Covid-19 affected client influences swift deployment of Merged Reality remote assistance solution.

 

A software solution using Merged-Reality (MR) has been made available by IFS after a customer affected by the impact of Covid-19 required a remote solution to remain operating.

Impact of Pandemic on the Field Service Sector

The technology's route to market came in record time following a request from one of IFS' long-standing customers, Munters, who had been monitoring the spread of the outbreak.

At the beginning of March and with the knock-on effect of global travel restrictions soon to take hold, the global supplier of sustainable air-treatment solutions, realised a solution would be required if service tasks were to continue.

“Our President Peter is in Italy, and as Coronavirus began to spread, he saw the immediate need to leverage remote assistance to help support both our field and manufacturing operations,” says Roel Rentmeesters, Munters Director of Global Customer Service. “By the beginning of March, it became urgent for us to get this technology in place to continue to be able to serve our customers and support our manufacturing operations.”

Rentmeesters contacted IFS on 6 March and the company were training staff six days later on the technology.

Currently, the firm are expanding the use of the technology to more than 200 users globally, which it hopes to complete within a fortnight.

IFS Remote Assistance utilises MR technology to create a real-life situational context that engineers can share with appropriate product experts operating remotely.

The solution blends to real-time video streams into an interactive environment for mobile devices. The app also includes, telestration, document sharing, three-party calls, screen capture, recording, call tagging and satisfaction surveys.

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Further Reading: 

• Find out more about IFS' remote assistance solutions @ https://www.ifs.com/corp/solutions/service-management/remote-assistance/
• Read a detailed overview of this case study @ https://blog.ifs.com/2020/03/munters-rolls-out-ifs-remote-assistance/

What reality are you using in your service programme? Virtual or augmented? Or are you leaning towards mixed? Mark Glover attempts to simplify the technology while keeping an eye on the real world.

Gimmick or game-changer? Danny Wieder, Field Service Consultant at HSO ponders if mixed reality can ultimately benefit the sector.


Wearing a Mixed Reality headset, an engineer can share what they see and communicate with another engineer miles away. They might also be able to simultaneously call up manuals or other information through a heads-up display and view details provided by their assisting engineer.

Last month saw the launch of Hololens 2, the much-improved successor to Microsoft’s mixed reality headset Hololens. Microsoft is not a lone voice in the dark, with a plethora of other companies working on technologies with similar applications. Nreal and Zappar are just two of the start-ups trying to cash in on this emerging market. Are their investors just taking a gamble or are there good reasons for their investments?

This makes one wonder – is Mixed Reality just another gimmick or could it bring major benefits to Field Service operations? I suspect the latter, and here is why:

The adoption of new technologies tends to follow the S-Curve. As a product or technology gains traction in the market, its market begins to grow. At first, the growth is slow, almost imperceptible. It then develops more rapidly as consumers begin to adopt the technology. As the market expands, that growth continues. Finally, a host of factors cause the growth rate to decline and then gradually growth tapers off as it becomes a replacement market.

"The adoption of new technologies tends to follow the S-Curve..."

So where is Mixed Reality on the S-Curve? In his much quoted “Diffusion of Innovation”, Everett Rogers terms the first group to adopt a new technology as “Innovators”. Innovators are characterised by a willingness to take risks, have the highest social status, have financial liquidity and have closest contact to scientific sources and interaction with other innovators. Their risk tolerance allows them to adopt technologies that may ultimately fail. Financial resources help absorb these failures. I would suggest that the US military, who have just placed a large Hololens order, fits squarely into this category.

The next stage of adoption belongs to the early adopters. Early adopters have a high degree of opinion leadership as well as high status and financial liquidity. Whilst facts and figures are still sparse, anecdotal evidence suggest that we may already have started to move into this phase. The companies I hear about who are investigating Mixed Reality are in niche markets, very profitable and their engineers are highly skilled. They are happy to take some risks and try innovative solutions. This suggests that we may be about to accelerate fast up the S- Curve, but what benefits can we expect?

Well, wouldn’t it be nice if we could bottle skills and experience. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case and wherever we look we encounter skills shortages. Be it HVAC, Gas Central Heating or High-Speed Printing; in Cornwall, London or Scotland – companies struggle to recruit experienced engineers. In niche sectors it is the worst. When baby boomer engineers are retiring they the take their skills with them and it’s hard to replace them. Would it not be great if a senior engineer could guide the engineer on site through fault-finding and repair from the comfort of the office (or even from home), in real time? How many senior engineers could you retain this way?

But then, do we need to stay with the traditional model of service visits. In many sectors it is common that the first visit is about identifying the fault and the parts required to fix it. We may try to do this over the phone but often without success. How often could this be done by customer staff with guidance from a skilled engineer delivered remotely via Mixed Reality? I imagine it would be a lot, if it was easy enough. How much would that improve engineer productivity and first-time-fix rates and fix-times? And what about inaccessible locations or when the fault occurs off-shore or on a ship? The benefits of Mixed Reality for fault finding and assisted repairs are massive. Of course sometimes it’s as simple as getting a second opinion about a tricky issue.

