Six Ways To Improve Your Field Service Management Operations

[stephenmann]

Did you know that ServiceNow offers field service management (FSM) capabilities?

I wouldn't blame you if you didn't, our field service management application was previously called ServiceNow Work Management which I guess can mean different things to different people. However, this application was enhanced and renamed to ServiceNow Field Service Automation as part of the Eureka release.

Although a more appropriate question, and one less likely to get me fired, is:

How well are you supporting your remote employees and business operations?

The challenge for IT and other corporate mobile support groups

Enterprises often have people and business operations in field offices, or remote locations, with equipment that fails and requires service. But when the affected employee contacts the service desk, or non-IT equivalent, to request service for these assets, there can be disconnects between the service desk and the technicians who offer support in the field.

For instance, service desk agents may have to resort to multiple phone calls and emails to ensure that technicians are in the right place at the right time. Or there might be fix delays caused by the sending of field service technicians without the required skills or the right spare parts.

Or the affected employees might be left in the dark about what's happening and may even need to request service again if their issues have not been correctly resolved. Resulting in a poor service experience and potentially an adverse effect on business operations and even business revenues. Meanwhile, field service team management are often flying blind with little data on, or insight into, field service technician performance and how to improve efficiency and effectiveness in the field.

Ultimately, enterprises with distributed operations and mobile/remote workers can be inconvenienced, or even suffer customer and revenue loss, through inefficient and mismanaged field service operations.

Effectively supporting remote employees and assets

For me it's a two-part conundrum — not only do we need to improve service delivery and the service experience, we also need to efficiently manage the work tasks performed across multiple locations by a finite field services team. And, in many ways, the latter helps to influence the former.

Work tasks need to be quickly and correctly matched to agent skills, geographic territory assignments, and available inventory. With productivity and service experience improved through capabilities such as geo-location tracking, auto-dispatch, auto-routing, and maybe even the SLA-based mapping of tasks. Plus we need to ensure that the correct parts for the job are available, and in the right location, when needed.

Then information availability is critical:

• Field service technicians need information on the move. The ability to quickly view task details and record information such as tracking the time they spend on work tasks.
• Managers need access to reports and dashboards to gain real-time insight into utilization, capacity, the end-users and locations requesting work, and improvement opportunities.

It's a lot of additional capabilities that aren't usually available in IT service management (ITSM) or service desk solutions.

So what do you need for effective field service management?

Gartner lists the following requirements in its online IT Glossary definition of field service management:

"Field service management includes the detection of a field service need (through remote monitoring or other means, inspection or a customer detecting a fault), field technician scheduling and optimization, dispatching, parts information delivery to the field, and process support of field technician interactions."

Source: http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/field-service-management

To add a little more color, ServiceNow Field Service Automation capabilities include (and pardon my marketing-speak, the bullets are taken from marketing collateral):

1. The ability to create work orders from incidents. Field Service Automation is designed to integrate seamlessly with ServiceNow Incident Management to ensure rapid resolution of incidents, no matter where they occur. Work orders can be as simple or as complex as the job requires — from a single work task through to multiple work tasks that can be efficiently completed in a particular sequence by a team of field service technicians. And task dependency relationships can be defined such that one task cannot begin until another task is completed.
2. Drag-and-prop visual dispatch and automation. The visual dispatch feature gives dispatchers drag-and-drop work assignment capabilities so they can assign tasks to technicians, based on their proximity, availability and the specific skills required to complete the work tasks. Dispatchers can see at a glance what times are available for technicians and then drag and drop unassigned work onto available times. A new single-click solution lets dispatchers automatically select the ideal field service agent and use auto-routing to determine the optimal route for them to service multiple locations.
3. Location-based management. Dispatchers can use geo-location tracking to know where field service technicians are and assign work based on proximity. They can also use a color-coded SLA map to prioritize or re-prioritize work tasks for field service technicians based on time to breach. In addition, a dispatch map enables dispatchers to view all open work tasks to understand work distribution and to quickly identify impacted areas. Work tasks can easily be assigned and assignments can be changed just by clicking on work tasks shown on the map and drilling down into edit mode.
4. Consolidated inventory and parts management. Work tasks leverage the inventory management capability from ServiceNow Asset Management so there's a single repository for assets in stock and a standard inventory control process for both asset and field service management processes. Asset Management features such as threshold-based stock replenishment and procurement ensure that parts are always available. Work dispatchers can source parts, reserve them for work tasks, and better schedule when work can be done.
5. A mobile optimized interface for field service technicians. Like all ServiceNow applications, Field Service Automation includes a mobile interface designed for busy field service technicians to quickly view and record information. From their smartphones and tablets, field service technicians can accept tasks, reject tasks, track travel time, track work time, and drill down into the information they need about their scheduled tasks.
6. Customized reporting and dashboards. Reports and dashboards can be easily customized to gain real-time insight into utilization, capacity, the end-users and locations requesting work, and key field service management metrics. A simple and flexible reporting engine allows users to quickly generate and save reports directly from a list of records. Users can right click within a list to generate bar charts and pie charts for instant analysis. They can also define their own personal dashboards by simply dragging and dropping the gauges and reports they need to highlight the most important information. It can also be integrated with ServiceNow IT Cost Management to track and better manage the costs of field services, including inventory and travel expenses.

So what should you be looking to achieve through effective field service management?

For me there are three main opportunities for IT organizations, or other corporate service providers:

• Speedier resolution and an improved service experience. Through efficient support services for remote employees and equipment, seamlessly bridging the gap between the service desk and field service teams.
• Increased efficiency of operations. Use geo-location tracking to know where field technicians are to assign work based on proximity, SLA mapping for priority, and auto-routing to determine the optimal route for field technicians to service multiple locations.
• Better visibility of field service operations and improvement opportunities. Create custom reports and dashboards to better understand resource utilization, travel versus work time, failure rates of field equipment, and more key field service management metrics.

So it's been a long read, and a little bit marketing-y, for a blog but hopefully it's got you thinking about how your field service management operations can and should be improved through field-service-management-enabling technology.

Image source: Flickr: Tambako the Jaguar's Photostream