With a raft of large platform providers including Salesforce, IFS, Oracle and Microsoft all now offering embedded field service solutions within their wider platforms is there still a market for specialist best-of-breed solution providers? We take a look at the arguments for both stand alone and integrated solutions....

Alongside the question of which type of scheduling engine is correct for your organisation (dynamic, assisted, optimised etc etc), there is also the additional consideration of whether you should opt for a solution that is stand-alone/best-of-breed or one which is fully integrated within your other core business solutions such as an ERP or CRM system?

There are valid arguments made for both sides and, as with every new introduction of technology within a business environment, careful consideration needs to be made as to what will fit best with your existing solutions and your future plans, as ultimately every organisation is unique and will have unique requirements.

However, let’s briefly look at the pros and cons of both stand-alone and integrated solutions.

The case for implementing a standalone/best–of-breed scheduling solution:

The first and perhaps most obvious of these is that the implementation of a standalone system is not necessarily tied into the complete overhaul of business-wide working processes - implementing a scheduling engine really should be viewed as a business not IT exercise.

This means that on a one off basis, implementation and training can generally be swifter than implementing a more encompassing solution such as an ERP.

However, if a company is intending to roll out an entire suite of stand-alone products then the time to implement each will greatly outweigh the time it would take to implement one overall system.

 

The one key area where traditionally best-of-breed solutions have been viewed as often being the more superior option has been in terms of degree of fit.

Generally a best-of-breed solution will have been purchased to fit a particular requirement or need (i.e. mobile workforce scheduling in this instance) and you may well find that certain companies have developed a strong feel and understanding for specific industry verticals – meaning an implementation can often be as close to out-of-the box as possible if you find a company that has worked within your sector and therefore has a feel for some of the nuances of your market.

This leads us to another big benefit of choosing a standalone option in that there is a wider amount of choice available to you.

Firstly, many vendors that also offer their solution as a part of an integrated platform such as IFS or Oracle, will also offer their Field Service Management tools as standalone as well.

So when looking at a standalone option you are able to select across the entirety of the available marketplace, from the well known industry leaders through to smaller vertical specialist providers.

Of course such a wide range of choice can also be a challenge in it’s own right.

And whilst smaller standalone solutions may have perhaps more flexibility and a better understanding of your business, it is important to understand their position in terms of business security - no matter how good their solution you will need some level of ongoing support, so you need to know they will be around for at least the amount of time you intend to use their solution for.

 

The flip side of this is that of course with a stand-alone provider, in a worst case scenario there is always the fact that walking away from a solution that hasn’t delivered all that was promised is potentially less painful than if you have opted for an integrated solution that sits across a number of different divisions within your organisation.

The case for implementing integrated systems:

When we look at the benefits of integrated systems, again there are a number of key arguments as to why this approach has merits.

Perhaps the biggest and most important of these is the easy flow of data across different business units. In an age of Big Data, such seamless transition of data from one business division to another can help deliver a 360 degree view of a customer – something that is seen as the holy grail of business today.

For example, the ability for a sales representative to see that a client has had a number of call outs for service orientated support could open up opportunities for up-selling an improved service package. Similarly, an engineer on-site could potentially see an opportunity for selling some consumable items whilst undertaking a service call and could place this information directly into a CRM directly from his mobile application – something which is relatively easily achieved in many platforms and something which could be a much more cumbersome process with multiple systems in place.

 

Another perfect example of the importance of visibility across a platform could be that if an engineer arrives at a site where the client’s SLA period has expired. All too often such information can be overlooked resulting in that engineer’s work essentially being given away for free.

A second significant benefit of the integrated approach is that many companies will find adoption of new systems a lot easier at the end-user level due to familiarity of the tools.

Platforms that have various functionalities across different business units are likely to have a fundamental terminology, nomenclature, shared short cut buttons, and similar menu configurations etc.

This concept also, of course applies to the support IT departments are able to deliver.

It is far less demanding for an IT team to deliver support across one platform than various stand-alone solutions. Similarly it can also mean that support from the platform vendor is directed to one location, and often one specific account manager rather than having to have multiple vendor support channels in place.

