Coping with COVID-19: A Conversation with TCS

As announced last month, Zinier has partnered with TCS to launch a digital solution built on the Zinier platform to provide functionality that helps field service teams adapt to new requirements driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. TCS has extensive depth and breadth of experience helping customers in a broad range of industries respond to the COVID-19 crisis. The company is part of the Tata group, India’s largest multinational business group, and has over 443,000 consultants in 46 countries providing business, technology, and engineering services and solutions.

Zinier’s CEO and Co-Founder Arka Dhar and Anil Pai, Global Head of Digital Field Service Management for TCS, recently exchanged perspectives in a video conversation about “5 Steps to De-Risk and Optimize Your Field Service Workforce.” The video outlines how the urgent need to respond to the pandemic has suddenly and dramatically changed the landscape of field service.

The 20-minute conversation addresses five crucial steps many field service organizations are taking to mitigate risk and ensure optimal performance across their workforces, including:

• Protecting front-line technicians with scheduling optimization
• Reducing risk by adapting to safe zones and new safety procedures
• Ensuring visibility across distributed workforces
• Building an on-demand workforce of people and technology
• Fixing things before they break with proactive automation

In their conversation, the two also explain some key mandates for field service operations in the post-COVID environment. The standard operating procedures (SOPs) of the past, they note, have been updated with a new meaning for “SOP” today: Safety, Optimization, and Prioritization. Another topic emphasized in the video is the importance for field service operations to embrace the technology that will enable them to be a resilient pillar supporting the world’s infrastructure.

Drawing on examples from many industries and sectors — from hospitals to banks to telecom to facilities management — the video also highlights how the pandemic has revealed some of the cracks in the outdated processes still used in many field service operations. These revelations are driving a real-time revolution to aggressively pursue solutions that both automate field service information management and integrate with other vital systems.

You can watch the video here.

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