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How business-oriented Machine Learning improves Field Service productivity

Paul Smitherman |

Field services organisations often struggle to balance efficient customer service with employee satisfaction. One of the main challenges they face is how to minimise field technicians’ travel distance and time in order to respect SLA’s and potential production impact, while at the same time respect their customers’ time windows.

Excel is still widely used to run the maintenance and scheduling of work and service orders. Some organisations are using third party software, but this is seldom integrated with their main SAP systems.

Using the power of intelligent algorithms to harness the end-to-end maintenance flow

Wouldn’t it be great if your customer could receive an automated SMS or email to give them an ETA of the technician’s arrival, just like Amazon or DPD in the B2C world? Meeting your SLAs by being able to automatically communicate with customers and manage their expectations would greatly improve customer satisfaction levels. Equally, being able to reduce mileage per engineer and fuel costs would not only cut expenditure and boost productivity levels but have a positive environmental impact on your organisation.

Capitalising on the power of the intelligent algorithm to optimise your service scheduling and execution will save you a lot of time and money, increase ROI and improve customer service. This is because algorithms enable a more “intelligent” usage of the massive volume of data natively available in your SAP system. You get a natural integration with SAP using bi-directional connections, rather than simply interfacing. Algorithms create paths and links between all the information to allow key stakeholders to take appropriate decisions at the right time, with information flow consumed through a business-oriented cockpit interface.

Digitalising and integrating your field service management into your ERP will align the entire community of people involved in this process so they can easily collaborate, whether on the payroll or as a contractor.

SOA People’s intelligent optimisation software is fully integrated with SAP and all modern functionality is embedded, for example for mobile access, alerts, KPIs and so on. It’s been designed to generate the best possible routes in real-time, taking into account external factors such as traffic, and control capacity management.

The digital asset management platform lets technicians plan their day much faster, reducing mileage, fuel costs and increasing productivity – a win for the organisation, the customer and the environment.

Webinnar replay BIA Ready4 Advanced Scheduling

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