Geerings, one of the South East of England's leading providers of MPS and print management services, is upgrading its service management capability with the installation of 2serv.
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Feb 15, 2017 • News • 2roam • 2serv • Geerings • Jon Killengray • managed print services • mobile application • print management services • field service • Service Management • Software and Apps
Geerings, one of the South East of England's leading providers of MPS and print management services, is upgrading its service management capability with the installation of 2serv.
Developed by Purpose Software, this market-leading software solution will provide the Geerings management team with faster access to real-time information to enable data-driven decision-making and streamline billing processes.
According to Jon Killengray, Service Manager at Geerings: “We selected 2serv after an extensive review of available solutions as we wanted to work with a company that really understands the needs of resellers in this market sector and is able to deliver the highest level of service and support. Purpose Software also offered us the ability to install the software on a subscription basis allowing us to pay for the system as we use it without major up-front capital expenditure.”
Geerings is also installing 2roam, a mobile application that empowers engineers equipped with tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices
Further savings will be achieved by enhancing the toner management process including the automatic checking that consumables have achieved the correct usage. 2serv also provides rapid access to informative management reports that can be run at a press of a button without impacting on overall system performance. These reports present up-to-the-minute data in formats that are easier to interpret for better decision-making.
“Purpose Software is providing us with a service management system that will deliver lightning speed performance no matter what we throw at it, unlike the previous system which often struggled during the generation of complex reports,” continued Jon Killengray. “The 2serv system is fully future-proofed providing us with access to all enhancements, as they are released as part of the subscription programme, ensuring that it will continue to meet the evolving needs of the business.”
Geerings is also installing 2roam, a mobile application that empowers engineers equipped with tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices to access and update 2serv from any location. It will increase the productivity of the company’s field service team by enabling them to make more efficient use of their time.
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Nov 04, 2016 • Features • Evatic • Field Service Management Systems • Interview • Service Management • Software and Apps • Asolvi
Kris Oldland talks exclusively to Pål M. Rødseth, CEO Evatic as they announce the acquisition of Tesseract Service Management...
Kris Oldland talks exclusively to Pål M. Rødseth, CEO Evatic as they announce the acquisition of Tesseract Service Management...
Evatic AS, a leading software vendor within Service Management, have acquired Cranbox Ltd in the UK, the owner of the Tesseract service management software product trading under the name Tesseract.
Together Evatic and Tesseract will complement each other’s product portfolio and strengthen the product offering within the service management field in the market. Tesseract has its main office in High Wycombe just outside London and an office in Reston, Virginia in the US.
“We believe that the two organisations will complement each other both when it comes to products, industries and geographies”
We believe that the two organisations will complement each other both when it comes to products, industries and geographies
“I believe that Tesseract are in the best hands going forward”, says Colin Brown, founder and CEO of Tesseract.
“With more than 150 customers in a wide range of industries, there is very little overlap with Evatic both when it comes to customer industries and geographies, and I am confident that the product and the customers will continue to thrive under the Evatic ownership”.
Evatic is a leading European service management software company with the head office in Trondheim, Norway and offices in Sweden, Germany, France, Poland and Singapore.
With a global reach and more than 300 customers in 30+ countries Evatic offers a broad product suit for companies that need to make their services profitable. Evatic is a private company owned by the founders and Viking Venture.
Speaking exclusively to Field Service News on the day of the announcement Rødseth commented “We have known Colin for a good number of years and we were actually having the same discussion about four years ago - before I joined Evatic. But somehow those discussions didn’t end in a conclusion, so we picked up the ball again about six or seven months ago and had a long and fruitful discussion that ended up in Evatic acquiring Tesseract - and we are really delighted with that.”
From an outside perspective there seems to be a lot of synergy between the two companies with each being able to fill gaps in the others markets and solutions. Something that Rødseth was keen to highlight.
“There really is a complimentary side to this, we view the UK as a really interesting market,” he began.
Currently in Evatic we are focussing our business around the copier/print industry - that’s where we have our main customers and we have a system that offers a really specialist contract management tool, which is great for advanced or complicated contracts that a lot of the copy/print guys do. So we have a great system for them.”
“However, we are not as good in the generalist service management solutions, for example repair centres and stock management solutions - that is where Tesseract fits into the picture.”
