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Research conducted by Bill Pollock, president and principal consulting analyst at Strategies For GrowthSM (SFGSM) reveals that selecting a Field Service Management (FSM) solution often requires months – if not years – of due diligence to reduce the “long list” of potential vendors and solutions down to a carefully selected “short list” of possibilities...

Making a decision based on your own research is often a daunting task, collating and interpreting RFP information and sorting live demonstration ‘vaporware’ from actual, live software capabilities.

The following provides an additional set of information that your peers in the industry consider fundamental to the decision – data your team can use to make a final, intelligent choice that grows with your business into the future.

The results from SFGSM’s 2017 Field Service Management Benchmark Survey clearly identify four specific factors cited by half (or nearly half) of the survey respondent base when making their respective FSM vendor and solution decisions, namely:

• 50% Prefer a solution that interfaces with Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• 47% Prefer to work with a single provider of Field Service functionality
• 47% Prefer a solution that is intuitive and easy to train on
•  45% Prefer to invest in a solution that fosters Sales and Service collaboration

Another 35% also cite their preference for a solution that rolls out quickly.

While each (or all) of these factors may have contributed in some way to your decision-making process, your final decision is likely to rely more on how the FSM solution you choose will address your greatest challenges, provide the greatest opportunities and benefits for services delivery improvement, and allow you to compete head-to-head against your strongest competitors.

Compounding the importance of your selection, the chosen solution must also provide the ability to improve existing customer satisfaction levels, and increase the services organisation’s contribution to the company’s bottom line. Quite an undertaking, to be sure; but certainly doable – but, only with the most effective and robust FSM solution in place, and a full complement of vendor resources to support it over time.

Functionalities to Look For When Selecting & Evaluating an FSM Vendor/Solution

Gartner cites six categories of FSM enablement that should be included in any (i.e., every) FSM solution – at least every FSM solution that is strong enough to run the entire organisation’s services business. They are:

1. Demand Management – including customer portals, multichannel customer communications, IoT integration, triage support, field work order/appointment request, field quoting, field parts sourcing, ticketing system integration and long-cycle work requests.
2. Work Planning – including forecasting, scheduling optimisation, parts demand planning, purchasing, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) integration, customer communications and third-party service enablement.
3. Technician Enablement (Mobile) – including Global Positioning System (GPS) integration, routing, equipment history/site details, social collaboration, customer communications, knowledge base/work instructions, purchasing & quoting/sales and tool management.
4. Work Order Debrief – including work order financial information, customer forms, site evidence, equipment updates, recommendations, payment collection and customer surveys.
5. Operations – including invoicing and price books, installed equipment manager, maintenance agreement management, maintenance plans and quoting, warranty management & warranty claims management, revenue recognition enablement, reverse logistics management, depot repair, equipment supersession, engineering change requests and fleet management.
6. Analytics and Integration – including field service performance management; cross-functional predictive analytics; alerts, notifications and gamification; and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and GPS integration.

While most vendors will say they offer all of these functionalities within their FSM solution offerings, it is more than likely that there will be significant gaps in key categories such as work planning, technician enablement, and analytics and integration (among others).

However, each of these areas will be critical to the overall enablement that your FSM solution is needed to provide and, therefore, must be included in the FSM solution that is ultimately selected and implemented.

Marne Martin, CEO, ServicePower, a leading provider of field service and hybrid mobile workforce management solutions, agrees that all six of these areas must be addressed in any FSM solution, noting “For organisations looking for a single vendor, end-to-end solution with an easy integration process to existing CRM or ERP packages, ServicePower is a great fit.”

“ServicePower supports a seamless integration mechanism to any CRM, including the launch of an App for the Salesforce AppExchange and new prebuilt connectors to most major software packages.”

 

“Our solution provides a full complement of mobile workforce management functionality, from consumer entitlement, to schedule optimisation and contractor dispatching, work order management, enterprise mobility, asset, inventory and contract management, and 360° BI (i.e., Business Intelligence).”

