When it comes to glitz, field service management can't hold a candle to its shinier customer-facing cousins, sales force automation and customer relationship management. "The sales guys walk around with Rolex watches, while the service guys wear vinyl watchbands because they're bumping into things as they work," says Michael Maoz, an analyst at Gartner, Inc.
However, this background player is moving to the forefront of many manufacturers' strategic initiatives, especially as they wake up to the service organization's potential as a reputation booster, a cost-cutter, and a profit center. Indeed, after-sales services such as installation support, maintenance, and spare parts can generate more revenue than the sale of the product itself.
To realize this potential, companies need to enable service technicians to retrieve and transmit data to logistics, inventory, CRM, ERP, time-and-billing, and other back-end systems while they're in the field. According to a recent survey by the Aberdeen Group in Boston, 88% of companies identified as exhibiting best practices in field service management view the connection between the field and back office as a top strategic priority.
"Mobile and wireless technology are becoming tremendously important to field service management," Gartner's Maoz says. "It's the best way to avoid time-consuming paperwork or inaccuracies or duplication of effort."
In fact, companies that have forged this connection are seeing some real benefits, according to Aberdeen, including a 27% improvement in worker productivity, a 19% increase in customer satisfaction/retention, a 17% increase in overall profitability, and a 13% increase in service revenues.
With that in mind, here are some tips for getting the most from mobile field service technologies (Click here for additional online resources).
Find Your Pain Point
Before jumping into a technology decision, you need to gather key performance indicators on your field service operation. This will reveal the areas ripe for improvement, such as product uptime, service responsiveness, time to repair, service-level compliance, efficient scheduling, parts availability, or truck rolls, says Eric Karofsky, a senior research analyst with AMR Research in Boston.
The metrics used by the Aberdeen study participants included technician productivity, service response time, customer satisfaction, first-time resolution rate, profitability, and service revenue growth.
Gartner's Maoz also suggests reviewing customer feedback, benchmarking against best practices, and distinguishing between what you can improve through process change versus new technology. "You don't want to over-invest in service excellence; you want to right-invest," Maoz says.
Research the Providers
A wide array of vendors offer ways to mobilize field service applications. ERP vendors such as Oracle Corp., Microsoft Corp., and SAP America, for instance, have all extended their field service modules with wireless and mobile capabilities. Vendors such as Metrix Inc., MRO Software Inc., and Datastream (recently bought by Infor ) have added mobile capabilities to their field service and asset management applications.
And pure-play vendors such as Broadbeam Corp., Dexterra Inc., MDSI Mobile Data Solutions, @Road, and Questra Corp. offer systems that enable you to add functionality to existing applications, such as connection management, predictive maintenance, and route mapping capabilities.
An emerging software category is intelligence device management, which enables companies to proactively monitor and remotely diagnose products (via machine to machine wireless networks) from printers to pipelines to elevators. "Intelligence is built into the system so you're aware of a problem before the customer," Maoz says.
Back-end Integration is Key
Mobile field service systems are not stand-alone systems; they need to tie into back-end systems to reap the expected benefits. For instance, integrating with human capital management systems enables you to send technicians with the right skill sets to resolve problems, AMR's Karofsky says. Integrating with CRM provides insight into which products the customer has deployed, as well as existing contracts and warranties.
Linking with procurement systems lends efficiency to the parts-ordering processes. "There's a whole host of integration that has to happen," he says.
Making the Network Connection
Another decision is what type of connection to establish -- landline (which could include Virtual Private Network and/or public Internet-based) or wireless (including wide-area wireless or WiFi). According to Aberdeen, many companies are now using WiFi hotspots (41% of respondents) and wide-area wireless (37%), but more plan to implement the latter in the next 18 months (44% versus 17%). A majority (56%) plug into customers' wired or wireless networks, but only 15% plan to use that technique in the next 18 months.
With wide-area wireless connectivity, technicians can exchange data automatically without any explicit command from the technician, the Aberdeen report points out. In out-of-coverage areas, data is stored on the device and synchronized when a network connection is restored. Conversely, using landlines or WiFi hotspots means batch synchronization, where technicians initiate data transfer at specified times throughout the day.
Be Wary of the Downsides
A large percentage of mobile field service management deployments fail, according to Aberdeen, because companies don't give enough thought to some basic characteristics of these systems.
These include a lack of consistent bandwidth, constrained power supplies, small form-factor devices, and limited storage capacity. In addition, the conditions in which field service reps work are highly disconnected and dynamic. Companies need to plan around these drawbacks in order to succeed with these projects.
Flaunt Improvements
When you make improvements to your field service systems, make sure you let the company know about it. Service departments tend not to toot their own horns, Maoz says, but they should. "They've been trained to think of themselves as the fix-it people," he says. "It's not in their nature to point out they've lowered inventory costs 3% because of better field service tools or better parts planning."
But if you capture the metrics and show management you've impacted the top or bottom line, perceptions will shift, which may enable you to secure funding for more improvements, he says.