We now see this as one company with two different products, one being the Evatic product and one being the Tesseract product.
“We now see this as one company with two different products, one being the Evatic product and one being the Tesseract product.” He added.
“I think we will continue to build the Evatic solution to tailor to industries that require really, really complex contract management solutions - and the key vertical for us there is the copy/print industry.”
Rødseth explained “However, we do have some customers outside of this sector and we are already actively looking at if we can move them over to the Tesseract solution.”
“A lot of the smaller customers that we have would benefit from running a Cloud solution with Tesseract so we hope to have some customer synergies from that. However, the primary reason for the acquisition was geographical expansion into the UK and the US.”
“Where we have our customers today is mainly in the Nordics and we also have offices in Norway, Sweden, Germany, France and Singapore but for whatever reason we have never had a strong presence in the UK. We now hope to build the Evatic brand in the UK now that we have a presence there via Tesseract and similarly we hope to be able to bring Tesseract to the European regions where Evatic is already strong.”
“So hopefully quite soon our sales guys will open their jackets and there’s not only an Evatic or Tesseract logo there but there is both.”
And it seems it will be business as normal for both companies in the short to medium term as Rødseth alluded to there being no loss of the newly acquired Tesseract band.
“The Tesseract brand has been over 30 years in the market it is a very strong brand so we will continue to keep that for the Service Centre and build on that and we will keep the Evatic brand for the document management vertical” he said.
What is clear is that there is a great deal of respect between the two parties, especially from Evatic towards not only the heritage of the Tesseract brand but also towards industry veteran Brown who will be stepping down from his role as MD but will remain working with Evatic in a consultancy role.
“Of course it is not going to be easy to filling the shoes of an industry veteran like Colin, but we will do our best to keep up innovating with Tesseract as we’ve done with Evatic as well.”
“We have 20 + people here that all have experience with the product and there is deep knowledge here within the organisation - we are hopeful towards a very positive future for both Tesseract and Evatic following this change.”
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Jul 28, 2016 • News • IFS • Service Management • Software and Apps • software and apps
IFS Applications 9 selected as the new finance and service contract management system for JLA’s growing business in an agreement valued at £1million
IFS Applications 9 selected as the new finance and service contract management system for JLA’s growing business in an agreement valued at £1million
IFS, the global enterprise applications company, announces that JLA, one of the UK’s leading suppliers of commercial and industrial laundry and catering equipment , will implement IFS Applications™ 9 for its entire operation.
IFS Applications 9 will provide JLA with an advanced system to manage its customer contracts by encompassing service contracts, rental and asset management,
James Greenman, JLA Chief Information Officer commented “IFS Applications 9 was selected because it not only meets JLA’s current needs, but it is agile enough to adapt to changing requirements, laying the foundations for a long-term strategic relationship. The project will begin immediately and is scheduled to go live in the second quarter of 2017”.
“It’s great to be working with such a customer-focused and growing company,” IFS UK Managing Director Paul Massey said. “Our work with JLA demonstrates our strength in helping service-centric firms effectively manage business and we look forward to a long and successful partnership.”
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Mar 08, 2016 • News • Future of Feld Service • Future of FIeld Service • Events • Service Management
Technology, training and customer collaboration are the key topics for this year’s Field Service Summit taking place on 12 April, St Hugh’s College, Oxford.
Technology, training and customer collaboration are the key topics for this year’s Field Service Summit taking place on 12 April, St Hugh’s College, Oxford.
The one-day conference gathers over 90 senior field service directors from across the UK. They are meeting to explore how new technology and fast-changing customer expectations are shaking up field service management. With a pre-conference networking reception on the early evening of the 11th April, and a unique format enabling all delegates to meet with and talk to all speakers - the Field Service Summit ensures that busy executives maximise their learning opportunities, and minimise time spent out of the office.
Readers of Field Service News, responsible for managing a field service team, can receive a 25% discount off the standard price of a delegate pass,. Quote FSN25 when registering here.