She further adds that, “While most FSM vendors also offer ‘scheduling’, ServicePower’s solution is the only one on the market designed to improve the customer experience though real time AI (i.e., Artificial Intelligence) and robust mobile functionality, while streamlining service operations with integrated hybrid workforce management functionality.

SFGSM’s survey results validate the effort ServicePower has expended in extending our solution to include the full spectrum of functionality required to manage a mobile operation, from entitlement through a plug and play intelligent consumer portal to warranty management and BI.”

Making the Final Decision – It’s Time to Decide!

The Cloud has normalised the playing field for most FSM vendors and their customers.

The options are many, the costs have come down (i.e., through the proliferation of the subscription basis model) and the FSM solution alternatives are “all over the place” with respect to the comparative breadth and depth of product functionality, strategic partnerships, FSM vendor acquisitions, “new” product roll-outs and the like.

However, in deciding which is the best fit for your field service operation, today and for the long term, one thing remains clear – the field service operations at your organisation will remain the central focus of your role and responsibility.

Why would you want to go with a vendor that doesn’t provide it all?

 

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Having introduced the concept of crowd-sourcing in previous articles for Field Service News, Manuel Grenacher, Coresystems, now takes a look at how and why the two new technologies dominating conversation in field service circles are perfect bed fellows for the gig economy...

As I discussed in my last article on why crowdsourcing could be transformational for the field service industry, the outlook for the growth of the field service market is hugely positive – MarketsandMarkets predicts that it will nearly triple in size to $5.11 billion between now and 2020. In this article, I’ll examine the technologies that will likely play a major role in driving that exponential growth of the field service market over the next few years.

The IoT Effect

The technology that has played a huge role so far in precipitating the growth of the field service industry is the Internet of Things (IoT).

This isn’t surprising, as the IoT is having a profound impact on not just every technology driven industry, but also the daily lives of people across the globe. And the IoT and the real-time connectivity it enables has led to a massive spike in consumer expectations for instantaneous customer service.

These new elevated customer demands created by the IoT are impacting the field service industry greatly, as organisations running any kind of a field service operation have been forced to rethink their strategies and tactics for customer service delivery, including their workforce resources and supporting field service technologies.

 

The bottom line is the IoT is very much here and is impacting your industry whether you realise it or not; so to put it simply, either you respond to the new realities of an IoT-driven world or you risk obsolescence.

The Era of Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) isn’t just a social media fad anymore, as enterprise use cases for augmented reality are on the rise and on a fast track to implementation. Indeed, ABI Research predicts that 21 million AR units will be shipped by 2020 with sales reaching $100 billion.

The field service industry, in particular, stands to benefit greatly from AR.

Imagine service technicians with specialised AR headsets, who will then have all the information they need for an installation and/or repair on a heads-up display. No more fumbling around for a laptop or tablet in the middle of a project.

 

AR would also connect on-site technicians with more experienced engineers back at an organisation’s headquarters who can visually supervise and troubleshoot more difficult technical issues.

With that, the use of AR boosts the key field service metrics of first-time fix rates and average repair time. It also benefits staff training and skills shortages, especially as devices trend toward IoT and more advanced technology.

Clearly, AR will benefit service engineers and technicians worldwide, many of whom are in the field service industry.

Enter the Gig Economy

Obviously, the gig economy isn’t a technology, but it’s a movement that could reshape field service management as we know it.

The digital technology underpinning the gig economy (such as the IoT) can help workers become entrepreneurs who have the freedom to dictate their work on their own terms, which has long been the allure of the independent contractor.

Skilled workers who have expertise in certain industry sectors – such as field service management – can either make extra money in their free time while pursuing their passions, or they can use the gig economy as their sole source of income.

Pioneering companies in the gig economy, such as Uber for the transportation sector and Airbnb for hospitality, have laid a blueprint for other industries to follow. In field service, we see a future in which for-hire field service technicians can connect – through technology tuned for the gig economy – to organisations who need extra manpower for their field service teams.

 

At Coresystems, we know first-hand the challenges that organisations face when the field service requests greatly outnumber that company’s field service technicians. By leveraging independent workers in the gig economy, organisations can help deliver the real-time service that customers now demand.

