OverIT Next-Gen FSM Platform 2023 Wave One accommodates customers’ needs helping them expand FSM and LAM features in scheduling & dispatching and mobile empowerment areas, and becomes even more strongly oriented to integrability, extensibility, and configurability.
The Next-Gen FSM Platform 2023 Wave One offers proven benefits in terms of support of both dispatchers in managing the overall schedule, considering criticalities happening during the day, and technicians in the field who can now leverage GIS capabilities across the business, even offline, and rely on an intelligent voice-powered virtual assistant giving necessary personal support and guidance on diagnosis and task completion.
Quickly optimize the schedule by identifying any issues about not completed or not yet planned tasks
Expand the offline capabilities of GIS to provide the best possible support to field activities
Provide frontline workers with an intelligent voice-powered virtual assistant, giving necessary personal support and guidance
The challenge
From a dispatcher perspective, a new day means a new working schedule, trying to plan activities for field workforce and prioritizing the right work to the right technicians, while monitoring work progress and issues occurring in the field. Preventive and corrective asset maintenance, inspections, customer services, damage assessments, complex jobs, appointment-centric use cases, are only a few of the activities dispatchers have to face in their daily life. Most of the time, they create the overall schedule and dispatch a high volume of WOs per day per technician, taking into consideration skills and availability, SLAs, and best routes. However, sometimes unexpected events happen and dramatically change the planned schedule (cancellations, emergencies, travel issues, traffic, and overruns). If the unexpected happens, it results in work order scheduling errors, urgent tasks not scheduled yet, and tasks not planned or not completed properly.
• Let’s suppose John. Today he has to manage an electricity meter inspection for an end customer. However, on his way he finds traffic and fails to keep the appointment. The dispatcher forgot to reschedule the appointment again because she didn’t notice the delay in time, and so the technician has not recovered the time and the end customer is not satisfied.
• Or let’s imagine Caroline. Today she has organized her activities to manage the last appointment in a place close to her doctor’s. Unfortunately, the dispatcher suddenly remembers an urgent task to complete on the same day. The only technician with the right skills to do it is Caroline and the time of availability is the last hour of her working day. It’s across town, so Caroline wouldn’t make it to the doctor in time.
How can organizations support dispatchers in maintaining the overall schedule, receiving real-time data about work orders status and tasks at risk, and monitoring all information to ensure that activities needed are carried out?
The solution
The critical jobs scheduling assistant feature allows dispatchers to quickly identify any issues about not completed or not planned tasks (such as unplanned activities about to expire, scheduled tasks but not yet taken in charge by technicians or taken in charge by them but not yet started, appointment-centric work orders not scheduled, and so on). This feature provides a visual display of all those tasks that are in jeopardy, quickly optimizing the schedule with high precision. Dispatchers have a complete view of real-time and full information about issues and not completed tasks, their reasons, and sense of urgency to promptly react to changes. This way organizations support dispatchers in the intraday schedule of activities in order to easily respond to changes by proactively recovering problems and dispatching activities to technicians, avoiding doing this late or reactively to make sure the job is done.
Impact & KPIs
• Improving schedule optimization
• Simplifying planner’s intraday activity
• Increasing the number of WOs scheduled and executed per day
• Saving costs and time
Watch the video and discover the full potential of the Critical jobs scheduling assistant (aka In jeopardy tasks) feature
The challenge
Energy & Utilities, Oil & Gas, Telco, and Transportation companies are expanding the GIS footprint and leveraging GIS across the business. GIS combined with FSM is becoming a single source of truth to manage needs across assets, customers, employees, and the surrounding environment. In particular, linear asset management organizations opt for GIS capabilities to manage dynamic network models. A huge pain point here is related to the management of mission-critical operations on gas or electrical networks located in remote places (such as in the middle of the desert or underground). This means that the connectivity is poor or there is no connectivity at all. And so, it is challenging for technicians to access data, documents, or map information in an environment which limits the potential of GIS and prevents them from receiving the necessary support to handle activities in the best possible way.
The solution
Recognizing it as a huge differentiator, OverIT has invested heavily in GIS, also through the commitment of a dedicated GIS Center of Excellence. OverIT confirms itself as the only player with advanced mobile GIS functionalities and now expands its offline capabilities as to provide the best possible support to field activities. Technicians can rely on a rich work package of GIS visualizations to use while offline. They can view the detailed structure of plants (including specific information and multimedia attachments about the asset to maintain) and consult geographic data and maps in offline mode with a high level of configurability. Technicians choose the best view based on the type of layer or work. Moreover, the system supports several file formats, allowing technicians to rely on a variety of data and maps that are automatically updated through REST API. When new data is present in the system, technicians are immediately notified through push notification and can download the content smoothly from mobile, thus experimenting dramatic benefits, even when no connectivity is available. In a world where security topics nowadays represent a milestone within organizations, these highly innovative files are able to meet the increasingly growing requirements in terms of cybersecurity, protecting the overall enterprise environment of customers.