Speaker Lineup
The Field Service Summit ditches slide decks and lets delegates sit in small groups to listen to and ask questions of our stellar lineup of speakers: Martin Summerhayes, Head of Strategy & Business Change, Fujitsu, John Cullen, Vice President, Global Marketing & Brand, Metso; Hans van den Heuvel, Operations Director, Services & Support EMEA, Canon Europe; Christian Nolte, Global Head of Field Service, Wincor Nixdorf; Sanjay Patel, Head of IS Strategy, Architecture & Commercial, UK Power Networks;Graeme Coyne, Manager, Siemens; Neil Taplin, Director of Operations, Arqiva; Coen Jeukens, Service Contract Director, Bosch; Professor Andy Neely, Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge; Howard Lightfoot, Professor, Operations Excellence Institute, Cranfield UniversityStandard price tickets to attend the conference are £870+VAT. Please quote ‘FSN25’ to receive Promotional Offer price of £652.50+VAT for Field Service News readers. NB. This offer is only available to serving field service end users - not consultants or solutions providers.; Aly Pinder, Senior Research Analyst, Aberdeen Group; Bill Pollock, President, Strategies4Growth; Jan van Veen, Customer Centric Innovation for Sustainable Growth; James Rock, Managing Partner, DesignThinking; IFS; Astea; ClickSoftware; ServicePower; GreenRoad; FLS - Fast Lean Smart; MPL Systems
World Class Technologies On Show
The latest field service technologies will also be on show from world-class technology providers.
Readers of Field Service News, responsible for managing a field service team, can receive a 25% discount off the standard price of a delegate pass.
Standard price tickets to attend the conference are £870+VAT. Please quote ‘FSN25’ to receive Promotional Offer price of £652.50+VAT for Field Service News readers. This offer is only available to serving field service end users - not consultants or solutions providers.
Register here
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Feb 17, 2016 • News • Events • Service Management • Servitization • Customer Satisfaction and Expectations
UPDATE: LEADING UK SERVICE MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE PROVIDER TESSERACT JOIN LIST OF PROVIDERS TAKING PART IN THIS YEAR'S SUMMIT...
UK based software company Tesseract have become the latest specialist provider to join the select panel of session sponsors...
UPDATE: LEADING UK SERVICE MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE PROVIDER TESSERACT JOIN LIST OF PROVIDERS TAKING PART IN THIS YEAR'S SUMMIT...
UK based software company Tesseract have become the latest specialist provider to join the select panel of session sponsors adding a further layer of insight into what promises to be an interesting two day session bringing together a mix of practitioners, solution providers and academia to discuss the key challenges in delivering service within an aftermarket environment.
Tesseract, pioneers respected within their field for delivering both the worlds first windows based field service management software as well as the worlds first browser based field service management software are joined by a well rounded group of solution providers including Kuehne & Nagel who will be providing insight on service logistics, Syncron who offer parts and inventory management solutions, and TrackUnit who offer telematics solutions.
The 2nd World Chief Service Officer Summit takes place in London, UK, on March 14th and 15th, with a focus on Manufacturing Aftermarket. Field Service News is pleased to be a media partner for the event.
The manufacturing sector is changing rapidly. As sales reach saturation point and competition increases pressure on prices, manufacturers are seeking other revenue streams. Revenue from aftermarket sales will become increasingly important and customer service will have a higher profile. That presents both great challenges and great opportunities.
If you are in manufacturing, repair and operations, this is the summit for you. Come and hear about the latest developments in spare parts supply, 3D printing, CRM, leasing and service support for products such as autos, heavy equipment, medical device, yachting, aircraft and consumer electronics.
Over two days, in four themed sessions, delegates at the summit will hear from over 20 speakers, learn what the key trends are in service development, hear what competitors are doing and how to deliver service in a customer-driven environment.
Sessions include:[unordered_list style="bullet"]
- The Global Market Outlook and Internet+ Market
- Supply Chain Management & Innovative Service Design
- Technology Innovation and Profitability
- Field Service & Mobile Workforce Management
Among the confirmed speakers are: Peter Rudzio, CLAAS Service and Parts; Wim Vercauteren, Manitou Group Alvaro Lizarraga, SANY Europe; Waldir Gomes Goncalves, Embraer Executive Jets; Robbert Kerber, LuiGong Machinery Europe; Per Stjernqvist, Volvo Construction Equipment Denmark; Alexandre Marrot , Xerox; and Professor Tim Baines, Director of the Aston Centre for Servitization Research and Practice.
