Field service management solutions enable enterprises to get information from the field staff on real-time basis along with host of contextual data and thus make the process more intelligent, the employee more efficient and the customer happier.

1. Trends In Field Service Management
“Mobilizing field force”
Business is becoming increasingly mobile and to better manage employees in
the field, Enterprises want visibility more than ever, to what is happening on the
ground. Field service management solutions enable enterprises to get
information from the field staff on real-time basis along with host of contextual
data and thus make the process more intelligent, the employee more efficient
and the customer happier. Field service management opens up newer
opportunities to review and improve your business operations and offer a more
“informed” top-down assessment of current business.
Challenges in field service management:
 Meeting customer expectations: The whole customer engagement
paradigm has changed over the last few years. Customers today expect
certain level of preventive maintenance and compare service quality
across industries. Today, service satisfaction not only determines
customer loyalty, but is imperative to ensure continuous revenue.
 Spare parts Inventory management: The onus to update spare part
utilization today lies with the data entry team, which is prone to errors,
missing service papers and erroneous service reports among others.
 Real time view and communication: Not knowing the location of the field
staff on real time basis put a huge disadvantage both in terms of
productivity and cost. Location information clearly helps prioritize and
allocate service calls in an optimum way, and drives cost and customer
satisfaction goals.
 Capturing voice of customer: The actual voice of the customer is not
getting across to the right stakeholders in the enterprise since it is
dependent on the field staff to capture and share it proactively.
 Service delivery optimization: Allocation of service tickets allocation to
right service engineer, which goes beyond not only finding resource with
right skill sets and limited workload, but also includes elements of
location proximity to customer and spare parts availability. This will help
harness better results for both customer and organization and avoid un-
necessary travel and delays.
The right solution:
Field service management mobile application can help enterprises respond to
the above challenges.

2. There are two key components for this solutions that work together seamlessly:
- A smartphone and tablet based application, which primarily retrieves
assigned work orders, captures data and uploads data back to server.
- A web portal application, which can have a host of functionalities right
from user management to ticket assignment, analytics, re-allocation etc.
Field service management mobility application allows context based execution,
which the manager has access to the following parameters up-front and uses
them to assign the best possible field engineer for a given situation:
 Skills and certification levels of engineers
 Current number of open tickets at engineer level
 Recent work done by each engineers
 Real time location of complete field force
 Recent overtime assessment
 Priority of current task
 Priority of new task
 Availability and location of spare parts
There are multiple advantages of using this application that result in reducing
costs and improving efficiencies:
 Reduction in manpower cost – there is no longer a need of separate
manpower for data entry. Entire service report can be synchronized and
various analytics can be pulled from web portal.
 Improved productivity – there is no need for field executives to collect
work order physically from office. The mobile application acts like a
single point of reference for various information like customer contact,
products, service details etc. and the work order can be downloaded as
and when assigned.
 Reduction in travel cost – A field executive is able to now plan his route
accordingly and is not required to visit the branch on a daily basis,
thereby resulting in saving of fuel allowance.
 Improved customer satisfaction-As the allocation & update is on the
move through the mobile application, it helps in improved turnaround
time to customer resulting in better customer satisfaction
 Voice of customer - Helps track voice of customer by capturing image,
audio and video recording along with customer co-ordinates.
 Authentication of the field force feedback – The application helps to track
the individual track for the day which gives a cross check whether the
executive has traveled the required path for the calls or not. Also data
uploaded are time and location stamped.

3. Tips for decision making:
When is the right time for an enterprise to invest in this solution? Enterprises
ticking a yes to any three of the below parameters will want to look at this
solution right away:
 Your organisation has multiple field executives, who continuously need to
be co-ordinated and guided
 You’re looking to increase the average number of calls per field executive
per day
 You’re expanding on product line and geographies
 Customer satisfaction is the most important agenda driving your decisions
 You want to bring down the operation cost without compromising the
quality.
Conclusion
Mobility solutions allows enterprises to achieve the benefits of efficient field
service management without the traditional complexity, cost and management
overhead. Historically, such solutions were requiring high initial capital
investments, relied on proprietary hardware and software, sometimes failed to
deliver reliable communication network or access to critical business
information and faced limited integration with mission-critical field service
systems.
The landscape is changing over the last few years with high adoption of smart
phones and tablets along with better and high speed communication network
coverage. The cost for such solutions have come down significantly and the
math is working our right now regarding return on investments. It is imperative
to equip field engineers with tools which will not only make their life easy but
has significant impact on customer satisfaction and enterprise bottom line.
About Avaali:
Avaali Solutions (www.avaali.com) is a company that focuses in the Enterprise
Information Management (EIM), Enterprise Mobility and Internet of Things
(IoT) space.
In EIM, we focus on supporting enterprise customers manage the lifecycle and
generate value from your unstructured content (contracts, documents, emails,
vendor invoices, HR data etc). We’ve several partnerships in this space
including Silver partnership and SAP Competence Partnership with OpenText,

4. Platinum Partner with ReadSoft (worlds leading provider of applications to
automate business processes), SAP reseller partner, Canto (world’s leading
provider of digital asset management) and Kofax. We have strong consulting
and implementation skill-sets on OpenText and ReadSoft – we're equipped with
consultants who come with strong global implementation experience these
solutions.
We also have offerings for shared services where we provide advisory services
and implementation services to help set up and scale SSC for enterprises. A
company profile can be found
on http://www.avaali.com/Avaali_corporate_presentation.pdf
Our offerings for shared services can be found on this link -
http://www.avaali.com/service-offerings/shared-services.
In our Enterprise Mobility practice,we provide advisory service, enterprise
mobile application development and managed services. More about our
mobility practice can be found by clicking this link
: https://www.dropbox.com/s/s04o4shialwmcm6/Avaali_Mobility_background.
pdf?dl=0
In our Internet of Things (IoT) practice, we focus primarily on two areas –
solutions for Healthcare (Telemedicine and Remote Patient Monitoring) and
solutions for Location Based Services (LBS). More about these offerings in this
link:
http://www.avaali.com/enterprise-solution-focus/internet-of-things
http://www.avaali.com/images/Avaali_Presentation_IoT.pdf
We've executed several projects iwith large enterprise customers such as Hatsun
Agro, Alkem Labs, Tata Sky (for automating their Accounts Payable), Sun TV,
Wockhardt etc. We're working with a large Oil & Gas major in India to fully
automate their Accounts Payable process with a Vendor Invoice Management
solution. In addition, we're also doing some interesting work with a large
pharma major to automate their order to cash and procure to pay process as
they're setting up their shared services organization.
Contact:
Info@avaali.com
www.avaali.com
+91 80 49602727