Blogs

Man and IoT will work together to deliver proactive services

The word disruption is thrown about a great deal nowadays – and why not? We live in exciting times with social, mobile, analytics and cloud being hailed for offering new levels of flexibility for organisations looking to do more with less, writes Marne Martin, the chief executive of ServicePower.

IoT offers the greatest opportunity to challenge and change the way of doing things, especially for companies that provide services based around assets in the field, and especially for those that can use it in concert with other technologies

Back in the early 2000s the field service sector pretty much pioneered enterprise mobility before consumers even knew what a smartphone was. Just like enterprise mobility, it is the nature of the sector and the machine-based assets that technicians work with, which is also seeing field service as a hotbed of advancements for IoT.

Field service organisations have employees that work remotely installing, maintaining or repairing equipment that can be connected via IoT; such as riggers on an oil platform, cable television installers, emergency gas repair crews or even individuals responsible for servicing life-support systems.

IoT working with man to deliver new business models
The true power of IoT in the field is not as a standalone technology, but as part of a wider platform. So, for example, a hotel chain could work with a facilities management company that offers sensors in its boilers that could detect failing parts or falling pressures and then trigger an alert to the mobile device of the nearest engineer. Great news for the hotel, no cold, complaining customers. The service model has moved from reactive – pain’s already occurred – to proactive where customers will not be writing that critical TripAdvisor review about the cold rooms and water.

The future is to extend the data collected into a wider connected platform, where technology works together to share information, join business processes and optimise operations that deliver unprecedented levels of efficiency. So rather than just push an alert to a mobile device, the information distributed by the machine’s sensors trigger a series of tasks that, enabled by technology, work together to deliver optimised services at the minimum cost. As an example that boiler alert could instead go to a central scheduling engine which then considers the problem, the parts available in stock, the engineers with the skills needed to fix that particular asset, their location, the time of day, the hotels service level agreements etc. When the engineer is selected all the information they could possibly require is delivered to their smartphone, phablet, tablet or rugged device, including GPS guiding them to the location, the asset in question, schematics, maybe even augmented reality which guides the individual to its exact location. They could then sign off the job, even take photos if they wish.

All this information captured by machines and on mobile out in the field becomes invaluable. Technicians can scrutinise individual jobs in real-time, or executives the long-term data so that they can predict issues, be proactive in addressing them and prevent problems in the future.

Everyone will benefit. Providers of field based assets will be able to outmanoeuvre the competition, reduce operational costs and increase revenue from the ability to provide premium service levels. Clients (like the hotel mentioned above) will also be able to outmanoeuvre their competition by offering their end customers (using the hotel analogy think guests) better and more continuous services.

Mobile and machines will push data into the cloud and bring into play analytics that can be shared across social to deliver more efficient operating models. With this our understanding of our service realms will be expanded to derive efficiencies and service improvements in completely new ways and positively contribute to the utilisation of both M2M and IoT. I would recommend any company that provides assets in the field to consider what IoT can do for them; its use will only grow and depending on your mindset can be thought of as either an opportunity or a threat.