Contributor: Graham Barry
Senior Consultant, Enigen
Field Service Management is changing to better support the customer.
Some may call me old, but after 30 years of working with Field Service Management, I have played witness to its evolution over time.
Field Service Trends:
In the early years, when it came to businesses with mobile workforces, the biggest problem was the absence of a real-time communications channel with the technician because of manual field service platforms. In most organisations the technicians were given a paper manifest when they left the depot each morning, and they would phone in at lunchtime to see if there were any new jobs. Moreover, every piece of documentation or reporting was done by hand – usually on the end of the paper manifest. You can imagine the huge administrative burden this posed, not to mention the room for error.
The first big change came when mobile data networks suddenly gave companies the advantage of passing job information and data on in real-time. This allowed the transfer of more accurate information without the need to transcribe it from daily phone calls, and it provided the engineers with the opportunity to give job status updates while on the road.
The second big change was the development of the automatic technician scheduling software, which utilised the power of the computer to calculate the most efficient distribution of job tickets to available resources – known as the ‘travelling salesperson problem’. The first generation of these systems would enable a batch processing solution which planned all the jobs overnight before the working day started, and then made recommendations to the despatcher on who to give new incoming tickets to. This quickly developed into real-time scheduling products, which could evaluate and make recommendations for new activities in milliseconds. The best example of these were the solutions used by the major supermarkets for scheduling their home shopping deliveries, which could now present slot availability grids to their customers quickly, based on the actual routes planned and not on preconfigured slots.
The third shift in Field Service came when some suppliers took the step to move to a cloud-based SaaS solution, with new entries to the marketplace only offering a cloud field service management solution. While this did not see a huge change in terms of functionality, it did improve the non-functional requirements of security, availability, release management, performance and time required to set up the solution. These cloud-based solutions are continually evolving, with the addition of AI and Machine Learning to predict the travel distance and work duration of scheduled activities, which not only optimises the time of field agents but produces a more achievable plan that can cope with any unexpected events.
The fourth – but by no means final – change is the one we are undergoing now, where the focus is on achieving customer satisfaction at the earliest opportunity – sometimes before the problem even arises. The ideal solution is the one where the customer resolves their issue without the need to send a technician at all. This is where the connected suite of applications comes into play. At this point, the majority of field service solutions are cloud-based and can make use of the full range of SaaS products that suppliers provide, including Knowledge Management, AI, Content Management, Supply Chain Management, and ERP. Integration tools allow for the connection of best-of-breed applications, both front-office and back-office (including external services such as payment systems) to work seamlessly together and ensure complete visibility into all operations.
There are many other products and technologies that come into play to form this picture. Gone are the days of hanging on the phone for hours to talk to an agent. With the inception of AI-driven chatbots, Contact IDs and Emails can inform companies about who you are and can diagnose issues using their knowledge base of solutions for previously solved issues – all without having to speak to the customer. When it comes to field service maintenance, we are even getting to the point where the use of IoT can enable companies to diagnose customer or asset issues before they are reported. Assets can receive early servicing due to sensor-identifying alerts, thereby avoiding costly breakdowns and eliminating the need for expensive parts. This not only reduces costs but extends the lifetime of assets significantly. This is not to say that those all-important human interactions should be eliminated. The aim is to use AI within service to identify as soon as possible if the technician is required and the actions required.
A final note:
In my experience, it has become harder to differentiate Field Management solutions, but it is becoming more important to consider which other products they can interface to (Chatbots and AI for example) for it is these products which enable scheduling and maintenance to be conducted in the most cost-effective and time-efficient manner possible. By investing in a Field Service Management solution like Oracle Field Service Management, the ROI is giving service agents (field or otherwise) the tools they need to manage ticket resolution, with as little time commitment and inconvenience to the customer as possible.
If you’d like to discuss whether Oracle Field Service Management would be a good fit for your business, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Alternatively, you can contact [email protected] and we will put you in touch with our experts.
About the contributor:
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