Completing Field Force Automation - Extending Intelligent Mobility

I recently wrote an article for The Enterprise Mobility Foundation, The Next Step in Business Process Optimization: Mobility.  In this article I describe the enormous amount of work that has gone into designing and automating business processes and ERPs like SAP.  The conclusion of the article is that as sophisticated as ERPs are today, there remains significant feature gaps, especially in extending business processes out to the mobile workforce.

In this article, I want to highlight some areas where there is still much work to be done in field services.  In field services, a number of SAP mobility partners like Clicksoftware and Syclo have comprehensive field services and enterprise asset management solutions with mobile clients for use on smartphones and ruggedized handhelds.  However, there are still feature gaps in the integration of real time data, M2M integration, geotags, business intelligence, augmented reality and multi-media support.

Let me give you a not so futuristic field services scenario to consider.  A field services technician arrives at a customer's location.  Recognizing the location (based on geospatial data and scheduling data), the service tech's smartphone begins to both display and read, using an audio feed, the customer highlights including recent support issues, account status, warranties, contracts and possible upsell sales opportunities.  As the service technician unloads his/her tools and walks toward the worksite, they are getting educated on all the most recent events through their ear piece.

As the service technician passes near various pieces of equipment with a maintenance and repair history the information is both displayed and an audible voice reviews the history.  As the service technician enters a building, the blueprint of the building and a map of  the location of all equipment under service contracts appears on their screen.

Now let's pretend we are movie directors and insert a flashback - before the service technician was scheduled and dispatched, the field service automation system queried the maintenance and support status of all equipment on the customer's campus.  Equipment needing repair or maintenance was identified, parts required were pulled from inventory or ordered for delivery.  Required tools and equipment were pre-loaded into the service technician's vehicle and time was allocated to complete all the necessary work on the premises.  Consolidating all the work possible during a visit reduces fuel, travel and labor costs.

As the service technician arrives at each piece of equipment, he immediately snaps a digital picture of it.  A diagram, with step by step instructions overlays the digital photo and instructs the service technician on how to complete the service most efficiently.  The service technician speaks to the mobile application confirming each step until it is completed.  This audio file is immediately translated, interpreted and the work order is closed.

If any step in the process takes longer than expected, the mobile application will ask if a digital video file demonstrating the necessary steps would be useful.  If the service technician affirms, then the file automatically plays.

If advice from another expert is required, the service technician can request it and the mobile application can initiate a knowledge management process (see solutions from SAP mobility partner's Leapfactor, Open Text's Open Text Everywhere, or SAP's Streamworks) that queries experts and connects with them automatically.  If a connected expert requests a live video feed of the equipment or the work, the service technician simply aims the smartphone digital video camera at the equipment or activates the hat mounted video camera.

Before each peice of equipment is reached, an automatic M2M (machine-to-machine) communication is sent from the office asking the equipment to perform diagnostics on itself.  The diagnostic is completed and wirelessly sent to the service technician's smartphone.

All of the technology in the scenario above exists today.  It just has not been integrated all together into specific use cases like the one above.  Perhaps SAP partners are waiting for customers to request it or for SAP to document it or for you to suggest it.

*Read the Mobility News Weekly at http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/p/kevins-mobility-news-weekly.html.

*Read the M2M News Weekly at http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/p/m2m.html.

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Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
CEO/Principal Consultant, Netcentric Strategies LLC
http://www.netcentric-strategies.com/
www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict
http://twitter.com/krbenedict
***Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility consultant and Web 2.0 marketing expert. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
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http://www.clicksoftware.com/e86e075b-4fca-44c9-bfeb-4efcc978f416/knowledge-center-white-papers-delivery.htm

Mobile Expert Interview Series - Jane and Keelin Glendon of HotButtons

I had the pleasure of interviewing two mobile experts this week, Jane Glendon and her daughter Keelin Glendon. Jane founded her mobile software application company, HotButton Solutions, http://www.hotbuttonsolutions.com/index.html, in Calgary, Alberta in 2000. HotButton Solutions focuses on mobile field data collection applications for the oil and gas industry. The focus is deep, as in deep mud and snow.

Jane and Keelin have a lot of great stories to tell about selling and supporting mobile applications in the wilderness. I learned that moose gather on the roads to lick the salt, bears like to scratch their backs on oil well heads and a rugged handheld computer screen only survives 4 whacks with a hammer and nail to break. I also learned that northern Canadian oil workers have been known to express their dislike for new technologies by throwing ruggedized handheld computers into a moving compressor fan (it still worked), and that clever oil workers customize mobile applications to keep track of animals and game they see along the road in preparation for hunting season. One particular oil well inspector developed a golf course along his oil well inspection run/path. This is the kind of work for me!

HotButton sales calls often require taking an airplane to a remote northern airstrip and renting a 4x4, or driving 9 hours through the wilderness to train oil patch workers on mobile applications. Keelin, who does much of the onsite training and sales calls in the cold northern oil patches of Canada considers mud, snow, seasons and storms before booking her travel. Before driving to some locations on remote one-way roads, Keelin must radio ahead to warn oil tankers coming down the mountain.

Jobsites have buildings with names like the doghouse, compressor shack, dehydration building and field office. These buildings have been known to collect bullet holes during hunting seasons. Stray dogs are known to make oil camps and field offices home and co-habit alongside the local bears that are given pet names by the workers.