So there you go – the three factors that we envision having the biggest impact on the evolution of the field service industry over the next few years.

What are some other factors that you’re seeing through your own work in the field service industry?

We invite you to share your thoughts in the comments section.

 

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Marne Martin, CEO of ServicePower, discusses how the “intelligent” service organisation is able to meet increasing customer expectations whilst simultaneously driving increases in revenue and brand loyalty...

Productivity, for field service operations, is the means to an end of delighting both your customer and the C suite in your company.

Improved customer satisfaction and increased revenue are the holy grail of any field service department. If you are also able to do these two things using a hybrid workforce, your internal metrics and profitability of your service organisation can also improve.

Large enterprise organisations have long understood the value of artificial intelligence algorithms embedded within mobile workforce management technology, in its ability to improve productivity and efficiency of staffed mobile workers, as well as its ability to provide field teams with the process and information needed while on site to resolve issues in a single visit.

The power of big data, cloud computing, and machine learning are all proven to reap benefits of more productive, least costly schedules which improve overall metrics and customer-centric KPIs like schedule adherence and mean time to schedule. Service priorities can also be driven off of more than SLAs and start looking to customer profitability, propensity to purchase additional services, and a number of other emerging customer-centric areas that service organisations are starting to focus more on.

 

In the last decade, more and more of these same organisations have taken hold of the additional benefits of intelligently integrating contracted mobile workers into the labour mix, as well as the ability for customers to schedule into the time slots that a service organisation or manufacturer want to make available.

Using contractors expands capacity, in terms of availability, skills or geographical coverage, field service organisations can provide service when and where their customers require, in a manner that’s more consistent with an employee with a branded van.

In an “intelligent” service organisation, service is enabled to meet the customer’s expectations, drive increases in revenue, brand loyalty, as well as efficient capacity planning.

By using the available technology, plus a hybrid workforce model that looks to coverage and demand to assess what technicians you need where, the type, skills and training such that you can begin blending employed with contracted workforces, the next level of productivity beyond that of your peers can be achieved.

Field Service experts know service. But what can expertise in field service bring to complimentary sectors that are used only to point to point travel optimisation and not schedule or priority based optimisation.

The fact of the matter is that any business with mobile workers whether service, sales, delivery, inspection, home health care, etc. are dearly in need of the ability to drive improved schedule prioritisation, compliance and productivity.

Even financial services companies with work allocated to the back office can benefit from optimisation.

 

With that goal in mind, ServicePower recently released Boost, on the Salesforce AppExchange.

Boost provides any organisation with mobile workers beyond field service, to healthcare, financial services and sales teams, the ability to continue using their Salesforce application to manage customers and create work orders for when field based services, of any type, are needed. Then, using Boost, pass that list of work orders or tasks to ServicePower which uses our patented Artificial intelligence-based optimisation technology to produce a more productive, least costly schedule.

Boost makes schedule optimisation go far beyond only travel optimisation as it does both to achieve greater improvements in productivity, capacity and schedule compliance available to every organisation, easily, from the Salesforce AppExchange.

Start moving beyond just the CRM to after-sales service to prioritise your visits by propensity to buy, profitability on orders, or any other customer metric you feel important.

It’s also worthy to note that true optimisation is not geo-productivity or Uber-like logic. Products that claim geo-productivity or Uber capabilities do provide a mechanism to schedule a resource when a customer raises a hand for a service. So, is response time better in this scenario?

Yes, in so much as you have a worker in the field already sitting idle, you can see their proximity on a map, and send them to the new customer. It doesn’t limit the schedule costs, because it’s not taking into account the entire daily schedule. It’s reactive scheduling, which is nice if you have slack  capacity, but slack capacity costs money.

On demand scheduling is great, from a PR perspective. It doesn’t offer the proactive services customers expect from providers today.

Mobile workforce management software with optimisation does.

Boost, in particular, provides more than a point on a map. It provides an easy route to a real optimised schedule, using your existing Salesforce implementation, regardless of whether you’re managing 25 mobile workers or 1,000.

