Contributors: Graham Barry, Senior Consultant and Emily Smakowski, Alliances Executive
Sustainability is no longer a consideration.
In 2024, it is imperative that businesses assess their operations to determine the best ways to reduce waste, lessen emissions, and operate more eco-efficiently.
There are numerous ways that businesses can reduce their carbon footprint, and every business should tailor their approach to suit their specific needs. However, if your business operates with a large mobile workforce, or owns a large number of assets, then you should consider Field Service Management software.
Importance of sustainability in business:
What does “sustainability in business” mean?
The goal of a sustainable business is to conduct operations without negatively impacting the environment. To safeguard our planet, companies need to drive down carbon emissions, encourage eco-friendly employee practice, and improve resource consumption. This is a moral and ethical initiative but also offers competitive and financial benefits due to rising regulatory demands and consumer inclinations toward eco-friendly brands.
There are a number of ways that businesses can integrate sustainable practices into their operations, and field service management is one of them.
What are field services?
Field services refer to any work conducted outside the office. This can include delivery of products, repair and maintenance, inspections, customer support, home visits, and asset management.
In turn, Field Service Management is the means by which to organise and optimise these mobile operations. This involves scheduling jobs, routing travel paths, delegating based on skills, providing times of arrival, enabling workers, and much more.
However, Field Service Management is by no means an isolated application. It’s an important piece of a technological platform that connects service applications such as asset maintenance, service logistics, and customer service.
Together, these applications form a truly connected, intelligent platform that plays a crucial role in promoting eco-friendly practices and helping businesses operate more sustainably.
Technician scheduling and routing:
If your business relies on agents who are often on the move, then fuel consumption can be a big challenge when it comes to operating sustainably. The typical answer to this might be to invest in electric vehicles. However, this can be costly and does not eliminate the issues that arise from last-minute schedule changes or heavy traffic, both of which extend time on the road.
This is where route optimisation comes in. Field Service Management utilises self-learning and predictive capabilities to determine the quickest travel route possible. The software considers various factors such as previous data, real-time traffic updates, inventory stock, and employee skills, to ensure that the right worker with the appropriate parts gets to the site as quickly as possible.
Moreover, Field Service Management optimises employee job allocation based on skills and individual performance, which means that jobs can be matched to technicians more specifically. This ensures that jobs are completed with higher efficiency and reduces the chance of return visits. This not only significantly improves customer satisfaction but also massively reduces wasteful fuel consumption, especially for large workforces.
Predictive Field Service:
We are in the midst of a “circular economy framework” evolution, in which companies are refurbishing, repairing, remanufacturing, and recycling products and assets in order to maximise their lifetime. In doing so, these companies reduce the need for new manufacturing production, which contributes to sustainability by eliminating waste and lowering factory emissions.
IoT and Smart Devices help to extend a product’s lifecycle. IoT devices have ‘sensor-identifying alerts’ that can detect issues and identify potential equipment failures before they occur, thereby avoiding breakdowns and eliminating the need for new parts. This is called ‘predictive’ service – as opposed to ‘reactive’ service – which is considerably eco-friendlier. Predictive maintenance reduces the chance of equipment failure, decreases unscheduled downtime, and contributes to the overall lifetime of a product or asset, in line with the circular economy framework.
Furthermore, in some cases there may not be a need for a site visit. Remote diagnostic tools can work with remote assistance to resolve issues in real-time without the need for a field worker to make the journey. Assets can be troubleshooted, diagnosed, rebooted, and fixed remotely, which is especially useful in emergency situations which tend to have the higher mileage.
Therefore, by utilising predictive maintenance and operating remote diagnostic tools, businesses can significantly reduce transport emissions and contribute to sustainability – and let’s not forget customer experience!
AI technologies:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a massive role in predictive maintenance, thus improving field service efficiency and sustainability.
AI insights are increasingly being used to support human engineers. By analysing historic fault patterns, AI can recommend the necessary parts required by an agent to solve the issue, and then trigger an automated process to order and dispatch the parts promptly, ensuring that it reaches the engineer at the designated site on time. This enables mobile workers with the parts they need to complete their jobs, thereby reducing the need for future visits and reducing travel emissions.
Streamlining Communication:
Intelligent service solutions can improve sustainability by streamlining and improving communication channels. Instead of paper manifests, mobile agents can work off mobile interfaces that provide essential information such as job history and digital manuals, which provides agents with the information they need, whilst reducing paper waste. Moreover, by using a cloud-based solution, all documentation can be exchanged and stored in secure cloud-based systems, eliminating the need for physical paper copies, and making the information more accessible for employees.
In addition, intelligent service solutions such as Intelligent Advisor or Chatbots can streamline communication between field agents, contact centres, and customers to reduce unnecessary travel. For instance, if a customer can engage with a Chatbot to establish a remote solution for their issue, then the need for travel is eliminated. On the other hand, if Intelligent Service can identify the root cause of a breakdown, then the system can trigger an event to ensure that the field service engineer has the skills and the tools they need to fix the problem the first time.
Sustainable Business Practise:
Creating a sustainable business requires more than just the commitment of top-level executives. If a business truly wants to be more environmentally conscious, it needs to build a culture of sustainability amongst its employees.
Effective tools, like field service management, can aid in this by providing field agents with pre-configured workflows that offer step-by-step guides on how to work more eco-efficiently. This empowers employees with the tools they need to make sustainable decisions, whilst building a workforce that is committed to sustainability for the long haul. This approach allows businesses to transform their operations, reduce their environmental impact, and create a more sustainable future.
The Path to Sustainability:
Ultimately, we are all working towards the same goal: to preserve our planet.
As a Digital Consultancy, if we can help businesses operate in a manner that contributes to this mission, then we are happy to lend our expertise to help make that happen. If you are interested to hear how field service software can support your business’s sustainability goals, then please reach out via the following link: https://enigen.co.uk/contact/
About the contributors:
Graham Barry has been providing businesses with Field Service consultancy and implementation support for 30+ years. As well as other apps including Fusion Service (Intelligent Advisor and DCS) and Service Logistics, Graham’s specialist focus has been on Oracle Field Service Cloud, which was named as a leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Field Service Management.
*Field Service Management Gartner Report: https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/4020406
Emily Smakowski has worked in the Digital Consultancy space for 3.5 years, and in that time has built up an extensive knowledge of the Oracle technology ecosystem including Customer Experience (CX) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) applications. Emily’s specialities lie in cross-departmental digital transformations, particularly in line with sustainability efforts.