Again such familiarity can improve issue resolution dramatically and this is also an important factor in terms of upgrading a system. With a selection of stand-alone solutions in place your IT department may face an unmanageable stream of continual updates and bug fixing patches, whether you are on a Cloud system or On Premise.

With a platform approach, the vendor is likely to help ease the burden of so many updates by combining many system wide tweaks in each new iteration.

 

One final consideration is that as mentioned above, whilst the implementation of one standalone solution may be swifter, the implementation of a business-wide system ultimately will be more efficient in terms of man-hours allocated to implementation in the longer term.

So in summary, whilst standalone may be more suitable in terms of degree of fit, a fully integrated package is ultimately likely to be more effective in terms of time, cost, resources, and project management in the mid-to long term.

However, a standalone approach does allow you to spread the cost and resources required for implementation and given the ability for scheduling engines to provide clear, tangible ROI within a generally short time frame, best-of-breed solutions could be the right option for those companies looking for direct improvements in the short term.

 

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John Cameron, General Manager, Trimble Field Service Management gives his expert insight into how companies can best make the shift away from manual processes to automated...

Field service companies of all sizes will be at different stages in their scheduling journey. Some will be very experienced with using scheduling automation whilst others are still using manual, paper-based systems to schedule work. Surprisingly, there are many field service businesses out there today that are still at the manual stage and looking to automate their processes for the first time.

With so many advanced scheduling solutions on the market today, it can be a daunting task knowing what type of technology and level of sophistication would be the best fit for a business, as well as how to tackle challenges around change management.

According to Aberdeen Group, 44 per cent of field service managers regard planning and scheduling to be the greatest opportunity for investment. The benefits realised by fully automatic scheduling and optimisation tools are undeniable; allowing the scheduling algorithms to automatically manage resources in the most efficient way not only improves productivity but allows the dispatcher to concentrate on other, more valuable tasks.

[quote float="left"]44 per cent of field service managers regard planning and scheduling to be the greatest opportunity for investment.

However, the change from paper to automatic scheduling is a jump too far for many. A stepped approach or journey is a more sustainable way to manage the business change and ensure that a field service business achieves its primary objective – getting the right technician to the right place at the right time with the tools to do the job, first time.

 

The following article explains the various scheduling strategies as steps, allowing businesses to select the stage that best describes its current operation and identify the goal for its future scheduling needs.

 1.     Paper-based

A dispatcher can typically manage 15-20 technicians via a paper based system. Whilst many service organisations still use paper-based processes today, this is field service scheduling at the simplest level and it can quickly start to fail when volume, complexity or volatility increases.

Often a day’s schedule is forced to change, due to such circumstances as a new high priority service request comes in, a job overruns or a technician gets caught in traffic and arrives late. When circumstances like this happen it becomes very difficult to reconfigure the schedule for the rest of the day, given the number of dependencies, geographic distances and demands of each individual piece of work.

2.     Manual Scheduling

Manual scheduling is characterized by ‘drag and drop’ features whereby a dispatcher can easily drag and drop work orders and tasks onto technicians’ calendars and dispatch work out to them electronically. Typically the system will do some automatic checks once the task is dropped. For example, to check if the technician allocated to a job has the skills to complete it. Manual scheduling offers a more automated and predictive solution to a paper-based system, helping businesses to save time and improve accuracy.

However, as human intervention is heavily involved, it can prove difficult to manage complex scheduling processes via this system.

3.     Intelligent Advisor

A Semi-Automatic scheduling service is invoked by a user, to start an automated process. Although this scheduling system is automatic, it still requires some level of human interaction, which is something few vendors provide yet many businesses prefer as it allows them to maintain some level of control and trust.

[quote float="right"]Having decision making tools built in to a scheduler can also help to alleviate a lot of headaches experienced by a field service manager.

Having decision making tools built in to a scheduler can also help to alleviate a lot of headaches experienced by a field service manager.

 

For large field operations, emergency jobs often come in that need to be added to the day’s schedule so having a tool that advises on the impact of what adding this job in will have before it is assigned can help to prevent the de-railing of a field service operation. Often known as a ‘what-if’ tool or an ‘intelligent advisor’, such a feature allows dispatchers to make quick, informed decisions to keep the best possible quality of the schedule.

