More Productivity,More Profits with Field AutomationBY J. SHARPE SMITH

With tightening margins and customers demanding better service, enterprises arelooking, more than ever, to make their technicians more efficient in the field. Theanswers are coming in field service automation are leading to increased technicianutilization, reduced call center volumes, fewer errors and increased billable time.

“Service-minded organizations today are struggling to identify new and innovativeways to grow service and ensure cost-effectiveness in order to differentiatethemselves from their competition,” says Erik Anderson, vice president, sales,Agentek, a provider of real-time, mobile field service automation solutions.“Companies are looking to turn service from a cost center to a profit center byimproving operating efficiency, reducing response time and increasing customersatisfaction. Service is becoming more of a strategic arm of the company.”

Automation is the key to streamlining field service processes, increasingproductivity, enhancing customer satisfaction and boosting revenues. Improvementcomes in these areas: • Fewer errors than filling out paper reports and less time spent by back office

employees on data entry• Real time updates to asset and inventory databases and increased access to

computer backend system data• Simplified dispatch and work order management and reduced call center

communications• Enhanced ability to meet regulatory requirements• Honoring service level agreements (SLA) and fixing products on the first visit

Is there an ROI in automating field service? Service organizations using field serviceautomation have experienced a 9 percent reduction in repair time leading to a 22percent increase in SLA compliance, a 21 percent increase in first-call resolutionrate, and an 18 percent increase in service revenues, according to the studyrecently published by the Aberdeen Group – The Mobile Field Service Update: 2007and Beyond. The study also shows enterprises that excel in work order completionand SLA compliance see service margins of 17.2 percent, which is 2.5 percentabove the national service margin average.

“The difference between a pacified customer and a satisfied customer can greatlyaffect future revenue streams through customer share of wallet and subsequentcustomer referrals,” says Sumair Dutta, research analyst at the Aberdeen Groupand co-author of the report.

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Motorola MC9000

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Field Service Automation Goes Real Time

Filling out paperwork, sending data back once or twice aday and trading cell phone calls are no longer acceptablefor those companies wanting to increase their servicetechnicians’ productivity.

“The field service automation trend that we see isgrowth in applications that are real-time enabled,” saysBrent Iadarola, research director for the mobile andwireless group at Frost & Sullivan, a business researchand consulting firm. “Technicians are becoming moreproductive because they have access to more backendinformation and applications than ever before.” Morethan three times as many industry leaders track fieldservice in real time or on an event basis, compared withother companies, according to the Aberdeen Group.

Real-time automation allows field service processes to beintegrated with adjacent functions in the service chain.Aberdeen reports 44 percent of companies it polled areworking to integrate service parts planning anddistribution more closely with field service.

“It is not good enough to pull out information, store itand throw it into a backend system, where some dayyou have to produce a report,” says Agentek’sAnderson. “Corporate America is looking to empowertechnicians to do their jobs in the field with instant

access to all the resources and information, available inseconds on a real time basis and completely interactive.”

Software Suites Becoming the Preferred Option

Throughout the lifecycle of any product –– from saleslead generation, inventory management to the servicingof any product and eventual asset retirement –– everydepartment of the enterprise is involved. Heretofore,each department had their own software applications,with each operating on different platforms and withseparate databases. But that is changing.

“What enterprises are really demanding today is the abil-ity to manage and monitor all the different applicationsfrom one single platform,” says Iadarola. “It is inefficientto run different departments ondifferent platforms. Applicationsshould be mixed and matchedusing the same platform,depending on the particularneeds that each department.” Acomplete software suite will pro-vide for numerous applications,such as point of sales, distribu-tion, inventory, e-commerce,accounting and workflow sys-tems, which serve individualbusiness units.

“While many mobility technologies are still offered assingle purpose applications, mobility solutions willcontinue to evolve into strategic platforms that cansupport multiple applications,” says Chris Hale, vicepresident of marketing at Agentek. “Mobilitytechnologies are the lynchpin allowing the mobile fieldservice worker to become a fully integrated element ofthe CRM strategy.”

The importance of having a complete software suite canbe seen in the purchase of FieldCentrix by ASTEAInternational. FieldCentrix’s field service automationsoftware has been integrated with ASTEA’s servicelifecycle management and customer relationshipmanagement solutions. The result is an end-to-endservice management solution with mobility solutions thatrun on a wide range of mobile devices.

Agentek’s Chris Hale

Accessing real time job information.

“It is no longer sufficient toimplement mobility solutions on astand-alone basis,” says DebbieGeiger, vice president, marketing,ASTEA International. “You need toensure that mission-criticalcustomer information flows freelyacross all the business units and tofield service technicians when andwhere they need it. An integratedapproach is the key to making amobile solution a success.”

