Resource Type: White Paper
Published by:  Astea
Title: What is the next phase of service innovation

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Synopsis:

Innovation causes company evolution and every year service is becoming more important to companies not only as a source of revenue but also as a key driver of customer loyalty...

It is no longer enough to merely deliver quality service in a timely manner. Customer demands and competitive pressures are driving service companies toward service innovation – developing new service offerings and service delivery mechanisms that their customers will find valuable.

To remain competitive, service organisations need to make investments in developing and designing new service products, tapping into new markets, and finding new ways to deliver service – making innovation part of the culture, from the executive suite to the field technicians.

This White Paper published by Astea takes a look at best practices for companies looking to innovate their service and it covers:

• Where the best opportunities for service innovation exist
• How to institutionalise innovation with 'service innovation teams'
• What metrics to use to measure the ROI of innovation activities

Overview:

As service has grown in importance as a source of revenue and a key driver of customer loyalty, customer expectations of service delivery have increased. It is no longer enough to merely deliver quality service in a timely manner. Service organisations have to do more than simply keep costs low and maintain market share.

Customer demands and competitive pressures are driving service companies toward service innovation – developing new service offerings and service delivery mechanisms that their customers will find valuable.

This type of service innovation has become an increasingly vital component in a company’s competitive strategy. Executives recognise that focusing on cost control is not in line with long-term value creation. To grow, organisations need to reinvent customer relationships and embrace new technologies and business models.

Where is Service Innovation Needed?

In March 2016, The Service Council (TSC) conducted a survey on service innovation to gauge respondents’ perceptions of their own organisations.

When asked how innovative their entire organization was, the majority of respondents said their company was somewhat innovative (58%), while roughly one-third (31%) said their company was innovative. Asked specifically about their service organization, the responses were very close, with 23% responding “innovative,” 56% “somewhat innovative.” A slightly larger group said the service organization was not innovative (11% for service compared to 3% for the entire company).

Service companies can innovate on a number of levels: the service delivery process, customer management and communication, service design, new product/ service development, the client interface, and in their technological choices.

Institutionalise Innovation

According to The Service Council survey, just 31% of respondents have a service innovation team in place. For service organisations to thrive in a marketplace that puts greater value on innovation, that has to change.

Service organizations have to look at innovation on a strategic level, and at all the ways that the service team can innovate – from developing new services and process-oriented changes to focusing on external service delivery processes and finding more opportunities to provide service.

These companies need to develop a service innovation team focused on fostering such projects. The team should include input from supervisors and managers, frontline employees/technicians, VP-level service leaders, regional leaders, and C-level executives.

Measure Your Success

Those innovation investments can’t be made blindly, however. Establishing whether a given innovation provides a return on investment (ROI) requires metrics around those innovation activities and their results. In The Service Council survey, just 20% of respondents said they already had innovation metrics in place.

Measuring innovation is a combination of art and science, which makes those metrics difficult to develop. You have to find the right things to measure; every company has its own organizational culture, so every company must fine-tune what it measures to reinforce the goals, values, and norms that it finds critical for inspiring innovation and best practices.

Technology Enables Innovation

One key enabler of both new service products and new service delivery mechanisms has been technology. Digital technologies have driven radical change and disruption in the service sector.

These include customer self-service portals and mobile apps, mobile field service automation and work order management solutions, GPS-enabled fleet tracking/management systems, and automated dispatch and scheduling solutions.

Getting Started

Service organisations that want to improve these efforts should institutionalise innovation by establishing dedicated innovation teams and resources and develop metrics to measure the effect of innovation. Frontline employees should be involved, and customer needs and insights should be analysed to develop an innovation road map.

• Begin with customer insights
• Understand the funding mechanism
• Determine who will develop and deliver new innovative service products and models
• Track innovation activity
• Institutionalize innovation

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Resource Type: White Paper
Published by:  Astea International Ltd
Title: Standing alone or part of a bigger picture?

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Synopsis:

First-call resolution or first-time fix rates have become a critical key performance indicator (KPI) for field service organisations interested in gaining a competitive advantage.

