Your field tech finished a job and is taking important notes on paper forms and reviewing paper-based documentation on a clipboard. He returns to the office, logs and files the info, or perhaps physically hands it to office staff for manual entry – often into multiple systems. Unfortunately, it’s known that issues with accuracy and timeliness that result in errors, waste, and unhappy customers are inevitable.

It doesn’t have to be this way – and it shouldn’t.

Join us next Wednesday, June 26th, for a new FieldOne webinar, Keeping Profits in the Processes: Your Digital Clipboard. Our team is looking forward to introducing the ‘Digital Clipboard’ concept – automating processes to improve quality, efficiency and profit.

We’ll discuss how field service organizations can successfully eliminate duplicate data entry, unnecessary paperwork, and other manual procedures which create inaccuracies, waste, and customer dissatisfaction. All that, with a field service management process connected to “The Digital Clipboard.”

If you’re ready to leverage mobile connectivity in order to centralized field applications, improve efficiency and increase overall profitability, register now for your preferred time:

• 9am ET on Wednesday, June 26, 2013
• Noon ET/9am PT on Wednesday, June 26, 2013

The Sky Webinar Series is continuing throughout the summer, too. Next up:

• July 24: Learning From Your Field Service Data – Increasing Efficiency Increases Profits
  
• August 22: Fix the Customer First – How Mobile Info Helps Improve Customer Satisfaction

Hope to ‘meet’ you next week!

Leveraging your ‘Big Data’ is so important, in fact, that it should be a central consideration when choosing your company’s field service management and mobile solution. Have your team ask the questions: how is your data integrated? How is it shared? And how best can the staff of the entire enterprise gain the most from your field service data to fully advance your business?

This month, in Field Technologies Online, Sarah Howland (FTO Editor-in-Chief) asks: What Does Big Data Mean In Field Service? To prevent the dreaded ‘ignorance by overused buzz words,’ Howland explains what Big Data really means, related to field service:

Organizations have more data coming in than ever before, and that, if you can determine how to process that data in a way that makes it consumable, you can leverage it to make more informed business decisions.

Advancing and expanding your company’s mobile technologies is an absolute must as increased data amounts and types flow into the organization from the field.

In addition, effective field service management requires information and services from any number of enterprise systems – ERP, CRM, knowledge management, document management, supply chain management, and many, many more. For most organizations, this means a multi-platform, multi-application integration requiring significant up-front investment and considerable ongoing costs for modifications as business requirements change.

Here’s our list of some of the key features in an ideal field service data integration solution:

1. Consistent adapter model – The core integration design environment should view all applications in the same way, while presenting information that is unique to each application for precise, efficient results.
2. Open connectivity – The foundation for integrating core business systems with a wide variety of applications and data stores that are unique to each enterprise.
3. Configurable templates – Reusable integration modules that can be assembled and reassembled for multiple integrations, easily accommodating change with simple reconfigurations.
4. No custom coding – The integration toolset should enable business or data analysts to quickly design and deploy sophisticated integration solutions without tapping IT resources.

FieldOne Sky’s Simplified Integration features all of these elements, and much more. The solution eliminates the complex custom integration projects that delay the deployment times and bloat the implementation costs of alternative field service management solutions. It adds to the agility of the solution as changes can be managed in-house with a point & click interface.

Discover more about FieldOne’s Sky smooth, expansive data integration handling; contact us to start a conversation.

Soon afterward, Jon Carroll, CEO of The Service Council, published his series: 5 Key Takeaways from the 2013 Smarter Services Executive Symposium (the final entry went up last week). Since we agree wholeheartedly on the following, we figured it was worth sharing.

Jon’s first takeaway from the event was Developing a Customer-Centric Mission is Key. It is critical to steer the service organization in this direction – and embrace it as a company-wide philosophy. Service enterprises can not narrow the focus on their service teams alone; it must be all areas of the company that fully subscribe to the customer-centric ideal.

There are five questions Jon asks when considering the creation of a customer-centric mission. Drilling down further, let’s focus on the fifth question – mainly, the second half:

Who is delivering the experience? Do they have the information/tools necessary to do so?

