ARCHIVE FOR THE ‘software-and-apps’ CATEGORY

With the launch of a dedicated field service application, enterprise mobility platform firm Kony has stepped firmly into the busy arena of FSM software providers. However, they bring with them a new set of thinking that could change the way the entire industry approaches app development in the future.

Kris Oldland spoke exclusively with Jonathan Best, VP EMEA at Kony to understand why they believe they are changing the game for the better...

As we sit down to discuss the new launch of Kony’s dedicated field service application I am genuinely intrigued.

The launch seems to fly in the face of the logic that has underpinned the success of Kony in many senses. Kony has established an enviable reputation for being a slick and intuitive platform that facilitates the ease of developing mobile apps.

Facilitating bespoke app design is what these guys do and they do it brilliantly. So surely an off-the-shelf, vanilla field service app goes against their very ethos?

However, my mistake here was thinking that the app stopped at being just plain old vanilla. Sure the base layer may be the same for everybody, but to continue the metaphor the ability to tailor this app is as open and as varied as the contents of a tin of hundreds and thousands.

“Principally what we have is a platform for the development of apps within enterprises. And that’s where most of our customers are investing,” explains Best

“But when we see the same app requested in multiple places rather than us doing custom built apps for every single client, it makes sense for us to provide at least a foundation that they can start from,” he adds.

 

And here in lies the rub.

Kony’s approach is very much centred on client empowerment and in the understanding that whilst there are core requirements across differing companies in differing verticals, ultimately no two businesses are identical, and therefore no two businesses will require an identical field service app.

“Probably the big difference between our apps and the more traditional field service app is that we are trying to provide a base level of functionality, that somebody can take out of the box and use if they don’t have a process or they just want to build something very quickly; but much more, what we are trying to provide is a base level functionality that people can build on top of and develop,” Best states.

“We are not trying to build a 100% solution but instead build a 60 to 80% solution that can then be tailored to meet your business process.”

 

This approach is something that Best and his colleagues don’t see in the FSM market currently and is an approach that could ultimately prove to be a genuinely disruptive influence within the sector.

“Our approach of course opposes what quite a lot of what the traditional apps have had, which is ‘this is a field service solution this is how it works.’ You can tweak around the edges a bit but really you must follow the processes as it is laid out in the core application.”

“And most of those field service applications that have been developed for mobile historically have come from some kind of core system provider be that a ClickSoftware or a SAP or an IBM, whoever, where it is a mobile part of wider solution.”

“What we are trying to say, as a mobile company, is lets look at the mobile process and then try and figure out all the ways that you connect that to whatever your back-end systems might be.”

“So what we are doing for customers is helping them to develop the mobile use case and connect that to their back-end systems. What we saw with field service is that lots of people wanted a field service capability - they either had one that they weren’t very happy with or they didn’t have one and they wanted to create one, and what they wanted was the capability to tie that into whatever their back-end systems were.”

“So they do not necessarily have to take SAP’s field service solution for example just because they use SAP’s systems on the back-end,”

 

Such flexibility to tailor a mobile application to truly fall in line with your own specific workflows is of course both an innovative and exciting approach. But it also sounds like an option that could require some heavy development and a bunch of spare programmers to undertake such work isn’t a resource every company has to hand.

So what exactly is the process of evolving the Kony app beyond the 60% out-of-the-box offering into a well tailored app designed for a specific company’s needs?

“It can be undertaken by the customer if the customer wants to do it,” replies Best.

“Or it can be Kony if the customer wants us to do it - we have a 600 person strong professional services organisation that we can bring to bear on these projects, but probably most commonly it is partners - the traditional model of us being the software provider, the customer being the driver of the demand and the expert in what the processes are; and a system integrator sits in between and takes the Kony technology and builds the app together with the client.”

Fundamentally what the Kony platform provides is an ability to plug into your existing systems and then provide a dedicated tool for mobile interaction with the data stored in those systems based around the needs of any given individual within the enterprise.

And as we enter more fully into an age where information and data is key, the free flow of data facilitated by deep level integrations is of course highly advantageous for the field engineer, enabling them to arrive on site fully prepped for the job they are about to do. However, such movement of data is of course a two way street and the amount of valuable data that is available to a field engineer could also be highly useful if fed into the right place, whether it be sales, R&D or even third party partners.

 

“There is a lot of good stuff in those back end systems that you want to be able to provide out to salespeople, that you want to be able to provide to service engineers and you probably want to be able to provide it to business partners as well,” Best begins.