Up to the CIO Level

With enterprises moving from tactical to strategicinitiatives in their field service automation softwaredeployment, the buying decisions for software havebeen elevated to C-level personnel. According toAberdeen, 86 percent of industry leading firms havedirector or vice-president level oversight of their fieldservice operations. Vettro, a mobile applications providerfor field sales and service organization, for example, hasgone from selling to the individual departments to

selling directly to CIOs in closeto 80 percent of its accounts.“Today’s CIO is getting hit withmobility requirements acrossmultiple business lines,” says PatSmith, vice president, marketingfor Vettro. “Productivity is beingseen, not as a business lineneed, but as an organizationalinitiative. To fulfill this need,CIOs are opting for a completesuite of applications, which theycan deploy on a staggered basis if they want.”

Mobile Devices, Networks Improve

Mobile devices today are getting cheaper and faster,which enhances their ability to provide real time data.What’s more, they are becoming more feature rich withcomponents such as bar coding, signature capture andcredit card swipe, which make them more attractive forenterprise field service automation applications.

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Vettro’s Pat SmithASTEA’sDebbie Geiger

Mobile devices are becoming more feature-rich, with barcode scanners, signature capture, credit card swipe and evenRFID capabilities.

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“A set of market conditions has removed thebarriers to mobile computing. Perhaps the largestbarrier was the cost of the hardware device,”says Agentek’s Anderson. “Lower cost mobiledevices have led to a lot of interest in corporateAmerica changing their business models.”

Even though a large population of laptops is inuse in the enterprise space, handhelds withexceedingly fast processor speed and increasingmemory capacity are gaining in popularity. “Atransition is occurring from a laptop to ahandheld for those users that don’t need a bigscreen. The more the handheld can do and themore we integrate into it, the happier thecustomer is,” says Bruce Krohn, director,Motorola's Field Mobility business.

Field service devices are indeed becoming morefeature-rich. For example, Motorola recentlyintroduced the durable MC35 Enterprise DigitalAssistant, which combines built-in GPS, Wi-Fi,Bluetooth, camera, wireless email, Internetaccess, signature capture and bar code readingcapability.

Greater network speeds, increased coverage andlower data prices are all working together tofacilitate field service automation over carriernetworks. “In the past, we did not have the dataspeeds, bandwidth, and reduced latency toenable these applications. With the high speeddata transmission standard EVDO Rev A(Evolution-Data Optimized), we can deployalmost any application,” says Butch Musselman,Sprint Nextel vice president of industry businesssolutions.

The Motorola MC35 operates on AT&T’s EDGE,third-generation, high-speed, mobile data andInternet access technology network, which covers250 million people in 13,000 cities and almost40,000 miles of U.S. highways. The unit alsoconnects to an organization's wireless LAN via802.11b/g, providing even more coverage.

Networks are also providing the tools forenterprises to take advantage of mobilecomputing, including field service automation.Sprint Nextel, for instance, has more than 100

Wi-Fi Infrastructure Adapts toLocation Solutions

In perhaps the seminal event of Wi-Fi RTLSdevelopment, Cisco Systems launched its WirelessLocation Appliance 2700 in 2005, which incorporatedlocation into its Wi-Fi systems. Shortly afterward,PanGo Networks and Cisco announced a joint assettracking solution that integrated Cisco’s locationappliance with the PanGo Locator® 2.0. Most recently,Cisco teamed with Aeroscout to create a locationsolution that is specifically aimed at the aerospace,automotive, mining and semiconductor manufacturingindustries.

The Cisco Wireless Location Appliance uses RFfingerprinting technology designed to track mobiledevices to within a few meters. With RF fingerprinting,a spatial map of the floor plan is programmed into thesystem, which includes all physical characteristics andaccess points. Using this map, or “location fingerprint,”the Wireless Location Appliance takes into account thebuilding’s floor plan as well as attenuation, reflection,and multiple paths, which affect the accuracy of RTLSsignals. To determine the location of the RTLS tags, thesignal strength is triangulated, but the locationinformation is also matched against the database oflocation fingerprints until it finds a match.

In February, wireless LAN infrastructure vendor TrapezeNetworks™ introduced the LA-200 Location Appliance,which is designed to allow large-scale, real-time assettracking over their existing Wi-Fi networks. Scalability isachieved through routing the data from access pointsaround the wireless LAN controller and directly to thelocation appliance, which reduces the traffic load onthe Wi-Fi network. The LA-200, a component of theSmart Mobile™ architecture, plugs into an existingTrapeze Networks Wi-Fi infrastructure.

Trapeze is partnered with location services technologysuppliers, including Newbury Networks, PanGoNetworks, AeroScout and Ekahau. The Trapeze solutionincludes off-the-shelf business-centric location trackingapplications from these vendors, as well as customsoftware integration, and the LA-200 is compatiblewith Wi-Fi tags from all of these vendors.

