Portable Field Workstations: Revolutionizing Management of Field Service

If you provide any service out of the office (no matter the industry!), you know it is much more complicated than just coming to customers and fixing what's broken. Whatever you do – sell and service agricultural equipment, climate systems, woodworking machinery, construction equipment – you need a simple yet flexible, reliable, and user-friendly solution to manage your field workers, track and increase their performance.

Firstly, you need a system to plan customer visits, ensuring efficient task allocation and even workload distribution. Secondly, ensure that your service engineers have access to real-time customer and equipment information while in the fields at the customers', even with no network coverage. Thirdly, equip them with tools for seamless time tracking. And finally, empower your service managers with analytics and reports to analyze field service engineers' performance.

We have good news for you: we've created a solution to help you with all that – and more.

We named our solution Portable Field Workstations based on SAP Service Cloud. Although the name suggests that it is designed solely for field workers, it is a comprehensive tool that allows you to effectively manage your field services.

At the heart of this solution is a mobile application that contains all critical customer-related information and tools to track the services provided, time spent on each visit, performance of service engineers, and more. All these features are also accessible offline, which is particularly useful when your service engineers are in areas with no internet connectivity. They simply need to sync the data with the system once they are back online and the information is available to all system users.

Furthermore, the mobile application also has a web version, which means that you can use it without having to install the app. On the other hand, the application offers rich functionality for service team managers, including a wide range of reports (and you can customize them even further) and analytical tools to track the performance of service engineers and their workload.

1. When a customer makes a service request, our system enables you to assign the task to a service engineer. The service request contains all the necessary information about the customer, their equipment, and the services previously provided to them. This information helps our field workers to prepare for the onsite visit to the customer.
   
   

2. When at the customer's, the service engineer can add all the data about performed services to the system: the service history gets stored in the customer profile in the cloud. It is available for every system user once the service engineer syncs the data.
   
   
   

3. There's a very convenient feature to automate tracking data about customers' equipment: you only need to scan the QR or bar code from the equipment.
   
   
   
   

Typically, companies rely on their employees to provide information about when they arrived and how long they spent on the visit. While it's important to trust your employees, it's always better to automate these processes for efficiency. Our application provides tools to track the start of the visit (when the field worker leaves your office) and allows for quick check-in and check-out through GEO tracking. This feature makes it easy to calculate the exact time spent on a visit. Furthermore, all the information collected can be analyzed to evaluate the performance of each service engineer, the duration of different types of service works, and manage workload more effectively.

Analytical and business intelligence tools are extremely valuable for any business. Our solution provides a range of reports that enable you to track the performance of your service teams and optimize it accordingly. We can offer you some examples of these reports, but it's important to remember that you can customize the solution further and create reports tailored to your specific needs.

1. With the help of the solution, you get analytics on the statuses of service requests.
   
   

2. You can create a report featuring service execution split by customers and service requests.
   
   

3. You can quickly identify what customers need the attention of your service teams most often.
   
   

4. You can also discover what equipment needs maintenance most often. Can you imagine how many important decisions you can make based on that information?
   
   

5. And even more, you can build reports on types of service performed by service engineers - with the option to split them by regions or employees.
   
   

6. The report on time spent on different types of service requests is a huge help in planning workload.
   
   

7. As well as a report on time planned and time spent on different kinds of service requests.
   
   

8. And there's a special report on the workload of every employee: you can quickly visualize who has the most working hours and who could do better.
   
   

9. Based on the types of services your engineers perform, you can track their performance – and maybe plan professional training.
   
   

Our solution is based on SAP Service Cloud. But you can enhance its functionality and create a unified ecosystem combining SAP Service Cloud and Sales Cloud modules. Just imagine how many amazing benefits you gain!

As mentioned above, with the Portable Field Workstations, you have all you need to manage field services. With SAP Sales Cloud, you can complement that solution with a complete database of all your clients and prospects – including those who have never subscribed to maintenance support with you. How do you benefit? Take a deep breath; it's going to be exciting.

Imagine a client who bought ten tractors from you – but never asked for maintenance service. It means that some other company services all these tractors. A unified sales+service solution allows you to discover that client – and maybe make some offers to persuade them to switch their service provider (and choose you!).

On the other hand, you might have customers who only do service with you – while buying their equipment from someone else. Why not make a special offer for them too, to convince them that you can suggest a better price?

The more customer information you have, the better offers you can make. It allows you to increase the loyalty of your customers and, initially, their LTV. And with this unified solution, you can do all that.

Believe it or not, implementing the solution takes only four months. The implementation doesn't require a big team either; 4-5 mid/senior-level SAP experts are enough. It means that the implementation is affordable.

And there's even more: it doesn't matter if you already use any SAP products or only plan your SAP journey: Portable Field Workstations Based on SAP Service Cloud can be your first experience with SAP.