While historically automation efforts in field service have focused on improving efficiency and productivity in an effort to reduce costs or complete more work orders each day, they have not necessarily had a direct impact on customer satisfaction.

This white paper looks at the importance of first-time fix rates when it comes to customer satisfaction and explores means in which you can improve your own first time fix rates.

Overview:

Customers don’t necessarily measure field service effectiveness in terms of efficiency. Yes, they want a technician to arrive as quickly as possible, but they also want their problem solved quickly and, preferably, in a single visit.

If a repair can’t be made because of a missing part or lack of expertise on the part of the technician, customers experience costly downtime as well as frustration.

That’s why first-time fix rates should be a top priority for companies interested in improved customer retention.

There is significant room for improvement in many organizations. According to data from The Service Council, the average first-time fix rate for service companies is just 74%, while failure to resolve an issue on the first visit was a top customer complaint according to 34% of respondents.

In an Aberdeen Group survey, first-time fix rate was cited as a critical service metric by 38% of respondents, just below service profitability (41%) and customer satisfaction (68%). (Source: “Evolution of the Field Service Business: Optimizing the Field Service Chain,” Aberdeen Group).

First-call resolution plays a critical role in improving customer service and profitability. However, improving first-call resolution rates is not a simple proposition. There are a number of different factors that play a role, including parts availability and logistics issues, technician training, vehicle management, optimised scheduling, diagnostic tools, and dynamic dispatching capabilities. Without the right systems in place and without proper process design, it can be difficult or even impossible to improve performance.

Tackling any one of these elements individually won’t solve the problem. Service organisations have to take a systemic and holistic approach that will enable them to get the right technician to the customer site, equipped with all of the necessary parts and technical know-how in a timely fashion. This is crucial to ensure successful customer interactions.

This white paper looks at:

• The high cost of return visits
• A fix for first time fix rates
• Integrated Service Management
• Preventative measures
• Continuous improvement

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Resource Type: White Paper
Published by:  Field Service News (sponsored by IFS)
Title Standing alone or part of a bigger picture?

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Synopsis:

The benefits of adopting a scheduling solution for field service companies are well documented. Increases in efficiency and productivity are matched by clear and tangible return on investment, whilst enhanced service delivery standards lead to greater customer satisfaction.

However, scheduling solutions come in a number of different flavours including manual, semi-automated and fully dynamic plus there is the consideration of whether to opt for an integrated scheduling engine or a stand alone 'best-of-breed' solution. So which is best for your organisation?

Overview:

For those that have already implemented a scheduling tool as part of their field service delivery, whether it be a fully dynamic system or something simpler that is designed to assist a human dispatcher rather than fully automate the dispatch process, it is almost certain that there will have been some important savings made in key performance areas.

However, there is another perhaps equally important argument for implementing some form of scheduling tool – the impact it will have on a company’s ability to deliver the highest levels of service excellence.

We live in an age where service is absolutely a key differentiator between similar competing brands.

It is certainly fair to say that the consumer of these early few decades of the twenty first century is more empowered, more knowledgeable and far more demanding than ever before.

 

But does this translate across from our consumer lives into our working environments?

We have already seen the consumerisation of technology within the working space and very simply the mind-set of many is “If Amazon can guarantee to deliver products to me within 60 minutes for no extra charge why can’t my service provider improve his Service Level Agreements (SLA) so I can expect an engineer on site within hours rather than days?”

So in a world of high customer expectations can field service companies afford not to assess their own scheduling set up and see what solutions are available?

Almost certainly not because they can be assured that their competitors most likely will be doing so at some point in the near future, such are the clear benefits identified in any given case study on the implementation of a scheduling solution.

However, scheduling solutions come in many different flavours and across the following pages we shall look at some of the considerations field service companies must take into account when selecting a solution that is right for their organisation.

This white paper looks at:

• The different types of scheduling engine available
• Selecting which is right for your organisation
• Stand alone solutions versus integrated
• What differentiates scheduling engines?
• What advancements should we be looking for in a scheduling engine?