Find Boost on the Salesforce AppExchange at: http://sforce.co/2p4mKV2

 

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IFS’ new ownership private equity firm EQT are standing true to their promise to accelerate the growth of the Swedish firm as they make to key UK acquisitions...

ERP provider IFS have further enhanced their offering into the field service management sector this month with two key UK acquisitions.

Both announced on the same day the Swedish organisation took ownership of both field service management system provider mplsystems and also implementation specialists Field Service Management (FSM).

Whilst the latter acquisition perhaps had an air of inevitability about it as FSM have been working as resellers and system integrators for IFS for some time now, it was the acquisition of mplsystems that will have raised eyebrows within the industry perhaps the most.

However, the acquisition also makes perfect sense from a technology point of view as mplsystems, who have only just launched a new genetic algorithm based scheduling engine themselves, (see page 8), are more widely acknowledged for their omni-channel contact centre technology which has earned them recognition from Gartner as a visionary within the CRM Customer Engagement Magic Quadrant.

Indeed, IFS’ move to bring this technology into their own, gives them a truly end-to-end service lifecycle solution, following a similar path to Microsoft in terms of how they have brought CRM and Field Service together under one platform.

 

“It’s quite specific why we’ve acquired mplsystems” Mark Brewer, Global Industry Director, Service Management told Field Service News as the announcement went to press. “It is very directly a recognition on IFS’ part that we have a gap in our end-to-end offering in the customer engagement area.”

“We were looking to acquire some IP, and in the case of mplsystems, some very strong IP, to plug that gap in the customer engagement piece, at the centre of which is their omni-channel contact centre capabilities.”

In fact, the acquisition of mplsystems and the integration of their contact centre technology within the IFS solution, is in perfect line with the roadmap that IFS appear to be continuing down, and sits perfectly alongside the introduction of the embedded CRM within their ERP solution that was introduced at their last significant roll out (IFS Applications 9).

“There has been a lot of conversation recently around the convergence of CRM and FSM and when speaking at Field Service Management Expo a couple of months back I alluded to this then also.” Brewer commented.

“We see now both technologies sitting under the customer experience space, and there will be three prongs to our offering in this area moving forward.”

 

“Firstly, we will continue doing what mplsystems have done very successfully across the last few years which is to offer a Contact Centre as a Service (CCaS) capability to many organisations with large contacts centres - people like Aviva and ALDI. The two other prongs to the offering then are that it will integrate with our IFS FSM solution so it will form the customer engagement capability of that offering. It will then also form the customer engagement capability of IFS Apps.”

“So whether you are taking down a service request, whether you are taking a return material authorisation, whether your taking a feed from an IoT connected device or even if you are utilising social or chat-bot technology, whatever the medium of engagement you choose we will go through the mplsystems customer engagement solution.”

So how do IFS see this new ability to manage the entire customer experience lifecycle? Is this something they feel gives them an advantage over competitors or are they getting themselves back on a level playing field? Is the inclusion of this technology a USP that they can push as vendors, or is it something their customers have been demanding for some time now?

“I think there are two points to that question,” Brewer replies.

“I think there is definitely a customer pull because we are seeing the focus that is evolving from productivity improvement and operational excellence to a model that is more focussed on revenue enhancement. In its most simplistic terms people are seeing service as a growing opportunity from a profitability perspective.”

 

“However, we do also see this as a USP as we believe we have best-of-breed capabilities in a number of our separate offerings and in our standalone FSM solution now we have the capability to run a world class contact centre, we have the capability to do world class optimisation and scheduling. We have the capabilities to deliver a full return material/reverse logistics operation and we have the capability to do very strong contract and warranty claims management as well.”

“All of those elements are what we perceive to be best-in-class, and by filling in the gap with the customer engagement capability, via the acquisition of mplsystems, we now genuinely have a unique offering as it is not just a broad set of capabilities, it is a number of complimentary best-in-class solutions that can feed into and off of each other.”