For these reasons, transiting from a manual to semi-automatic system is recommended instead of diving head first into a fully automatic process.

4.     Automatic Scheduling & Real-Time Optimization

Some companies may not have the time or resources to drag and drop work orders into manual and semi-automatic systems and check all the details. It can also prove difficult to keep on top of scheduling all of the in-day emergency tasks. Fully automatic scheduling takes the intuitive nature of automated scheduling even further. Such a tool quickly and easily builds schedules automatically and dispatches work to technicians out in the field based on pre-defined parameters. The process completely eliminates manual intervention.

A Case in Point: Pacific Telemanagement Services (PTS)

PTS achieved a 95% job completion rate and 75% productivity increase transitioning from manual to automated scheduling.

The company operates a fleet of 90 mobile workers who service pay phones and pay internet kiosks, as well as perform freezer cleaning and maintenance for their ice cream distribution company, Arctic Express. Until recently, it was using a manual scheduling process to assign tasks each day, which lacked efficiency and productivity suffered as a result.

[quote float="left"]We used to just throw a group of tickets at our technicians in an assigned region to see what they could get done in a day...

“We used to just throw a group of tickets at our technicians in an assigned region to see what they could get done in a day. Each morning they would print out a list of their tasks, then spend a half hour planning routes based on their own knowledge of the area. We saw that this way was not always most efficient,” said Justin Keane, Chief Operating Officer of PTS.

 

The company tried using a map feature to sequence the stops but this took an hour a day for each regional hub, and as they manage 8 regional hubs, it took 8 hours a day to build the routes.

PTS implemented Trimble’s cloud-based scheduling solution to help it improve the efficiency of its scheduling process and raise the productivity level of its workers. By transitioning from manual to semi - automatic scheduling, PTS has been able to cut 3 hours a day spent on routing per dispatcher to about 45 minutes a day — a productivity saving of 75%, or about 9 hours per week. Furthermore, technicians no longer have to plan their own routes, saving an additional 90 hours per week of their time so that they can spend it on completing more jobs per day.

 

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ServicePower Technologies Plc a provider of workforce management software, recently announced the launch of ServicePower Unity, an integrated, cohesive mobile workforce management software product providing field service enterprises with the capability to manage the complete service cycle from entitlement and work order management, schedule and route optimisation, 3^rd party dispatch,  field mobility, claims processing and business intelligence, in a SaaS deployment.

ServicePower Unity combines all of the components of our mobile workforce management platform into a single, integrated SaaS offering, based on a per user license fee.

Unity provides all of the elements of ServiceScheduling’s real time, unlimited intra-day schedule optimisation, or Optimization on Demand^TM, with ServiceOperations and NEXUS FS^TM, enabling clients to manage, dispatch and adjudicate claims from their third party contractor networks, while providing the field service management functions to those same third party contractors needed to improve their own productivity and customer satisfaction rates.

 

All of this is combined with enterprise mobility for both the employed and contracted workforce, and robust operational and business intelligence, ServicePower Unity enables ServicePower to meet the needs of every member of the field service ecosystem, regardless of size or workforce model, in the cloud, for a single fee, while delivering a higher overall ROI than seemingly competing software.

Marne Martin, CEO, ServicePower, stated “This is an exciting launch for ServicePower.  Our mobile workforce management software platform has always provided intra-day route optimisation, contractor dispatch and claims management, enterprise mobility, business intelligence, and with the launch of NEXUS FS^TM and Optimisation on Demand^TM, new SaaS field service management software and optimisation as a service, we’ve delivered our platform on premise, hosted or as SaaS.  ServicePower Unity brings all of the components together, in a SaaS model, at a single low cost, such that any sized field organisation can take advantage of the same productivity tools, improving operations and the customer experience, while achieving real ROI on their investment  ServicePower continues to lead innovation in the field service management market, now offering the most complete, wholly configurable mobile workforce management software on the market, all as a true SaaS product.”

Nick Shipton of scheduling specialists Kirona outlines why flexibility is as much a key ingredient in scheduling as optimisation...

Mobilising field based staff is high on the agenda at the moment with many organisations looking to increase the effectiveness and efficiencies of their workforce alongside offering increased levels of customer service and satisfaction.

