The Serious Business of the 5G Revolution

They say that when it comes to comedy, timing is everything. They also say that the only difference between comedy and tragedy is the passage of time. Whatever your role is with 5G, you’d probably agree that its timing has been a bit, well, awkward. Just as the telecom industry was ramping up for a major revolution, along came a comedy of terrors to thwart its progress. For starters, the biggest expansion in mobile technology in a decade landed at the same time as the biggest pandemic in a century. Not only is 5G facing challenges from the pandemic, but it has also faced challenges from other disruptions (such as major natural disasters) in many regions.

At the same time, 5G is also driving increased in complexity for field service operations by an order or two of magnitude; the size of cell towers may be shrinking, but their population is exploding – often by anywhere from 100- to 1,000-fold. Bottom line: There’s nothing funny about the challenges that this creates for field service operations.

And even as the telecom industry builds out this cutting-edge new infrastructure, many carriers continue to rely on paper-and-pencil approaches to manage their field service operations. Some may have begun to digitize some of the documents in the workstream. But most have yet to introduce automation to streamline their processes to keep pace with the new complexities ushered in by 5G.

At The Big 5G, an event for telecom professionals, Zinier’s Matthew Nolan shared the details of how several Zinier customers have supercharged their field service efficiency to manage this unprecedented growth amid unprecedented challenges and constraints. In this 10-minute video, you’ll hear about the impact of intelligent field service automation in a series of mini-case studies about several global field service operations. (Warning: spoilers ahead.)

In one case study, Matthew reveals how automating a single simple process for assigning vendors enabled a leading telecom carrier to bring an additional 60% of projects to within their scheduled completion dates. He also outlines how an intelligent field service automation platform can close the pesky gap between your plan of record and your reality – even with the complications added by sudden disruptions driven by the COVID-19 pandemic.

One reason for this, Matthew explains, is the efficiency of leveraging a modest one-time effort to create a template that can be repeatedly leveraged with the flexibility of infinite customizability. Finally, Matthew showcases how the visibility that emerges when field service automation is in place creates more efficient and more resilient responses to today’s challenges.

You can watch the full “5G Growing Pains: How AI-Driven Automation Lets Field Service Keep Up” video here.

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