Field Service News

M5STACK Announce World's First Programmable Camera

Aug 16, 2019 • News • AI • Hardware • IoT

M5STACK expands further into AIOT(AI+IOT) edge computing market with the K210 RISC-V 64 AI Camera.

M5STACK has launched the K210 RISC-V 64 AI Camera— an innovative machine vision and machine learning programmable camera that’s competitively priced to meet the needs of a rapidly growing AI market.

AI cameras help engineers quickly implement machine learning, image recognition, and speech recognition functions, and the K210 RISC-V 64 AICamera supports OpenMV and MicroPython to make programming on easier while delivering the maximum efficiency and flexibility needed for advanced level big data computation.

M5stick-V AI Camera features its integration with machine vision capabilities, featuring the unprocessed acceptability to AI Visioning with high energy effenciency and low cost. We co-oped with Sipeed providing the MicroPython environment makes programming onM5stick-V easier.

Made with the incredibly powerful machine learning AI chip 'K210'— Kendryte K210 -an edge computing system-on-chip (SoC) with dual core 64bit RISC-V CPU and state-of-art neural network processor. a high-performance hardware accelerator that offers superior low power vision processing speed and accuracy— K210 RISC-V 64 AI Camera comes with numerous built-in advantages over its competition.

From its KPU high performance convolutional neural network (CNN) hardware accelerator, powerful calculation capabilities, and relatively low cost high-performance AI core to its exclusive hardware package with camera, horn, microphone, screen, gyroscope, battery, wireless communication and complete enclosure, K210 RISC-V 64 AI Camera was built from the inside out to be a powerful, ready-to-use product-level AI application terminal.

The module comes with the OmniVision OV7740 sensor, using the OmniPixel®3-HS technology, providing a best-in-class low light sensitivity, making it ideal for machine vision. In addition to an OV7740 sensor, M5stick-V features more hardware resources such as speaker with built-in I2S Class-D DAC, MEMS Microphone, IPS screen, 6-axis IMU, 200mAh Li-po battery, and more.

More than the visioning, M5stick-V also features the embedded APU - Audio Processor. With its hardware beam-forming support and dual 512-point FFT units, the M5stick-V is also capable of a series of machine hearing works like voice wake-up to speech recognition.

K210 RISC-V 64 AI Camera provides built-in image processing model libraries for advanced real-time facial and object recognition that makes it perfect and ready-to-use for:

Face recognition/detection
Object detection/classification
Obtaining size and coordinates of target in real time
Obtaining type of detected target in real time
Shape recognition
Video/Audio Record/Display
Game simulator

M5STACK technology is already employed by engineers and creators and can be used in a number of practical industrial scenarios such as for creating and programming logistics sorting robots, intelligent security in buildings, autonomous driving, and countless others.

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Finance Sector is a One-Stop Shop For Attackers, Says Report

Aug 15, 2019 • Management • News • cyber crime • research report • Cyber Security • report • F-secure

F-Secure’s research highlights the broad range of threats facing the global finance industry.

Research Finds 3PLs Lack Innovation

Aug 14, 2019 • News • management • report • Parts Pricing and Logistics

Study from SCALA reveals third-party logistic companies (3PLs) are falling behind in innovation and productivity.

Third-party logistics companies (3PLs) are lacking in proactivity and continuous improvement, according to the latest research from supply chain and logistics consultancy, SCALA.

SCALA surveyed a selection of the UK’s best-known businesses and 3PLs (whose revenue runs into the billions and whose number of clients run into the thousands) to ascertain companies’ satisfaction rates and areas of concern regarding the performance of their 3PLs.

The findings revealed that a key shortfall in 3PLs’ performance is their inability to innovate and bring fresh ideas and solutions to the table. More than half (59%) of the companies surveyed stated that their 3PL is ‘poor’ at introducing new initiatives. None said that their 3PL is extremely good at this.

However, the research highlighted contrasting views from 3PLs; the majority of which were overly optimistic in their performance. Indeed, 84% of 3PLs said they are good at introducing new ideas and initiatives.

John Perry, managing director at SCALA, commented: “These findings show that there is clearly a major conundrum for both parties. There is definitely a feeling amongst client companies that 3PLs do not bring enough innovation, particularly after the 3PL has won the contract.

“However, in our experience, the 3PL’s response to this is often to point out that the greatest improvement potential comes from looking at the supply chain and service more holistically, but they find their clients can be resistant to this level of collaboration. Yes, there are opportunities for standalone innovation in operations, but greater impact can be gained by looking at logistics as a whole. The two respective companies need to work together to truly achieve that.

“More upfront discussion and negotiation, together with ongoing regular reviews and sharing of information, would lead to more consistent expectations and better performance.”

