3min chapter

Sustainable Supply Chain cover image

The Power of Completed Service Work in the Supply Chain World

Sustainable Supply Chain

CHAPTER

Field Service Management Has Been Revolutionized by Smartphones

The advent of mobile devices has been absolutely revolutionary for the field service industry. There's no question about it. And my career at field service, it's just completely revolution-area. I've had a few companies come to my house to do some work and one or two of them are still using pieces of paper. That really surprises me because it's very, very, very rare today. It's pretty wide to be adopted.

00:00
Speaker 2
And I got to think as well, the whole world of field service management has to have been revolutionized by the advent of smartphones. I know this is nothing new. Smart phones have been around 10 years at least at this point or almost 15, I guess now this point. But I see now when I have someone come to my house to do some work, they work on the phone. You know what I mean? They work on whatever it is they're working on, but they're also working on their phone. They're making notes of everything they've done and they're taking photographs. And then at the end, they put up the screen for me to sign with my finger, which never looks like my signature puttots. Of course, that's a whole another topic.
Speaker 1
But yeah, even an ex will do today. Yeah.
Speaker 2
But I mean, like I said, they're photographing and documenting everything now with the phone. I mean, how has that changed field service management?
Speaker 1
Oh, my gosh. And my career at field service, it's just completely revolution-area. When I first started, as I mentioned earlier with IBM, there was a dispatch center with several women sitting around a roundtable and they had a spinning wheel in front of them with slots and they would put a card in there whenever there was a service call. And that card indicated who the technician was that was working on it, where the technician was done with the work. He or she picked up the phone and called the dispatch center and they pulled the card and they wrote the information on the card. Today, obviously, all of that is way in the past and today technicians receive notifications about what jobs have been assigned to them on their mobile devices, whether it's an iPhone, an Android phone or a tablet of some kind. They can accept a job. They can reject a job. They can then use that phone also to communicate directly with the customer. They can have a notification sent from the phone says, I'm on my way. They can chat with other people in the organization. So if they need to have some technical support from another engineer that may have some knowledge that the person on site needs, they can use a chat to chat with that person. They can record all of the time that they work on the customer's problem. They can record all the parts that are used. They can record comments. They can record voice recordings and attach those. They can attach documents. They can attach pictures. They can fill out a checklist, a checklist that tells them, okay, for this type of equipment, do these five things. And oh, by the way, when you do item number four, you also have to do these other things. So the advent of mobile devices has been absolutely revolutionary for the field service industry. There's no question about it. And I don't know of any company right. Take it back. I've had a few companies come to my house to do some work and one or two of them are still using pieces of paper, which really surprises me because it's very, very, very rare today. It's pretty wide to be adopted. Yeah. Yeah.

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