The Field Service Management Organization's Guide to IoT Smart Homes

IoT home devices connect with other devices using flexible, REST APIs. Using a powerful IoT platform, the gap between the device sensors and data networks is bridged. This is all made possible thanks to backend apps that manage the data generated by hundreds of sensors.

ServicePower is the leading AI-enhanced platform for synchronized field service management, incorporating scheduling software, deployment, a two-way customer to field tech communication platform, and business analytics into a single location.

Our IoT service platform deploys quickly in 2-4 weeks, depending on the size of your field service operation, and provides instant insight into every level of operations.

Gain insight into areas such as

• Customer satisfaction
• Work order completion rates
• Hybrid workforce productivity
• Workforce fraud analysis
• Customized KPIs to meet your business goals

Field service technicians often face hurdles of:

• Unavailable parts, lowering the first-time-fix rate
• Lack of niche experience with IoT technology
• Estimating completion times of IoT home devices, which vary greatly between hardware failures and appliance maintenance work orders

Fortunately, with a smart workforce management tool like ServicePower’s platform, your team is enabled by predictive maintenance alerts that pinpoint IoT home device issues, available parts through proactive inventory management, and deployment of the right technician for the work order.

Scheduling work can take many different paths, which ultimately provide varying levels of automation, productivity and customer satisfaction improvements to the organization.

Often, smaller, less complex organizations rely on basic or manual scheduling or rules based scheduling.

Basic Scheduling

Basic scheduling typically entails building and managing a schedule manually. This is clearly labor-intensive, doesn’t consider travel, nor is there computer logic applied to scheduling decisions. There is no automated handling of schedule changes or exceptions. Most interfaces are very similar to Microsoft Outlook with perhaps some drag-and-drop functionality.

This approach isn’t scalable, so as the enterprises evolve and become more complex, basic scheduling can’t evolve with it and so it becomes necessary to climb the technology ladder.

Automated, Rules-Based Scheduling

With more volume and complexity of field service operations, manual schedules are very quickly ferreted out as inefficient, costly and inaccurate.

The next rung up the ladder, simple computerized logic, often mistakenly called ‘optimization’, is used to automatically build the schedule, based on technician skills, availability, and service level agreements. This approach decreases the overhead of manual scheduling. However, it can’t manage jobs which cannot be assigned without violating a rule.

This approach only fills white spaces or ‘availability’ within a schedule, without any automated re-scheduling or ‘re-optimization’.

Intelligent Schedule Optimization

Schedule optimization is recognized generally by the field service industry as necessary when operations 1) employ large workforces and 2) have complex scheduling requirements. In both those cases, basic nor rules based solutions can handle the volume of work, complexity of scheduling requirements, nor, perhaps most importantly, intraday changes. Schedule optimization produces demonstrable improvements in productivity given all of the above.

Schedule optimization requires artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, and can also use historical data such as asset ownership and service history combined with machine learning to produce automated, efficient and highly productive schedules. If an AI backbone is missing, what you’re dealing with is more likely a rule-based solution. Rules based schedule tools can produce productivity. However, once complexity is introduced to your scheduling process, rules break and the customer is at risk.

A contractor is an independent company or mobile worker with whom a field service or mobile workforce organization has on boarded, credentialled and negotiated rates and expectations for service delivery. Contractors cannot be treated by the mobile workforce organization as an employee and schedule them as such, since, most often the contractor receives work from multiple sources.

ServicePower’s contractor management solution offers a true multi-tenant SaaS solution used to manage 3rd party contracted networks, including dynamic job dispatching with robust rules and ranking logic, real time status collection and mobile dispatching.

The solution enables contractors to manage profiles, dispatched jobs, claims, payments and view collaborative analytics, while clients govern whom, what and where work is performed on their behalf.

Contractor Management offers clients:

• Web service integration for appointment requests, booking, and status, cancellation, updates
• Manage authorized third-party networks
• Configurable AI based dynamic dispatching logic including rules, ranking and robust eligibility
• Real time booking of service appointments based on available time-slots
• Real time job status to track the progress
• part orders from distributors and aggregators
• Key in memory business intelligence and analytics for contracted labor

Service contractors

• Configure profiles, accept work and file claims through integrations with mass market service or business management solutions
• Directly in ServicePower:
  • Set up profiles
  • Accept and provide status on work orders
  • File and manage claims, view claims payments
  • View literature, warranty and product information provided by job sources
  • Manage their own work orders, assets, parts inventory through our integrated business management solution