Participating companies that shared their views in SCALA’s research cover a wide range of sectors but predominantly operate in the grocery, FMCG, electrical appliance and homewares sectors. The 3PLs range from regional providers to the very largest in the UK, with the majority having in excess of 100 clients.

Aeromark Provides Real-time Multilingual Field Service Solution for UCC Coffee

Aug 13, 2019 • Software & Apps • News • aeromark • Catering and Hospitality • UCC Coffee

UCC Coffee uses Aeromark platform for its service delivery.

UCC Coffee, the leading total coffee solution provider, is using Aeromark’s real-time multi-lingual Service Management platform to deliver fast, effective service to its customers.

The company provides a market leading Total Coffee Solution to some of the industry’s leading foodservice, hospitality and retail companies including restaurants, pubs, QSR, contract caterers and grocery multiples.

In the UK, a team of more than 160 specialist coffee engineers, use smart-tech to look after all aspects of commercial coffee machine care; from full-service maintenance to reactive callouts. UCC Coffee’s customers rely on the company both for exceptional coffee quality, consistency and to ensure their equipment is always available; any downtime must be resolved in the fastest possible time.

Using Aeromark’s real-time service management platform has enabled UCC Coffee’s operations team to achieve a consistently high first-time fix rate.

UCC coffee has also recently extended its service capability to manage planned and reactive maintenance for its pan-European customers. “Providing world class service to our customers, underpinned by smart technology, is central to our market leading Total Coffee Solution for foodservice, hospitality and retail businesses across the UK, Ireland and, in Europe,” said Elaine Swift, Regional Director (Northern Europe), UCC Coffee.

Using dynamic, automated multilingual workflows, Aeromark’s real-time, multi-lingual Service Management platform enables companies to manage the unique challenges of operating a field service workforce across multiple regions while delivering the best possible service, regardless of location.

The service request lifecycle is streamlined from start to resolution; providing complete visibility and a full audit trail of customers’ equipment, service history, stock consumption and engineers performance. Uniquely, once a service call is scheduled for a European location all job information is automatically translated to the engineer’s local language.

UCC Coffee’s service centre receives requests via phone, email and self-service portal forming the work queue from which planners quickly and easily create service team schedules using multiple scheduling options.

Schedules are optimised to real-time, providing planners with a visual view of the status of jobs as the day progresses. They can see at a glance when service calls are completed quicker than expected and can add additional calls to an engineer’s day. Equally, if jobs overrun, work can be reallocated to other engineers, ensuring customer service levels are met and service efficiency is maximised.

Intelligent workflow translation automatically moves jobs designated for engineers in European locations to the relevant language workflow with job details, job sheets and related forms presented to engineers in their local language; streamlining and standardising service delivery.

Information and costs applied to the job, including usage of parts and engineers’ time on site, is automatically translated back to English and passed to the UK workflow and billing system for invoicing.

Customers of UCC Coffee can also submit service requests directly into UCC Coffee’s work queue, via a portal; giving the customer unparalleled visibility and control and increasing the efficiency of the service supply chain. A true example of a service ecosystem and partnerships powered by technology.

Service Execution Solutions: is it worth it?

Aug 13, 2019 • News • management • PTC • first time fix • Service Execution Management

Is investing in service execution solutions enough to improve first-time fix rates and achieve high levels of equipment uptime? Chris Mitchell from PTC explains more...

Is investing in service execution solutions enough to improve first-time fix rates and achieve high levels of equipment uptime? Chris Mitchell from PTC explains more...

Improved asset uptime, first time fix rates, repeat visit avoidance; all are undoubtedly some of today’s OEM’s most relevant metrics and challenges: revenues from service offerings, whether it be PBL contracts or more traditional service models, are too significant to be ignored.

Not least through industrial applications of the IoT we see an abundance of applications and use cases relating to operating and servicing equipment, whether in the field or in the factory. The way we can now easily connect to assets and operate, monitor and diagnose them remotely is simply fantastic.

Many also focus on applications of augmented reality to not only improve the way equipment is maintained in established markets, but also how it can be maintained in emerging markets, where experience and training is simply lacking.

The trap many OEMs fall into, however, is the notion that investing into the improvement of such service execution challenges is sufficient.

Improving asset uptime in this way has certainly never been easier to accomplish - all the enabling technology is here today! Adopting these new technologies to improve the service experience are essential. However, there is a huge aspect to servicing assets, which is still widely ignored: Spare parts inventories are not optimised – so the right part is too often not available at the right time, place and cost: Companies’ investment in their spare parts inventories are simply too high.

Balance sheets are laden with huge amounts of cash that are tied up in incorrect inventories and need to be freed up to be spent in other areas of the business or to simply improve operating margins. Bills for expediting shipments and cannibalising production inventory are largely too high.

The challenge is that unlike production inventory planning, spare parts demand, and therefore inventory, is much more difficult to predict. Too often historical demand is used to forecast but, in most cases with low levels of accuracy.