For more details and to register to attend click here:
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Jan 18, 2016 • Features • future of field service • PCT • Interview • Service Management • servicemax • software and apps
In our continuing series on field service industry leaders, Dave Yarnold, CEO ServiceMax talks to Mark Ambasna Jones about the company's journey so far and the future of field service.
In our continuing series on field service industry leaders, Dave Yarnold, CEO ServiceMax talks to Mark Ambasna Jones about the company's journey so far and the future of field service.
When Dave Yarnold, ServiceMax CEO, first ventured into Europe in search of business, ServiceMax were nothing more than a start up. Today it is one of the most successful field service management providers in the world.
Still a relatively new kid on the block in software terms, ServiceMax is only eight years old. You get the feeling it’s still punching above its weight and Yarnold encapsulates the energy and excitement of the company that believes it is onto something.
ServiceMax has witnessed phenomenal growth (300% year on year with 150 new customers in 12 months, according to the company). Its inaugural ServiceMaxLive Europe customer event in Paris last year showed it has certainly arrived.
Yarnold was fresh back from Japan when we met. Was it easier to set-up in Japan than in Europe, I asked?
“Western Europe in particular and North America were clearly the top targets for us when we first started but then the next one in line terms of the number of manufacturers and the premium on service and quality was Japan. It’s always hard going into a new territory, a new country. No one wants to be the first to break a market but fortunately we have a number of companies that have done global roll outs and that has helped us and continues to do so.”
It’s really cool to see what different folks are doing with the platform.”
“In our early days in Europe we were a small company with just a few use cases. To have people like Manish Gupta from Schneider Electric and John Cooper from Sony at ServiceMax Live was great and I think that says a lot about how far we have come. I have personally been working with Manish for five years, before we even had a team here, I was flying to Paris working on the details, looking at the installed base and helping find a solution. Schneider has over 20,000 field technicians.”
I asked why Yarnold had seemed particularly enamoured with Inspecta when its CCO Timo Okkonen spoke at the event.
“Timo has such a great story to tell. Inspecta is an interesting company and what it’s trying to do using ServiceMax is so interesting. It now has 1,600 users of ServiceMax but it’s using the software for company transformation. The thing I love about his story is that it’s not just about service it’s a tool for collaboration, for employees to talk, to share important information. It’s really cool to see what different folks are doing with the platform.”
Service as a software
Transformation is a recurring theme. Yarnold’s suggestion that software as a service is becoming service as a software seems to fit with the Inspecta case study. He believes ServiceMax has found itself at the heart of this changing landscape, partly by design but also partly as a result of being in the right place at the right time.
So does he see the company as a disruptor, ripping up the rule book?
We can take these grand ideas around IoT and make them usable, creating understandable user cases for IoT.
What would that be, I asked?
“Quite simply it’s a machine talking to a machine, and when the machine says something is wrong, you take that data, dispatch a technician and fix the machine before the customer even knows there is a problem, eliminating unplanned downtime. We can help here and play a very disruptive role. We have the right tools to do that.” Banking on IoT makes sense and for service it’s an obvious fit.
ServiceMax had even rolled out Kevin Ashton, the guy credited for coining the term the Internet of Things to talk at the event and drive home the point. But isn’t everyone thinking along these lines? And what makes ServiceMax so different?
“We’ve been looking at IoT for several years now, going back to when it was referred to as M2M – seemed like a good idea then but now it’s a better idea because it’s called IoT right? So we were always clear that we didn’t want to solve the data problem – all that data coming off of sensors, we didn’t want to get involved with sorting out the big data. We figured others would do that. We wanted to distil the data into something useful for service organisations. Our platform is geared to ultimately be agnostic, taking smart distilled data and to use in a service environment. This is where service becomes more strategic.”
ServiceMax has partnered with PTC to deliver the IoT bit, leaving it to focus on the service angle. Yarnold admits it’s still early days but you get the sense that this is a pivotal moment for the company and the industry as a whole.
Does Yarnold see a shifting role for field service technicians?
We think that the Chief Service Officer should be a C level position...
