chassis with up to four additional SATA III SSDs for RAID 0/1/5/10 configurations.

Tremendous I/O Interface Options

When it comes to interface options, the advanced Z14I offers:

Thunderbolt™ 4 technology; 40Gb/s of bandwidth; one port that supports multiple protocols (USB 4, DisplayPort, PCIe); supports up to 2x 4K displays; backward compatibility with Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C; maximum flexibility for docking station;
HDMI and VGA video ports as standard configuration
Equipped with 2x RJ-45 LAN and 2x RS-232 ports

Maximum Connectivity

Featuring advanced wireless technology and improved connection robustness with its Intel® Wi-Fi 6 AX201 and Bluetooth® V5.2, the Z14I is ideal for applications that require an instant response. Wi-Fi 6 AX201 provides a maximum speed of up to 2.4Gbps, 1.39x faster than AC 9260, while its Bluetooth® V5.2 bandwidth is 8x greater than v4.2 and can connect multiple devices at once.

Exceptional Graphics’ Performance

The new Z14I comes with Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics, 150 MHz higher than UHD 620, resulting in 2.75x faster 3D effective speed – more than enough for daily usages. For professionals running massive graphic computing, the Z14I also can be built with optional expansion standalone NVIDIA GeForce® GTX 1050.

More Rugged Than Ever

MIL-STD 810H certified (drop, shock, vibration, rain, dust, altitude, freeze/thaw, high/low temperature, temperature shock, humidity, explosive atmosphere, solar radiation, salt fog, fungus resistance), the Z14I withstands harsh environmental challenges. It also boasts six-foot drop resistance and IP65 certification to stand up to any extreme conditions. In addition, Ultra-long battery life of 16 hours with five minutes of bridge time ensures data loss and downtime are non-issues.

Z14I-intel11

AVAILABILITY

The upgraded Durabook Z14I fully rugged laptop starts at £2,988.

For more information visit Durabook @ https://www.durabook.com/en/products/z14i-laptop/.

Technology Adoption Is Key for the Effectiveness of Service Delivery

Jul 27, 2021 • Features • Aly Pinder • Covid-19 • Servitization and Advanced Services • GLOBAL

Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News is joined on the Field Service News Digital Symposium by Aly Pinder Jr, Program Director of Service Innovation and Connected Products at IDC. Aly is a seasoned expert in the field service industry,...

IFS’ Growth Trajectory Continues with Software Revenue Growth at 20% for H1, Driven by Impressive Rise in Cloud Adoption

Jul 26, 2021 • News • Cloud services • Digital Transformation • field service management • IFS • GLOBAL

IFS, the global cloud enterprise applications company, today announced its financial results for the first half of 2021. After a strong Q1, H1 is evidence that the company is successfully executing its growth strategy and pursuing its transformation...

With more companies recognising the benefits of deploying in the Cloud and turning to IFS to digitally transform and deliver their moments of service, all software revenue line items grew double digit driven by a steep acceleration in cloud revenue (+79% YoY) and recurring revenue (+27% YoY).

Continued improvement in the quality of the revenue mix with software at 74% of revenue AND H1 Cloud revenue up 79% YoY

H1 also saw some key milestones for IFS, including:

The acquisition of Axios Systems extends IFS’s service management proposition into ITSM and ITOM to create the most compelling Enterprise Service Management proposition on the market. Combined with IFS’s leadership in Field Service Management, this secures IFS’s ambition to cement itself as the market leader in broader the Service Cloud space.
The launch of IFS Cloud, IFS Cloud is built using the latest technology including the industry’s most modern UX, digital-twins for enhanced performance, low code/no code development, containerization and a composable architecture which are all critical to creating business agility and realizing value.
The global launch of IFS’s new branding together with the Moment of Service sets out IFS’s clear strategy to align its value proposition to Servitization to enable organisations to deliver their Moment of Service.

