Field Service News & Technology Roundup is our blog series, where we feature the latest interesting field service and technology insights impacting field service organizations.
With the Thanksgiving Holiday taking center stage in November, the area of field service management and geospatial asset management were a flurry of activity. While having no relation to the Holiday itself, it’s still an interesting observation. Perhaps it’s the weather or it’s just a coincidence, either way it was an interesting month for field service news. Read on for the key articles you might have missed.
A Walkthrough: Putting Field Service Business Process Automation To Work
Source: Field Technologies Online
Author: Mark Percy, VP of Technology at Field Squared
The average mid-size to enterprise field service organization that maintains a highly distributed mobile workforce, isn’t looking for a simple field service and geospatial asset management solution to effectively manage their mobile field workforce. Instead, we repeatedly hear organizations seeking a solution that allows them to at least partially, and sometimes fully, automate field service business processes.
Business process automation, while in its early stages of adoption just a few years ago, is now a must-have software solution at many Fortune 100 to 1000 companies. The article, A Walkthrough: Putting Field Service Business Process Automation to Work, takes the case of an Oil & Gas services organization and breaks down specific workflows to automate that will have the most impact. The use case is applicable across practically any industry that maintains complex field service processes, manages / services geospatial field assets on an enterprise scale and that have a mobile workforce management component to their operations.
It’s a great read if you’re looking for real-world use cases of field service process and workflow automation.
Top CIO Priorities: The Threat of Amazon, Customer Experience, Data Insights, And Data Security
Source: Forbes
Author: Peter High, Forbes Contributor
We thought this article was so interesting that we tweeted about it. The beauty is you don’t have to be a CIO to appreciate the priorities Peter High lists in the article. We all know this is the Age of the Customer, but we don’t always think about technologies to layer on-top of the customer experience.
For instance, High mentions augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (AR) as part of the customer experience. Here at Field Squared, we blogged about How Augmented Reality Will Change Field Service Operations from the perspective of technicians conducting field work. The other side of that is the customer experience leveraging AR to interact with your product or service, which High discusses in the article.
Additionally, pay close attention to the section, Rescaling in the Digital Age. As we’ve learned, no two field service organizations are alike in the type, complexity or age of the third-party back-office systems they use for work order and asset management, scheduling or customer experience management. As High points out, this is something many organizations are dealing with and it’s worth reading some of the strategy behind how they are dealing with it.
Image Source: Unsplash by Keith Misner