 

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Resource Type: White Paper
Published by:  FieldAware
Title: Making the move to mobility: the digitilaisation of field service

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Synopsis

Field service organisations have always embraced technology, and the rate at which technology has developed in recent years has led to true revolution within our industry...

Providing both a comprehensive overview and practical advice on how you and your organisation can improve efficiency and productivity amongst your mobile workforce this white paper explore a number of key areas including:

• Extending your back office into the field
• Empowering your field workers
• Focussing on the right mobility tools for your business

Published by FieldAware this white paper covers the key considerations service leaders should focus on to ensure they able to harness the power of this new wave of mobility in field service management...

To access your copy of this great resource simply click the link above and complete the brief form to register.

Overview

Field service organisations have always embraced technology, being early adopters of field service management software since it was introduced in the late 1970s.

Originally designed as on-premise, server-based scheduling solutions, the software was very much focused on enabling the back office to improve the efficiency of work order scheduling and dispatch. Technicians however, had only limited access to job and customer information due to the cost and performance limitations of existing devices (proprietary handheld devices or laptops) and networks.

The mobile evolution has shifted this balance. With the widespread adoption of smartphones, for example, over the last decade, digital mobile devices now form an integral part of both work and personal lives. Add to this the proliferation of tablets in the last mobility wave five years ago with the introduction of the iPad and most companies now use some form of mobile device. This use may be a mix of smartphones, tablets and laptops, but as such the focus of the service work has now moved significantly on to the field technician.

Extending the back office into the field

Although the technician is the “new” priority for field service organisations, back office processes remain essential components of any service operation. The right mobility solution gives the whole organisation the ability to manage the workflow seamlessly and keeps all operational elements connected.

For the back office, a mobile solution which easily integrates into existing systems is critical, as often within a field service organisation a mix of best of breed solutions are employed due to the niche nature of the work carried out. This can often mean that systems are used in isolation and data from one system doesn’t always assimilate with others. An integrated mobile solution means that the two-way flow of data and information is captured just once and in a consistent and efficient way.

Empowering the field worker

Managers and technicians, alike, report that the key to any technology implementation is ease of use. Taking time to learn new, complicated ways of working puts up barriers to adoption which workers may well look to by-pass and either go back to the way things used to be done or patch together their own and disparate ways of using the various solutions.

Equally both older technicians and newer more technology-savvy workers may resist the change, but with a solution that is easy to use the implementation is easier and quicker adoption inevitably means a better ROI.

Implementing mobility and the next evolution

While it is recognised that most companies now use some form of mobility, it is also acknowledged that the majority still do so in a basic way; to enable a checklist approach to their work. Those that still work with paper-based systems report they will look to move to digital mobile platforms in the near future, understanding this disadvantage affects their ability to be competitive.

Focus on the right mobility solution

Whether you are looking at developing a current mobility strategy or introducing a mobility solution for the first time, how do you choose the right software for your business with the many solutions on offer today?

From working with a range of companies in different industries, FieldAware have found that whatever type of field service organisation you manage there are some principals that cut across the different requirements and these are revealed in this section.

Focus on performance

The face of field service has changed. Technicians are the priority, and they need the tools and access to the information that will transform them from corporate overhead to revenue and profit generating brand proponents.

Technology has changed. The world has “gone mobile”. Smartphones and tablets are powerful and relatively inexpensive, and the networks that support them are fast and reliable.

Mobile apps must have capabilities which take the technicians’ role into account, without forgetting the back office. Cloud-based web applications deliver advanced capabilities (scheduling and dispatch; asset, parts, customer and roles and rights [security] management; employee time tracking and comprehensive reporting) and must be easy to use and easy to integrate with existing ERP, CRM and accounting systems

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Resource Type: White Paper
Published by:  Field Service News (sponsored by Solarvista)
Title BYOD and Field Service
Download: Click here to Download the white paper

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

Synopsis

What are the key benefits and major challenges of implementing a Bring Your Own Device strategy for field service organisations

Overview

If we cast our minds back just a few years, the talk amongst the enterprise was very much centred upon the new emerging trend of Bring Your own Device (BYOD).