IFS CEO, Darren Roos, commented: “IFS is a technology led company with the single goal to make the latest technology advancements available to our customers in a way that creates value fast, has a low total cost of ownership, and is easy to consume and use. H1 is evidence that our strategy to focus on this and to build agility into our product operations so customers can respond to the market fast is working.” Roos continued: “Customers can see the difference in what IFS is doing, and that ensuring their success is why we do what we do. They also see that very few other vendors offer flexibility in deployment, depth in product and powerful technology while shaping their business around customers experience.” Roos concluded: “Delivering our Moment of Service to our customers is a very real mission for IFS, and the sharp rise in cloud adoption is testimony to that.”

IFS Chief Financial Officer, Constance Minc, commented: “I believe our H1 performance is evidence of a strong and successful strategy. We are delivering double digit software revenue growth at 20% and our share of software revenue and recurring revenue continue to increase improving future performance predictability.” Minc added: “The upward trend in our performance is not only present in the last 6 months but over the long term as demonstrated by the double-digit growth in LTM software revenue for the past 3.5 years.”

Other financial highlights include:

H1 software revenue was SEK 2.6bn, an increase of 20% Year on Year
H1 recurring revenue was SEK 2bn, an increase of 27% Year on Year and representing more than 80% of software revenue
H1 cloud revenue increased 79% Year on Year representing more than 39% of software revenue
Proportion of license revenues from net new customers is 54% of total

* Note: all figures based in Swedish Krona and reported in constant currency.

How the Role of the Service Engineer Can Evolve and Adapt to the Rapid Changes in Service Delivery

Jul 23, 2021 • Features • Aly Pinder • Covid-19 • Servitization and Advanced Services • GLOBAL

Largest Telecommunications Group in the Americas Selects OverIT's SPACE1 SaaS Solution to Support Advanced AI-Based Remote Assistance for Over 2,000 Call Center Agents

Jul 22, 2021 • News • Artificial intelligence • Augmented Reality • Digital Transformation • OverIT • Telecommunications • GLOBAL

The largest telecommunication company in the Americas has selected OverIT's SPACE1 to help transform the customer experience for their broadband and television services for their users in the Americas.

SPACE1's unique ability to combine augmented reality-powered remote assistance with guided digital instructions delivered improved interactions between agents and customers, resulting in the telco group choosing SPACE1 during testing to replace their existing remote assistance platform.

This Telco giant was looking for a solution that could support the following:

Real-time customer engagement from SMS or WhatsApp for session control and collaboration
Digital work instructions for agents
Intelligent indexing and re-purposing of interactions for training and knowledge management

Agents being able to interact easier with end-customers by having preliminary virtual calls to triage results in reduced field technician visits to customer homes by 50% and improved first-time fix rates by 70%. Using Artificial Intelligence, agents from 7 different call centers are equipped with more efficient tools in real-time. They can interact, capture, and record their experiences with the end-customer, which are then processed by and shared within the entire organization.

One of the Telco group's essential requirements was the ability for SPACE1 to integrate seamlessly into their current tools. SPACE1's proven track record with integration has presented them with the right choice for their business compared to other AR providers.

"The selection of OverIT's SaaS offering by the largest Telecommunications group in the Americas marks a new milestone for OverIT's SPACE1 supporting B2C business models. OverIT's industrial-grade AI-based remote collaboration and knowledge management platform is unparalleled in the industry and the only capable of offering complex virtual collaboration scenarios. This contract definitely strengthens the explosive growth of the subsidiary in North America", said Alejandro Nestares, SVP and GM OverIT Americas.

Backed by US capital with development headquarters in Italy and main US offices in Boston and Miami, OverIT is a multinational company with more than 20 years of international and cross-industry experience in Field Service Management. The firm is recognized by premier global advisory and consulting organizations as a leading vendor in FSM and AR industries. 

IFS acquires Customerville

Jul 21, 2021 • News • Digital Transformation • field service management • IFS • GLOBAL • customerville

IFS, the global cloud enterprise applications company, announces that it has acquired Customerville.