It is obviously key that in order to mobilise your field staff effectively a complimentary scheduling solution is required to efficiently organise the jobs before dispatching them at the appropriate time to the mobile device.

However, what is sometimes overlooked is an understanding that that scheduling solution may need to react to different types of work in different ways, and therefore it’s key that the solution offers flexible methods of scheduling to suit how you need to drive your organisation.

Organisations often offer a wide range of services to their customers which can result in diverse requirements in terms of how those services need to be accessed by the customer and how that demand needs to be planned, which can cause issues if your scheduler has been built to suit a particular vertical or service, and drives you to fit the service to the schedulers constraints rather than configure the schedule to suit the requirements.

Some services will require fairly simple allocation of one off tasks based on matching skill-sets to the type of work, but if you throw into the mix customers expecting appointments at the first point of contact whether that is via a phone call or self-service this simple offering becomes much more complex, especially if you also want to throw into the mix planned works and programmed works.

 

The key with offering an appointed service is that you need to be able to offer and steer the customer towards taking a slot which not only satisfies them in terms of service levels but also takes into account all the other jobs in the system at that point in time, and allows you at that first point of contact to firstly offer the most efficient slot for you organisation, therefore building in maximum efficiency for the workforce.

Even if your organisation has only a small proportion of these ‘fixed’ appointed jobs they become the key jobs in the solution to plan other work around that has a more flexible time window, as we can’t break the direct promise we’ve made to the customer via that appointment.

Generally planned works have a more flexible planning window so we may need to carry out the job within the next X days or complete the jobs once a week, or once a month but we are not too worried about when we carry it out within that period.

Most scheduling systems will handle this well as there is plenty of flexibility within the large planning window to continually optimise your routes until you are satisfied with the schedule, but if you have an appointment to satisfy then that can throw an expensive spanner in the works as the scheduler doesn’t have the ability to move it where it may want to.

To further complicate matters other services may be carrying out far more complex works such as those which have dependencies and sequencing of tasks required to ensure they are carried not only in the most efficient manner but also in the correct order, or have a service that needs to deal with a very high volume of jobs with a short duration within small geographical locations.

All of the above pose different scheduling questions and of course you could look at implementing different solutions for these different scenarios however you lose the ability to get a complete view of the workforce and lose the ability to look at whether further efficiencies can be gained by carrying out more work at one location whilst you have resources there.

Reporting also becomes a trickier task as you are unable to easily view within one system how different services or regions may be performing.

Analysis can then be done to look if the location and levels of field based staff are correct and whether with a slight adjustment to these levels and locations performance can be improved.

You can also start to look at hierarchical KPI’s, so right down to operative level we can start to look at where and how the business can be improved.

The ability to implement a truly flexible scheduling solution such as Kirona’s DRS not only allows you to both improve the day to day operation of the organisation but also analyse how it can continually improve.

 

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BrightHouse is the UK’s leading rent-to-own retailer providing high quality, branded consumer electronics, domestic appliances and furniture via affordable weekly payments. They have 3,000 employees in a growing network of over 300 stores.

BrightHouse has implemented Kirona’s Job Manager mobile application to connect their central team with their field-based Customer Agent Advisers. This ensures accurate, up to date information flows seamlessly and securely between the two, enabling real-time visibility and that processes are streamlined to significantly improve customer service.

As well as Kirona’s Job Manager application, BrightHouse are also benefiting from Kirona’s InfoSuite management information software, ensuring the business has real-time actionable insight.

Alasdair Skeoch, Head of Credit Operations at BrightHouse commented “Kirona’s Job Manager and InfoSuite software has enabled us to improve customer service and empower our Customer Agent Advisers. Job Manager provides our Customer Agent Advisers with accurate, secure customer information when they meet with our customers. They have the latest account information, credit agreements and customer data to hand enabling them to serve the customer efficiently.”

 

He explains further “We are delighted with the initial implementation of the software and are looking for continual enhancements including implementing Kirona’s Dynamic Resource Scheduler, their Analytics tool to gain further actionable insights as well as applying the software to wider areas of the business.”