We had 30 plus CSOs in a room and the liveliest discussion was on this – do your service people sell or serve and how best to generate revenues? Do you provide incentives to sell and potentially break the trust they have with customers?
Customers do trust their service techs. I’ve been in meeting s where customers have turned to the field service tech and asked, “should I buy this product?” There is a lot of power and trust here so you have to be careful.”
Are any companies doing this now?
“A lot of companies have armed the service teams with soft skills; they don’t call them sales skills. I think that some of the more forward thinking ServiceMax users have put some tools in place to coach field service people in what to look for, how to look for competitive equipment, for example, to identify a potential upsell opportunity and putting lead generation buttons in the system. It’s a delicate balance.”
Too delicate? Will it last?
“Service people are wary of pushing field teams towards selling too hard but they also seem excited by the fact they are relevant and generating revenue. Now service is not just considered a cost centre. Service people are getting involved in growth discussions.”
Look out for part two of this Industry Leader article when Yarnold talks about the 4 Ps he considers essential to service success.
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Dec 17, 2015 • Features • Software & Apps • microsoft dynamics • field service management • Service Management • Software and Apps • Customer Satisfaction and Expectations
Smarter customer engagement, an interactive customer service hub and streamlined knowledge management are some of the enhancements Microsoft will introduce to its Dynamics CRM platform in 2016. Microsoft Dynamics General Manager Bill Patterson gave...
Smarter customer engagement, an interactive customer service hub and streamlined knowledge management are some of the enhancements Microsoft will introduce to its Dynamics CRM platform in 2016. Microsoft Dynamics General Manager Bill Patterson gave Field Service News Editor-in-Chief Kris Oldland the low down on the innovations .
Having spent 2015 focusing on productivity improvements in Microsfot Dynamics, Microsoft is turning to customer service experience enhancements in 2016. "It has probably been one of the most significant areas in innovation and investment we've been making in Microsoft," Patterson states. "We see that organisations today are operating still like they were ten years ago. They are still trying to compete on the basis of price or on the strength of their product or service that they have for their offerings. But key data is really beginning to emerge that a lot of consumers today are largely beginning to stay with brands due to the customer experience and we see customer service playing a huge role in that realm of differentiation."
We have all been part of good customer services experiences but those that we remember oftentimes are the most extremely bad ones. What we are trying to do for enterprises today is really help them understand their customers, help them engage with their customers and help them empower their employees to really drive and centre that degree of engagement."
"While organisations may understand this dichotomy, the reality that they find themselves in today is that a lot of their tooling is dated, a lot of their systems have not been modernised to keep up with the needs of their customers and they are struggling with the proliferation and explosion of channels in the digitalisation of the service experience like never before."
The service agent today is mostly dealing with technology and screens that were built for the last decade of computing
This presents one of two key challenges for today's service-oriented organisations. While the challenge to deliver the level of service excellence is spread across a growing number of channels, simultaneously there is the challenge of overcoming high employee churn rates within customer service roles which Microsoft analysis of labour statistics around the customer service role both in the US and the UK has revealed as worryingly high at around 27%. "If you think that one in four of your team is turning over every twelve months increasingly it's a really struggling proposition to keep employees engaged and empowered to ultimately to deal with customers. "
"And that meta-trend - the ability to engage with customers and to empower employees - is really what's driving Microsoft, what's driving our innovation force behind our set of releases."
With their latest roll out their Dynamics platform, Microsoft is looking to resolve these challenges with three new elements that Patterson describes as being at the centre of that employee empowerment and customer engagement problem set for an organisation. Perhaps the biggest of these changes, and one that is likely the headline grabbing development, is a complete overhaul of the user experience.
"Most CRM systems have been built over time with this notion of the relationship and relationships take time to emerge and unfold for an organisation," explains Patterson. "So it's s oftentimes that a CRM system is designed with lots of data, lots of forms and lots of views. For organisations who need to keep up with high scale but low amount of data within an interaction there was a dichotomy between the optimised user experience and the user experience we find today in most CRM systems."
"So we went back to the drawing board and back to the core of the user experience itself and designed what we think is the most productive user experience for customer service agents on the planet."
A bold statement indeed. So what is the detail behind the hyperbole?
