What is field service management (FSM)?

Overview of field service management

Field service refers to any service work that is carried out on a site away from the company's premises. Service work on site can include installation, maintenance, repairs, or removals.

Field services take place across many industries, from telecoms and high-tech to manufacturing and utilities—and not all field services are focused on equipment. They can also take the form of other scheduled work by any professional that takes place out “in the field,” for example, a healthcare professional who makes home visits to a patient.

From a customer’s perspective, “field services” are delivered not in some remote location, but in the most private of spaces: their own homes or work environments. So it’s not surprising that their expectations are high when it comes to efficiency, disruption avoidance, and quality of work.

From the service provider’s perspective, there are a wide range of logistics considerations that need to be managed flawlessly to meet customer expectations. And with churn rates at an all-time high, businesses know they must consistently deliver top-quality customer experiences.

Effective field service management—powered by advanced technologies—holds the key to both customer satisfaction and service provider efficiency.

Key components of FSM

FSM supports all activities involved in coordinating a company’s field resources, including processes for scheduling and dispatching workers, as well as managing contracts, data sharing, and reporting. The most common components include:

• Field service scheduling: These capabilities help companies manage service appointments, timetables, and shift rotas. The best software uses AI to help prioritise service calls and optimise even the most complex scheduling.
• Dispatch management: These features simplify and optimise the process of dispatching service personnel out on work assignments.
• Parts management: With parts management capabilities, companies can maintain an adequate supply of parts and spares as they are needed in the field.
• Service reports and invoicing: Such features can assist with tasks such as creating on-site service reports and automatically uploading invoices into an ERP system, followed by invoicing the customer.
• Field service metrics, analytics, and reports: Particularly when available in real time, field service metrics, analytics, and reports can help teams quickly detect issues and make decisions to resolve them. They can also be used to ensure service level agreements (SLAs) are being met.
• Mobile and desktop reporting: Such reporting can provide a unified view of customers, products, and service staff in one place to help streamline field service processes. The best software supports desktop, mobile, and offline dashboards and graphical reports.
• Augmented and virtual reality technology: This technology enables field technicians to be guided visually by experts who are not on site and helps technicians to complete their work quickly and safely.
• Integration with ERP and other systems: Such integration helps companies to seamlessly manage assets, contracts, and other elements that enhance field service management.

The exact components vary between software suppliers, but the best solutions will contain some combination of the above.

Benefits of field service management

Particularly when leveraging advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, FSM can unlock unparalleled visibility into service operations and a multitude of benefits.

These include:

1. Improved first-time fix rates: The best field service management solutions use AI-based recommendations to quickly locate the best engineers in the immediate area and ascertain that the correct materials are available to complete the job. In addition to enhancing customer satisfaction, properly completing field services on the first visit increases efficiency—both in terms of energy and human resources.
2. Harmonised field service processes: Integrating and harmonising front- and back-office processes enables effective collaboration and greater visibility, a key feature of the modern field service experience enjoyed by both service providers and their customers.
3. Reduced environmental impact: At the same time, sustainability goals can more easily be achieved by reducing the service-related carbon footprint. Taken together, better route planning, minimal return journeys, and greater visibility into fuel management go a long way towards reducing environmental impact.
4. Greater asset uptime: Field service management plays a key role in enterprise asset management (EAM) solutions that use advanced technology for preventative maintenance by service providers. EAM software uses real-time insights, the Internet of Things (IoT), and advanced predictive analytics to help companies keep their assets operational by predicting, simulating, and optimising their performance.
5. Reduced costs: Through streamlined processes and more intelligent, data-driven dispatching of field service professionals, productive time and revenue potential are maximised while operational costs are kept under control.
6. Empowered technicians: The best solutions provide workers everywhere with access to the information they need to carry out their jobs efficiently and effectively—whether from a desktop in the office or from a mobile device in the field. This may include viewing each customer’s asset information and service history, as well as other documentation that provides remote assistance.
7. Improved customer satisfaction: With the right tools and processes, organisations can resolve issues more quickly and ensure they meet SLAs, which results in happier customers.

Common challenges in field service management

As service networks grow in scale and new business models arise, field service management becomes increasingly complex and unwieldy. After all, field service operations involve not only people, but countless other factors: navigating unfamiliar territory, traffic, parts availability, and jobs that take longer than expected. The need for data-driven field service management solutions is apparent. These solutions, when deployed correctly, help address some of the most common challenges faced in the field operations process.

