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Internet of Things And Predictive Maintenance Transform The Service Industry

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The field service industry is huge, encompassing 20 million field technicians in vans spread across the world, maintaining everything from hospital equipment to office elevators, heavy manufacturing machines and wind farm turbines, and there are a lot of efficiencies which can be made.

On this scale, minor adjustments to variables such as time taken to carry out repairs can have huge consequences, and IoT technology – sensors and real-time monitoring – can give big clues about what should be adjusted.

ServiceMax is the market leader in Field Service Management (FSM) – solving thousands of problems every day with their clients’ offsite or mobile machinery and equipment.

One year ago it launched its Internet of Things (IoT)-driven cloud service management platform, in partnership with PTC. Through this platform, marketed as Connected Field Services (CFS), companies are able to make the leap to “predictive maintenance” – fixing problems before they occur.

So, what sort of results have been seen a year after rolling out this technology? Well, very encouraging ones, according to ServiceMax founder and CSO Athani Krishna.

“In many cases, we are still seeing pilots and experiments but there are certain companies that are moving beyond that,” he tells me.

Predictive maintenance  

Medical equipment manufacturer Medivators is one such success story. By implementing CFS across their international operations the company has seen a 78% increase in the number of service events which can be diagnosed and corrected remotely, with no need to despatch a field technician.

“Now they have the window into what might be happening they are able to better diagnose issues remotely, and send out a software patch or a fix without having to roll out a truck to fix it,” says Krishna.

In fact, according to ServiceMax’s report on its first year performance, customers have reported benefits after switching to a connected strategy across productivity, efficiency, growth, revenue, customer experience and compliance.

This potential for a move towards a predictive or proactive maintenance and service paradigm is one of the most enticing promises made by modern analytics and data capture technologies, to the manufacturing and servicing industries.

Not every organization can be ready to make the jump right away – a thorough understanding of how data affects a business, from the ground up, is necessary first - but taking small steps to improve measures incrementally is often a useful tactic for building a connected strategy, says Krishna, and once this is done then ideas like predictive maintenance become a viable possibility.

“In many cases if you look at the state of the service industry, there are a lot of ‘laggers’.

“You still run into companies which have dozens if not hundreds of technicians and the organization is still essentially being run on pen, paper and fax.

“Making a leap from there to a connected strategy is a big leap – so companies take multiple shots to get to a modernized, centralized platform where you’re automating workflows and capturing all the information digitally.”

Boosting cash flow with quicker reporting

Another efficiency achieved by Medivators is a reduction in the average time taken for a technician to file a report following an incident from around two weeks to two days.

This is a valuable metric as it vastly reduces the delay before clients – in Medivators case, healthcare providers which use their equipment – can be billed for a service event.

“Ultimately the goal will be to move towards being able to bill customers within 24 hours, which will really improve cash collection,” Krishna says.

Another customer which has recently signed up to use ServiceMax’s technology is Jones and Frank, the US’s largest installer and servicer of fuelling pumps and equipment. It hopes that the cloud-based, mobile analytics and management system will drive efficiencies in areas which were previously hindered by a reliance on legacy systems and siloed data.

The hope is also that eventually field service organizations running CFS or similar technologies will be able to offer 100% uptime guarantees for machinery and equipment in mission-critical settings – for a fee of course.

Ultimately adopting a connected strategy is not something which can be limited to purchasing one product or service – as Krishna puts it, it’s about using the opportunity to consider an “entire business model upgrade.”

“How a company goes to market, how they make margins, how they differentiate themselves based on service and how they build and keep long term relationships with customers – it has to be a company-wide initiative.

“Anyone who looks at it that way will have a chance to succeed.”

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