Kirona is a leader in delivering software solutions that enable organisations to provide exceptional field-based services in the most cost-effective way possible by providing clients with a suite of software that enables them to manage their end-to-end service processes and to seamlessly link field-based workers with central functions. Not only does this improve the service delivery to their customers it also reduces costs and enable significant efficiency and productivity increases.

Neil Harvey, CTO at Kirona, added “It takes an exceptional retailer to achieve real success in these challenging times and BrightHouse has seen sustained growth by giving customers the means to access quality household goods, and doing it with fairness, honesty and integrity. Many people probably take it for granted that they buy a new TV or a washing machine if they need one. But for millions of people this is not an option.  Many hard-working people do not have the cash to buy household essentials and home comforts outright, and are often ignored by mainstream lenders. BrightHouse successfully offer a way to bridge this financial gap. BrightHouse approached Kirona with a vision of how they wanted their service to improve, and we worked with them to deliver their Customer Agent Advisers a mobile workforce solution to enable them to achieve this.”

 

Neil continued “BrightHouse now has streamlined processes that are achieved by implementing Job Manager. By eradicating paper work from the field and information collected in the field is automatically posted into the relevant systems and necessary follow-up actions are triggered. Their Customer Agents are empowered by providing them with all of the information they need to perform the required task, while the customer benefits from the service efficiency that Job Manager has enabled.”

Kirona’s innovative technology enables organisations with mobile field based workers to improve productivity, customer service, field based worker visibility, reporting, and reduce costs.

 

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Resource Type: White Paper
Published by:  Field Service News (sponsored by Exel Computer Systems)
Title: The helping hands of field service management
Download: Click here to download white paper

By downloading you agree to the T&Cs listed available here

Synopsis

How to stay ahead of the ever-changing suite of Field Service Management (FSM) tools, including a focus on exactly what is the latest development of Assisted Scheduling?

Overview

The need for companies to employ some form of scheduling engine is clear, the benefits of adopting such an approach are thoroughly documented and clearly tangible. Introducing some level of automation will certainly deliver improvement in field service efficiency and productivity.

Indeed, the introduction of any level of optimisation within the dispatch role will inevitably lead to the reduction of fuel consumption costs that can make a compelling argument for implementation, for even the most cautious of financial directors.

The pile of case studies available to read extolling the benefits of scheduling are stacked high and readily available – each of them stuffed with positive examples and statistics to back up the claims FSM providers make, including how quickly companies have seen a return on their investment.

And of course the benefits of improved scheduling go far beyond the elements that are so clearly identified on a P&L. Customer satisfaction levels are often dramatically increased with the introduction of such tools.

The field service manager’s mantra is to get the right engineer to the right place at the right time, when this is achieved the customer of course feels the benefit of minimal interruption to their own workflow.

 

With customer satisfaction becoming one of the key differentiators between you and your competition in this current age of information, the investment in a good scheduling engine that can empower your team to deliver top tier service could appear to be ever more vital.

Imagine if every person within your team could effectively schedule a service call...

This white paper takes a look at the on-going evolution of field service scheduling systems from manual solutions through to fully dynamic and automated optimised solutions, exploring some of the benefits and challenges of each.

It also then takes a closer look at the latest type of solution appearing 'assisted scheduling' and assesses whether this approach found in a number of next-gen solutions bridges the gap between those scheduling engines which are sometimes seen as prohibitively complex and expensive and those that offer little in the way of true optimisation.

Do assisted scheduling solutions offer a perfect balance for smaller and mid-sized organisation between the efficiency improvements of a high end solution and the human intuition of an expert dispatch agent? Finally the white paper touches on some of the other factors within a wider field service management system that can enable companies to truly take advantage of their scheduling system- be it manual, assisted or fully dynamic.

 

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Optimised scheduling remains an absolutely crucial tool for many field service companies and one that could improve many other companies’ efficiency and productivity levels if they were to adopt such a system. On a recent Field Service News webinar based on this topic, Kris Oldland interviewed scheduling expert Daryl Dudey from IFS to find out more…

KO: What is a typical timeframe from modelling a scheduling solution through to actual implementation?

DD: There are several things that affect that.

Firstly how driven a company is but also how large the organisation is. If we are dealing with smaller teams we can roll out a bit quicker, so we could even be talking weeks moving from pilot to live, if we are talking about a larger organisation with a couple of thousand people out in the field generally speaking we’d like to take a little longer with that to make sure we are considering all the factors.

