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Plexal, the innovation company established by Delancey, is working with the UK government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) to support the diversification of the UK’s telecoms market and stimulate the creation of products and services from SMEs and startups. The announcement was made by Minister of State at DCMS Julia Lopez at techUK’s Our Network Future event yesterday.Through its LORCA programme, Plexal has worked with leaders from the telecoms market to assess where there could be opportunities for SMEs to provide products or services.

Plexal has now identified SMEs that will take part in a 12-week sprint aimed at developing robust  business cases, technology roadmaps and investment plans. The aim is to create a diverse commercial ecosystem for private 5G networks that enables large and small vendors to play a role.

THE SMEs WILL WORK WITH PLEXAL AND THE GOVERNMENT TO DEVELOP OPPORTUNITIES AND TO OVERCOME ANY BARRIERS THAT EXIST IN PLAYING AN ACTIVE ROLE IN THE TELECOMS INDUSTRY.

The SMEs will work with Plexal, the government and industry to carve out and develop opportunities and overcome any barriers that exist for startups to play an active role in the telecoms market. These barriers could include making sure the products are interoperable and have robust cybersecurity built in.

Plexal is looking at current and future 5G private networks in two categories: 

• Fully private, where the value outcome remains isolated from the public 
• Private today, but will need to integrate to the public network to realise all the benefits 

The sprint will support the UK government’s aim of developing a domestic capability for 5G and making sure the telecoms market includes a diverse range of vendors – including a larger number of small and medium-sized companies.

Commenting on the innovation challenge, Andrew Roughan, managing director of Plexal, said:

“We think there’s a big opportunity to understand and develop the role of SMEs in the telecoms market. Our open collaboration model, which is bringing industry, the government and SMEs together in a pre-competitive environment, is a novel way to approach the challenge of how the UK creates a diverse telecoms market that supports the creation of homegrown, sovereign technology.”
Plexal is an innovation company that delivers programmes for both industry and government, including NCSC For Startups, Cyber Runway, LORCA and London RoadLab. Plexal also works with industry to solve their innovation challenges and partner with startups.

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Further Reading:

• Read more about Leadership and Strategy @ www.fieldservicenews.com/leadership-and-strategy
• Read more about Telecommunications on Field Service News @ www.fieldservicenews.com/telecommunications
• Read more articles about SMEs on Field Service News @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/smes
• Learn more about Plexal  @ www.plexal.com
• Follow Plexal on Twitter @ twitter.com/Plexalcity

Survey reveals 51% of UK SMEs feel benefits of 5G are being overhyped...

New research, reveals 72% of UK SMEs believe 5G will make them more efficient and successful.

In the Big Discussion we bring together a panel of industry experts and focus on one key topic within the field service sector.
In the final part of our series on dynamic scheduling our panellists, FieldAware's Mark Tatarsky and Fast Lean Smart's Chris Welsh are asked if SMEs can also benefit from optimised scheduling.

Can smaller and medium sized organisations benefit from optimised scheduling, or is it only beneficial for enterprise-level field service providers?

Marc Tatarsky, SVP Marketing, FieldAware
Advances in cloud computing, multi-tenant SaaS solutions, and new micro and macro optimised scheduling capabilities enable optimised scheduling to scale down. Optimization is now an effective solution for organizations of all sizes.

Micro optimisation enables service delivery firms to build a library of business policies that can be used to tune the optimiser to create a work schedule for an individual team or region. The business policy contains the rules that ensure competing business objectives are balanced appropriately. The rules ensure the right field technicians are considered for the work while managing business objectives such as limiting travel time, delivering priority work, or balancing the number of jobs across the team. 

The business policy library can cover how the team should work in various business scenarios. These can include an emergency schedule; prioritising installations at the end of the reporting period to assist in achieving revenue targets; during seasonal changes, etc.

Running the service delivery business is easier when you select the business policies you want to apply to different teams and then change them as needed to reflect the changes in their business. The benefits of accelerating time to value and reducing the cost and complexity of maintenance that a micro optimised schedule provides small and medium sized organisations equally apply to the enterprise.


Chris Welsh, Director, FLS – FAST LEAN SMART
Yes, most definitely, optimised scheduling will help even small service operations that are performing multiple jobs per day to be more efficient and deliver reliable customer service – essential in an ever more competitive industry where customer expectations are rising.

Even with a handful of engineers, there are thousands or millions of possible permutations for job assignment and most providers will resort to allocating work according to postcode patches. This makes it easy to allocate jobs but the ‘hard borders’ between resources can be the greatest inefficiency for field service delivery and you might turn down an appointment request that was actually achievable and cost effective. 

An optimised schedule considers all resources and travel time without these hard borders and, in my experience of performing scheduling tests, an optimised schedule compared to a manual schedule will typically reveal a 25%-50% reduction in mileage whilst making sure appointments agreed are achievable - that might be 1 to 2 hours saving per day for the engineer to do that extra job.
Perhaps equally important, only engineers with the right skills and parts turn up and engineers get home on time! This contributes to greater employee engagement and to the success of the company.

Report suggests spend largely driven by new emerging digital services such as cloud, the Internet of Things and the roll-out of 5G.

Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) who use vehicles are aware of digitisation benefits but many still rely on manual processes.

New research from TomTom Telematics shows fleet-based SMEs are turning to digitisation to improve productivity, communication and cost.

The study, which canvassed over a thousand companies across the EU and USA, revealed 81% of those decision makers surveyed said they could get more jobs done if they could digitise more of their workflow.

However, the majority of those questioned admitted taking a manual-paper heavy approach to every day tasks such as expense management, customer updates and quoting and invoicing.

Beverly Wise, TomTom Telematics' UK Sales Director said the survey highlighted two key areas. "First, SMEs are frustrated by the costliness, time ineffectiveness and potential for error explained when handling essential tasks manually," she explained. "And two, managers want digital solutions to take care of these jobs."

You can download the full here.

 

New UK research shows that UK SMEs have a bullish attitude towards investment over the next 12 months. SMEs are most likely to invest in IT equipment, cars, vans and plant & machinery.

Research carried out for London-based SME asset finance and leasing specialist Norton Folgate revealed that of 400 surveyed  four in 10 (39%) of SMBs planned to invest in new IT equipment over the next 12 months, spending an average of £5,290 each.

Cars are the second most popular working asset among SMEs, 18% of business owners planning to acquire at least one over the next year, spending on average £14,496.

Plant & machinery (12%) and commercial vehicles (11%) are in third and fourth places with SMEs spending an average of £7,426 and £11,163 on these respectively

According to the findings, 10% of SMEs intend to use asset finance and alternative finance to acquire their working assets, underlining the growing popularity of this sector.  Indeed, more than half (53%) expect demand for alternative finance – including asset finance - to increase over the next two years.

Norton Folgate, part of the Amicus Group since 2015, reports seeing a significant increase in the number of enquiries among SMEs. Robert Keep, Founder and Principal, said: “Most SMEs understand the critical importance of up to date IT systems and this is reflected in their willingness to invest in new equipment over the next 12 months.

“We’re finding that many small business owners increasingly see the value of using asset finance to acquire these rather than tying up working capital or turning to bank overdrafts and expensive credit cards. Being part of Amicus has put us in a very strong position to further enhance our asset leasing and finance capabilities.”

John Jenkins, CEO of Amicus commented: “It’s encouraging to see such significant numbers of SMEs are committed to investing in their working assets and the growing importance of asset finance.  Norton Folgate has built a very strong reputation in this field and is playing an integral role in our strategy of offering a diversified range of specialist lending services.”

 

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