As discussed in the latest Sky Webinar Series, the right platform is key to seamless service integration – and seamless integration leads to more productive techs and enthusiastic customers. Consider that the field service management platform is at the base of all your operations, connecting all your data with all your techs and the rest of the entire enterprise.

So what is your platform based on? Here’s what your field service management solution might have been based on:

• Build: It is very costly in time and money, and requires extensive knowledge, to create a completely customized field service solution from the ground up.
• Buy: Off-the-shelf applications tend to be rigid; after all, customization is limited. Your employees are stuck with the packaged user interface. And even as a pre-packaged solution, it does require some level of expertise for deployment.

Since platform is key, what business can afford to take on the risks of building or off-the-shelf solutions? The ultimate platform is a combination of building a customized field service management layer on top of a top quality, industry standard platform. This powerful integration means any field service enterprise gets the high quality features and performance they should expect, with the enormous range of customization they require. Open architecture, flexibility, and even third party plugins are just a few of the reasons why this solution is the solution for customer-centric service enterprises.

FieldOne’s Sky solution is exactly that: a field service management solution built on the strength of Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM, a platform with proven capability. For more information on how the Sky solution works to your customer-centric company philosophy, contact us.

Today we’re unveiling our new field service management offering specifically designed to help companies bring the highest levels of service quality across individually-managed franchises.

Placing the “franchise tag” on field service management, FieldOne Sky for Franchise Organizations (SFO) delivers the process automation and management capabilities necessary to drive consistency and customer satisfaction across numerous and geographically dispersed operations.

FieldOne SFO is specifically designed to help franchisors, franchisees, and service providers more effectively conduct business.  For franchisors, the offering drives consistent field service across the organization, while providing the monitoring tools necessary to ensure access to timely and quality services.  Franchisees benefit from a very low cost and easy-to-use automated repair and maintenance system with premier pricing.  Service providers also benefit from access to an enterprise-class field service management solution with no up-front investment and discounted monthly costs.

“The goal of every business is to provide a consistent, quality experience for all customers.  This is a particular challenge in the franchise model where field service is managed by individual operators, but has implications for the entire organization and brand. At FieldOne, ensuring the best field service possible is not just one of our goals – it’s all we do.  That’s why we’re bringing a new solution specifically designed for franchise operations to market.” – Ilan Slasky, CEO, FieldOne Systems

FieldOne SFO is based on FieldOne Sky, which enables field service organizations with powerful end-user capabilities and real-time access to enterprise resources and customer data in the field across a range of mobile devices, as well as intelligent management of all phases of the field service delivery life cycle.

For the full press release, click here.

Our Sr. VP of Sales and Marketing, Jim Hare, opened the presentation with key points about field service management and data accessibility.

The core of this business is information: Getting relevant data out onto the field has become a critical aspect. We’ve come a long way from the old days of back office call-ins, and now the strength of a field service company lies in its capability to connect all aspects of the business to its organizational data streams.

Of course, it’s connected to the other critical aspect of the field service business: customer experience. The more data and access you can provide your techs, the more beneficial and successful your customers’ service experience will be.

So how do successful companies empower their teams with productive data streams? The answer is your field service management system: this is where all the data must come together. FSM is the connecting point for your data.

There are two obvious options for creating your FSM’s environment: Build or buy. But are either of them ideal?

We can’t help but point out a few of the glaring cons when it comes to off-the-shelf applications: They can be rigid. The user interface might not work for your teams. Customization isn’t as fluid. They require some level of expertise to deploy.

Then again, building from the ground up requires extensive knowledge, textbook resources, and the cost and time invested is much higher than buying.

Is there a third, optimal approach?

Yes. Which is why FieldOne builds on top of an industry-standard platform – Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Our award-winning Sky solution is an integration of the best Microsoft’s CRM has to offer with our original layer of field service management optimization.

Here are just a few reasons why this combination works:

1. Open architecture: We’re not locked in a single vendor’s approach.
2. Flexible and scalable: The Microsoft CRM is capable of multi-language, multi-time zone, and more, along with the ability to scale  into the 100,000s of users.
3. Third party plugins: Further customization with the ability to add on.

For more information, and to hear Ted Kempf, Director of Field Services at Microsoft, speak to the value of interoperability and open architectures, view the webinar now. To learn more about Sky, give us a call (1-866-918-8324) or email.