Design-Driven Feedback™ technology provider, Customerville, is an award-winning feedback platform that elevates feedback and listening across the entire customer journey, blending technology, design, and behavioral science to emulate how people naturally share and respond to feedback.

The acquisition creates a uniquely strong proposition for IFS. IFS enables customers to orchestrate their customers, people and assets to deliver outstanding moments of service. In order to ensure these moments of service are indeed outstanding and critically, meeting customer expectations feedback is essential. By embedding the ability to gather the voice of the customer at the moment of service, IFS will enable companies to perfect these moments of service.

Customerville to be integrated into the IFS Cloud proposition helping IFS customers increase engagement, improve revenue and profitability, and drive product, service, and outcome innovation.

IFS has a long-established relationship with Customerville with the tool deeply entrenched in its own VoC program. The customer sentiment analysis and the really unique view of the intelligence Customerville brings to IFS has played a significant part in how IFS has developed its services, how it developed IFS Cloud, and is continuing to shape its customer Life Cycle Experience program and culture.

The acquisition further cements IFS’s commitment to deliver the capabilities organizations need as they shift their business models away from selling products alone. As companies increasingly focus on design and innovation for service, they are asking for capabilities that helps them understand their customers and their needs better and maintain a dialogue over time. With the acquisition of Customerville, IFS is responding directly to this need.

Darren Roos, IFS CEO, commented: “Customerville is highly differentiated in its field because it is Design-Driven, unlike competitors that offer surveys in static and flat formats, Customerville transforms customer surveys into rich, interactive experiences elevating customer response rates by between 400% and 600%. Successful VoC programs are proven to increase revenue, reduce costs and create a customer centric culture”. Roos continued “Providing this capability to every IFS customer as part of IFS Cloud means empowering them to not only deliver products or services based on customer insights but to do so at the early design stage which creates significant business value.”

Max Israel, CEO of Customerville, commented: “Our goal at Customerville is to show companies they can own the narrative and go beyond emailing dry reports; this is a fundamental shift for companies looking to deepen their understanding of the customer journey and make smarter decisions. With IFS we saw a meeting of minds in the desire to create a mechanism that would enable businesses to embed surveys into their own customers’ journeys.” Israel added “IFS is committed to enabling customers to deliver amazing Moments of Service and we love the team’s passion for creating great experiences. Customerville fits right into that mindset and is a natural extension of IFS’s proposition and we look really forward to our joint successes”.

Customerville surveys are beautifully designed, thoughtfully structured and aligned to the customer journey to create an engaging experience and provide insights decision makers can act upon. The value is not limited to customer engagement and can extend to create better engagement internally with stakeholders, people, managers, employees as well as throughout the ecosystem with partners, suppliers, and others that impact success.

With its main operations based out of Seattle, WA and in Valencia Spain, Customerville offers an advanced survey tool which transforms data into an interactive Design-Driven Feedback™ platform. The offering is designed to generate significantly higher engagement and response rates from customers and address the declining feedback rates resulting from the quarter of a trillion surveys sent out globally every year. Customerville has a comprehensive solution that integrates feedback collection, analysis, distribution, and action into a single, interconnected platform, to help understand and improve CX.

The Evolution of Quality Service

Jul 21, 2021 • Features • Aly Pinder • Covid-19 • Servitization and Advanced Services • GLOBAL

Service Insights, Aquant’s New AI Tool, is the Missing Link in Exceptional Customer Experiences

Jul 13, 2021 • Features • Artificial intelligence • Digital Transformation • technology • Aquant • GLOBAL

The platform converts messy service data into detailed insights for service executives, providing visibility into customers at risk of churn and workforce training opportunities.

Service executives, do you want to see into the future and prevent customer disasters ahead of a negative Net Promoter Score (NPS) or service escalation? Aquant’s Service Insights makes that possible by doing all the complex data analysis for you.

