What happens to your productivity if the air conditioning unit at the office takes a vacation on a steamy summer day? Or what if the copy machine decides to start smoking while printing your presentation handouts five minutes before the big meeting? How do you feel when the power goes out right as you put your feet up to watch the big game? And what would you do if a malfunctioning piece of medical equipment caused injury to you or a family member? As consumers, most of us simply take maintenance and repair services for granted. We are totally oblivious and don't even think about it until something breaks. We just want things fixed as soon as possible. We don't care how it gets done, we want it done now.

While field service may appear to be a simple task, there may be no more critical business process to the profitability of many companies. The effectiveness and efficiency of field services often has a direct impact on consumer safety, corporate liability, and customer satisfaction. Thankfully, mobile technology is perfectly suited to save the day. Say goodbye to paper-based work order forms and inventory tracking sheets. Field service automation is here to stay.

The problem

As companies compete in an ever-global marketplace, many businesses are watching their profits slowly erode away. When energy, material, and labor costs rise, it is not always possible to pass those costs on to the customer due to increased competition. As a result, cost-cutting is often the only available strategy to maintain or enhance profit margins. While reductions in actual service may provide short-term savings, the long-term negative impact on customer satisfaction is rarely worth it. For this reason, the efficiency of the underlying business processes must be improved.

Field service is inherently mobile, and usually requires interaction with a wide variety of data from disparate sources. Information must flow both in and out of the field. Whether the service is being performed with an asset-centric maintenance approach or in a dispatch-oriented repair mode, timely communication with the service technician is absolutely critical. Paperwork is not only time consuming to the technician, but it is also subject to a redundant, highly error-prone data entry process. Proper accounting for inventory and correct billing for parts is often difficult to manage. Time and expenses also suffer from time consuming paperwork and data entry processes. Like any workforce, each individual technician will have his/her own unique set of expertise and experience, while managing the assignment of specific tasks to the most appropriate technician can be an extremely complex and challenging process. The final and arguably most important problem is the prioritization and scheduling of service to maintain cost effectiveness while simultaneously managing customer expectations in a timely manner.

The solution

By replacing paper-based forms and communication processes with mobile and wireless technologies, companies can immediately realize significant benefits through field service automation. Work orders flow to the field electronically, and service is scheduled automatically. Technicians are dynamically routed based on location and priority of the service as well as the experience or skill set of the worker and the inventory or parts that they may have with them. By allowing the technician to capture data at the point of origin, the need for redundant data entry is eliminated, which increases both the quality and turn-around time of the information.

With complete service history, technical reference, and dynamic troubleshooting guides at the technician's fingertips, diagnostic time can be greatly enhanced. With the automated electronic documentation of services performed and parts used, payment cycles can be accelerated by billing faster and more efficiently. Time and materials can be easily accounted for, and technicians are able to perform more jobs by not having to waste time on paperwork. By improving the turn-around time and increasing the quality of the service through better access to information, customer satisfaction and ultimately, business profitability, can be dramatically enhanced.