Automate and Increase Service Productivity with SAP Field Service Management (FSM)

The servitization of many industries, specifically industrial manufacturers, offers new opportunities for?decarbonization and sustainability driven by maintenance efficiencies.?

These maintenance efficiencies will help companies?optimize their energy use,?at a time of sustained high energy costs, with its impact and importance for the global climate.?

At a practical level, servitization means original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) need to maintain service level agreements (SLAs) more effectively to meet outcome-based contracts.?

Effective field service management is a key revenue channel for these OEMs as well as their customers, preventing service disruption, customer churn, and improving net promoter scores.

The talent shortage of maintenance technicians is a constant challenge across industries, which also offers manufacturers the chance to scale their services through optimized processes.

Manual processes and travel time have consistently limited productivity for technicians and companies servicing dozens or even thousands of customers.

Scheduling and dispatching of the right technician at the right time, with the optimal route, is critical to improve first-time fix rates, freeing them up for further tasks.

Connected, digitalized, processes and?artificial intelligence (AI) optimization can make a major difference of up to 23%?in scaling the impact of qualified technicians for their customers.?

SAP Field Service Management (FSM) offers a flexible AI framework for automated planning and re-optimization that caters to the individual requirements and use cases of each customer.

This enables service companies' scheduling teams to programmatically represent all criteria and constraints that are relevant for planning and optimization of field service activities. Supervisors can set hard or soft constraints to better automate these criteria.

Examples of these criteria could be distance between the current location of the technician and the planned job, their next available time slot, the technicians’ skills and the requirements of each individual job, the technicians’ familiarity with the customer and the issue at hand, and so on.

The automation of service calls further enhances efficiencies. Internet of things (IoT) sensors can directly trigger SAP FSM APIs to automatically create a Service Call in SAP FSM to be assigned to a technician.?

In turn, this service call or work order is automatically scheduled or rescheduled to the best-fit technician, depending on required skills, technician’s distance from the asset, and other factors that the customer has set up in the SAP FSM Policy Designer.?

SAP FSM enables customers to extend their workforce rapidly and securely with external teams and experts, managed through the crowd sourcing portal and application programming interfaces (APIs).

Using these APIs, external crowd partners can then update skills and schedules so that the AI auto-scheduling can take these criteria and constraints into consideration.

Furthermore, these external experts can assist internal resources in real-time through SAP Partner?TeamViewer's xAssist app, where customers’ teams can access and share directly with camera capabilities, allowing annotation and audit of asset maintenance service calls.

This integrated SAP FSM?remote support with augmented reality?allows servitization providers to scale up their services and rapidly resolve issues by accessing internal or external experts, increasing productivity of less experienced technicians onsite.?

SAP FSM offers companies a connected app using automated AI scheduling to improve utilization and productivity of technicians to optimize SLAs, improving mean-time-to-repair?and uptime availability of their customers' assets and services.?