WHITE PAPER THREE FIELD SERVICE MANAGEMENT TRENDS YOU CAN T IGNORE

Transcription

1 WHITE PAPER THREE FIELD SERVICE MANAGEMENT TRENDS YOU CAN T IGNORE

2 CONTENT MOBILITY... 1 SCHEDULING OPTIMIZATION... 2 SAAS... 3 WHAT THIS MEANS FOR SOFTWARE SELECTION... 4 CONCLUSION... 6 ABOUT IFS... 7

3 THREE FIELD SERVICE MANAGEMENT TRENDS YOU CAN T IGNORE BY TOM DEVROY VICE PRESIDENT SALES, IFS NORTH AMERICA Field service management (FSM) operations are under unprecedented pressure from competitors and from increasingly demanding customers. In this whitepaper, we will discuss how these market pressures are driving three distinct but inter-related trends. We will also offer insights into how you can select FSM software technologies to stay ahead of these trends, exceed customer expectations and drive efficiency and profit across your operation. The trends driving our industry and the FSM software we will be selecting and implementing going forward include: Mobility Scheduling Optimization Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) MOBILITY Due to pervasive and rapidly advancing consumer technology, managers and field technicians themselves expect to be able to interact with FSM software they use to manage their business using mobile devices, including smartphones. Regardless of whether they are accessing their FSM software applications on a mobile device or on a laptop or desktop computer, users are expecting the same tools and the same functionality. This is what we strive to deliver with IFS Field Service Management and IFS Mobile. We believe that FSM software must accommodate this expectation for an easy-to-use platform that supports multiple devices, including laptops, handheld devices, rugged devices and tablets, so the technician has a guided work flow regardless of whether or not they are connected to the back office. This technology needs to function without a lot of technician administrative overhead so they can work untethered or connected to the back office at any particular point in time. Mobile FSM software must be more than a browser-based app it needs to be a native app designed for the platform than can use the native features of the device to, for instance, reading QR codes or bar codes for part consumption. The device s GPS services may be used for locating a part in the service supply chain. 1

4 The mobile application also requires a high degree of integration with the back office service system so that service level agreement (SLA) commitments can brief technicians on response time commitments. These SLAs often also contain requirements for first time fix or total repair time and all of that that information needs to be available for the technician. While these informational elements must be visible to the technician, other things must be automated so the technician does not have to think about them. The technician should not be thinking or worrying about pricing that is associated with their different classes of labor, their travel times or trip charges. These things should be automatically calculated so that the technician does not have to figure that out in the field or coordinate them with a back office administrator. SCHEDULING OPTIMIZATION Ideally, this requires a mobile solution that is engineered to work seamlessly with the back office FSM software application. But it also requires a high degree of real-time scheduling optimization on the order of what is offered by something like IFS Mobile Workforce Management. What an optimization tool does is, in essence, take a field service schedule developed by FSM software, optimize it based on numerous factors that are much too complex for a human scheduler to calculate, and send it back to the FSM software application. Because these calculations need to take place in real time, only highly-specialized software running advanced and proprietary algorithms can perform them quickly enough. Scheduling optimization software must determine, based on the available resources and the prospect s or customer s preferences or contractual requirements, the most important criteria for managing the schedule. Whether the priority is less drive time, less windshield time, mitigating any overtime charges or making sure that you are complying to SLA commitments because of potential penalties, scheduling optimization can calculate in real time the ideal schedule, route, the technician to send, and more. It can make sure that the part is available for the service job at hand and prevent technicians from driving past each other to service calls. It can calculate, given the requirement of the job and the qualifications, skill ratings and certifications of the technicians, which technician to dispatch. All dynamically in real time. The reason scheduling optimization is so important is easy enough to understand. There are, after all, two drivers for cost in any service organization: labor and parts. On the labor side, a scheduling optimization engine can ensure you dispatch a technician with the right skill level and the right certification in time to meet warranty commitments, SLAs or other contractual commitments. It can also reduce cost by making sure you are not, for instance, sending a journeyman to a call that an apprentice can manage just so long as the apprentice has the right skill set to work on the call. 2