For example:

• Scheduling conflicts: Human error and time-consuming manual processes can result in double-booking technicians, scheduling an unavailable technician, or arranging appointments at the wrong time.
• Low first-time fix rates: Due to miscommunication regarding job tasks or misunderstanding of parts or time required, engineers often need to schedule return visits—a recipe for customer dissatisfaction and poor resource utilisation and efficiency.
• Poor work order management: Inefficient workflow—typically due to the absence of a centralised database and integrated processes—results in inefficient procedures and higher service costs.
• Suboptimal route planning: Technicians are not necessarily skilled at finding the best way from point A to point B and navigating unfamiliar environments, which can lead to late arrival times, wasted fuel, and unnecessary vehicle wear and tear.
• Communication lapses, both internally and with customers: With so many channels—text, e-mail, dispatch apps—missed messages and misunderstandings are widespread. Delays in information sharing between field workers and the central office can leave customers in the dark, both literally and figuratively.
• Safety and liability risks: Field service involves inherent risks for technicians working in hazardous environments and even for those who are simply on the road day in and day out. Field service technicians must be confident that their employers are invested in their well-being; otherwise, they will find opportunities elsewhere.
• Inability to manage performance: Lack of visibility into technicians’ on-the-job performance makes it difficult to oversee their work, compare their effectiveness against goals, and provide needed support.

Four tips to improve field service operations

Data, data, and more data: data fuels insights, and insights empower business owners to make better-informed, more strategic decisions that in turn improve internal operations and the resulting customer experiences.

Here are four ways in which business insights can be leveraged to improve field service operations:

1. Intelligent scheduling and dispatch management: Send the appropriate technicians with the correct tools to complete jobs on the first visit. For greater efficiency, plan routes to minimise travel time for each technician. This enables them to provide the greatest number of services per route and reduces the fuel, time, energy, and frustration involved in having to travel back and forth.
2. Close internal collaboration: Effective and efficient field services require internal collaboration that goes far beyond an individual team. Entire departments, from sales representatives to technicians, must be aligned on company processes, standards of service, and customer requirements to deliver efficient service that meets and exceeds customer expectations.
3. Proactive planning and predictive maintenance: Emergency call-outs and the associated stress for everyone involved—especially with service scheduling and technician dispatch—should be rare, not commonplace. With the use of advanced technology enabling regular preventative or predictive maintenance, you can plan ahead to the greatest extent possible to the benefit of all stakeholders.
4. Customer-adaptive processes: Finally, remember whom you are serving. Today’s customers have heightened expectations, communication preferences, and alternatives at their disposal should your service fall short. Fully integrated FSM provides the agility to adapt processes to the customer’s preferences. It helps you anticipate the customers’ requirements and ensures that they consistently receive timely updates and accurate estimates.

Examples of field service in different industries

Businesses in every industry are harnessing field service management solutions to enhance the customer experience and improve efficiency. Here are just a few examples:

Industrial manufacturing: Weir Minerals, a leading mining equipment manufacturer, needed to improve customer equipment availability and data management. Moving from paper-based processes, Weir digitalised field service management and integrated with ERP. Now the company collects and analyses data in real time. This has helped it to streamline FSM, better support its remote workforce, and deliver more positive customer experiences.

Wholesale distribution: Patterson Dental supplies dental health equipment to dentists across the United States. By streamlining field service management processes with a single integrated solution, Patterson can now schedule field service appointments more efficiently and provide the data needed for technicians to complete repairs more quickly.

Utilities: Chesapeake Utilities, an energy delivery company, aimed to modernise their operations by consolidating disparate, outdated IT systems. Utilising SAP Field Service Management, it automated operations and improved efficiency. This transformation enhanced service delivery, improved customer experiences, and provided valuable insights to drive future growth.

The future of field service management

There’s no doubt that technologies such as AI, IoT, and predictive analytics will continue to transform field service management in the future. When combined with digitalisation, tightly integrated processes, connected assets, and predictive maintenance, it unlocks the potential to offer lucrative new services and further enhance customer experiences. Increasingly mobile solutions and augmented reality (AR) can also evolve the role of service technicians by equipping them with accurate information on any asset from anywhere—and by connecting them remotely to real-time insights into equipment status, required replacement parts, and next steps for maintenance and repair.

Why SAP Field Service Management?

All the best field service management solutions have one thing in common: they are data-driven. At SAP, our offering enables the continuous collection and AI-driven analysis of real-time operational data—empowering informed and proactive decisions, often before issues arise.

That said, the use of AI in field service management goes far beyond the analysis of operational data. Artificial intelligence is also utilised in scheduling, which can often be one of the greatest barriers to success in field service management. With our AI-driven scheduling capabilities, service requests or calls can be prioritised by importance, scheduling and dispatching can be optimised in real time, and future planning can be customised. Predictive routing further enhances our scheduling system by predicting real-time and future traffic patterns to support in dynamically optimising resource allocation, and facilitating proactive adjustments to meet evolving needs.

Given the critical importance of visibility and collaboration in effective field service management, SAP Field Service Management provides a 360-degree view of the entire service space in dashboards and graphical reports. These provide visibility of customers, connected products, and service staff. With online and offline mobile capabilities, your service technicians can gain real-time access to accurate information about customer assets requiring service and parts inventory available at any time and place.

Mobile tools and access to reporting enable technicians to access knowledge and guidance when it matters most and to generate comprehensive on-site service reports.

With the ability to tightly integrate with ERP and EAM systems, our field service offering also helps companies deliver fully unified customer experiences. With automated delivery of customer invoices and uploads to other systems, it connects the entire value chain—for intelligent, proactive management of the full lifecycle of physical assets.

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