Really we try to go for a timescale of six months from start of project through to live, that’s the goal if possible. Also the nature of the business the more the senior management is driving the project the more likely it is we are going to get to live quicker, that’d very important.

A lot of the time these implementations can be viewed as IT projects but they’re not they’re business projects and businesses need to understand there is a lot of change involved in this, employees are involved, customers are involved and everybody really needs to be concentrating on it and focussing on it to get the result everybody wants.

KO: In your experience is it a case that those companies that have the full management buy in get more from these types of implementation?

DD: Absolutely. The ones that have that buy-in, that have that drive, they’re the ones that see the significant improvements to their business. They’re the ones that see the big numbers in improvement in terms of cost of travel and increasing jobs per day. They’re the ones that see the most success.

[quote float="left"]A lot of the time these implementations can be viewed as IT projects but they’re not they’re business projects and businesses need to understand there is a lot of change involved

Also in a company that decides they’re not over ride the system manually they’re not diluting the benefits. By the management setting those sorts of rules down the project works just that much better. From experience I’ve also seen that those companies that drive an implementation better, those people out in the field and in the dispatch office end up liking the system more anyway. Because they get the benefits out of it that they were expecting.

 

KO: So as well as there being a need to be driven by the top level, is there also a strong case for involving the end users, the field engineers and dispatchers throughout the implementation process?

DD: Involving the technicians, their team leaders and the dispatchers is absolutely key. At the end of the day this could be seen as a bit of an invasive system, coming in and changing working practices and taking responsibilities away from people. So we need to manage it in the right way to keep those people on-board.

[quote float="right"]Involving the technicians, their team leaders and the dispatchers is absolutely key. At the end of the day this could be seen as a bit of an invasive system, coming in and changing working practices and taking responsibilities away from people.

However, in the end people end up doing what they are better at. So with dispatchers for example, instead of having to decide which job to do in which order, they have more time to do what they are better at which is contact customers and dealing with the technicians and making sure everything is running smoothly.

 

It’s the same with the technicians. They are able to do what they are best at, which is being on-site, fixing equipment, interacting with customers etc. Basically not deciding which route is the optimum etc. So in my opinion, everyone benefits.

KO: What is the typical R.o.I following an implementation?

DD: It can vary but scheduling as a project is very much a return on investment project.

Most companies can expect to see five to fifteen per cent increase in productivity in SLA hit rates so that will hit the bottom line. Every organisation of course has different priorities so they tend to tune things in a different way.

Fuel savings are a particularly direct way of measuring cost savings. PHS in the UK for example made fuel savings of around 7 or 8% a year, which for them equates to around £2 million. So they made some significant savings – quite a lot more than they paid for the solution I might add, so the solution paid for itself pretty quickly.

We are currently running a free field service health check, which is a great way of getting a picture of this, and a great way of putting the business case together. We can take customer data if they are unsure and we can run that through and we can give you some predictive numbers which is a great way of seeing what that R.o.I specifically in line with your business.

KO: All too often we hear that service doesn’t perhaps get the voice it should in the boardroom, what do you recommend a service director should do when building the case for investment in a scheduling solution?

DD: To be honest the numbers make a pretty good case for themselves. Increasing jobs per day, reducing fuel costs etc there are all pretty big numbers and there aren’t many projects you can implement that are going to get you big savings like that.

But there are some more intangible benefits as well such as customer satisfaction. A lot of organisation using manual systems can end up sending the wrong technician out, or maybe a technician is missing parts and that just causes frustration at the customer end really.

[quote float="left"]There are some more intangible benefits as well such as customer satisfaction. A lot of organisation using manual systems can end up sending the wrong technician out, or maybe a technician is missing parts and that just causes frustration at the customer end really.

So sending the right engineer, with the right skills and the right parts, in the agreed allotted time window is pretty important when it comes to customer satisfaction.

 

Also a possibility given the increased efficiency is maybe offering shorter time windows, which can be a big competitive benefit. If you customers are all offering AM or PM slots and you can offer one hour or two hour slots that’s another pretty compelling case for scheduling optimisation I think.