Finally, with the acquisition of FSM Ltd it appears to essentially be a case of bringing a very successful outsourced operation into the IFS fold.

“FSM has been a very successful in the UK and Ireland in securing some very big customers for us, they’ve got a great track record and ultimately with the new ownership of EQT we now have a much more aggressive growth strategy and in key geographies including Europe West (which includes UK) the investment is there to bring companies like FSM on board to support our capability to grow our market-share further."

 

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Resource Type: eBook
Published by:  Solarvista
Title: The top 10 “often forgotten” risks when selecting field service management software

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Want to know more? Access to this resource is available to Field Service News subscribers only - but if you are a Field Service Professional you may qualify for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription!

Click here to apply for your subscription now and we’ll send you this white paper to your inbox now instantly as a thank you for your time!

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Synopsis:

Selecting the right solution to meet your field service software needs is crucial. This eBook explores 10 often overlooked risks that companies must consider when selecting a FSM solution that could save expense and time during and after implementation.

Overview

The eBook focusses on ten often overlooked considerations field service organisations should address when selecting a new field service management solution. As well as identifying pitfalls to be aware of the eBook also looks at means of overcoming them.

The areas of focus within the eBook include:

1. It won’t actually do what you need it to do:

This seems an obvious one and one that everyone is aware of, right? Well, not quite. Defining how any software works (and especially with field service software) is a difficult and abstract exercise and unless you work in IT as a professional (and even then you are likely to find it hard), it’s an almost impossible to be truly 100% sure that the software will do what you need it to do.

2. It’s hard to access on the devices that people really want to use:

Over the last few years, the march of new smartphone devices has exploded and of course everyone has a position about “which platform is best”.

In reality, they all have their pros and cons. Devices shouldn’t be the deciding factor. You should let people use the device they feel most comfortable with. Some might prefer iPhones, some might prefer Android etc., some Windows tablets etc.

3. It won’t connect well (or easily) to your existing systems:

Let’s face it, integration is the bug-bear of any project. Over the years, different approaches have surfaced, each one meant to “make it easy” and, whilst there has been some success, it’s mostly, by its nature, hard to get right.

It’s not so much the technology, as the process and its impact upon resulting products you may have.

4. You buy it against a fully “thought-through” RFP documents, demos and then you find out it cannot do a particular feature exactly as you need it:

This sounds like it shouldn’t happen; after all, you spent a lot of time asking every stakeholder what they needed. But so often in this scenario, we see a good 10-20% of functionality is forgotten about and it’s need is only encountered “in project”.

This causes significant scheduling, resources and budget issues. Where do you find the extra time or money to pay for such expansion of scope?

5. Once implemented, your processes and needs change, so the system becomes less relevant and/or effective:

In selecting a product and vendor, you need to make sure that the future is catered for. You are buying a future, not just for today. Your business will change and the software needs to change with it.

6. The system slows down once in heavy use and over time:

One of the key reasons for choosing a new system may be that you want a more responsive system than the current older one. The performance of software is hard to predict, especially on systems and networks used for other purposes too, such as in-house servers and networks.

To mitigate this risk, the best solution is the cloud. With cloud computing, you have virtually limitless CPU, database and network power at your disposal.

7. Your staff don’t embrace the tool enough or it doesn’t get used properly:

Let’s start by saying this isn’t a criticism. But it’s human nature (and proven dynamic) that products that are easy to use, get used the most. Field service management software falls into “complex ERP” and certainly some parts of all ERP software is complex. The users at greatest risk of this phenomenon are mobile users, such as field engineers & technicians.

8. Information isn’t connected together so getting business intelligence is difficult:

Any ERP solution will generate vast quantities of data. Getting real insight from all this data is, again, a tricky task. We see so many systems procured where the business intelligence (“BI”) is assumed to be something done AFTER the system is implemented.

9. The time it takes to implement is longer than envisaged:

We’ve already mentioned several reasons why predicting the duration of an implementation can be difficult. But by avoiding many of these mistakes, the risk to timeline can be reduced or even eliminated.