Not often enough is spare part demand forecasted by employing causal factors, where forecasts are calculated based on your equipment usage rates and average values for casuals, such as meantime between failure rates. OEMs would now able to use real-time usage data and predicted failures of the asset to further improve forecasts and therefore optimising parts availability further.

"Too often historical demand is used to forecast but, in most cases with low levels of accuracy..."

Regrettably the required information is often not provided by other parts of the organisation, the negative consequences of which are not addressed in the organisation. Levels of equipment uptime and part availability are far lower than they should be. Brand loyalty suffers, customers buy parts (and equipment) elsewhere and revenues are impacted.

So how do we solve the conundrum of keeping inventories low whilst exceeding customer expectations in terms of equipment uptime and part availability?

The approach needs to be all encompassing if you really want to offer first class service to your customers at the lowest possible cost and should incorporate the following:

1. Improve parts availability by improving forecasting, inventory optimisation and supply planning - this will drive immense value within a few months of implementing and will drastically reduce inventories, equipment downtime and improve first time fix rates. You now have a parts supply chain, which perfectly supports an optimised service and repair network.

2. Automate field service operations by ways of a connected optimisation solution wherever possible, by leveraging exception monitoring and failure prediction from connected assets - let the asset tell you it’s failing rather than the customer when it’s too late - this will further reduce downtime and speed up repair time frames.

3. Enable the field technician (or customer) in the most effective way, by leveraging digital service content delivery through phones, tablets or VR, AR or MR headsets, leveraging augmented and virtual reality technologies. This will speed up repair or maintenance steps and ensures technicians operate effectively and based on the most up to date information available, information that is delivered from downstream CAD and PLM solutions.

4. Ensure service contracts and parts are priced correctly. This way you ensure sales are profitable and customers return to you time and time again for repeat business. This is also the ultimate way to combat the threat from copy pars.

There are many more applications of the above technologies, not least training and enablement, but hopefully it becomes clear that implementing one technology without the other will only unlock some of the value.

So in summary: the key to an optimised field service operation is not just the use of best of breed execution tools such as AR, Field Service Management and Service Parts information. The technician visit can only be successful first time if the correct spare part is made available, i.e. if the demand for the spare part has been predicted as accurately as possible and has been made available to the technician!

Chris Mitchell is Director Business Transformation - Servigistics Business Unit at PTC.

Localz Opens US Branch

Aug 12, 2019 • News • future of field service • Business Expansions • localz

Software outfit launches US arm in up and coming tech region Culver City.

UK Consumer Confidence Remains Low as Companies Look to Provide Human Touch, survey finds

Aug 09, 2019 • News • deloitte • report • Customer Satisfaction and Expectations

Consumer confidence remains flat in Q2 amid continued economic uncertainty, according to the Deloitte Consumer Tracker Survey.

Findings from the Deloitte Consumer Tracking Survey has revealed the UK consumer confidence index is -8 per cent; down four percentage from this time last year. Customer experience expectations, however, show no signs of slowing, with over half of UK consumers feeling more loyal towards brands that show a deeper understanding of their preferences and priorities. This means that now more than ever, businesses will be focusing on providing a seamless digital customer experience, optimising customer engagement.

While technologies like AI and automation will be critical for businesses to remain competitive in these times of such low consumer confidence, it is important not to overlook the importance of in-person human interaction. Retailers with omnichannel strategies retain an average of 89 per cent of their customers, according to Teleperformance DIBS, and any businesses failing to focus directly on customer experience will struggle with customer retention.

Rajnish Sharma, from Teleperformance Digital Integrated Business Services, comments: “With people so worried about their personal finances in the increasing economic uncertainty, it will take a lot more than just a good product or service to persuade the average consumer to hand over their cash. Consumers are looking for frictionless, hassle-free and personalised customer experiences. In fact, in the next year the customer experience will be more important than product and price. To remain competitive in these times of economic uncertainty, businesses need to be available to provide round-the-clock, real-time service – at the consumer’s convenience. While AI bots are widely being introduced to improve engagement and streamline communication, it’s important to note that human interactions are not just cognitive, but social and emotional.”

Sharma continues: “Regardless of whether the consumer is interacting with a brand from behind a screen, over the phone or in-person, they want their issue or query solved as quickly as possible. 96 per cent of customers who have to expend a high level of effort to get their issues resolved become more disloyal, compared to just 9 per cent who have a low-effort experience, according to Gartner.

“AI-powered chat bots act as an enabler for customer service teams and companies need to ensure they do not underestimate the emotional intelligence which only comes from human agents. While confidence in the economy remains low and the rate of spending growth slows down, it’s the businesses that recognise the human nuance that will be the ones that stay afloat in the UK’s extremely competitive marketplace.”