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Smart field services with IoT connected products

See how Cumulocity IoT provides real-time monitoring and diagnostics of your equipment for higher reliability at a lower cost.

More profitable services, more productive customers
Looking to increase margins and control costs for service visits? Smart field services help equipment makers deploy technicians and repair specialists more productively. With data from IoT devices and connected equipment, you can tell when customer equipment needs servicing, and exactly what intervention is needed. Use these powers to send technicians to field sites only when they're needed—and complete the job on the first visit. Targeted services that help your customers maintain greater uptime also increase your value as a strategic provider of aftermarket parts and services. Climb the IoT maturity curve with smart field services.
Increase technician capacity
With insights from IoT connected equipment, you can perform remote diagnostics to understand the condition of customer equipment. Schedule technician visits based on real need and optimize routes to reduce unproductive visits and increase first call repair rate.
Optimize component management
With insight into the real-time status of equipment in the field, you can better manage spare parts and components. Become a trusted supplier of spares for your customers—and capture more aftermarket revenue—by aligning inventory of critical spares with expected replacement needs.
Enhance quality and reliability
Empower field service teams to service equipment with direct knowledge on any potential issues, including actual conditions and predicted remaining service life, before they arrive. IoT delivers insights to plan services and eliminate corrective needs.
Why offer smart field services?

The numbers tell the story:

billion dollars. That's how much revenue growth could be captured globally through tech enablement of industrial services1
%
achievable reduction in field-service costs through reduced in-person visits2
%
less time to repair through proactive services1

1 McKinsey: Tech-enabled transformation, The trillion-dollar opportunity for industrials

2 McKinsey: Coronavirus: Industrial IoT in challenging times

In the past our company was regarded primarily as a component supplier, but now we are a solution provider meeting our customers' needs in ways they never expected before.”

- Oliver Prang, Expert Digital Business Development, SMC Germany
Take a closer look at smart field services
  • What are smart field services?

    For many equipment makers, an important part of their business model involves aftermarket services. These services include work performed at the customer site after purchase and installation such as equipment repairs, part replacement, regular maintenance, and consultative services.

    Unlike customer support that can be provided remotely, field services by definition require employees of the equipment provider to go to the customer site. As a result, equipment makers must manage teams of technical service providers to diagnose, fix and improve customer equipment.

    Smart field services involves leveraging IoT data collected from equipment in the field to better schedule, plan and execute on field services. This can allow the maintenance, field service, customer service, and consultative services teams to provide more accurate, timely maintenance, part replacement, and performance management support.

    Before offering smart field services, equipment providers must collect operating metrics and asset settings from deployed equipment. This data provides crucial indicators of performance. The equipment maker can use this data to improve efficiencies in how they provide aftermarket care, leading to direct financial benefits for the equipment maker. Improved preventive and predictive maintenance also helps customers improve operating efficiency and enhance uptime.

  • Why should you invest in smart field services?

    Smart field services elevate your customers' experience to a completely new level. By offering prompt services that meet their needs and help them maintain uptime, you become a critical partner for your customers' success. Greater customer loyalty improves customer retention and builds your reputation, fueling new product sales.

    Specifically, smart field services create opportunities for equipment makers to both reduce costs and build higher-margin services.

    Smart field services allow companies to reduce costs in 3 key ways:

    1. Improve installation and ramp-up processes to reduce the time to install and commission equipment at the customer site.
    2. Deliver firmware & software updates to ensure that all machines run on the latest version for consistent, secure performance.
    3. Improve field service offerings, improve first time fix rate, and provide guidance to the customer without going onsite. Condition monitoring enables data-driven understanding of equipment performance and conditions, so the equipment maker can use high-value technical service teams more efficiently: reducing the number of service visits needed and making each visit more productive.

    Equipment makers who embrace smart field services can build higher-margin services in multiple ways:

    1. Condition-based (predictive) maintenance services: Field service or maintenance programs are based on the actual condition of the equipment, not on a fixed schedule or machine failure. With insights into equipment performance and required maintenance before your technicians arrive on-site, you can complete more repairs, more quickly, on the first visit.
    2. Optimized spare part management: With real-time insights into the parts your customers need, you can keep the right amount of inventory in stock. Equipment users benefit from your inventory management with faster fixes that lead to lower downtimes, while you reduce unnecessary inventory overhead. As a trusted supplier of parts and maintenance services, you can significantly improve aftermarket revenue.

    Consider the alternative: if you do not embrace smart field services, you will likely lose aftermarket businesses to lower-cost competition, weakening your relationship with their customers. And without being able to allocate field service resources efficiently, your profit margins will erode over time. 

                    See how to connect equipment faster
                

Finding the right IoT partner is the most efficient way to become a smart equipment maker. You'll need IoT analytics to see how to prevent problems with your products and reduce maintenance costs. You may also need a network of experts to guide you. Learn more about the easy-to-rebrand Cumulocity IoT platform.

                    Smart, connected products
                

Deliver new features faster with connected products. With the ability to remotely monitor, manage and analyze product data, you’ll know how and when customers use your products. You’ll see how to sell more services, create new product bundles, design contracts based on use and offer higher-value services with stronger SLAs. Offer OEE as a value-added service to your customers.

                    Deploy predictive maintenance services
                

Learn how IoT data, continuously analyzed by streaming and predictive analytics, enables predictive maintenance services that help customers maximize uptime, predict maintenance needs and reduce maintenance costs.

                    Advance your sustainability goals
                

IoT solutions can help your organization operate more efficiently, unlocking opportunities for green solutions in enterprises, cities and communities. Advance your conservation efforts with new ways to reduce energy consumption, enhance efficiency, monitor quality in real time and keep your systems running at peak performance.
Smart field services in action
smart field services
Adding intelligence to transport
QTRS deploys predictive maintenance to help avoid breakdown of a fleet of mobile refrigeration units, increasing sales and preventing spoiled cargo.
smart field services
Keeping machines humming
PRAB, a leader purveyor of automated recycling equipment, uses Cumulocity IoT to analyze data from connected products to keep its machines running reliably.

smart field services
Introducing "smart field analytics"
With edge hardware devices, SMC uses Cumulocity IoT analytics to generate scalable predictive maintenance, leakage detection and energy efficiency monitoring.


IoT for Smart Field Services with Flexco
Join Software AG and Flexco as we explore smart field services to deliver a better customer experience. Discover best practices as Flexco share their journey and discuss how the benefits from deploying smart field services—and the potential value you can deliver to customers by using insights from IoT devices and connected equipment.
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