One good way we recommend to make sure you meet timelines desired (and perhaps more importantly, budget!) is to use “Agile Project” styles for both procurement and implementation.

10. You start well, but as staff leave and new people join, the use of the system degrades and it becomes less useful/relevant:

We often see this referred to as “death by a thousand cuts”. It’s more common than many think. And almost impossible to see happening unless you look closely. Slowly, over time, your people lose contact with the software, function by function, process by process.

 

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This eBook offers further details on each of the above challenges and how to overcome them.

Want to know more? Access to this resource is available to Field Service News subscribers only - but if you are a Field Service Professional you may qualify for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription!

Click here to apply for your subscription now and we’ll send you this white paper to your inbox now instantly as a thank you for your time!

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Evatic, a leading software vendor within Service Management, has acquired WinServ Software in Sweden.

Together Evatic and WinServ will have more than 800 customers in 30+ countries and be the leading European service management software supplier. WinServ Software has its main office in Stockholm.

“We are extremely happy to add WinServ to our product family” says Pål M. Rødseth, CEO of Evatic. “We have known Ronny, founder and CEO of WinServ, for years and we believe that the two organisations will be much stronger together when it comes to developing the service management software solutions for the future.

This is our second acquisition in less than a year, following our acquisition of Tesseract in the UK in September of 2016, and it is in line with our strategy to become the leading player within this space”.

 

“I believe that WS Software are in the best hands going forward”, says Ronny Fransson, founder and CEO of WS Software. “We have known Evatic for many years, and we are confident that the WinServ solution will be in the best hands going forward. Being part of a larger software group will add strength to the product development that is needed to be a service management solution provider in the future”.

Evatic is a leading European service management software company with the head office in Trondheim, Norway and offices in the UK, Sweden, Germany, France, Holland and Singapore. With a global reach and more than 800 customers in 30+ countries providing customers with service management solutions under the Evatic, Tesseract and WinServ umbrella, 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

 

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Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News talks to Jeremy Squire of Fast Lean Smart about when a best-of-breed scheduling solution can be the right option over a broader, more generic Field Service Management platform as well as what types of field service companies will benefit from optimised scheduling.

Paul Saunders of Kirona explains why just “making do” is a dangerous approach when it comes to your field service management systems...

The majority of field service organisations have a mobile solution which meets their needs to varying degrees, however for a large proportion of these organisations, the solution was implemented for a specific contract and then rolled out to other contracts where it’s not a perfect fit or was implemented several years ago, met 100% of the “then” requirements of the organisation but has failed to keep up with the changing requirements of the organisation, their customers or even technology.

This leaves many “making do” with a mobile solution that is expensive to maintain, hard to adapt and less responsive when it comes to providing a competitive advantage above their competitors, mobilising new contracts or delivering additional value on existing contracts.

The contract won and the service delivered by a field service organisation three years ago is typically different to a contract to deliver a similar service today, with clients requiring a different level of service, more efficiencies, more flexibly, all with great visibility.

This means organisations require a more flexible, enterprise class mobile solution that can “adapt” to meet the various needs of the field service organisation and contracts that it provides.

 

Today as a minimum, a field service mobile solution should be capable of integrating with multiple back office solutions, as the majority of field service delivery organisations either end up having multiple back office works management solutions (as they acquire businesses or contracts) or have other systems such as HR, finance, etc.

A modern field service organisation needs a mobile solution that is independent of its FM back office capable of delivering a mobile job that varies from contract to contract, meeting the specific requirements of that contract. Therefore the mobile solution needs to be configurable allowing a single PPM or reactive job type to be modified to be specific to the contract that it’s deployed for.

As an example an organisation might have a standard PPM or reactive job type, with standard fields and workflow deployed to the mobile device, however when a job for contract ‘A’ is received by the mobile solution, additional workflows and data collection might be added automatically to meet the requirements of that contract prior to it being dispatched to the mobile device. This might be contract specific surveys, health and safety checks or intelligence gathering that might deliver additional benefit to the FS organisation or their customer.

Where does this additional data collected get held?

