The time is right to think beyond Covid-19 and invest in paperless service and maintenance systems through digital enablement.

With available technologies, your service and maintenance teams can be safer and more productive, with better results long after the initial vaccine roll-out is completed. As it is still unclear what the future looks like you must continue to invest in protecting your maintenance personnel and your business from continued risks associated with COVID-19.

Rather than thinking about what extra things need to be added to protect your staff, you should think about eliminating steps, processes, and tasks and making your maintenance and service function more streamlined. Eliminating the need to handle and store paperwork is a significant step.

"The streamlining of your processes can be achieved through greater use of available technologies and digital enablement."

Digital enablement is simply the use of available technology to improve the performance of your organisation.

Greater digital enablement in your service and maintenance teams is easily achieved using smartphones and tablets without the need for extensive capital investment. But also enormous opportunities can be achieved using AI, remote monitoring and more.

Dedicated service management systems and apps are easily configured for your specific needs to capture job details, checklist tasks completed, information on parts used (and required), timesheet and labour data and before and after photos. Reports are automatically created using the data captured and analysed on the smartphone. Integration with 3rd party CRM, Sales Order and Invoicing, and Inventory Management systems complete the job cycle. Resulting in the reduction or even removal of paperwork from these multiple points of contact and continuing to promote better COVID-19 health and safety.

"Think big but start small and build on success."

Taking these initial steps will also open up new strategies on which your organisation can capitalize long after the pandemic. The opportunities for operational efficiencies are enormous. For example, scanning of barcodes on spare parts used to track inventory in real time through integration with a centralized system (scanning capability already built into the smartphone apps.) IoT sensors (temperature, pressure, vibration) along with AI provide data on how an asset is functioning to let you know when there is a problem and automatically create and assign a callout job to the maintenance team. This can help move towards predictive maintenance and extend the life of the asset.

"The days when maintenance teams complete paperwork and dockets should be over for your organisation."

With currently available field service apps and software, the possibilities for organisations to quickly go above and beyond customer expectations are enormous.

See how Arantico can help you improve Inventory Management with real-time management of your field-based service engineers.