“A lot of our customers have got a core field service organisation of their own but then they use a third party to fill in the gaps around peaks in demand etc. and they probably want to provide different amounts of information about assets and customers to a third party than you would do to your core sales force.”

“What Kony traditionally provides is the platform that allows you to say ‘we want this information to be available to this person on this device for this purpose.”

However, perhaps Kony’s greatest strength in coming to the field service sector is that they arrive less encumbered by the rules and formulae of any previous iterations of their product, meaning they can take a fresh pair of eyes, that are customer focussed, when it comes to what should or shouldn’t be included within a field service application.

“A lot of people say to us there are gaps in the field service solutions that are available on the market."

“Again, if you look at a lot of the typical field service solutions that are on the market, it’s difficult to extend them to have an additional capability or to add something new into the mix. For example if you look at IoT,” Best ventures.

 

“As people are putting more and more sensors in the capital equipment that is getting serviced, they want to be able to integrate it much more with the field service engineer and the system they are using but it’s very difficult in a lot of the traditional field service solutions that weren’t built with IoT in mind.”

“We are saying lets provide the core capability that allows you to do scheduling, that allows you to push jobs out to the field, allows you to do all the things that any field service person needs you to do. But lets do that on our platform which enables you to tie back into a much broader set of back-end systems than is probably the case in the offering that you are using today, and lets do that in a way that opens up the capability to integrate new things like IoT.”

Of course one of the most exciting factors of the field service industry right now is that it is in a state of almost constant beta, with new technologies being integrated and adopted every year.

With such a dynamic technology base at play future proofing any investment as much as possible is crucial. Which is another benefit of Kony’s approach to FSM app development.

“One of the reasons people are increasingly investing in Kony is because we provide that future proofing at both ends,” Best claims when the subject is brought up.

 

“Our capability to integrate into back-end systems is recognised as the best in the industry and our ability to support differing device types and OS that are getting produced is unparalleled.”

Another factor to be considered within the development of any enterprise app, whether it be for field service, or other areas, of the business is the User Interface. This is something Best is acutely aware of and believes the move to a platform based approach, will see user experience in business to enterprise apps improve vastly as costs of development become greatly reduced.

“One of the things that is happening in the current generation of apps is that people are paying much more attention to what can be done with the interface”

“A large driver for this is that now with Cordova and HTML5, and tools like Kony provide, we can produce native output at a much lower cost by using technology to create it and so there’s ‘this write once, run everywhere’ approach to building apps which has taken a lot of the cost out what previously used to be associated with glossy native development.”

Of course there is another benefit of the ‘write once, run everywhere’ approach as well. There is a growing demand amongst field service providers to be able to provide their own clients with applications that show information on their assets such as maintenance history, mean time to repair, current uptime availability and so on.

Such apps are powerful sales and marketing tools, and as such, a slick user experience here is an absolute must.

However, Best points out that whilst the idea is sound, outside of a platform such as Kony’s actually implementing such apps could be a significant resource strain. “Of course that sounds like a very logical business process to have,” he comments.

“But if you think of what it means logistically, you are going to push that out to the end customer where you can’t control what their devices are. Maybe they want to access it on an iPhone or an Android device; or, in the future who knows what else.”

“That means our customer, using our platform has to provide that app in whatever format their customer wants to consume it in, so they need that capability to provide apps for various OS or device agnostic apps and that’s one of the key capabilities that Kony provides.”

Whilst both the ability to provide customers access to service information as well as being able to tailor an app to meet your exact workflows both sound exciting, it is the potential of the Kony platform to enable field service companies to simply and intelligently expand the role of the service engineer that could be the potential game changer.

 

And as our conversation progressed Best was able to reveal a number of ways that this was already happening with their existing clients.

“The field service engineer is on the customer site and the customer says something about wanting assistance with a new project – that’s great sales data that you want that field service engineer to capture and pass to the right guy in the organisation to follow up with,” Best says outlining one such scenario.

“That functionality typically isn’t built into a field service engineer’s general workflow but of course its very easy to build that into an app. For example, if you have got a notes field and some sort of capability that says press a button here if you think the sales guy should give them a call and follow up.”

“Another example is a utility firm we are working with. They have a customer feedback form which they ask the customer to fill in to show how prompt were they, did they fix the issue, did they leave things neat and tidy after they left etc.”

