Improve efficiency and data accuracy with intuitive, use-case specific tools and major platforms already in place.
In today’s array of options for field management software, companies can struggle to understand the pros and cons of each solution. Large-scale field service platforms offer part of the answer yet often fail to support things like ease-of-use and GIS. More focused tools, or point solutions, seem attractive on the surface but have hidden costs and complexity for implementation and maintenance. In addition, some software tools claim to be products but are unfinished “starting points” for custom solutions that are impossible to maintain or upgrade.
Behind all these challenges is the risk of eroding data quality. The more data “handshakes” that point solutions bring to the system of record data, the more the quality degrades over time because business rules aren’t followed. This leads to safety and non-compliance risk. Anyone who’s struggled to answer questions like which customer homes are affected by an outage can understand the pain that bad data quality brings.
Modern mobile mapping, when combined with the right enterprise platforms for work management, brings the best of both worlds for a complete solution for field services.
Disconnected Data Degrades Workflows
Business leaders are chronically forced to make decisions that either solve a specific use case or support the enterprise data and operation needs, with both options feeling suboptimal. When considering work management systems, the choices are too often a generic enterprise platform tool, or a disconnected point solution app. Neither option fuels the organization with the intelligence it needs to understand job status, asset condition or inventory.
In cases where field services toolsets are part of the enterprise platform, often the features available aren’t fast enough to schedule efficiently. Many times, the larger platforms are focused on other business functions like finance or inventory and keep things like field management as an afterthought—which means that specific functions and use cases aren’t supported well.
Alternatively, if the app is not part of the enterprise, then data becomes siloed. The effort needed to have field data interact with the system of recorded becomes unmanageable. Over time, this leads to corrupt data, higher costs and compliance issues.
In the field, staff struggle to get the complete picture of work to perform. Most in-field work management apps don’t connect to asset or GIS data. And if it does allow for GIS or EAM connection, it’s usually view only, online only and requires a complex setup to work properly.
Even more challenging, those apps that seem tuned to field workflows are third-party, disconnected apps that are expensive, complicated to learn, and impossible to maintain, upgrade or keep up with ETL-based data updates. For many companies, after a couple years of using these kinds of tools, the results are a major backlog of data updates that never get done and end up making the system of record data unreliable.
Challenges faced when solving for field workflows include:
- Generic tools that aren’t tailored for schedule/dispatch
- Disconnected apps that don’t integrate with enterprise systems
- Technical debt from ETL’s or custom connector software
- Weak or missing connection between work management and GIS
- Major backlog of ETL-based data updates
Lemur with Salesforce Field Service Provides Integrated Data and Tools
To enable smooth operations from the back-office planning to the field execution, teams need tools that tell them accurately what needs to be done, when and where. Schedulers would understand the work for the day, in the context of customer needs and asset maintenance plans, in one place. Dispatchers would have confidence that the right people were getting to the right in-field assets with the right equipment on the truck because they would have unified information. Field teams would start their day quickly and execute their work efficiently and with confidence because they trust and fully understand their data.
The combination of Lemur with Salesforce Field Service seamlessly unifies enterprise data, work management, schedule and dispatch and GIS for both the back office and the field.
Salesforce Field Service has a state-of-the-art schedule and dispatch suite, which is built into the core Salesforce platform. It has one of the fastest, most effective work scheduling engines on the market, and weaves in core Salesforce data such as customer service and work history. It also brings modernized tools like robust, built-in AI and a streamlined, easy to use interface for both the back-office and the field users.
In the field, Lemur integrates to the Salesforce mobile app to weave work management into the map experience, delivering a unified view of GIS assets and work assignments. Users can quickly pull up work orders from the map view while understanding network connectivity of the affected asset. They can add notes and markups to the GIS data and associate it with the Salesforce work order, or barcode scan directly from the map to auto-populate forms. Offline situations—planned or unplanned—are no problem with Lemur’s offline-first design
Users in the office or the field can operate this robust suite of tools while remaining within the system of record the entire time. That means no more third-party apps and zero ETL strategies.
Streamlined Workflows Effective Field Service
By adopting the Lemur and Salesforce Field Service suite, users across the entire field program realize immediate efficiency gains. The end-to-end workflows provide streamlined tools for work execution that provide a seamless, easy-to-use user experience. Field data gets automatically fed into the system of record. With the Salesforce Field Service in-field app, workers record their jobs natively to the enterprise Salesforce platform and automatically update the back office on their progress.
Since Lemur integrates with Salesforce and is built on top of Esri’s ArcGIS, field workers know what work to perform, where and on what asset—and the back office knows exactly what work the field team completed. The end-to-end workflow runs seamlessly because both the work management and the GIS tools used are native to the systems of record.
Benefits of Lemur + Salesforce Field Service:
- Improved field service and decision support
- Back office to field operations connectivity
- Automatic, direct system of record data updates
- Industry-leading schedule and dispatch tools
- Unified work management and field GIS
A Complete Solution for Your Field Program
Lemur and Salesforce Field Service provide a complete solution for the entire field program. The software suite delivers robust functionality that’s easy to use and covers the full spectrum of specialized needs for all users, from the schedulers and dispatchers to the field technicians. It gives an accurate, complete picture of the work assigned for the day because it’s built into the Salesforce and Esri systems of record. Data accuracy and completeness is woven into daily work because the native tools take with them the business rules already built in. It reduces operational expense and maintenance costs while eliminating the need for failure-prone ETLs. Companies get the benefit of working from the enterprise system along with the precision and power of tools tuned for the work at hand, including unified, offline-ready GIS and work management for techs.
For more information, visit our related service pages or contact us today.
Adapt to
Change
Partner With TRC’s Tested Practitioners