The reality is from my experience is that companies may have these SLAs in place but they may not necessarily be meeting them and it’s interesting that when we do the initial phase and we take some historical data we discover some often huge discrepancies between what a company thinks they are delivering and what they are actually doing.

The reason being is that when you are using a manual system or a semi-manual system then it’s pretty hard to consider all these variables.

You’ve got to consider where the technicians are, what jobs are nearby, what parts and skills are required on those jobs, when you need to get there etc. It’s just to much for a person to deal with in reality. So sometimes things slip.

Whereas in an organisation not only are they to hit the SLAs they’ve already guaranteed to their customers, they also have the opportunity to offer shorter SLAs. If your peers and competitors are using manual systems and offering a four hour delay you could offer a two SLA and they simply wouldn’t be able to achieve that.

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Welcome to the fourth part of this series exploring some of the big trends to expect in 2016 within the field service sector, written by Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News.

 So far we’ve explored servitization in part one, IoT and AR in part two Smart Glasses and Rugged Computing in part three…

 This time around we look at a stalwart of field service technology in optimised scheduling and why it is more important than ever, the growing importance of user interfaces and one of the most hotly anticipated topics in fleet management – the connected car and how it will change telematics forever…

Improved scheduling will become a huge part of the equation for those selecting FSM software this year...

For all of the excitement around technologies such as AR and Smart Glasses in being able to reduce the need for field service companies to send their engineers to the far flung corners of the globe, the truth remains that for the majority of field service companies, for the time being at least, the holy grail of operations remains the age old mantra of ‘getting the right engineer, to the right job, with the right parts on-time, every time.’

As such scheduling tools remain a vital ingredient in the field service management cookbook and this fact hasn’t been overlooked by many of the key players in the FSM software space.

 

With ServicePower having invested heavily in both R&D and the acquisition of intellectual property in this space and the recent roll-out of their new solution NexusTM, they are anticipated to take an aggressive approach to the market, whilst scheduling remains a core functionality of a number of significant players within the space including IFS, ClickSoftware and Astea.

Such a competitive market place makes for an environment where innovation and product development is set to thrive.

For field service companies seeking to either update their solutions or take the plunge and invest for the first time in a solution then having a variety of options is of course a major bonus and given the potential savings that dynamic scheduling engines can deliver, the refinement of such tools, making them more effective and easier to implement, is great news.

Connected vehicles and Telematics-as a-Service will challenge the traditional fleet technology sector

With the advent of the connected vehicle, the telematics industry was in danger of cannibalising itself as specialist providers began working with OEMs to provide in built systems.

On the one hand this was perhaps no bad thing and just the natural evolution of the sector.

Indeed there have been some exciting collaborations spearheaded by companies such as Telogis, who through a number of shrewd partnerships with the likes of Volvo and Ford have seen their technology placed at the heart of many next-generation commercial vehicles.

On the face of it such agreements are win-win-win.

Great for the OEMs as they seek to outpace their competitors in terms of on-board technology, great for Telogis who have access to a much wider market and great for those field service companies who are seeking a complete turnkey solution.

 

But the flip side of course is that such partnerships also limit the choices available to those companies that either want to explore their options further or have existing systems that they don’t want to move away from.

Another approach to building a telematics solution was unveiled by Dutch Telematics giant TomTom at their developers' conference in Amsterdam last year when they unveiled the .connect platform.

With three separate APIs encouraging as much integration as possible the development of the .connect platform was a masterstroke by a company that had already reinvented themselves once in the face of a declining routing and tracking market as it placed them as a telematics platform firmly at the centre of a suite of 3^rd party apps that the field service company could select to define a telematics solution that was bespoke to their own specific needs.

Essentially by modelling their approach along the lines of Apple’s App Store, Google’s Play or Saleforce’s Appexchange, TomTom have paved the way for new thinking in the telematics space and have thrown down a gauntlet for the rest of the industry.

A seamless User Experience will become a prerequisite for field service companies and their clients alike

In September last year I spoke to Marne Martin, CEO of ServicePower shortly before the launch of their new FSM software Nexus FS.

