Three Takeaways from Field Service Asia

SINGAPORE – Another exciting week at Zinier, after members of our APAC team met with more than 180 industry leaders at Field Service Asia.

Field Service Asia is the region’s leading conference on field service and customer support. This year, the event focused on key business challenges in Asia Pacific, from the need to recruit millennial workers to the importance of using technology to drive better customer experiences.

Here are three key takeaways from the event:

1. Field service is changing … sort of

The field service industry is at a crossroads. Gone are the days when organizations could run their day-to-day operations on pen and paper – there are too many sites to visit, technicians to manage, and data points to analyze.

Technology is changing the way organizations think about, schedule, and execute work. But when we talk to field service leaders, they tend to bring up the same organizational goals and operational challenges.

Field service leaders still want to reduce the number of return visits. They want to be able to track activity in real time, across multiple teams and job sites. Most importantly, they want to shift field service from a cost center to a profit center.

At Field Service Asia, almost every conversation looked at how organizations can use technology to minimize costs, maximize value, and help teams work smarter and faster.

2. New technology should play nicely with existing solutions

Throughout the week, we met a number of people who asked a variation of the same question: how would your platform enhance the functionality of our internal systems?

Most field service organizations have already made significant investments in their own customized solutions. Ripping out these systems is not a viable option, especially when you consider the amount of time spent training people on how to operate them.

At Zinier, our approach has always been to augment what’s already in place with intelligent automation. Our open, AI-driven platform was designed to integrate with other applications. For example, an organization could pull in work orders from another application and use Zinier to generate recommendations about technician assignments, based on historical trends and real-time data.

3. Industries are gearing up for AI

AI is quickly moving from the conceptual to the practical, and enterprise investment is close behind.

According to a report by IDC, global spending on AI is expected to surpass $35 billion by the end of 2019, an increase of 44 percent over the previous year.

At Field Service Asia, most of the attendees fell into one of three industries – telecom, medical equipment, and engineering. Across each of these industries, there was a tremendous amount of interest in how AI could solve specific challenges, whether it was automatically re-assigning technicians to avoid SLA penalties or using real-time data to predict failures months in advance.

Want to learn more about our approach to field service automation? Contact our team today to request a demo or discuss your operational challenges in more detail.

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