If you believe industry watchers and analysts, the Field Service Management (FSM) market could as much as double over the next five years, to around $5 billion. That growth is being driven by businesses putting strategic emphasis on selling long-term services and guaranteed ‘outcomes’, as well as hikes in consumer expectations around service quality and digital service interaction. On top of this, more and more OEMs are building IoT connectivity into their products and equipment as they drive towards a ‘value-added’ aftermarket that offers predictive, automated service delivery.
There are other important dynamics at play. Data-driven FSM capabilities are now a must-have for service organizations if they’re going to profitably deploy and manage engineers and technicians in the field, as well as meeting customer expectations around service and support. And putting this data in the hands of in-field technicians requires a complete FSM toolkit that is available on, and designed for, mobile devices.
IFS FSM 6 provides the most complete, connected field service solution available on the market, and enables choice around how to licence, deploy and configure in the way that best suits different service organizations’ specific needs.
With the new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) deployment option, the initial cost and risk for businesses transitioning to servitization and outcome-based models has been lowered, making it much simpler for many organizations to make the move to a new service management solution. While 80% of new IFS FSM customers choose deployment in the cloud, we remain committed to offer choice for customers that want to run it from their own data centers as an alternative.
Your FSM software should never constrain the service you can deliver but a very real drawback of some cloud offerings is the limitations they impose in areas such as workflow configurability or interfaces. When deployed as a SaaS offering, we engineered IFS FSM 6 with flexible workflows, data fields, interfaces and user behaviors to fit a huge range of user and device preferences; just in the same way as it’s available for those customers who chose to deploy on-premise. Thanks to its focus on enabling configuration, IFS FSM 6 virtually eliminates the need for costly and complex customizations.
Whether you’re running 10 or 10,000 jobs a day, in the field, at the depot, or across dealer- or asset-based operations, IFS FSM 6 can be quickly and easily configured to fit your business model and processes. With even greater mobile field service capabilities and an intuitive new user experience designed with both field workers as well as management and support center staff in mind, it really is a leap forward in what FSM software can bring to the table.
Know your options – same functionality, many choices of deployment
Our FSM solution gives you a lot of control and choice around deployment. It’s available on-premise or through the cloud and can be based on subscription or perpetual licence – the choice is yours to fit your field service needs and your business requirements. Here are the options:
- SaaS: With lower up-front investment, software-as-a-service is the attractive option for organizations looking to roll-out a smaller footprint and scale up as business needs change. Deploying as a fully manged cloud service can bring significant reductions in IT and infrastructure costs, and with ‘evergreen’ software updates which ensure businesses are always able to benefit from the most up-to-date version of the software.
- Subscribe: Purchasing software on a subscription basis is beneficial for many, because the expense can be assigned to a given department’s operating budget, and is well below the normal threshold for a capital budget spend.
- Licence: With a one-time license fee, our solution can be run either in a company’s own data center or on private cloud. The cost of the license is paid up-front and allows businesses to own the software outright with the rights to use it indefinitely. Alternatively, they can place it in a private or public cloud run by a third-party vendor.
With IFS FSM 6 you can combine models of license and deployment for choice, flexibility and to create the right fit for your service operations. What is important is that whichever model suits your business, you won’t have to compromise on the capabilities that the solution can deliver and can choose the option which will drive your service organization to success.
From field to fingertip
Choosing the right FSM software empowers service organizations to meet service demand, improve technician utilization rates and hit service level agreements contractual commitments. We have opted to provide our customers with a greater choice of deployment options for IFS FSM 6 in order to give you the flexibility to roll out a full suite of service business capabilities in a way that fits your organization, avoiding any complex integration—and putting that all important real-time operational data in the hands of the people who need it.
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Shayur Maharaj
Great piece with some insightful points on field service. Thanks for sharing.