“That’s a logical business process but when we dug in and looked at it we found that it was actually only about 1 in 12 customers who filled in the form. Then at the end of the month the engineer was supposed to have collected all this stuff up and mail it back to the head office.“

“So he had this massive pile of paper in the back of his van which he’s then got to pick up and put into an envelope and mail to HQ: and then there is somebody who’s job it is to go through each one.”

“It was a horrendous process and of course that guy is already there, with the customer, with a tablet doing his field service work – how much simpler to give that tablet to the customer at the end of the job with a brief survey?”

“In this case just 6 questions, each with a slider ranging from very happy to very dissatisfied at either end , and they don’t have to fill anything in because that is already captured from the job data. It takes them literally less than a minute.”

 

“The response rate went from 1 in 12 to 1 in 2. It gets immediately processed at HQ, there is no rekeying and then there is the cost saving - no paper, no postage, no wasted man hours...”

“So all of these business benefits came about but it’s not something anybody had ever thought of as a field service process. Yet it’s a completely logical add on for a field service capability.”

“It’s also something that no FSM system today provides but it’s the kind of thing that we can add on very simply because its just an extension to the app.”

I often comment that technology at its finest just makes things work better, and given the flexibility and ability to adapt and evolve applications on the fly, it seems the Kony platform could well go some way to helping companies achieve that.

Indeed the biggest change Kony’s arrival in the field service space may bring is in how we approach our service engineers’ workflows in an increasingly mature digital age.

 

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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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Security and communications company Total Integrated Solutions has deployed Tesseract's service management software as part of a major restructuring programme designed to deliver more towards more proactive service and maintenance solutions for customers.

Total Integrated Solutions (TIS) has grown from the company that brought television to Mansfield in the 1950s to a highly recognised and valued brand within the UK’s communications and security systems industry.

With clients ranging from the University of Leeds to the MOD, TIS specialises in telephony, data integration, television and satellite distribution, marine communications, CCTV and fire and intruder detection systems.

Now TIS is restructuring in order to better serve its customers. It recently implemented a new ERP system but found that, while the system is strong on finance and contact management, its service element wasn’t ticking all the boxes. So TIS sought out Tesseract.

 

“Tesseract is one of the most highly rated platforms out there,” says John O’Hanrahan, Head of Service Operations at TIS. “We were aware of them because some of our competitors use them, and we’d heard good things about them from the industry. Following a demonstration from Tesseract, we saw that they offered exactly the level of detail and functionality we were looking for."

Tesseract’s service management software will be integrated with TIS’s ERP system.

It will replace its current, much more manual incident management operation, which requires staff to allocate engineers to deal with issues based on their own knowledge of the engineers’ skill sets, locations and availability.

With Tesseract, everything is automated, improving workflow and visibility and saving TIS a huge amount of time, time which the company can reinvest into working more closely with its customers.

Tesseract’s asset management tools will also help improve the solutions TIS offers to customers. John O’Hanrahan explains,

“Each time a customer logs a fault with a CCTV camera, Tesseract builds a history into that asset. If the camera keeps breaking, it means we can get to the core of the issue and look at more proactive solutions than just repeat repairs. This helps our customers save money, an objective that’s at the forefront of what we do.”

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Leading mobility specialists Kony and Cognizant are joining forces to deliver a new class of mobile enterprise solutions. The two companies have announced they will jointly develop and deliver solutions spanning enterprise mobile applications, mobile app design, and mobile back-end services to enhance business process efficiencies and security.

The suite of cross-platform mobile applications  will be suitable for industries such as banking, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and government, as well as horizontal mobile applications that can be used by sales and field services, workflow, and human resources organisations. Clients will have access to Cognizant's Digital Fabric robust mobile middleware back-end service, based on Kony’s MobileFabric for enterprise-grade mobile services.

In addition, Kony's advanced mobile app design capabilities will be integrated into the offerings of the Cognizant Digital Collaboratory in New York, further enabling clients to envision the "art of the possible" as they architect their digital future using Cognizant’s Digital Works methodology.

The news of the collaboration has been welcomed by clients.

 

“We are looking forward to working with Cognizant and Kony to architect and implement our digital transformation,” said Dan McCormick, regional IT director, Rentokil Initial plc.

“Cognizant’s digital expertise, deep domain knowledge and global scale, combined with Kony’s market-leading platform for enterprise mobility, gives Rentokil access to best-of-breed capabilities. We’re confident that Kony and Cognizant working together will drive the highest value and best possible outcomes for Rentokil as we take our digital journey.”