5 Scheduling optimization is even more of an imperative when it comes to parts management. If you send a technician out to a service job and they don t have the right part, you have to pay for a repeat visit. That repeat visit is probably the most costly service event that can occur throughout the duration of the lifecycle of a service call. SAAS SaaS is a buzzword in the software industry for a number of reasons. In some cases, software can be more easily provisioned for technical and organizational reasons in this fashion. SaaS, in the formal sense, is more than buying software that is hosted on someone else s servers. It means that, instead of buying a perpetual license to use the software, you are renting it. SaaS is popular among some people who sell software because, if you are using the software for more than a few years, you can wind up paying for the cost of that perpetual license many times over. Let s review some of the specific situations where this is a worthwhile proposition, where participating in this trend towards SaaS makes good business sense for the customer. There is, in the market, a misnomer that software as a service is only attractive to small to medium businesses (SMBs). It is true that among companies with five to 15 or 20 technicians, SaaS can make a great deal of sense. Since each technician probably generates about $200,000 in gross annual revenue, that means that at the high side, this is a $4 million dollar business. That $2 million to $4 million business likely doesn t have an extensive IT capability, and it may not make sense for them to host their own IT infrastructure. This is one type of company that, in line with the conventional wisdom about SaaS, is attracted to this licensing model. These companies are also usually interested in a relatively narrow subset of software functionality, ranging from scheduling and dispatch, call debrief and perhaps mobile. Their budget is somewhere around $1,000 per month. During their implementation, they do not expect much more than training from their vendor, and we are working to try to make their go-live times very quick so they can immediately, and with little business disruption, address their primary pain points. But that SMB is not the only type of company gravitating to SaaS. The other type of company we see pursuing SaaS as a delivery system for FSM software is the larger enterprise that cannot afford to wait for corporate IT planning cycles to address urgent organizational or customer needs. These companies typically expect all of the functionality that they would normally get from an on-premise solution. But they want to treat it as an expense item for a given department operation rather than as a capital expense. In so doing, they are avoiding an operating cost, which are generally going to be run up through the IT organization. So in reality they opt for SaaS as a way to circumvent unwieldy internal processes. 3

6 These are the two dynamics we see driving the SaaS trend. We are seeing larger and more sophisticated organizations coming to us to circumvent normal IT procedures. And we are seeing smaller companies with expectations of a limited set of functionality but expectations for a rapid go-live. The enterprise-level SaaS companies do tend to actually expect an implementation process that much more closely aligns with an on-premise implementation. WHAT THIS MEANS FOR SOFTWARE SELECTION Technologies are changing, and your business needs are changing as well. This means that, in selecting software, you want to make sure the vendor you choose offers you the foresight, flexibility and agility to adapt not just to the current trends but the next trend. And the one after that. It is also necessary to determine if given technologies that are part of these trends fit your specific needs. Change is happening perhaps most rapidly in the area of mobility. Handsets are changing constantly, and the operating systems that are important for the FSM industry are changing just as rapidly. This presents a challenge for a software vendor, and for the IFS Mobile product, we had to evaluate trends regarding these underlying technologies carefully, and continue to do so. Initially, we developed our mobile solution on Windows CE6.5 a platform that was widely used for hand held base mobile applications that were wirelessly enabled. When Windows 7 was introduced, it left us with a rewrite situation and at that point we could have looked to the virtual machine tool market place to find an appliance that would allow us to deploy our mobile device across different platforms. We could go from HTML 5 to Android to the Apple IOS system. But we consulted various analysts and performed our own research and found that the Windows 7 mobile platform for handheld phones was not going to garner much market share and in fact it did not. The outlook was that Android, because of the variety of devices that ran on the Android operating system, would probably overtake the Apple operating system over the course of In fact that did happen. Apple is very successful with the ipad, but we really had to make a decision if we were going to rewrite, or try to rewrite on multiple platforms. In our opinion, the synchronization capabilities of HTML 5 weren t robust enough to take us where our customers wanted to go, so we settled on the Android operating system. We have been very happy because the performance is outstanding, both on the tablet and the smart phone. And we anticipate that our prior IFS Mobile for windows platform will be compatible going forward with Windows 8, presenting the path forward for our windows users, on various devices. We continue to investigate HTML5. 4

