Big Data Can Make A Big Difference In Field Service

By Brian Albright, Field Technologies magazine

Advanced data analytics can enable predictive maintenance and new sales opportunities.

Field service is moving into a new phase of optimization: using data analytics to improve business processes. Now that field service automation, work order management, fleet management, and other solutions are firmly entrenched in the industry, many firms are looking for a Big Data solution to help take all of the information generated by these solutions and use it to improve operations.

All of this data can be corralled for predictive analytics that can help guide the service organization, identify new business opportunities, and optimize processes. “A true Big Data solution should blend field service data with sales data, asset data, customer data, and any other information you are collecting and then analyze that data as a whole to determine what the larger trends are that may be hiding in the data,” says Jeffrey Wartgow, vice president of product marketing at TOA Technologies. “The goal in using Big Data in your organization is to have a long-term impact on the business, and to do that you need to blend that field service data with data from sales and customers to find the trends that will help you make smarter decisions.”