SYN-002_WP_State of Emerging Tech_C

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With the combination of IoT and machine learning, where computers learn to function in intuitive ways that they were not specifically programmed to do, vast amounts of data can be used to make better decisions and perform more proactively and preventatively based on past experiences. And, thanks to speedy, at-your-fingertips service from companies like Amazon, Zappos and Uber, this high level of service standards will be required of manufacturers when it comes to future field service needs – both at home and at work. Manufacturers must adopt this emerging technology as they move from a break-fix model to a maximized uptime model to ensure service parts are in the right place at the right time, leading to quick repairs and happy customers. Driverless Cars According to Juniper Research, by 2025 there will be 20 million driverless cars on roads around the world, becoming most popular in North America and Western Europe by 2021. For manufacturers, this new development could be especially beneficial to field service. Driverless vehicles mean technicians can multitask – something that they can’t (or at least shouldn’t) do behind the wheel today. Multitasking allows technicians to use their field service app to ensure the upcoming appointment is as efficient as possible while en-route to the call – reading up on customer history, service part inventory and equipment data – so that the technician walks into the appointment ready to make the repair quickly and successfully, thus improving the customer experience and maximizing uptime. In the workshop, we found that current adoption is way off from the future state predicted by Juniper Research. Only about 5% of the group were actively planning for this technology – but the good news is that many were interested in its potential. However, with the potential also comes concern: With driverless cars being relatively new on all fronts, lots of questions around insurance, liability and costs still remain. Driverless cars could be the answer to optimized routes in field service. But driverless cars could be the answer to finding the most optimized routes in field service thanks to the following benefits: • Time optimization of the end-to-end service call. • Cost reduction for fleet maintenance. • Reduction in accidents. • More service calls per day per technician. • Shared vehicles. The biggest concern here is adoption: many believe the technological advances are outpacing the ability to implement it – especially when talking about giant corporations where implementing a major shift like this is a heavy lift. But with the theme of the entire conference being innovation, we believe the idea of business transformation will evolve alongside the technology. Orange Paper | State of Emerging Tech in Field Service
Drones Drones: you’ve seen them at high school sporting events, outdoor concerts or even in large scale photography settings. But for field service, specifically, there are both immediate and long-term benefits of drone technology. As for right now? Drones can be used as a means of diagnosing issues on large-scale equipment that’s difficult for people to physically inspect, like say, oil rigs. This means less risk for the field service technician, as drones can help them survey large or hard-to-reach areas without putting themselves in dangerous situations. Or, they can be used in warehouses to retrieve service parts, like they currently do at Amazon, making product uptime and repair efficiency the ultimate priority. Of the group in the workshop, a portion of the companies are using drones in their businesses today – but not so much in a field service use case. Drones have been a huge asset in a surveying aspect – used to see overhead views of construction space, roadways, damage assessment, and seeing where their equipment is located in giant work areas. Drones could even be used to deliver a part in the field – if a technician is on-site making a repair but doesn’t have the necessary part, a drone could bring it to them, eliminating the need to make an additional service call down the road. The possible KPI benefits include: • Increasing first time fix rates. • Decreasing carbon footprints. • Cost savings implications. • Increase of after-sales service satisfaction rates to rural areas. All of these benefits are drivers that make drones an exciting way to leverage parts supply and parts delivery in the not so distant future to improve overall customer experience and maximize product uptime. Augmented & Virtual Reality According to Foundry, a software design company with expertise in emerging technology, Virtual Reality (VR) is the umbrella term for all immersive experiences, created by using real-world content, synthetic content or a hybrid of both through multimedia or computer-simulated reality. Augmented Reality (AR), however, is an overlay of content on the real world, but that content is not anchored to or part of it. The real-world content and the computer-generated content (such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data) are not able to respond to each other. Expected to be a $120B market by 2020 with 75% of the market share being owned by AR vs. VR, consumers are certainly leading the trend, with business not too far behind. But, within this particular group, the main approach that explains the lack of adoption is the idea “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” There are still questions around how you measure and track the success of this technology, and concerns around whether the results are worth the effort definitely give pause to these emerging technologies. Only 5% of companies actively use AR and VR, but 20% see it on the roadmap of their organization. Of the workshop attendees, about 5% of companies are actively using AR and wearables, but not just in their field service processes. One company uses the technology for marketing collateral, using it to mimic the inside of their product for sales,
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