A market reports discloses that 52% of companies still use manual methods for organizing and tracking their field service tasks. If your organization is one of them, then you might be able to relate with the following situation representation for legacy field service organizations.
With a data-driven approach to field service, you can re-imagine your processes, maximize the technician expertise quotient, and mine data for gathering powerful insights.
Field service businesses that are unable to cope up with the evolving customer expectations are distant from the desirable state of smartly dispatching the right resources at the right time. In an old-school setup, technicians are unable to predict and prevent breakdowns from happening, leading to downtime at the customer’s end.
Why Excel-based/legacy asset tracking systems are a big NO!
The dilemma of pitting productivity against customer satisfaction and vice-versa is a classic problem in industry. This is where legacy Asset tracking and management systems for field service organizations also find a spot.
Legacy asset tracking practices limit you to technician-only enabled inspection, maintenance, and repair of asset equipment. Those systems do not sync data and thus, fail to provide insights, resulting in inadequate workflows. With the absolute lack of up-to-date asset information and automated tracking, these legacy systems take away new earning potential opportunities. Such organizations often experience increased downtime and higher dispatch costs because employees are not equipped with the devices and data that aids productivity.
These legacy systems require technicians to physically check upon the asset's health and performance, challenging resource availability and efficiency. Operational excellence does not exist because these legacy asset tracking systems are not capable of predicting parts and asset failure or carry out any systematic diagnostics.
So, if you still employ legacy systems, you are set up to fall behind. Hence, it is time to deploy technology to automate your field services asset tracking processes, eliminate duplication, lack of traceability, and discard manual processes.
Asset Tracking and predictive maintenance
With Connected Field Services, your organization is enabled to monitor the health of its assets via IoT/sensors to trigger alerts based on fault codes that further promote work orders for equipped technicians.
Predictive maintenance helps every discrete asset installation with its performance since the fault is detected way before it leads to the breakdown. Further, remote assistance can be put into place to accomplish maintenance for disparate installations.
Machine-based asset maintenance alerts and automated data collection lie at the core of connected asset tracking. It helps the field engineer access an asset from anywhere to perform diagnostics, seek performance data, and build co-relations to projected availability and utilization, thus also offering an impetus for inputs into the product lifecycle and supply chain.
While all of these together reduce the asset downtime, they also instill a trust factor with the customer since the asset minimizes unscheduled failures/breakdown. While this happens, your organization can easily shift its focus to commercial selling of asset maintenance contracts in the form of value-add services and key cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
Exceptional field service and predictive maintenance is all about migrating from ‘reactive’ to the ‘proactive’. Being able to manage and control asset information for various customer service locations with a 360-degree view of service considerations and history can be electrifying for field service organizations.
In a pursuit to delight their customer, organizations that are enabled with connected asset tracking, can gain a competitive advantage across their industry, grow their revenue streams, and achieve operational excellence.