Typically the FS back office solutions are not flexible enough to enable this additional contract specific data storage therefore the mobile solutions server component needs to be capable of storing and making this information available either through integration or reporting.

As many field service back office solutions cannot handle the complex process workflows required by a modern field service organisation this is also something that is often required by the solution that is actually “doing the work”, i.e. the mobile solution.

The ability to implement workflows before and after a task has been dispatched to the field is another key component. If a new reactive job is created where specific niche skills or high value equipment is required, put this into an authorisation process prior to dispatching to the mobile device. Equally if an operative has a specific outcome on a job, the mobile workflow solution should be able to automatically create one or more follow on tasks, place the job in approval, etc.

 

Organisations would need to have developers who develop and tweak their existing solution to meet the needs of them or their customer, or they get their suppliers to do this. They should have a mobile solution capable of being configured and tested in minutes/hours, not days or weeks to meet their exacting requirements.

Kirona’s Job Manager Suite including Job Manager Mobile is a two part solution, JM Mobile and Control Centre. JM Control Centre is capable of being integrated with multiple back office solutions. Within JM Control Centre, users can configure what a standard job type is (such as PPM or Reactive) as well as what additional contract specific workflow or data requirements are required for each instance of this job on a mobile device all without the need for supplier or an organisations development team.

JM Control Centre and JM Mobile can also allow complex contact specific workflows to be implemented, ensuring compliance to the field service organisations standards and processes as well as their customers. This workflow also removes the need for back office intervention for follow-on’s jobs, special tasks, approvals, etc. reducing the resource requirements of organisations.

All of the above gives field service organisations and their customer’s greater flexibility whilst gaining in-house control of their job workflow, something most organisations have never had, enabling them and their customers to be proactive as well as reactive, collect more information for their customer and their customers sites and gain a competitive advantage to enable execute contracts more effectively and to win more business.

 

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IFS, the global enterprise applications company, today announces it has completed the acquisition of mplsystems Limited and Field Service Management Limited.

mplsystems Limited is a provider of omni-channel contact center and customer engagement software that, together with IFS’s leading Service Management offering, provides a complete end-to-end customer engagement solution. Field Service Management Limited, an implementation specialist of Field Service Management solutions in the UK and Ireland will bolster IFS’s Service Management sales, consulting, and support organisation in the region.

UK-based mplsystems Limited develops and implements omni-channel contact center and field service management solutions at some of the UK’s most well respected brands, including: Babcock International, HomeServe, Ecomaster, ENGIE, and Iceland. The company is recognised as a Visionary by Gartner in its Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service for Western Europe (published 24 October 2016) and a Niche Player in its Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center (published 8 May 2017), primarily thanks to its investment in innovation that has resulted in a flexible, integrated and easy-to-use contact center management platform.

Field Service Management Limited is a UK based implementation partner of IFS in the UK and Ireland. Its expert team of Service Management consultants will join IFS’s UK operation in order to drive further growth in the region. To date, Field Service Management Limited has supported IFS with some of the largest service management implementations in the UK.

 

Commenting on the acquisitions, Fredrik vom Hofe, Group Senior Vice President for Business Development at IFS said “IFS is already recognised as a global leader in the Service Management sector, which we are extending further with these two acquisitions. The opportunity resulting from the acquisition of mplsystems will mean that businesses around the world who want to deliver the best customer service from the moment a customer makes an enquiry through to an issue being resolved, now have the most complete and connected service management proposition available on the market’.

Paul White, CEO of mplsystems Limited, stated “The team at mplsystems is delighted to be joining forces with IFS. We now have a great opportunity to take our award winning omni-channel and customer engagement solutions onto the world stage”.

Alex Stratis, research analyst at IDC, commented: “IFS is not only extending but also strengthening its Service Management proposition with the acquisition of mplsystems. The combination of IFS’s existing capabilities in managing field service with mplsystems’ ability to connect to service recipients via contact center, web, text, and mobile interfaces means customer engagement can be managed in a more integrated way. Both companies share similar values in innovation and a customer centric mindset which is important for the businesses to effectively integrate.”

 

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