With the phrase being first coined by Intel in 2009 before quickly rising to prominence across the next few years, largely driven by organisations such as Unisys and Citrix who saw the early potential benefits of the trend.

However, the explosion of companies officially adopting BYOD policies never quite materialised in Europe as it was predicted it would and in certain circles there are even whispers that the trend may even be slowing down somewhat in what is perceived to be the BYOD heartland of the USA.

In this white paper we will review once more the case for and against BYOD reflecting on the further learnings we have seen in the last few years in terms of both challenges and successes of applications that have been documented, as well as exploring whether in the realm of field service, an inherently mobile-led environment, is BYOD is an option with merits.

 

Topics in the white paper include:

The attractions of BYOD

The rise in popularity of BYOD can be attributed to a combination of driving factors including the consumerisation of technology, the evolution of the Cloud Computing as a reliable platform in the enterprise and also a gradual shift in attitudes to the work/life balance (itself the result of the impact of technology in our working lives alongside the growing influence of Generation Y employees within the workforce.)

Significant benefits that can be drawn from a successful implementation of BYOD within the workplace which include:

• Personal choice
• Better work/life balance
• Improved efficiency
• No cost for equipment
• Decreased support and training costs

The challenges of BYOD

Whilst the benefits of BYOD initially leap out and are in the most part fairly obvious, in reality the actual implementation of a BYOD policy within the enterprise is wrought with complex challenges such as:

• Security
• Increased support and training costs
• Establishing BYOD policies around device usage

Overcoming these challenges and introduction of CYOD

Of course whilst the threat of cyber security increases, so to do the relevant solutions to overcome these risks. Let us be clear, despite the above issues BYOD is certainly not impossible to implement. It does however, require a lot more additional consideration than perhaps was deemed necessary in the early part of this decade when the hype around BYOD was at its highest.

 

One potential suggested solution to meet the challenges of BYOD is to move towards a Choose Your Own Device but is this really the magic bullet to get the best of both worlds?

BYOD, fit for purpose and the field service environment

Of course there is then the big question for field service companies – are the consumer devices selected by the employees necessarily fit for purpose?

In mission-critical environments such as field service, reliable real-time communications are key for optimum performance, and for proactive management of service-level agreements and compliance with key performance indicators.

Mobile field service workers need real-time access to their business applications and data, whether it is receiving the next job, navigation to an address, accessing a product or customer database and so on.

The perennial question of consumer vs. rugged is perhaps of even greater relevance when field service companies are considering BYOD policies.

 

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Resource Type: White Paper
Published by:  Advanced Field Service
Title A guide to delivering service excellence
Download: Click here to Download the white paper here

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

Synopsis

To satisfy direct customers or retain the business of contract customers, field service companies must provide professional service time after time.

Overview

This guide outlines how you can deliver winning service at a profit by strategically deploying today’s field service technology including the following sections...

Provide a professional response

Whether you operate in the business-to-business or consumer/domestic markets, you’ll need to consistently meet basic criteria, such as responding within the set timeframe or appointment window.

A field service solution helps you to deploy your engineers with maximum efficiency and equip them with everything they need to know to do a proficient job, from the customer’s contact details to inspection sheets. Technology gives you the option to send the customer the engineer’s estimated time of arrival by SMS or email.

Live capture of onsite data

The information engineers enter remotely through their PDAs feeds back to your call control centre and back-office reporting and billing systems. Customers can be sent up-to-date compliance certification within minutes after the job is completed.

From the information captured onsite, you can shorten the time to invoice, where applicable. Sending an invoice promptly while the job is still fresh in the customer’s mind avoids queries and delays further down the line. While not strictly speaking a customer service issue, having fast efficient billing processes reinforces your image as a professional service provider and helps to speed up payments and improve cash flow.

 

Collect customer feedback

Rating product suppliers and service providers has become a way of life. Customers are accustomed to completing online surveys and logging their opinions on review sites.

Without bombarding customers with survey requests, you can collect their feedback using standard forms on the engineer’s PDA or schedule a survey to be emailed to them after the job is complete.

Improve customer satisfaction through self-service

In a highly competitive market, customers will always expect you to add more value to your basic service.