“Historically, service decisions have been made using only a fraction of available service data. That causes blind spots into customer satisfaction and creates an environment of reactive problem-solving. If you wait until you receive a negative NPS, it’s too late,” says Shahar Chen, CEO and co-founder, Aquant. “The new normal in service requires providers to approach customers with solutions before a customer comes to a provider with a complaint.”

That kind of data-driven decision-making fosters better customer experiences and improves service outcomes. But before you can make informed decisions, you need a clear picture of what story the data is telling — and that’s been a roadblock for many organizations.

Service Insights Curates and Analyzes Disparate Data and Provides Actionable Recommendations

Service_Insights_Dashboard

“We’ve worked with leading service organizations to build a powerful analytics tool that is designed for business users,” adds Assaf Melochna, president and co-founder, Aquant. “Service Insights provides targeted information in the language that service leaders understand, and it does so in days, without the need for a multi-department deployment.”

Service Insights is Not a BI Tool. It’s an Entire Data Science Team at Your Fingertips

Aquant delivers a 360-degree view of the service lifecycle. Unlike traditional BI tools, Service Insights is able to access more of your data, and then analyze and interpret it — without the need for a team of data scientists. Users will see immediate value following a simple deployment process. Isolated data points become descriptive and predictive intelligence presented through auto-generated reports and easy-to-access graphical dashboards. Here’s what’s possible with Service Insights:

Mine insights out of your (un)structured service data - Gain a deeper dimension of insight into your unstructured data with Aquant’s Service Intelligence Engine by identifying key symptom and solution data directly from customer comments, call center agent notes, field technician debriefs, and machine log files. Formerly hidden data becomes a powerful decision-making tool.
Generate service performance and risk models - Service Insights automatically generates trends, recommendations, industry benchmarks, and predictions based on more than 5 million service tickets from manufacturers and service providers. Leverage Aquant’s predictive modeling to create customer risk scorecards, and manage workforce performance, and training strategies.
Get the right insight at the right time - Need a quick summary of your business, a snapshot of customers, or an overview of the workforce before your next meeting? Aquant auto-generates easy-to-read overviews for each customer or service provider, identifying key statistics and important trends. Focus on the most critical service issues without having to dig into dashboards.

To learn more or schedule a demo, get in touch.

3 Tips to Quickly Scale Your Appliance or Food Service Repair Business

Jul 12, 2021 • Features • service excellence • technology • Aquant • Covid-19 • Leadership and Strategy • GLOBAL

In this article from Aquant, we look at three tips to scale appliance and food repair businesses rapidly with the help of easy-to-use AI tools.

Service businesses are busy in 2021, and all indicators point to steady — or even above-average demand — lasting for the foreseeable future. Typically, high demand is great for business, but nothing has been typical about service in the last year. Many companies, especially owner-operator repair businesses, are turning away customers and additional revenue because they’re at capacity.

What Challenges Do Service Companies Face?

While industry demand has outstripped technician supply for at least the last decade, most businesses were able to manage — but COVID exacerbated the challenges of a sector already pushed to its limits. Some of the biggest contributing factors include:

● A lack of qualified appliance repair technicians

● The need to ramp up service teams quickly due to heavy demand post-Covid

● Increased repairs due to heavy home appliance usage during the pandemic

● Supply chain shortages that resulted in fewer new appliances available for purchase, creating an avalanche effect: consumers and business delayed new purchases, and older equipment required more frequent maintenance and repair

● Preferences for remote resolution options

Service businesses, from home appliance to food equipment repair and maintenance, are experiencing such a high volume of service requests that the search for qualified technicians has reached a tipping point.

“Repair companies are triaging calls, hiring new employees and navigating backlogs from the broken supply chain for parts,” states the Washington Post. That was just one account of many from an in-depth article that details the extent of the gap between service provider availability and customer demand across the country.

But rapid hiring, especially when paired with a scarcity of parts, puts added pressure on service providers who are already maxed out. Sound familiar?

problem-solution-triage-screenshot

What Challenges Do Service Companies Face?

New, easy-to-use AI tools are available to help service companies of all sizes upskill a new crop of employees quickly. This ultimately makes it possible for your business to take on extra demand while still providing exceptional customer experiences.