Then there is training. Ever simulated a fault and waited forever whilst six trainees take turns resolving it with their heads in a confined space? Wearing Mixed Reality headsets, they could be right there with the trainer inside the machine.

These are just a few examples. As technologies expand and become cheaper, their applications multiply. Just think what you could do with a mobile phone 10 years ago and what we use it for now. No wonder some industry analysts expect shipments of Mixed Reality devices to exceed five million in the next three years.

So, yes – I see Mixed Reality changing the way we do service, and soon!

Danny Wieder is a Field Service Consultant at HSO.

Sergey Krasovski, Strategic Marketing Analyst, Trimble explores the opportunities that augmented reality can present for field service organisations... 

The mass and wide-scale adoption of augmented and mixed realities are gathering pace across a multitude of industries. To define, augmented reality refers to the process of superimposing a computer-generated image on a user's view of the real world. Mixed reality is the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualizations.

In the field service industry, this emerging technology can play a significant role in changing the way field technicians and the business collaborates to resolve technical issues, provide support and access documentation. Indeed, technologies such as AR smart glasses can overlay digital information (such as text, video or audio) onto the human field of view, interactively and in real-time. ABI Research sees a turning point for AR smart glasses, predicting that 21 million units of AR smart glasses will be shipped in 2020, with sales expected to reach $100 billion.

 

Optimizing Service Workflows

Mixed and AR technologies present strong use cases for the field service industry for optimizing service workflows. The ability to perform time-critical jobs thoroughly, quickly and first time around, by obtaining the right information from the correct source, is one.

Historically, service technicians had to sift through paper manuals or search their own memories to find a fix for complex equipment issues. This was an onerous process to go through and often resulted in a disgruntled customer. Today, however, Augmented Reality headsets provide technicians with the ability to communicate, collaborate and solve issues more efficiently. They could be dispatched to a job where they could see the service manual, real-time data and technical details about the product directly overlaid on it. There would be no need for a clunky laptop, phoning a colleague for assistance or contacting the back office for customer information; everything they need would be accessible with a flick of their head.

There is a big place for Augmented Reality in optimising service workflows. However, deploying new technology takes careful planning to realise the full benefits.

 

Empowering Less Skilled and Ageing Workforces

In mission-critical industries, such as construction, manufacturing and agriculture, ensuring that the service team captures knowledge and transfers it efficiently across the organization is a ‘must have’, not a ‘nice to have’. Asset downtime or system failure is not an option as it may result in entire projects grinding to a halt and monetary losses. Issue resolution needs to be quick and this is where collaborative video tools can best support a less skilled and ageing workforce.

 

"Video collaboration with augmented peer-to-peer help is being designed and implemented to connect less skilled technicians with more skilled ones remotely..."

 

Video collaboration with augmented peer-to-peer help is being designed and implemented to connect less skilled technicians with more skilled ones remotely. A technician with specific areas of expertise may reside in an office and virtually walk an apprentice through a service call, step-by-step. Markups can be made during a video call between an expert and field technician to visually show what needs doing and to be sure the field technician is clear about what to perform service on. The expert can draw a circle or arrow on a screen to highlight a specific area, eliminating costly mistakes.

There are parts of the world where you can’t get the right expertise for a job or flying out a specialist may prove too costly for a company. Augmented reality eradicates these concerns by allowing experts to take those of less skill through the entire process. Not with a manual and not on the phone, but they can actually see what they are doing.

Many technicians are performing this peer-to-peer help in ad hoc ways today; using tools like Facetime and Skype. This, however, has resulted in issues. For example, sending a facetime request to another technician can be very disruptive. It is also difficult for the technician requesting help to know who to contact and if they are available. Whilst the time spent by the expert is not often tracked. For organizations that want to successfully scale this technology, they need to consider how to integrate it more tightly into the service workflow.

 

"As technicians age and a new crop of workers join the business, it is imperative that the latter be able to leverage past knowledge. An ageing workforce is putting pressure on service organisations..."

 

As technicians age and a new crop of workers joins the business, it is imperative that the latter be able to leverage past knowledge. An ageing workforce is putting pressure on service organisations. The benefit of augmented or virtual reality is its potential as a highly detailed, highly visual training tool. Companies are recording repairs being performed on older pieces of equipment to be used as a reference by less experienced technicians. By utilising augmented reality to make markups pointing to specific equipment details, service companies can create a searchable library using descriptive metadata, and hashtags for quick access. This is a great way to offer on-the-job training and avoids the downtime and loss of productivity associated with having the entire team come into the office to learn new techniques.

Collaborative video tools not only provide the field team with the real-time assistance when solving complex issues, they also connect field service to the entire organization. Indeed, video content, such as markups and screenshots, can be captured by augmented reality tools and stored in a cloud. The stored data can then be tied with a work order and include valuable metadata such as geolocation, type of equipment, date of last service etc. If such data is centrally stored and can be easily accessed, it could be used for purposes like new technician training, proof of work and so on.

For more information on how you can look to roll out augmented reality across your field service operations, visit: www.trimblepulse.com

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