No matter what industry you belong to but most of you can’t deny having field service operations. To manage them, sooner or later, you adopt field service management (FSM) software solutions. Again, not merely large to mid-sized businesses are taking recourse of digital field service solutions even small-scale to startups have also started adopting the Field Service Management Software to ensure growth and drive cost-effectiveness.
Before we unfold trends & technologies for Field Service Management, let’ gain its past overview first.
A decade back, field service management practices were operated manually. However, major organizations were still leveraging digital solutions while managing and optimizing their field operations. In fact, the emergence of smart devices like mobile phones, tablets, rugged screens, etc. encouraged the global market to bring digital transformation in their field operations.
To support this rising need and industrial adoption, many major market leaders came ahead and started launching their field service management software. Such market leaders include Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, IBM, and more in the list.
And this evolution couldn't remain limited to larger organizations. Hence, a few business solution providers continued this evolution and started serving Field Service Management software for small businesses and LionOBytes is one of them.
As per the research performed by GlobeNewswire, the Field Service Management market valuation is forecasted to reach USD 8.93 billion by the year 2030 at a CAGR of 11.9 % for the period of 2022 to 2030.
Another research performed by Fortune Business Insights reveals – “The global field service market was recorded USD 2.87 billion in 2020 and is expected to acquire 8.06 billion by the year 2028 at a CAGR of 13.9 % for the period of 2021-2028.
Furthermore, this race of FSM evolution has continued with the emergence of technological advancements due to increasing demand for transforming field operations. Moreover, with technological emergence such as AI (Artificial Intelligence), ML (Machine Learning), IoT (Internet of Things), AR/VR, etc., FSM vendors started evolving FSM solutions to serve better.
Since we could see faster growth of Field management solutions in recent years. Therefore, we anticipate the comprehensive cultivation of FSM solutions considering the rising business needs and challenges involved in field operations. Thus, this blog is drafted to gain an overview of immerging trends and technologies in Field Service Management. So, let’s have a brief overview.
Upcoming Technologies & Trends in Field Service Management Software
Process Automation
As an initial need, automation is a must-have deal for your business to effectively carry out your field operations such as work order management, scheduling customer visits, managing reporting, and ensuring seamless field surveys (followed by automated route creation).
Automation in field operations also equips you with information and insights which enables decision-makers in your organization to make informed decisions. You can eliminate the dependency of your employees when it comes to acquiring the relevant information whenever they are in need.
To understand this fully, imagine how manually managing your field operations will impact your business and how automation in your field processes can bring differences. Let's understand this through a use case.
Suppose you want to drive a field campaign to perform customer surveys related to your products and services. Here, manually processing your field campaign could be time-consuming, will require additional efforts from your field executives, and will imbibe more cost.
Apart from this, you won’t be able to track your field activities or each executive’s performance. When it comes to the reporting part, you will have to wait at least until the end of the day. However, to create detailed reports & analytics to reinforce your decision-making process, you need to wait for monthly or quarterly analyses.
Now, let's exhibit the other side picture wherein the field activities for each employee are defined and automated by leveraging the Field Service Management system. Through automation into field practices, you can automate the route of your field executives, know at what time they check-in to the customer location and what time check-out from the customer location.
Moreover, you can also stay updated with how many visits are made by your field executive in a certain time frame, how many questionnaires are filled, and more. Here automation in field visit practices helps you save your executive’s time, fuel cost, and energy. And in turn, you gain success in increasing your field representatives’ efficiency, productivity, and overall field performance.
Remote Working
Remote working is another emerging trend these days. We were all aware of this term earlier too, but the pandemic compelled almost all potential industries to continue working through remote processing, and later it became a trend. In upcoming years, we can see high-end digital adoption in remote workforce management.
So, this trend eliminates physically connecting with your field team or workforce to manage and perform field operations. Depending on your specific territory requirement, you can assign field tasks to your field executives remotely such as defining customer visits, automating route creating, and enabling them to get the questionnaires filled by their customers.
While being on distance, you can even track their field activity in real-time, get real-time field reports, and more. All you need is to implement Field Service Management Software to effectively drive your field activities through your remote field workers.
Proactive & Predictive Maintenance
Predictive Maintenance and providing Proactive solutions or services to the customers at their location is being considered a foremost trend these days. And with continuous adoption by almost all industries, this trend is steadily taking a lope and is anticipated to be leveraged by even small organizations in the upcoming years. Now, let’s understand how predictive maintenance works.
Predictive maintenance leverages AI and Machine Learning algorithms combined with analytics data generated through IoT-connected devices. Leveraging this information, you can proactively schedule field service to ensure maintenance at the customer site before the machine or system hardware fails.
Leveraging IoT configured system helps you know the device or machine status proactively to ensure or perform predictive maintenance. This helps lower your costs and saves your production line from being interrupted.
So, this is the reason why predictive maintenance is being considered by the market. In the upcoming time, we can see a major adoption of proactive and predictive maintenance addressing the customer/client needs to minimize outages and eventually lower the overall cost associated with field operations which in turn promotes profitability.
Advanced AI
The inclusion of advanced AI practices to benefit businesses in several contexts is the next considerable Field Service Management trend. AI is transforming organizations with automation in day-to-day business processes, smarter customer support solutions through AI-powered bots, automated task scheduling, forecasting sales, and more. Leveraging AI in such ways helps businesses to streamline their process flow and improve efficiency.
Through process automation, you can better optimize your resources. AI-configured bots can help you boost your customer support model as until the customer has a serious concern, the issue can be resolved through AI virtual assistants. Leveraging intelligent algorithms, you can identify customer trends and patterns to serve them what they anticipate.
Moreover, with the help of sales forecasting, you can better optimize resource allocation, and accurately estimate costs & revenue for future growth and profitability. By configuring smart inventory levels in your warehouse(s), you reduce cost and uplift efficiency.
Mobile Field Service Management
Mobile Field Service Management is the most lucrative trend these days which is being adopted by almost all scale organizations to bring process collaboration, drive efficiency, and reduce the cost due to automated route scheduling to visit at customer location.
Thus, providing information access to mobile devices to your field executives helps you in many ways. For instance, field managers in your organization can assign tasks using the web version of the FSM software which can be accessed and leveraged by their field personnel efficiently using mobile devices configured with the same FSM system.
Through this, you can achieve your field goals more effectively as you bring a seamless amalgamation of in-house and field operations which is the crucial need that modern businesses anticipate today.
Big Data
The next future trend of Field Service Management is Big Data. Adopting Big data can equip you with relevant field data collection, reports, and analytics that help you optimize your field operations, internal data processing, and the overall process flow. It can also empower you with accurate costing and seamless work order management.
Big data helps you identify the trends, patterns, and correlations in data that you collect through your field operations which can help you make informed decisions. These decisions can be made to level up our business growth and improve your customer experience.
Bring Efficiency and Drive Growth with LionO360 Field Service Management
Field Service is all about providing proactive solutions to your customers. So, if you are seeking to empower your field executives, increase your customer engagement, and transform your end-to-end field operations to drive efficiency, increase profitability, and maximize growth while lowering the cost, connect with our experts. We can boost your field service capabilities through our ‘LionO360 Field Service Management Software for small business’.