1. Upskill the New Workforce Quickly to Slash the Skills Gap

The workforce shortage is not new. Skilled trade positions, particularly technician and engineer roles, have been the hardest to fill. There are other obstacles compounding the issues, too.

The Baby Boomer retirement wave is in full swing. Your most senior techs are leaving and taking all their repair knowledge with them.

Millennials and Gen Z employees approach work differently. The two youngest generations leave jobs nearly twice as often as their older counterparts. This result is an increasing skills gap, and most in the industry don’t have the resources or budget to spend months or years training employees.

A better solution: Hire motivated employees with minimal appliance repair experience and quickly turn them into seasoned experts in weeks instead of years. That’s possible using technology that provides accurate recommendations with as much ease as a Google search.

How Aquant helps: Our service engine has digested and analyzed every major home appliance and food service equipment repair manual, combining them with real-life best practices from veteran, certified technicians. The intelligent tool is easy enough for any member of the workforce to use. That empowers every member of the workforce to perform as well as your longest-tenured employees.

When knowledge is easier to acquire, employees can work on honing soft skills like customer service and relationship building.

2. Increase Your First Time Fix Rate

It’s easier said than done. If everyone on the team could make accurate repairs more quickly, you could take on more clients and bill for more services. Bumping up your team’s first time fix rate is challenging in the face of other demands, especially with a more junior workforce — but it’s possible.

A better solution: Make sure that dispatch diagnoses the problem correctly during the initial customer complaint call. Then provide the technician with all the relevant information before they arrive on the job.

How Aquant helps: With a click of a button, your team can access information from all the major appliance and equipment manufacturers and pinpoint the problem and necessary parts needed with a high degree of accuracy. This increases the chances of your technician arriving with the right knowledge and the right parts to fix the issue on the first try.

3. Offer Clients Remote Resolution Options

How many times have technicians been dispatched to a job site, only to arrive and find that the solution was as simple as hitting the restart button or flipping a switch? Customers don’t want to wait days for a solution that they could have fixed themselves in minutes. And your business can’t maintain wasted truck rolls in the face of a demand avalanche.

A better solution: Train customer support to resolve less complex issues during the initial customer call. Instead of having them flip through manuals or consult decision trees (which takes time and can be frustrating), give them options to triage issues in a matter of minutes using an intelligent, digital tool.

How Aquant can help: We’ve created an intelligent — and evolving — database of service information based on millions of service tickets. Using the smart triage system, your support agent walks through two to four service issue scenarios with the customer, and the tool identifies the most likely solution. If it’s a simple fix, you can guide the customer through remote resolution.

Increase the Number of Brands You Support While Scaling Up

In addition to helping your technicians solve problems faster and more accurately, Aquant is like a cheat sheet for repair and maintenance companies. With data from all the top major home appliance and food service equipment brands, you have access to a pre-populated database with the information any technicians need to get the job done, regardless of the brand.

ARCHIVE FOR THE ‘global’ CATEGORY

What the Manufacturers Say:

Faster Computing Power

Storage

Tremendous I/O Interface Options

Maximum Connectivity

Exceptional Graphics’ Performance

More Rugged Than Ever

AVAILABILITY

For more information visit Durabook @ https://www.durabook.com/en/products/z14i-laptop/.

Want to know more?

Further Reading:

Continued improvement in the quality of the revenue mix with software at 74% of revenue AND H1 Cloud revenue up 79% YoY

Further Reading:

Want to know more?

Further Reading:

Further Reading:

Customerville to be integrated into the IFS Cloud proposition helping IFS customers increase engagement, improve revenue and profitability, and drive product, service, and outcome innovation.

Further Reading:

Want to know more?

Further Reading:

Service Insights Curates and Analyzes Disparate Data and Provides Actionable Recommendations

Service Insights is Not a BI Tool. It’s an Entire Data Science Team at Your Fingertips

Further Reading:

Further Reading:

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