“We are excited to join forces with Cognizant to provide unparalleled mobile and digital solutions to help our global clients,” said Thomas E. Hogan, chairman and chief executive officer, Kony, Inc.

“What makes this partnership so powerful is the unique and complementary fit of our respective assets and capabilities – Kony’s deep knowledge and intellectual property in enterprise mobility and Cognizant’s tremendous domain expertise, business process and design innovation, industry vertical depth, and impressive market reach and scale. Most importantly, our combined strengths will bring industry-leading innovation and value to our clients, which is the ultimate barometer of success.”

“The world is mobile. Serving today’s customers means connecting with them anytime they want and anywhere they are. As a result, we’ve seen an explosion of emerging end points and apps to engage, capture information, and support decision-making. This trend lies at the heart of digital transformation,” said Sean Middleton, chief operating officer, Emerging Business Accelerator, at Cognizant.

“Successfully harnessing these forces to capture value, though, requires a thoughtful approach supported by an efficient, secure and agile platform. We’re pleased to partner with Kony and to harness their world-class expertise and platform. Together with Cognizant’s Digital Works methodology, this alliance will help our clients across industries.”

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New products include Service Performance Metrics, the mobile Field Service app, and Catalyst, a new implementation package based on industry best practices

ServiceMax, a leading provider of cloud-based field service management solutions, yesterday announced its Spring ‘16 product release.

Built on the Salesforce platform, the ServiceMax Spring ‘16 release is headlined by ServiceMax Service Performance Metrics™, a new product that creates a clear link between field service best practices and field service management technology.

Business leaders have taken notice of the high margins, growth, and differentiation that service can deliver, and with ServiceMax Spring ‘16 field service leaders will have the business insights, mobile apps, and workflows to deliver on these expected outcomes and achieve operational excellence.

“With our Spring ‘16 release, we’re creating a way for field service organization to measure their businesses in ways they previously never could,” said ServiceMax co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Athani Krishnaprasad.

“After working with hundreds of field service businesses across a wide range of industries, we’re uniquely suited to provide a best-practice software platform that helps our customers deliver a best-in-class service experience in the field.”

 

ServiceMax Service Performance Metrics™

For the first time, field service leaders will have the insights to increase service revenue and efficiency using predefined, best practice KPIs that are easy to configure, track and compare across the business.

ServiceMax distilled industry best practices for business metrics such as attach rate, contract uptime, utilisation, first-time fix rate and repeat visit into a first-of-its-kind metrics engine. These true business KPIs provide the insight to track and act on performance over time across product lines, technicians, service teams, accounts, and locations.

ServiceMax uniquely guides customers using Business Value Realization™ and Maturity Matrix methodology tools that uncover the opportunities for improvement and define desired business outcomes. Now with ServiceMax Service Performance Metrics™, customers can easily monitor and improve service performance to achieve the results needed to realise desired business results.

The KPIs are configurable to customers’ business processes and flexible calculations enable consistent benchmarks across the company. Data snapshots of the KPIs are presented in an executive dashboard so that service leaders can conduct time series analysis and easily share insights across the organisation.

ServiceMax Field Service App

In Spring ‘16, ServiceMax delivers the ServiceMax Field Service app with a field-service optimised user experience with unmatched offline capabilities. Available as an early access release, the new mobile app supports Windows hybrid devices, such as Microsoft Surface, and provides an optimized design for Android tablets.

The new ServiceMax mobile experience extends to iPad, Android tablets, and Windows laptops and hybrids and offers improved navigation and search for field service engineers. ServiceMax incorporated feedback from technicians, customers and Apple UX experts to create an interface that improves productivity and promotes customer satisfaction.

ServiceMax Catalyst

The ServiceMax Catalyst implementation package provides a wealth of pre-configured service processes, business objects and functionality that can be quickly deployed across enterprise organisations.

With Catalyst, customers have an accelerated path to get started with ServiceMax and gain immediate benefits from their field service business. The Catalyst implementation package delivers a best-in-class ServiceMax experience that is based on over four hundred ServiceMax customer engagements.

"In times like these, organisations can no longer rely on experience and gut feel to make the right decisions. The field team, dispatchers, and service leadership all need data in order to adapt to changing trends and service needs," said Aly Pinder, Jr., Senior Research Analyst, Aberdeen Group.

"The future of field excellence will be enabled through solutions that can take the guesswork out of what to track by leveraging best practices, and the burden off over strapped IT teams to make insights accessible."

