Field Service Management 2019

More than 75% of field service organisations are set to deploy mobile apps that will offer better data collection and add capabilities that help technicians succeed by 2020, a Gartner study has found. A recent survey of Asia Pacific companies by Enterprise Mobility Exchange has also found that manual/paper-based processes (55%), siloed teams and processes (52%) and inefficient resource allocation (48%) are the biggest challenges enterprises are encountering with mobile workers. As a result, 36% are planning to build a higher budget for enterprise mobility initiatives and 31% want to acquire more resources to focus on improving enterprise mobility goals.

These are just some of the topics that will be covered at the 11th Field Service Management Summit, to be held from 15–17 April at the Hilton Sydney. Over 100 senior-level professionals from industries including government, utilities, health, telcos and construction will come together to discuss improving the customer centricity and productivity of field service staff through technology, workforce optimisation and change management. The 2019 event will also have a greater focus on technology, AR/VR, cloud-based solutions, GIS, UAVs, telematics, data and analytics, and real-time tracking.

Attendees can hear from over 45 speakers and network with professionals via three interactive workshops and a number of roundtables. The event will also feature two on-floor stages focusing on field services for trade service excellence and asset management, and an exhibition including ClickSoftware, Salesforce and IFS.

More than 30 case studies across six streams on dynamic scheduling, customer experience, operational excellence, enterprise mobility, workforce optimisation and disruptive technology will be discussed, including:

• Queensland Urban Utilities: Decreasing operational cost by 25%, increasing staff engagement by 25% and improving process safety by 300% with a new field delivery model
• Energy Queensland: Reducing resolution times by 4–6 hours by increasing employee engagement and transparency
• Aroona Alliance: Reducing CapEx by 3% by developing an in-house FSM solution
• ServiceMax: Creative approaches on how to retain and evolve your mobile workforce, how to deal with the ‘silver tsunami’ and how to effectively leverage third-party contractors.

Melbourne Water

Melbourne Water will also discuss how it created a fit-for-purpose in-house mobility platform for realised performance improvements of 90%. Ahead of FSM 2019, Melbourne Water Principal – Technology Enablement Frank Courtney spoke to event organiser IQPC about the main challenges the company faced and how it used collaboration to develop a solution that benefited everyone.

He said performance and ease of use were the main issues with the old mobility solution and, while the app theoretically had the features it required at the time, it was not timely enough for real-world use. For example, the speed at which it synchronised data and presented that information back was simply not fast enough. The system was functional but it wasn’t in a form that was fit for daily use.

“This quickly led to a sense of frustration from the user base, and they found their own ways around that. We had a lot of people in the field who were working around the system and this meant the data we needed wasn’t being collected.”

To address the growing dissatisfaction from both the field context and the business context, the company created a collaborative partnership with asset management and IT and ensured that everyone’s problems were taken into account.

“For example, one of our maintenance teams works at a level where every individual technician has their own workload; it’s a very specific dissemination of a job to a person. Whereas the other side of the maintenance delivery business work in crews and work is distributed across four or five people. The app needed to work and manage people’s time and availability in very different ways,” he explained.

As well as speeding up transactional flow and building trust with its users, Courtney said the solution was beneficial for technicians. “At an interpersonal level, we’ve significantly lowered the time technicians spend on their timesheets and administration. From their perspective, we’ve taken away a tool which was broken and provided them something that works and aligns with how their work is actually conducted.”

To hear more about Melbourne Water’s journey, register for FSM 2019.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/romaset