Utilities
Utilities organizations face many challenges in their service operations. ServiceMax’s complete suite of cloud-based field service solutions helps you meet and exceed these challenges to achieve hyper-efficient operations and deliver customer delight.
Field Service Challenge - Mission Critical Equipment:
Utility equipment serves critical needs for customers both residential and commercial. Any product downtime results in significant negative consequences. Utilities must not only maintain these assets, but also proactively address issues, possibly even before the customers raise them.
ServiceMax Solution:
- ServiceMax offers a highly configurable Preventative Maintenance solution that enables you to define, create and execute preventive maintenance plans to autocreate cases/work orders, and auto assign technicians to automatically complete maintenance tasks.
- ServiceMax offers the field service industry’s most innovative collaboration functionality with ServiceMax Chatter. Product Chatter uses device monitoring technology to send error messages directly from customer systems so you can proactively service the customer the moment the issue occurs.
Field Service Challenge - Get Green:
Utilities are increasingly under pressure to make their operations green.
ServiceMax Solution:
The Advanced Scheduling and Workforce Optimization modules enable dispatchers to assign the right technician to the right job based on skills, proximity, parts availability and/or other cost parameters thereby ensuring not only higher fix rate and customer satisfaction but also minimizing the total cost of schedule by decreasing travel times for technicians.
Field Service Challenge - System Integration:
Utilities usually run on complex and customized back office systems such as outage management systems and Geographic information systems. Any new software solution should seamlessly integrate with such pre-existing systems.
ServiceMax Solution:
By leveraging the Force.com platform, ServiceMax alleviates many of the concerns over ERP and other on premise software and systems integration. Unlike traditional vendors who offer a separate suite of complex integration products as part of an expensive middleware (that itself need to be integrated with each and every application), Servicemax leverages the proven cloud computing model where each and every process/function is designed as a service that can be easily integrated with other applications including those that are either in the cloud/outside the firewall or on-premise/Inside the firewall.
Field Service Challenge - Right Person, Right Job:
Utilities have complex and often highly customized products, which require teams of technicians with specialized skills to service for multiple days. Getting the right crew to the right job for the right number of days is crucial.
ServiceMax Solution:
The Advanced Scheduling and Workforce Optimization modules enables dispatchers to assign the right technician crew to the right job based on skills to ensure a higher fix rate. Each technician calendar is packed with as many tasks as possible to improve the utilization of the technicians. ServiceMax also provides capabilities to set the duration of task ranging from minutes to multiple days.
Field Service Challenge - Mobile & Offline Access:
Work crews in the utility industry tend to be located at work sites for days together and need to have access to the information they need irrespective of their location or the connectivity at work sites.
ServiceMax Solution:
- ServiceMax can be deployed on BlackBerry, iPhone/iPad, Windows Mobile and other popular mobile device. The mobile features include capability to push work orders or parts information to technicians in the field, provide technicians with relevant customer details, installed base and product information, and allow technicians to perform work order updates, and inventory checks.
- Under challenging internet or wireless connectivity circumstances, ServiceMax offers offline capability that lets technicians perform all the functions offline that can be synced later when online.
Field Service Challenge - Parts Movement:
Utility asset servicing can require complex and expensive parts movement from warehouses to equipment sites.
ServiceMax Solution:
ServiceMax’s Inventory Depot Repair and Parts Logistics modules manage both forward and backward logistics for the fast parts movement that your industry requires. The sophisticated parts logistics functionality in ServiceMax includes capability to request, ship and track products and parts movement between warehouses, truck stocks and customer locations including RMAs in addition to performing inventory updates on the appropriate location.
Field Service Challenge - Competitive, yet Profitable:
Utilities selling commoditized products like smart meters are increasingly relying on better and efficient service offerings not only as differentiators but also as revenue generating businesses.
ServiceMax Solution:
By capturing all the customer details including installed products, warranties, service contracts and contract entitlements, locations and parts availability, ServiceMax Installed Base Entitlements ensures that entitled customers are well served, invoiced and billed accurately while “non-entitled” customers are upsold new service contracts minimizing warranty revenue leakage.
Field Service Challenge - Service Partner Management:
Due to the sporadic nature of equipment issues, many utilities rely on partner crews to augment their servicing needs. There is a need for partners to have timely access to not only critical service orders but also relevant customer and product information.
ServiceMax Solution:
ServiceMax offers sophisticated partner process functionality, specifically designed for the Field Service industry. The Partner Portal gives partners access to work order information based on pre-defined partner visibility rules. ServiceMax Reports & Dashboards enable you to monitor partner work details and assess performance.
Field Service Challenge - Reports & Dashboards:
Recurrent quality issues of capital-intensive utility equipment can negatively impact the customers’ and the manufacturers’ top and bottom line. Management needs to analyze the service operations effectiveness and results on a regular basis.
ServiceMax Solution:
ServiceMax delivers industry leading Field Service Reports and Dashboards that enable management to make the right strategic business decisions. Gain insight on key operational questions such as “Who are the customers with recurrent service issues?” “Who are the crew members who worked on a particular type of equipment?” “what are the skill levels of those technicians?” “what service contracts resulted in the higher revenue?”
Field Service Challenge - Scarce IT Resources:
Though the service requirements of Utilities are increasingly becoming important, the service business units do not have the wherewithal to deploy and maintain expensive and complex IT systems in-house.
ServiceMax Solution:
ServiceMax’s end-to-end field service management suite is delivered in the cloud. By taking advantage of the benefits of cloud computing, companies get the benefit of a deep and broad field service solution without additional IT capital or operational investments.
Field Service Challenge - Reliability & Scalability:
Utility companies providing critical energy or gas supplies require high performing systems to meet their business needs.
ServiceMax Solution:
By leveraging the Force.com cloud platform, ServiceMax suite provides a highly scalable, reliable and secure system that can automatically and instantaneously scale from a few users to millions of page views as needed with zero additional IT investment.
Field Service Challenge - You’re Unique:
While ServiceMax addresses the needs of a majority of Utilities, your business may have special needs that may be unique to your organization.
ServiceMax Solution:
ServiceMax Services offers tailored implementation and customization packages to fit any of your needs to the ServiceMax suite. And the flexible, extensible Force.com platform allows you to build and add your own functionality at your own pace.