Interactive Service Hub
The UX Microsoft has introduced is called the interactive service hub. It has the ability to handle large screens of information, and to take a screen and easily turn it into an interaction. It's a technology that many will be familiar with in social solutions, Patterson readily admits. However bringing it into the customer service team at large to help them engage across all the digital channel - web, social email and so on - could be a very powerful tool.
There is a focus on building much tighter integration between Tier One and Tier Two agents.
That interplay between tier one and tier two today for most organisations is where you see the highest degree of latency in closing a business operation. It is our belief that if we can bring the tier one and tier two teams together in a way that information is continuous and seamless throughout a service funnel, then we could help teams react, respond and resolve issues much easier than before.
Smarter customer engagement
2016 will see the release of what Microsoft calls smarter customer engagement. It's an interesting concept that builds upon their own social engagement technology while addressing what is perhaps a key flaw. "What sentiment and social screens have proven is that it's a signal, a belief at a point in time but it may not get to the full unearthing of a customer perspective on things," Patterson begins. "So in addition to some advances we're making in the social engagement side we're introducing our Voice of Customer solution." This is based on some tech acquired last spring to go to the next level of voice-of-the-customer and feedback as part of the business process."
"When you combine the sentiment analytics with the enriched information on an interaction or on a survey perhaps, organisations can further understand their customers in a way that's not just only a point in time or what they might have said on a social network. The combination of these two is how we see organisations truly coming together to engage in new ways with their customers."
Knowledge capture and management
The third of the new developments particularly caught my attention as it is a tool capable of helping tackle a significant issue being faced by many, many field service companies: the challenge of capturing the knowledge, locked away in the heads of a workforce rapidly set to walk away from the business as they reach retirement age.
The challenge is two-fold: to capture of the knowledge and to make it easily accessible...
Microsoft's knowledge capture platform incorporates a WYSISYG designer to allow for simple and easy creation of content, as you'd expect, but perhaps more importantly they have also included social collaboration tools which allow companies to bring teams of people together to work in tandem on the creation of an article.
The upshot of this is that either each article becomes less disputed or you create fewer articles authored by individual experts who have distinct points of view. Either way it makes for a more streamlined approach to developing a knowledge bank and when the aim is to help deliver quicker understanding to your workforce and swifter resolution to customer problems, then quality should always trump quantity.
This is also something that Microsoft are acutely aware, says Patterson, pointing out that most knowledge management solutions have been built more as knowledge aggregators which end up taking in so much volume and so much data that agents really get lost in the cloud of information.
"Often what happens is an organisation will spend so much time indexing and not enough time thinking about the meaningful information that helps drive an interaction to a resolution. Over time the knowledge index becomes less and less trusted by the customer service team."
"So our focus was putting the knowledge into the core hands of the agents and the experts inside an organisation who can put the right information into the hands of the customer service interaction team so it can become a more thoughtful and ambient experience for an agent."
Supported by a powerful machine learning engine, the knowledge management tool analyses the content of what an interaction is about and pro actively surfaces and pushes the right knowledge into the hands of the agent whilst they are taking the call. This ability to place focused content intelligently in the right place at the right time could hugely improve resolution times within a service centre. However, the magic doesn't end there as the system essentially continues to refine itself through each interaction.
"Once that intersection between knowledge and interaction come together that binding, that fusion if you will, actually tunes the machine learning engine even further and enriches it even further this article solves this problem," enthuses Patterson.
Each of these developments are exciting in their own right but together it looks like Microsoft Dynamics 2016 is certainly shaping up to be an impressive update to the platform.
However, when it is bundled together with Office 365, Microsoft’s productivity suite, for a cost of between £40 and £95 depending on your own configurations, this becomes a platform offering fantastic value. Long may it continue.
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Dec 14, 2015 • Features • field service • field service management • Service Management • Software and Apps • Managing the Mobile Workforce
The latest developments in remote workforce management are helping companies to get more from their field service teams, explains Paul Ridden, CEO, SmartTask .
The latest developments in remote workforce management are helping companies to get more from their field service teams, explains Paul Ridden, CEO, SmartTask .
For field service companies that provide contracted, scheduled staff to client sites, workforce costs are a significant overhead, especially when you consider the constant pressure on margins and the need to provide innovative services to win new contracts.