 

In addition, Spring ‘16 expands the list of available localisations by including Finnish and enhanced Japanese language support.

 

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ClickSoftware, a leading provider of field service management solutions for the enterprise, today introduced Click Field Service Edge, a new cloud-based, mobile workforce management platform designed to meet the needs of the largest and most demanding field service providers.

Adoption of the cloud has more than doubled over the past two years and, with that, cloud-based software solutions have become entrenched in the business world.

Recognising the technological benefits for field service companies, ClickSoftware's first, cloud only, SaaS-based solution delivers field service management in an entirely new way.

With patented artificial intelligence, Click Field Service Edge connects enterprise customers with automated real-time insight and intelligent decision-making tools that provide a new level of productivity and efficiency to field workforce performance.

 

"As a company that has successfully managed billions of service engagements, and is exclusively focused on providing field service technology - since creating the market - we know what it takes to help our customers always be a step ahead of the demand, not just move in lockstep with it," explained Tom Heiser, ClickSoftware's Chief Executive Officer.

"We designed Click Field Service Edge to help prepare for the future, and transform the business of customer field service operations from reactive to predictive."

Benefits of the new Click Field Service Edge include:

Increased Service Intelligence and Collaboration:

Real-time status updates - including location and estimated time of arrival - provide organisations with competitive service advantages, enabling them to quickly plan, respond and deliver the best customer service experience possible.

Leveraging established service policies and intelligent decision recommendations helps increase business users' efficiency and productivity. Additionally, integrated tools and bi-directional communication, such as interactive appointment confirmation details, not only improve customer engagements, but also increase customer satisfaction, retention and organic revenue growth.

Ease-of-Use:

Intuitive tools and a flexible user interface allows mangers to create, test and deploy new functionality to drive user efficiency, productivity and satisfaction. Continual, seamless upgrades provide greater agility and enable business users to stay ahead of the competition while also eliminating the expense and time of IT integration.

Improved Scale and Scope:

Developed for the cloud, the solution's performance-optimised architecture offers efficiency, scalable and flexibility to continually support business growth and the changing technology needs of the market for decades to come. In addition, Click Field Service

Edge's intelligent mobile efficiency eliminates unnecessary data transfer on field devices to ensure that critical data is sent and received - even when connections are not optimal.

"It's clear that field service is in the midst of a shift from the basic 'install and fix' procedures to a much more strategic focus on customer engagement," said Jim Lundy, founder and CEO, Aragon Research.

"The influx of new cloud and mobile technology, the availability of big data and the arrival of IoT has led us to a place where field service is empowering businesses to differentiate their offerings, and positively impact every customer interaction throughout the service experience."

 

Click Field Service Edge is currently deployed with key customers including; Pacific Biodiesel, a leader in community-based biodiesel production and Southern Dock, one of the nation's largest providers of commercial doors, loading dock equipment and dock maintenance services.

"As a growing company, we needed a future-proof mobile workforce management solution that would fulfill our changing business needs while providing consistently great service to our customers," explained Katy Chandler, Director at Southern Dock.

"The advanced capabilities, together with a great user experience and the flexibility of the configuration options, made it an easy choice for us."

Click Field Service Edge allows any enterprise worker-from field service professionals to supervisors, dispatchers and managers-to build personalised, strategic engagements that resonate with their customers. These improved engagements, in turn, increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, retention, and customer lifetime value.

 

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Trimble has launched an end-to-end field service management suite called PULSE, designed to improve productivity across mobile workforces

The PULSET suite  is a comprehensive portfolio of end-to-end field service management solutions that enable businesses to deliver field service excellence across a range of industries, including construction, agriculture, telecommunications and utilities.

It is cloud-based and modular, enabling businesses to performing critical field service operations to transform the effectiveness of their work, workers and assets to improve productivity, customer satisfaction and their bottom line. Whether businesses need to streamline efficiencies in the back office, with technicians out in the field or both,PULSE provides an extensible portfolio of capabilities to meet a wide variety of operational requirements.

"The Trimble PULSE suite enables businesses to manage all of their field service operations in one place, with one provider," said John Cameron, general manager of Trimble's Field Service Management division.

"Our combination of telematics, back-office, scheduling and mobile workforce solutions allow us to offer the most complete set of end-to-end capabilities on the market today."

Built upon Trimble's robust infrastructure framework, the PULSE suite offers a comprehensive portfolio of capabilities to manage, schedule, mobilise and monitor the complete operation in real-time.