It sounds a contradictory statement but enabling your contract customers to access information about their service history online improves their perception of the service they receive, without adding to the workload of your service administrators. Customers can download their certifications, view weekly and monthly statistics, the progress of any jobs, invoices…a whole wealth of information.

Rather than having to navigate spreadsheets and other documents, a graphical dashboard can give them an at-a-glance view. This information can be made available to customers on their tablet devices and branded with your corporate identity.

Conclusions

Your delivery of service excellence is reinforced by how you handle information: sending information out to your field-based teams, capturing information from your engineers and flowing it into your back-office systems, sharing information with customers…

Modern field service technology makes all this possible in a way that would be unthinkable using manual systems or older technology. Mobile devices and web technology add another layer of agility by making location no object in being able to collect and publish this information

 

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Resource Type: eBook
Published by:  Telogis
Title Gaming the System to improve driver behaviour
Download: Click here to Download the full ebook here

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

Synopsis

As a field service manager you might be wondering how gamification can help your business, or perhaps you’re ready to start but you’re looking for ideas on the best way to implement.

This eBook published by Telogis can help you find the answers to these questions and understand how different employees might respond to gamification based on their personalities.

Overview

Gamification is a word that you will be hearing more often, with industry experts picking it as a growing trend in business applications.

The term arose back in 2002 but it wasn’t until 2010 that it started to gain traction. Software developers began using the engaging traits of electronic games to increase participation in business programs. Before long, business applications that allowed users to socialise, collect achievements and be rewarded started to pop up.

Over the years gamification has matured. More real-world testing has helped “gamified” business applications to evolve beyond a simplistic points system. This ebook explores the three fundamental elements of integrating Gamification into your business:

1. Mission
2. Alignment
3. Deployment

Phase 1: Establishing your mission

A business without a mission is like a ship without a rudder. Even if you already have a mission, it’s worth reviewing or updating it to match the current business environment. While your mobile workforce may be a subset of a larger business, there’s no reason it shouldn’t have its own mission, one that aligns and supports the overall corporate mission.

Once the mission is established, it’s time to break it down to individual goals or objectives that support the mission. Keep your objectives as specific as possible. No sport would ever get popular if the goal was vague, moved regularly or unclear to the players.

 

No matter what your objectives are – increasing productivity, decreasing fuel costs, improving driver safety or increasing asset utilisation – the secret to achieving them is keeping them Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound (SMART).

Phase 2: Align your mission objectives

To make sure you stay on track to achieve your objectives you need to check your alignment.

This means reviewing your objectives, to check they align with how you operate as a business. For example, if your company puts more emphasis on working as fast as possible without respect for safety, then setting an objective to reduce speeding won’t align.

Get your company influencers (normally managers or supervisors) involved and review your objectives with them. They’ll let you know quickly where they think alignment is lacking. It’s important that your managers are onboard with the new objectives – they will play an important role in influencing others and ultimately help achieve a successful outcome.

After reviewing and refining your objectives, aligning them with your organisation, you’re ready for implementation. It’s time to deploy.

Phase 3:  Deployment

The size of your organisation will determine the scale of your deployment planning. In the case of using Telogis Coach mobile app, small companies may only need brief training that includes a quick-start guide to explain how it works and instructions on how to download, install and log in to the app on their mobile device.

Large enterprises would benefit from the tailored implementation provided by Telogis Professional Services. Their expertise and deployment experience can help avoid common pitfalls and roll it out right the first time.

 

Monitoring results

First of all, you want to make sure everyone in your organization knows what your objectives are. If one of your KPIs is to reduce speeding by 50% then let the whole team know, not just management. A team wins when it knows what it’s playing for.

You’ll also need a scoreboard. Telogis Coach includes an enterprise dashboard that shows real-time results for specific KPIs - you can log in from anywhere and get an up-to-date score, either across the entire fleet or individual crews.

Celebrating wins

You don’t need to do cartwheels in the office every time a driver gets a perfect score but there should be recognition and reward. In most cases the size of the reward is not important; it’s about making sure they know you know, and it means something to you.