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partners developing both horizontal and vertical softwareapplications targeted at the enterprise. For example, onepartner, Jumpstart, can take virtually any paper formused by a technician and convert it into wirelessapplication, so it can filled it out over the phone througha series of keystrokes. When it is printed out it still lookslike the company’s traditional paperwork.

Thick or Thin Client?

Real time information flow is sometimes seen assynonymous with “thin clients,” which must beconnected to the backend system at all times tofunction, but it is still a “thick-client” world, wheredatabases and applications reside on the handheld,according to Smith. The main reason is because mobiledevices must sometimes operate without connectivity,which requires them to have their own database andsoftware applications. Until coverage is 100 percentguaranteed, some companies will require a thick client.

Some software applications download all the data oncustomer’s equipment to the mobile device when thetechnician is dispatched, so it will be readily available, incase the signal is lost.

“When the worker is offline andneeds access to currentinformation, that gap can bebridged by having an on-board

database,” says Vettro’s Smith.“When a wireless connection is

available, the system must beintelligent to detect new tasks and pushthe information out to the technician’sdevice.” At the same time, thebackend system must be automaticallyupdated with job information from

the field as soon as a signal isavailable to ensure that

managers have up-to-date information.

The Benefits to the Enterprise

The first step in field service automation is usually gettingrid of the inefficiencies of a paper-based system and thuseliminating errors. In order to remove the need forpaperwork and also facilitate the service call, the screenflow process of the field service software must bedesigned to allow the most efficient way to complete theprocess.

Developed as a series of screens, the application shouldallow the technician to communicate the neededinformation with the backend systems. Softwareengineers may ride along with the service technician ashe makes his rounds to see the current businessprocesses and if any inefficiency exists that may beimproved through automation.

“It all begins with the mobile worker. Getting firsthandknowledge of the field is extremely valuable,” saysSmith. “Organizations that have been in business for along time can get stuck in their ways, and it is importantto have someone from the outside looking at theprocesses with a different perspective and to provideinsight into how mobility can help with thoseinefficiencies.”

While digital signature capture is an ideal way of provingwork completion, a customer is not always available.

Then and NowPaperwork is being replaced byhandheld devices that automatethe same processes.

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Other solutions exist, however; a company that installswater meters may take a digital picture of the oldmeter, install the new meter and take another digitalimage of it. This photographic proof is then sent backto the corporate office to prove the work has beendone.

First time resolution of a repair job is very important,both to efficiency and customer satisfaction. To beeffective on site, a technician needs to be able to accessthe complete product history, product schematics,online service manuals and service level agreements.Also crucial to first time resolution is making sure thatthe technician has the proper skills and the right partsto fix the problem. The closest technician capable ofcompleting the job must be the one dispatched, thusaiding in first time resolution.

Automated access to information minimizes thenumber of calls to the call center, reducing the numberof dispatchers needed. The goal of automating fieldservice, however, is not just about reducing dispatchersor closing out an additional trouble ticket a week. Awell-informed service technician can also serve in asales capacity for a company. Each customer contactcan lead to warranty sales or other sales leadgeneration. Customer retention and additional salescan be built into the field service ROI model, as well aslead generation for the sales force.

“We are seeing the finalpiece of the serviceautomation puzzle.Companies arebeginning to see atangible return on theirdeployment of thesesolutions,” says Iadorola.“In the past it has beena competitive advantageto have a field serviceautomation solution.Going forward, it will bea competitiverequirement.”

The Consumer, Blackberries and the Future of Field Service Automation

One other factor affecting field service automation isthe consumer market. Not only are people now morecomfortable with new technologies but also increasedconsumer data use provides economies of scale thatdrive down the prices making it more affordable for theenterprise. Popular consumer features, such as cameras,global positioning, Wi-Fi and email, are now becomingfield service staples.

“The enterprise market definitely adopts technologythat is popular in the consumer market,” saysMotorola’s Krohn. “For example, we are seeing an up-tick in instant messaging, when service techniciansneed more information on a client or need to conferwith a more experienced technician or they need a partfrom another truck. We see increased levels ofproductivity with the use of instant messaging.”

The Blackberry phenomenon is another example of howoutside forces have had an impact on field serviceautomation. Productivity increases that white-collarworkers experienced with wireless e-mail opened theireyes to the advantages of real time access toinformation across all departments. Sales forceautomation proved how real-time access to customerrelationship management information could help closedeals on the spot. Successful implementations of GPS-enable field force management have set the stage forthe next evolution in field service automation. And thefuture of field service communications is a workforcearmed with better equipment, real-time informationand the right parts to get the job done the first time.

Executive Blackberry use has provided a gateway forwireless data in other areas of the enterprise.

Field workers also benefitfrom the increasedadoption of wireless data.