They had clearly spent some significant time working on the User Interface (UI) in the face of the growing impact of consumerisation on business software. “The key is taking what we’ve done with some of the new technology, and then making sure we have integrated a great user experience throughout the other applications, modernising the UI, but not losing all the functionality that we have built over the last twenty years.” Martin commented and as we look ahead to what 2016 holds in store her words continue to ring true.

Indeed, whilst in terms of the physical devices our field engineers are using, we may well be seeing the gradual shift back away from consumer devices to more industrial grade, rugged devices, when it comes to the user experience, consumerisation remains a vital trend, and one which FSM software providers will overlook at their peril.

 

But it’s not just about aesthetics, there is a very simple reason why field service companies should expect the apps they deploy for their field engineers to look as good and feel as intuitive as the apps they use in their personal lives.

To cut to the chase, the more instant familiarity an end user will feel with an app, the faster they will take to using it, which means the faster a company will fee the promised benefits of that apps deployment.

Indeed ServicePower are not alone in having put a significant amount of importance on the look and feel of their latest software.

One of the big bits of feedback from the IFS World Conference was that the company had spent a significant amount of time in ensuring their UI had a modern, elegant feel to it and that those efforts didn’t go unnoticed amongst the attendees.

Similarly when Solarvista launched the latest iteration of their own product, not only was there an extensive overhaul of the product itself, but it launched with a distinctly new look and feel that added a further gloss to what was a major product update.

 

However, it is not just within the apps used by field service engineers where UI is of growing importance.

Many field service companies are beginning to offer apps to their own customers also and whether these apps are communications channels, knowledge banks or even tools for monitoring assets within the field, increasingly digital interaction far outweighs human interaction for many companies and delivering a positive user experience through these mediums is as important to a companies relationships with their customers as face to face contact.

 

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Look out for the final part of this series coming soon which will focus on why knowledge sharing and easy reporting are the two operations that all field service managers should be demanding in 2016.

 

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As we enter the final few working days days of 2015 it's a good time to reflect on what we did well this year and of course what we can do better next year...

However whilst the world is certainly a better place financially than it was a few years ago we still live in an age of austerity. More and more companies have quite rightly moved their service departments to their own P&L as the shift from cost centre to profit centre becomes more common for a service division.

However, whether your field service operation is a necessary cost or a profitable division of your business, the ability to achieve more next year than you did this year with the same level of resource is one that can push your organisation to a better market share, greater profits and of courser internally will do your career as a field service management professional no harm at all either!

Fortunately many of the arguments for adopting certain technologies within field service industries are based on a robust return on investment (R.o.I) basis that will ultimately pay for itself and deliver ongoing savings in efficiency - often within a 12 month timeframe.

Driver behaviour apps offer reduced maintenance costs of your fleet vehicles for example, rugged devices are regularly bought because whilst they may be more expensive in the short term over the course of their lifetime the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is in fact much lower than that of alternative consumer devices.

 

Then of course there is optimised scheduling where not only will you see reduced fuel costs but also achieve higher job completion across a day so potentially not only reducing costs but simulataneously improving customer service also.

However, as with many things in life which sound a bit too good to be true, such claims of operational improvements and cost savings can sometimes be met with cynicism. Indeed, optimised scheduling may not deliver huge benefits for all companies, those with a relatively simple work process or a small team for example may not see the same benefits as those with larger workforces or a more complex set of jobs being allocated.

The simple truth is there is no simple answer as to the type of company that will get the best gains from optimised scheduling.

However, what is well documented is that most companies will see some performance gains and many of those who implement optimised scheduling will see highly significant gains such as PHS who saved £2M in a year in fuel savings alone. 

So in order to help our readers identify whether optimised scheduling would benefit their organisation, Field Service News has teamed up with specialist service management provider IFS to offer a free, no obligation Field Service Healthcheck that will identify exactly what efficiencies your business could make through adopting an optimised scheduler.

Simply click the link below to access the registration page.

Once there complete the brief form and instructions will be sent to you on how to undertake your free field service health-check and a scheduling expert from IFS will analyse your current workload and identify exactly how and where you could make improvements within three days of receiving your completed form.

So why sit in the dark about how much optimised scheduling could benefit your company. Find out for free right now...

 

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Click here to access the free field service healthcheck now... 

 

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