Keeping operational in the Field

An ever-increasing number of businesses are depending on mobile devices for their field workers to do their job: receiving daily tasks, planning routes, communicating with your back office, completing work orders, accessing schematics and resources to increase your ‘First Time’ resolution rate. 

So what happens when a device stops working. Or worse still, all your devices suddenly hit the same software glitch and go down? You can’t expect your Field Service team to troubleshoot and fix the problem. At the same time, the last thing you (and they) want to do is return to base.

As one of the UK’s largest specialist mobile device Managed Services provider we manage around 165,000 configured devices – twice as many as our nearest competitor. We provide remote support features that enable your IT or transport/logistics team to identify and fix the problems remotely. Anywhere and anytime. When that’s not possible our contract customers can get new and replacement devices into Field Service workers’ hands quickly with a complete “out-of-the-box” solution that provides real value for your business.

Prevention is better than cure – Intelligent Asset Management

Managing our customers’ assets smarter, faster, better is a top priority and our success at it is one of the reasons we have grown into the business it is today. By implementing emerging technologies, including analytical software advancements, we ‘inspect what we expect’ via Intelligent Asset Management (IAM) practices. This provides incident reporting transparency plus regular updates on how every single one of your devices deployed in the field is being utilised. Fixing problems before they escalate or stopping the same problems recurring over and over again.

Get the whole picture of your asset estate

With IAM, our customers always know the number of calls coming from a particular depot and whether an issue is hardware or software related – or even down to human behaviour.

Drilling down a bit further, if you have 1,000 devices in the field, do you know how many are actually live at any given time of the day, for example?  Can you tell where they are physically?  How many are still in boxes ready to swap out with other devices if needed?

The answers to these questions are available within our ‘live’ asset register.  At the end of each month, we provide a report that includes devices under repair as well as units that have been written off.

IAM allows us to determine that of the 50 devices in ‘buffer stock’, for example, 20 are actually in the buffer stock location, 10 are being prepared for swap out and another 20 are in transit to or from the field.  We can constantly monitor device status and identify, for example, that 22 devices have been missing from the network for the past week.

Recovering lost devices

Even if you already employ an MSP, it’s not uncommon for employees to access differing devices from depots, bypassing proper reporting and tracking methods. This is a big reason so many devices are identified as lost. A big organisation can lose hundreds of mobile devices each year, turning the missing units into a significant accounting issue.

However, our mobile analytics software can provide a user-friendly method of keeping track of the devices, including when they are used and by whom. We can even quickly determine which applications are opened and which ones are ignored, potentially highlighting training or productivity issues. 

And if the device hasn’t been activated or used for several days, we can help the user locate the unit.  As you know well, once a device has been missing for more than a month, there’s a decreasing chance of ever finding it.

Find out more

We’re already working nationally and internationally for clients including E.ON and Severn Trent Water, keeping their devices operational in the field. And by continuing to keep one eye on future challenges and the other on emergent technologies, we’ll continue to offer our customers innovative technology, software and service solutions that give them the edge over their competitors.