Grocer Rings Up Field Service Improvements

By Brian Albright, Field Technologies

Reliable information technology (IT) support and service are critical for any business. In the grocery industry, store-level IT service can have a direct impact on sales and customer service — if the registers are down, cashiers can’t ring up sales, and customers may simply leave their carts in the aisle and head to the next closest market.

It’s important to be able to get technicians to the store quickly with as much information as possible about the problem. Giant Eagle, a large, regional grocery chain, updated its previous IT field service management systems — including a help desk solution and Excel spreadsheets that were manually managed — to the full Astea Alliance field service management (FSM) platform. The system has helped the department boost its service-level agreement compliance to nearly 100 percent while improving visibility.