Remote workforce management has been around for some time, helping companies to capture proof of time, attendance and work completed, enabling them to monitor the status of their teams centrally. Now systems are emerging that bring all of these components in to a single package along with the other key back office functions required to effectively manage field service teams. As a result, they can now provide complete peace of mind that personnel are safe while ensuring they are delivering the services agreed.
Existing staff located at client sites can take on additional tasks such as inspections or audits
Based on a framework of electronic proof and attendance it is becoming possible for existing staff located at client sites to effectively take on additional tasks such as inspections or audits, enabling organisations to provide areas of differentiation to clients and make best use of resources to boost profitability. There is also an opportunity to provide a tool to register an operational issue or risk, irrespective of the remote worker’s core function, with an effective process included to encourage and simplify such an action.
Using smart forms, via a mobile application, an employee can quickly complete and submit an incident report, which triggers an email escalation process sent to the appropriate department so they can deal with the problem immediately. This means supervisors and managers can have a live-view of any issues, failures or wastage with details electronically captured including photographic evidence where appropriate. A copy of the incident can also be sent to an online portal where it can be monitored and managed through its lifecycle while providing data for trend analysis via the management information generated.
These flexible smart forms can be configured for a wide range of uses including alerts, inspections, audits, requests, job acceptance and job completion. In particular, it is possible to implement an electronic compliance solution for health and safety, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), COSHH hazardous substance procedures. These checks can replace existing manual processes to achieve immediate workplace compliance, while streamlining administration and saving money.
Typically, a paper-based solution is not only time consuming and costly to manage across multiple sites, but is easy to falsely or fraudulently complete. In contrast, a smart form registers the exact time it was completed and with signature capture shows which employee undertook the check. Furthermore, all the data is delivered to the online portal, so it is collected electronically in real-time without having to post hard copies and have someone collate manually.
The latest developments in remote workforce management is evolving beyond simply proof of attendance. It is providing the potential to enhance business performance and help overcome some of the operational challenges faced by companies in the field service marketplace in terms of revenue growth, customer satisfaction and compliance.
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Dec 03, 2015 • Software & Apps • News • aeromark • field service management • Service Management • Software and Apps
Facilities and maintenance services provider Arcus Solutions Ltd has achieves a 20% improvement in productivity following deployment of Aeromark Optmatics mobile workforce management software. Additionally, services levels are up 40%.
Facilities and maintenance services provider Arcus Solutions Ltd has achieves a 20% improvement in productivity following deployment of Aeromark Optmatics mobile workforce management software. Additionally, services levels are up 40%.
In 2013 Arcus went to the market to look for a new system that would help improve the management of the maintenance service to their customers and optimise the productivity throughout their 155 strong field service engineer workforce.
Aeromark Optimatics was selected as it offered smart technology that would provide clear visibility of field operations and optimisation of the whole service process, minimising operational costs whilst at the same time improving service levels.
After the first six months of full operation, not only has the cost base been optimised but the service levels delivered have improved by 40%.
“Aeromark’s agile approach combined with the power and flexibility of their Optimatics technology has enabled our entire business process to be optimised and aligned with best practice. This has resulted in over 50% reduction in touch-points, statutory paper records have been replaced with electronic documentation and we have seen a significant, reduction in fuel and wasted time” said Parag Gogate, Head of Projects and Quality at Arcus.
“As a result of the considerable success of this project, we have decided to roll out Optimatics as our standard enterprise software across the whole group” continued Parag.
Optimatics provides a complete mobile workforce management solution for the entire process of service delivery, from scheduling, workflow driven mobile applications through to vehicle tracking. It provides Arcus’s administrative employees a more consistent approach to working, which enables them to plan reactive jobs more efficiently, by sending accurate customer data directly to the Aeromark mobile application.
Roger Marks, Managing Director of Aeromark said “We are very pleased with the results from the deployment at Arcus Solutions who have not only enthusiastically embraced the technology but also the associated changes in business process. We look forward to working with Arcus on the next phase of the wider project.”
Field Service News is published by 1927 Media Ltd, an independent publisher whose sole focus is on the field service sector. As such our entire resources are focused on helping drive the field service sector forwards and aiming to best serve our industry through honest, incisive and innovative media coverage of the global field service sector.
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