What is Connected Field Service?
Connected Field Service and IoT is a rapidly evolving and emerging field revolutionizing how service and asset-centric businesses operate. Connected field service bridges the gap between your machine data and how it is operationalized to a service cloud application. By bridging this gap (figure 1), service organizations can gain valuable insights providing an accurate 360-degree view of the health of assets and customer usage.
Figure 1
Companies can finally shift from a costly and reactive break-fix service model to a proactive and predictive service model by applying powerful and intelligent rules to machine data streams. Bridging machine data to field service applications such as Bolt Data Connect on Salesforce Service Cloud provides enhancements that improve scheduling, proactive asset maintenance, and accurate inventory, to name a few. All of these capabilities can be automated and made actionable with direct machine data in real-time.
Why is it important to have it now?
There has been a significant rise in demand for Connected Field Service in the last couple of years. Some of the reasons why are:
- More sophisticated equipment and higher performance expectations
- Rising labor costs and skilled workforce shortages
- Frequent supply chain and logistics disruptions
- Rising fuel and energy costs coupled with environmental impacts
- Pressures from the rise of inflation
- Restricted mobility of the workforce due to public safety as a result of the pandemic
- Pandemic recovery and preparedness for future business continuity strategies.
These fundamental market changes will require the ongoing adoption of IoT solutions such as Connected Field Service as the primary method of interacting with customers and how assets are maintained and serviced.
Key benefits of Connected Field Service:
- Reduce downtime and diagnose problems before customers are aware of an issue
- Quickly address issues by remotely monitoring the health of assets and with ongoing customer awareness
- Maintain and service assets based on the individualized and unique patterns of usage
- Collecting and analyzing asset data to automate repetitive business processes
- Enable intelligent decisions when dispatching engineers with the right expertise, availability, proximity to the job, and the right parts.
- Create new sales revenue opportunities with enhanced visibility into products, services, company, asset performance, and customer satisfaction
- Diagnose and resolve issues faster by monitoring devices remotely and proactively keeping customers in the loop
Today, asset uptime is the central demand for service and manufacturing organizations to measure and track. Connected Field Service solutions provide application intelligence to ingest and process asset data to determine if an asset is running and running at peak performance.
It’s all about the Data! Data! Data! Data!
Did I mention data? The absence of data is to be without knowledge, and in today’s world, it is no longer acceptable to leave data behind. Companies must start ingesting data from all possible sources, including your machines. Becoming more data-centric is the digital transformation path that companies should prioritize. Machine data serves a purpose; however, the data needs to be captured, ingested, available, and appropriately processed to put the data to good use. Anyone can collect data, but it requires savvy and intelligent applications on powerful platforms to put that data to work.
IoT provides many broad purposes however when it comes to Connected Field Service IoT data serves as a backbone for service organizations that provide actionable and tangible results that improves both the top and bottom line of a business.
It’s more than just a trend.
While IoT has been a trendy topic, just like the internet was 25+ years ago, the impact and power of the technology are dependent on the applications that crunch on the data. Who could have imagined years ago that the internet would have brought us to where we are today. It’s because of powerful applications that use all the data available to us in many different and creative ways.
The same is true for IoT and the data for Connected Field Service. Companies should be keen to learn and scale with technology. The most valuable asset is data, and leaving machines in dark silos presents powerful and meaningful data points
IoT has enabled Connected Field Service and cloud technologies have enabled companies to make their assets smarter and more connected.
These two technologies have enabled companies to provide proactive service by managing assets remotely with an eye on data collected from sensors, predictive analytics, and artificial intelligence.
Start your Connected Field Service journey today!
Connected field service combines the Cloud and IoT technology to empower field service organizations. This model redefines how companies think about service. Connected field service is simple, saves money, generates new revenue, and can be implemented in phases.
Bolt Data Connect is a cloud-based platform that provides real-time actionable data from IoT-connected assets to field service operations and IT teams. Built natively on Salesforce, enterprise companies can scale asset management while reducing maintenance costs. BDC delivers the needed visibility to maintain and control assets to proactively or programmatically resolve asset issues. To schedule a demo of Bolt Data Connect, click here.
Written by:
Allan Alexopulos, Managing Director
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