What’s new in the Tokyo release for Field Service Management

[ServiceNow]

What’s new in the Tokyo release for Field Service Management  
by Beth Colehower, Director of Product Marketing 

As we talk with our customers, three key challenges come up repeatedly that are impacting both experience and operations. 

• First, manual and disconnected processes that result in a heavy administrative lift for both dispatchers and technicians.
• Second, scheduling and dispatching inefficiencies impacting travel time, overtime, and first time fix.
• And third, multiple systems and siloed data creating friction in the service experience and unnecessary effort for customers and employees. 

The latest Field Service Management (FSM) innovations in the Tokyo release help address these challenges, enabling you to improve technician effectiveness, increase scheduling and dispatching efficiency, and provide frictionless service with connected workflows. 

Let's dive into some of the top features you can expect to see in the Tokyo release. 

Territory Planning 

Our new territory planning capability helps you visualize, create, and manage territories. You can use this capability to plan out territories based on your business objectives to be sure you have the optimal number of resources to cover the workload. This also minimizes travel time and helps ensure compliance if resources can only work in a certain area.   

 

With the Tokyo release, planners have the flexibility to create multidimensional territories by drawing on the map or importing geographical data files. Through enhanced rules and visualization capabilities, any overlaps are minimized to avoid confusion and scheduling inefficiencies.  

Dispatchers and territory planners can create overlays to see mobile workers, crews, and assets on their territory maps. These visual cues help in appropriately balancing territories.  

Territory Planning is included in FSM professional licenses.  

Capacity and Reservations Management 

Next, let’s look at our enhancements around Capacity and Reservations Management. This capability gives you even greater control over capacities to increase scheduling efficiency. 

You can use capacity buckets to designate a set amount of work for internal employees as well as third-party contractors. This can then be released in increments for scheduling purposes.  

 

Say you have an internal field engineer who you want to use 70% of their time for maintenance work and keep 30% of their time available for break fix and emergency work. You can bucket their time using capacities to automatically schedule based on this. 

For third-party contractors, you can assign a set amount of work available to schedule against based on your scheduling agreements. For example, 50 hours in a week. Capacity buckets then allow you to designate how much of that 50-hour allotment should be used, or released, in a day. Rules can be put in place to automatically increase or decrease the capacity based on how much time is left in the allotted window.  

Increased granularity around capacity controls and allocation consideration rules help you maximize utilization and meet contractual obligations.  

Capacity and Reservations Management is included in FSM professional licenses.  

Schedule Optimization 

Schedule Optimization helps maximize efficiency and utilization with complex scheduling scenarios.  

Using Schedule Optimization, nightly batch processes are run based on scheduling requirements. This factors in multiple objectives simultaneously across numerous appointments and resources. 

Objectives that are factored in include job priority, availability of parts, technicians preferred by customers, and required skills.  

With Schedule Optimization, the efficiency gain can increase utilization, decrease costs, and reduce travel time, and as a result, reduce a company’s carbon footprint. 

Schedule Optimization requires an additional SKU, sold separately, along with an FSM Professional package entitlement 

Inventory Management  

 

Now let’s look at our new advanced workflows around inventory. To help meet the needs of customers, it’s critical that field technicians have the necessary parts to complete their jobs. Getting the right parts, though, can be a heavy administrative burden.

In the Tokyo release, we have new advanced inventory management workflows that make this process much easier. 

Field technicians will be able to request multiple parts at once, instead of individually. And searching for those parts is now easier in the Mobile Agent app.

These new workflows also help simplify and expedite peer-to-peer part swaps with real-time notifications. 

And when field technicians need to replenish their truck stock, they can now do that at will without having to associate each part to a work order. This makes managing inventory much more streamlined while still maintaining stock-level integrity. 

These new workflows are all about helping ensure field technicians have everything they need to get the job done on the first visit. This deflects unnecessary additional dispatches and helps in getting the job done fast. This has a positive impact on both the employee and customer experience. 

The Inventory Management enhancements will be available for customers using the Field Service Management Professional SKU. 

Planned Work Management 

The last feature we are highlighting today is part of our Store release. Planned Work Management provides advanced functionality to our current Planned Maintenance capabilities.  

It includes new workflows to facilitate different types of maintenance and planned work scheduling. This reduces the administrative burden for completing the work.  

New capabilities include automating the creation of recurring schedules. This is powerful for many industries including home healthcare, where recurring visits need to be scheduled for care over a set period.  

Another way Planned Work Management simplifies work completion for field engineers is by providing the ability to create maintenance plans that support servicing multiple assets on one work order. This is also beneficial across industries. One great example is property management, where multiple assets are serviced in a single maintenance visit. This can now be managed on just one work order. 

We also know that sometimes maintenance work can be pushed out due to a cancellation or completed early if a field engineer is onsite to do other work. The schedule for the maintenance visits that follow can be automatically adjusted to stay on track and in compliance.  

  

While Planned Maintenance is part of the Standard SKU, planned work management, with its advanced capabilities, will be part of the Professional SKU. 

Learn more 

These are just a few of the new features coming to Field Service Management in the Tokyo release.  

For more information, review the release notes and product documentation for additional details. Attend the Tokyo Release Broadcast on October 5th at 8:00a PST / 11:00AM EST to see some of these features demonstrated. Then, schedule a conversation and demo with your account team or contact us here.  

_________________________________________________________________________________________ 

© 2022 ServiceNow Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, Now Platform, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. 

servicenow.com