Managing back office operations - Provides back office support that allows for streamlined business processes that are repeatable and predictable.

 

Organisations can easily manage customers, calls, service contracts, estimates and work orders along with asset history, inventory and billing.

Scheduling and dispatching - Offers an extensive range of scheduling,  dispatch and optimisation tools to manage tasks, appointments, parts, shifts, routing and crew support.

Mobilising the workforce - Provides end-to-end data access and information collaboration through configurable and customisable mobile applications.

Monitoring the work, workers and assets - Offers organisations the ability to monitor work status, view the location of their workers, as well as all their mobile assets and vehicles. Businesses can quickly analyse work in process, utilisation, monitor performance, improve driver safety as well as ensure compliance is met.

"We recognise that there is no one-size-fits-all field service management solution and more businesses are continually seeking tailored solutions to address their individual pain points and priorities," said Cameron.

"The modular set of capabilities that characterise the Trimble PULSE suite allows businesses to tailor a solution based on their needs to >streamline operations and achieve field service excellence."

 

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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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Click here to download the white paper now!

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Built on the Salesforce Customer Service platform, Field Service Lightning promises to harnesses the latest mobile and IoT technologies, enabling companies to deliver connected, intelligent customer service from phone to field...

Salesforce one of the world’s leading CRM companies, announced this month the launch of Field Service Lightning, a new field service solution built for today’s connected world.

Harnessing signals from connected devices and customer data from Salesforce, Field Service Lightning is designed to be a modern approach to field service that is built for mobile and the Internet of Things (IoT).

With Field Service Lightning, Salesforce state companies can now unite customers, connected devices, agents, dispatchers, and employees in the field with one powerful service platform to deliver a seamless customer experience from phone to field.

With 6.4 billion connected things in use today 2020 predictions stating that number will reach 20.8 billion, the implications for field service are staggering. As connected devices become smarter and more predictive, it will create new opportunities to reinvent the customer service experience.

Built on Service Cloud, Field Service Lightning is built to enable companies to deliver mobile, intelligent customer service from phone to field.

In the initial press release Salesforce have stated that Field Service Lightning users will be able to:

Connect their entire service workforce:

Field Service Lightning connects the entire service organisation from call centre to the field.

Agents, dispatchers and mobile employees in the field will be on a single, centralised platform, bringing a new level of transparency and efficiency to customer service.

Service agents will have a 360-degree view of the customer and can create a work order from any case.

Mobile employees in the field will now have access to the customer’s full service and purchasing history, empowering them to easily resolve any issue that may arise and possibly upsell the customer on another product.

For instance, a homeowner requests a service visit because their Internet connection has gone down.

After resolving the issue, the technician sees within the field service app that the homeowner has previously asked about a faster Internet connection.

Using this insight, the technician presents new packaging options and the customer upgrades to a faster Internet speed at a discounted rate.

Intelligently schedule and dispatch work:

At the core of field service is scheduling and dispatching.

Leveraging features from ClickSoftware like scheduling and optimisation, Field Service Lightning promises to take dispatching one step further by applying a layer of intelligence.

Scheduling is automated based on skills, availability, and location to optimise on-site service. Rules can be put into place to automatically assign senior field employees to complex service issues, and junior field employees to the routine service calls.

Because scheduling is automated, dispatchers can focus on the real-time view of service operations and adjust resources accordingly.

For example, if the first job of the day ends up taking longer than anticipated, a dispatcher can assign a different field employee to the next job so the customer’s appointment does not get delayed.

Or if a mobile employee gets delayed by traffic, a dispatcher could route another field technician to the job.

Track and manage jobs in real-time:

Customer service moves fast and forward-thinking companies need real-time access to their service data.

Field Service Lightning promised to enable all service employees to update work orders, issue change requests and adjust job status, anytime, anywhere and on any device.

A staggering 65% of field service workers still print out their service tickets and bring them in their vehicles, slowing down the service process

Now, an employee in the field can see their open work orders on their mobile device, update them throughout the day as they complete jobs, and all the information is seamlessly updated in Salesforce.

We are just beginning to see what customer service can look like in the era of mobile and IoT,” said Mike Milburn, SVP and GM, Service Cloud, Salesforce. “Field Service Lightning gives companies the ability to reinvent their approach to service by connecting the phone to the field on a single platform, resulting in an amazing customer experience.”

Pricing and Availability:

Available in most regions now Field Service Lightning starts at $135 for organisations that have at least one Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition Service Cloud license.

 

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