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Efficiently delivering field service management is a complex task for most organisations. Field service traditionally requires dispatching and coordinating workers to specific locations to sell, install, repair, or maintain equipment or systems. It sounds daunting, but it is possible for this to be simplified into one system.
Field service management (FSM) systems are designed to oversee and coordinate a company’s resources out in the field, including workers and equipment. By optimising FSM systems, companies can streamline their workforce operations, which improves overall productivity and not to mention, simplifies daily life for both field workers and administrative staff back in the office.
However, as the field service industry becomes more complex, the emergence of high-quality FSM software leveraging cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the field service game throughout a number of diverse industries.
The great news is that there is a way for businesses to deliver world class field service management all built within the highly-scalable and responsive Google Cloud Platform using Dista. This blog will provide you with examples of how this is possible.
Leveraging Google Cloud Platform and Dista
Liveli’s technology partner Dista combines the familiar functionality of Google Maps with the scalability of Google Cloud, to offer a cloud-based FSM platform. By building this platform on Google Maps and Google Cloud, Dista can provide ready-made features such as:
- Accurate locators
- Dynamic grid definitions
- Cockpit and dashboarding
- Route optimisation
- Field asset tracking
Let’s see how these Dista features can be used in specific industry use cases.
Utility workers
Power, water and public transportation companies need to direct resources almost instantaneously to places of need. If there has been a power outage, an assessment and repair job must occur immediately and effectively to ensure residents aren’t uncomfortable for too long.
With no time to waste, a power company must dispatch its closest team to a broken powerline. By using the Google Cloud Distance Matrix API, operators can see the travel distance and time of each field team to the location, and dispatch the team with the shortest travel time. This will save the company precious time and allow them to cover more repairs and calls per day.
Health care workers
Health care may not be the first industry people think of when we talk about FSM; but many mobile doctors, nurses and paramedics can benefit from the use of FSM technology to assess and treat patients from afar or in-home.
By having a centralised hub for day-to-day operations, FSM software such as Dista can automate the entire scheduling process. Once somebody has called asking for assistance and the job is scheduled, field workers are automatically notified about the job type and location of their next patient. This reduces duplication of tasks and ensures the right field worker and tools are available when and where needed.
Postal workers
Failed deliveries are a major cost for industry: around a quarter of all deliveries fail the first time. For example, a courier has been dispatched to make a delivery. If the address has been manually entered by the head office and sent to the driver, there could be an error in the address, or the address could be invalid. These errors can cause major delivery delays, costing the company time, money and resulting in an unhappy customer.
By using the Google Places Autocomplete API, the “type-ahead” function is prompted to draw on details of approximately 100 million places and provide a drop-down selection of the predicted addresses. This way, when the driver is sent the address - they will know that it is a valid address, and shouldn’t have any problems when making their delivery.
Predicting maintenance with Google Cloud AI
Google Cloud BigQuery is a serverless, highly scalable, and cost-effective multi cloud data warehouse. Together with Auto Machine Learning (ML) vision, field service companies can use these technologies for asset management Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is used to automatically identify where repairs or maintenance is required by using many data inputs such as satellite imagery or field operator provided images.
A Liveli client is currently looking to BigQuery and Auto ML vision to identify where broken power poles are. Auto ML vision detects what a broken power line or pole looks like, versus what a properly functioning power pole looks like - and displays asset incidents on a map for the field operators to fix.
Then, you can use BigQuery to leverage the companies legacy data sets with their current real time data streams to correlate current powerline energy flows vs. historical incidents. This enables the company to see on a map if there are geographic relationships or hotspots that can be seen or are clustering, therefore making operations more predictive and easier to maintain.
Dista provides an easy gateway into AI and ML for your field service management operations, helping your organisation to be better prepared and ensure the right resource is assigned to the right job every time.
How can Liveli help?
Liveli is a Google Cloud Premier Partner which means we understand how to best utilise the Google Cloud and Google Maps APIs within the Dista platform. If you’re interested in building a tailored solution suited to your current business operations processes, get in touch with our team.
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