Recording the game time

Decide on how long each “game” lasts. Employees will soon tire of a game with no end in sight. You can choose any reasonable period but in general, for achieving fleet KPIs, a period of 90 days is most common. At the end of each period, results are tallied, players rewarded and recognised and the game starts over.

Gamer types

Not only will you have some of each gamer type personalities in your organisation, there’s also a little of each type in all of us. You should remember this with your gamification program and make sure you’re keeping each type happy.

Killers need sufficient competition. Achievers need plenty of recognition and rewards. Socialisers need lots of interaction with other players and Explorers need the opportunity to be creative with the game. Check from time to time that you have the balance right.

Give your team time to adjust to the new gamification approach, be generous with recognition and rewards and stay focused on your mission.

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Resource Type: White Paper
Published by: Kirona
Title: Six steps to being a leader - the field service checklist
Download: Click here to access the white paper
By downloading you agree to the T&Cs listed available here

Synopsis:

Field workforce management software enables organisations with a mobile workforce to significantly improve their operational performance. The State of Service Management 2015: Connect To Your Customers report by Aberdeen's Aly Pinder found that best-in-class field service organisations achieve on average a 14.4% year-on-year improvement in workforce productivity compared to a 4.1% industry average.

This white paper looks at six key steps that field service companies must take in order to reach these heights themselves and establish their organisations as leaders amongst their competitors.

Overview:

Topics within the white paper include: 

• Optimising resource planning: Field resource planning is complex. If you have 100 workers carrying out 5 jobs a day, then that are 10,000,000,000 (1 billion) possible combinations of how those jobs could be allocated. There may also be a myriad of additional scheduling criteria such as worker skills/trade, certification required (and the validity dates), languages spoken, job time frame (appointment slot/site access), the region/ geography, the worker’s experience, parts, materials, equipment required, and the list goes on.  No human planner can possibly consider all these scenarios and determine which is financially the best option with the highest chance of customer satisfaction. It is therefore, not surprising that over two-thirds of Best-In-Class service organisations leverage software for Optimised Resource Planning.
•  Making and keeping appointments: Compliance to your work schedule is critical for two reasons, first it ensures you are working in the planned most optimum way, but second and more importantly, it means you are delivering against commitments to customers. For work types that require a customer appointment, the complexity of scheduling increases. Now an organisation needs to schedule work by considering two diaries; that of the workforce and the customer. Appointments are also disruptive to the customers, so keeping them is essential to achieving high customer satisfaction
• Connecting with the mobile workforce: Equipping field workers with mobile devices is a well-trodden path, however, whether through limitation in mobile working applications or lack of integration, we tend to find that most field service organisations are not maximising the full potential of connecting the field workforce.
• Real time tracking and dynamic scheduling: One of the biggest challenges for any organisation is how to track and monitor field-based activity and to manage the emerging day. Exceptions will always arise, whether through an overrun, no-access or emergency work, the skill is being able to take this in your stride and be able to dynamically reschedule work to take into account the unexpected while ensuring you continue to work to the most optimum schedule.
• Analysis & Continuous improvement: Standing still is not an option for field service organisations. We see continual change from our clients’ including customer demands, executive level priorities and changes in the workforce – all of which requires them to analyse and continually improve their operation. Knowledge is key. Understanding every aspect of your field service operation, gaining insight into not only what is happening, but why this is happening, and then being able to take action on this insight.
• Integration leads to automation: The more staff ‘touch points’ that are required in a service process, the greater its inefficiency. Not only do manual processes create a drain on labour and therefore an increased cost, they are error prone and they create timescale lags. Workforce management software provides an opportunity to avoid this by automating key activities in the service management chain of processes. The more 3rd party systems that are integrated into automated workflows, the greater the benefit to the organisation.

 

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Resource Type: White Paper
Title: Resource: 21st Century Field Service: The impact of the Internet of Things on Field Service
About: In our latest white paper 21^st Century field service: The impact of the Internet of Things, we look at how once again technology will reshape the way field service operates. The following is compiled from extracts of that white paper
Download: Download the white paper by clicking here    

We are living in the most exciting of times:

In the first decade of the twenty first century we saw technology change the way that field service operates.