7 Mobile might make sense for virtually every field service workforce. But in determining the business need for scheduling optimization, there are a few hard questions that need to be answered about your field service environment. One question to ask has to do with the density of technicians that you have on a given metropolitan area. If you have a grouping of technicians within a given geography, you are likely putting those technicians into zones, or you are sharing resources across zones. Oftentimes, techs are put into zones because it is the only way for a dispatcher to handle the scheduling problem. You are a lot better off if you are able to quickly ascertain who has got the right part, the right certification and the right training to work on a given product. A dispatcher, a physical person, can only absorb so many of those variables in making dispatch decisions. If the number of technicians is relatively low for a given area, a dispatcher probably can make those decisions. If there are 50 technicians, and you have a number of variables to consider, you might need one dispatcher for every 10 technicians in a given geography. A common, but suboptimal, approach is to confine technicians to certain zip codes and have those managed by a specific dispatcher. Another zone might have another 10 technicians, also with the same variables, with a dedicated dispatcher and so on. The administrative costs can be counter to profitability. What a scheduling optimization tool like IFS Mobile Workforce Management offers is the ability to concentrate all of those technicians across those zones, combine the dispatch function into a single person, and let the computer and the software actually drive the recommendations to the dispatcher. So it is not unusual for IFS Mobile Workforce Management to allow us to go one dispatcher for 50, 80 or even 100 technicians depending on the complexity of the products that are being serviced. Without scheduling automation, you may need four or five dispatchers and would yield a schedule that does not meet as many customer expectations and leaves money on the table when it comes to the cost of a service delivery. If your field service force is large enough, concentrated enough, and works in a time-sensitive environment, this is a trend you need to consider aligning yourself with. For the right kind of company, getting the right tech to the right job with the right part with a much smaller administration staff means the tool can pay for itself in less than a year. Compared with scheduling optimization, it is quite a bit easier to determine if SaaS makes sense for your business. If you are a smaller business with few IT resources, SaaS may be a smart way to add sophistication to your business without hiring an IT manager or investing in on-premise hardware. If your business already has on-premise enterprise software, adding FSM functionality should not represent more than a small incremental cost from an IT standpoint. But in cases where a manager responsible for field service, customer service or sales feels the processes of their larger IT enterprise are overly restrictive, SaaS may offer a workaround. 5

8 CONCLUSION The only constant is change, and I hope that the above content puts you in a better position to understand and deal with three of the major changes affecting the field service industry. Nobody outside of your business can tell you for sure which of these trends is affecting your business more than the other, or exactly how you need to go about addressing them. But technologies are available, including comprehensive FSM applications and standalone scheduling optimization engines, that will help you address those you feel are most pressing. Tom Devroy is Vice President of Sales for the IFS Field Service Management product line. He has over 30 years of experience in high tech service operations including work with hardware, software and consulting firms, as well as premier global service organizations like Ericsson, DHL, Xerox, and Ingenico. He holds a degree in business administration from the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. 6

9 ABOUT IFS AND IFS APPLICATIONS IFS is a public company (OMX STO: IFS) founded in 1983 that develops, supplies, and implements IFS Applications, a component-based extended ERP suite built on SOA technology. IFS focuses on agile businesses where any of four core processes are strategic: service & asset management, manufacturing, supply chain and projects. The company has more than 2,100 customers and is represented in some 60 countries with 2,800 employees in total. If you are interested in further information, [email protected] or contact one of our regional offices or visit our web site: AMERICAS ARGENTINA, BRAZIL, CANADA, ECUADOR, MEXICO, UNITED STATES ASIA PACIFIC AUSTRALIA, INDONESIA, JAPAN, MALAYSIA, NEW ZEALAND, PHILIPPINES, PR CHINA, SINGAPORE, THAILAND EUROPE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA BALKANS, CZECH REPUBLIC, GEORGIA, HUNGARY, ISRAEL, KAZAKHSTAN, POLAND, RUSSIA AND CIS, SLOVAKIA, TURKEY, UKRAINE EUROPE CENTRAL AUSTRIA, BELGIUM, GERMANY, ITALY, NETHERLANDS, SWITZERLAND EUROPE WEST FRANCE, IRELAND, PORTUGAL, SPAIN, UNITED KINGDOM MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA INDIA, SOUTH AFRICA, SRI LANKA, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES NORDIC DENMARK, NORWAY, SWEDEN FINLAND AND THE BALTIC AREA ESTONIA, FINLAND, LATVIA, LITHUANIA THIS DOCUMENT MAY CONTAIN STATEMENTS OF POSSIBLE FUTURE FUNCTIONALITY FOR IFS SOFTWARE PRODUCTS AND TECHNOLOGY. SUCH STATEMENTS OF FUTURE FUNCTIONALITY ARE FOR INFORMATION PURPOSES ONLY AND SHOULD NOT BE INTERPRETED AS ANY COMMITMENT OR REPRESENTATION. IFS AND ALL IFS PRODUCT NAMES ARE TRADEMARKS OF IFS. THE NAMES OF ACTUAL COMPANIES AND PRODUCTS MENTIONED HEREIN MAY BE THE TRADEMARKS OF THEIR RESPECTIVE OWNERS. IFS AB 2014 En Production: IFS Corporate Marketing, January 2014.