Impact & KPIs
• Increasing enterprise security
• Expanding GIS capabilities
• Improving the quality of field activities
• Enhancing users’ experience
Watch the video and discover the full potential of the Mobile GIS offline extension feature
The challenge
The daily life of most of us is packed with several personal and business activities, may they be a hobby, a job, housework, or just a simple action. Listening to music, finding the best recipe for an important dinner, making a phone call, being informed about weather or traffic conditions. The speed of the world we live in has got us used to receiving information and answers faster and faster, visualizing updates in real time, now and immediately. Today more than ever, virtual assistants are therefore gaining competitive edge, with their ability to satisfy customer requests and do anything we want for us, from setting the alarm, to writing a message or requesting information on geopolitical situation. Of course, this does not only happen in our daily life, but also when it comes to work. When technicians are out in the field, they should be always prepared to handle both ordinary and unexpected events, ensuring efficiency and productivity. When required to manage a huge amount of work orders per day, even the most skilled operator could have a doubt about the execution of an activity or the use of a software platform. It happens to everyone, doesn’t it? Or let’s think of junior technicians and the need for assistance which they may need.
Let’s suppose several technicians within a company are in trouble today:
• John needs to collect data on an ongoing construction site, but he doesn’t remember how to debrief data.
• Donna needs to call her supervisor to double-check how to fix an issue on an electrical box. However, she doesn’t remember how to navigate into the collaboration app.
• While Emma is inspecting a meter, she finds an error message on the display. She knows she can rely on IoT data, but she doesn’t know where in the app.
What if, at any time, frontline workers could rely on a personal and digital assistant, who is always by their side and ready to answer?
The solution
OverIT provides frontline workers with an intelligent voice-powered virtual assistant, giving necessary personal support and guidance on diagnosis and task completion just using voice commands through head-mounted tablet.
Whenever technicians in the field have doubts about the use of the platform, they can ask the system by communicating with the virtual assistant by voice. Through the conversational AI technology embedded in the Next-Gen FSM Platform, the system studies and interprets all the documentation to provide the exact answer immediately. By streamlining interactions between them and digital services, technicians will never be left alone. Even first-time frontline workers can get answers to their questions in real time to be always fully prepared to perform the activities quickly and with high precision.
Impact & KPIs
• Expediting the execution of tasks
• Enhancing customers’ experience in the field
• Increasing business efficiency
• Saving costs and time
Watch the video and discover the full potential of the voice-powered virtual assistant feature
The Next-Gen FSM Platform 2023 Wave One increases its configurability due to the LDAP authentication protocol. Moreover, it has become even more strongly oriented to integrability and extensibility for all partners due to its “API-first” approach and new technologies (event streaming), always helping customers extend FSM features and integrations.
The definition of the business events catalog and its connection with event streaming technologies (SQS, Kafka, etc.) allow customers to close the integration roundtrip through the Next-Gen FSM Platform, by providing the ability to subscribe to events, as well as directly invoking synchronous APIs (already present since the Next-Gen FSM Platform 2022 Wave One). These technologies make the platform even more perfectly and easily integrable and extensible, continuing to unleash its potential with the constant aim to help customers extend FSM features and integrations, offering them a unique experience into an integrated enterprise application landscape.
The first step in the integration of a platform within a company is user sharing. The Next-Gen FSM Platform already supports a set of Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication flows, which just need to be configured. To increase the ability to configure our platform, the LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) authentication protocol is now available. Customers can rely on a powerful protocol for authenticating users of the platform against the company’s central directory-based identity services.
The Next-Gen FSM Platform has become even more strongly oriented to integrability and extensibility for all partners due to its “API-first” approach. We want to facilitate the integration of our platform by providing an out-of-the-box communication API layer, either directly or through specialized enterprise application integration software. In order to open up an unlimited number of possibilities to our partners, we are enhancing our Next-Gen FSM Platform REST API catalog, providing our partner ecosystem and customers with a wider set of tools to independently develop the platform.
• Time zone management (on all REST services)
• Multilingual management (on all REST services)
• Word order creation starting from the header without a work cycle
• Work order attachment management
• Offline GIS package management
and we are working to ensure their satisfaction.
Do you want to know more about our initiative?