When GPS arrived in the mid nineties devices such as TomTom’s GO & Garmin’s Street Pilot Range soon became commonplace and today just 5% of companies see routing software as an urgent purchase simply because the market has reached saturation.

The options for mapping software come in a number of options from one of which being on yet another device that has had a huge impact on field service technology – the smart phone.

The purpose of this brief jog along memory lane?

Just try and think of how your field engineers could function without either of these technologies today? Sure they got by, but these tools, along with a number of other breakthroughs made field service that much more efficient.

Thinking of how we worked in the early nineties seems like stepping back into the dark ages. Yet, the technological advances of the twenty first century and are set to be completely eclipsed as the evolution of field service moves ever onward.

In many experts eyes the biggest of these advances is the Internet of Things (IoT)

The benefits of IoT are clearly defined and tangible to field service, and whilst the concepts may seem futuristic in reality in many of the elements of IoT can be harnessed already using existing technologies.

Internet of Things 101

The term Internet of Things was first coined some 15 years ago having been proposed by British technology pioneer Kevin Ashton and largely does what it says on the tin. In a famous article for RFID Journal Ashcroft outlined the concept explaining:

“If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost.”

 The idea itself is fairly simple. If we give the ordinary items that surround us the ability to essentially communicate with the world without the need for human input, the world would run just that much smoother.

 

With RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) essentially the ability has existed for a while for such data transfer although other tracking technologies such as NFC (near field communications) digital watermarking, low powered Bluetooth, QR codes and their humbler, older cousin the barcode can also provide the same solution.

The Internet of Things in the consumer realm

In the past it was often enterprise level technology that led to a consumer counterpart, in the twenty first century we are beginning to see something of a reversal of that trend and in the world of IoT we are once again seeing this to perhaps be the case.

Major consumer grade electronics developers have entered the race to conquer the emerging ‘smart-home’ market this year with Samsung, Apple and Google all being connected with the increasing M&A activities in the ‘smart-home technology’ sector across recent times.

So with a competitive market place opening up it seems the futuristic smart home, one of the most tangible elements of IoT, could be with us much sooner than we think.

Now this is all well and good but what does it mean for field service?

Internet of Things and Field Service

There are obvious benefits for field service in a world where all of our household devices and business appliances are smart and able to communicate when their own parts are beginning to deteriorate or faults are beginning to appear.

This leads to proactive preventative maintenance, which will in turn see first time fix rates soar. Such solutions could also see the lines between product sales and service sales potentially blurring, as service becomes an intrinsic, built in function of all devices in the future.

Rolls Royce’s Power by the Hour:

However, this isn’t a necessarily new concept. A great example of such an approach is the way in which Rolls Royce pioneered their ‘Power by the Hour’ service solution. The British firm actually first coined the phrase way back in the 1960’s and the concept is essentially a simple one.

Their customers pay for the engines that power their aircraft measured by the time that the planes are actually in flight.

In practice this is a complex and sophisticated blend of contract that incorporates service and product seamlessly and today uses the latest technology available including Big Data and Machine to Machine (M2M) diagnostics to allow Rolls Royce to proactively monitor the status of each and every engine they have in operation and to be able to undertake proactive maintenance when and where required.

Essentially achieving everything that IoT based field service solutions promise to deliver.

Costa Coffee: Saving twenty first century offices from mediocre coffee

Another British company that are using the tools of the twenty first century is Whitbread’s Costa Coffee Chain, the second largest in the world and who recently announced the launch of their digital baristas.

Vending machines with IoT capabilities that can collate and interpret data that can be utilised both in service and sales.

Such an intelligent machine again offers many field service benefits like being able to predict when it needs maintenance, what the likely faults are, even what type of priority level it should be attributed given its predicted sales revenue.

The revolution is upon us...

Preparing for the IoT revolution is not a question of why, but more a question of when and as our white paper reveals the early stages of IoT adoption in field service are already underway, so surely the when needs to be now.

Download the white paper to find out more by clicking this link and completing the brief registration form.