The mobile application users are oil patch workers that have a wide variety of responsibilities and support many different business processes all on one rugged handheld computer. The same worker is responsible for a variety of tasks like the following:

• Checking pressure gauges and documenting the readings
• PVR – production volume reports
• Conditional assessments
• Rust inspections
• Leak inspections
• Safety and environmental compliance inspections
• Maintenance inspections of equipment, machines, buildings, pipelines and vehicles
• Site inspections (brush, grass, trees, etc.)
• Work orders

The working conditions are often cold, dark, wild, isolated and surrounded by flammable fuels. Keelin brings rubber boots along on her visits. There are more moose than people and IS - Intrinsically Safe ruggedized handhelds are required. These are devices developed to function safely around flammable environments. That means no mobile phone capabilities. I guess mobile phones can ignite fuels… I learn something new every day. For the most part the ruggedized handheld computers are docked in the job shack to synchronize the collected data with the home office.

How do they know when the weather is too cold for the handheld computers to function? When the oil patch worker freezes.

One example of the importance of having real time data visibility is a recent incident where the oil production volumes reported to the central office did not match the delivered oil volumes. The central office activated an alert and the oil patch workers were ordered to look for an oil leak. One of the field workers quickly checked his handheld and found the missing oil volume sitting on a tanker that was preparing to depart. The alert was canceled and everyone went back to work.

HotButton's mobile data collection software application is called HotLeap and includes a Universal Data Translator, Staging database, Bullseye and OrgAdmin. Jane has even received a patent for her technology. It is designed to work with Windows Mobile and Windows CE devices.

One mobile client application can support dozens of different oil field applications and business processes from one common menu on the mobile handheld. These mobile data collection applications most often sync to multiple database applications in the back office. There is deep vertical expertise and experience built into these oil patch applications that is relevant in both Canada and in the USA.

Jane's next step, as a mobile software entrepreneur, is to find a larger software company that can help them go global through a partnership or possibly by acquiring them. She says her global oil company customers love their mobile applications but prefer a vendor with a global presence and more resources than HotButtons has today.

This article is the first in a series of interviews with mobile industry experts. If you have a mobile expert or unusual character that you would recommend for an interview please contact me.

The next article in this series is called Nokia's John Choate. He works in the mobile Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality programs at Nokia. Yes, it is as interesting as it sounds...stay tuned.

The Downside of Mobile Applications

I had the fortunate opportunity to meet a classmate for coffee this week. I had not seen him for over a decade. He serves as a traffic cop and uses a TDS Recon mobile handheld computer in the course of his work writing tickets.

During our conversation we discussed the rugged laptop he had mounted in his unmarked police cruiser. He said it had many of their police forms and documents on it, but that the mobile software was not able to keep up with the required edits and changes needed on the forms. As a result, they had stopped using it for much of their documentation.

This discussion highlighted the need for a mobile workflow application that is a separate layer from the data layer. The field data collection requirements should be very simple to edit and not impact the field user. If the mobile application requires a complete update to edit data fields, then it risks early obsolescence or as in my earlier example it will simply not be used.


- Kevin Benedict,
Mobile Strategies Consultant, SAP EDI Expert and Technology Writer

Mobile Application Integration Platform - For Data Collection and Cloud Computing Services

An increasingly large amount of data is being consumed by mobile handheld computers and Smart phones. This data can come from a wide variety of sources and be in many different formats including GPS, LBS (location based services), SMS, voice, Email, Video, digital photos, barcode scanning, RFID, voice memos, documents and Bluetooth data connectivity to a large variety of data collection tools and equipment. The data can come from many different ERPs, database applications and SaaS (software as a service) offerings in a cloud computing environment.

The demand for mobile applications and mobile devices to be able to consume all of these various data sources and formats creates a need for an mobile data aggregation platform for mobile data feeds. This data often needs to be integrated into a mobile application somehow so the data can be used by the mobile worker. Some of this data can be aggregated on the database server side and downloaded or streamed to the mobile device, but data collection equipment and some applications are connected directly to the mobile device. For example, a voice memo application, GPS reader and a barcode scanner may be directly connected to the mobile device. The results of the barcode scan and the GPS data may be synchronized with the ERP to identify an asset that is located at a particular location. A data collection form that helps document the condition of the asset needs to be integrated with a digital photo, GPS data, voice memo, barcode scan and the asset data downloaded from the ERP. All of this data once aggregated, can be updated and synchronized back with the ERP.

There are some data sources such as weather conditions, shipment tracking and currency exchange rates that may be available as web services. This data also may be required on the mobile device, and even incorporated into the mobile asset management application. How do you bring all of this data together from the server and from the data collected on the mobile device so it can be used by the mobile worker in the field? That is the challenge. It can always be done in a custom manner, but how can this be solved in a reusable manner?

Mobile applications need:

• GUIs or mobile application forms that have an integrated data validation and business rules engine
• GUIs or mobile application forms that include a mobile workflow engine associated with the screens
• Mobile database and synchronization technology
• Mobile data aggregation platform (this article)
• Mobile business process platform and ERP integration so the mobile worker can be part of the enterprise business processes in the ERP even outside the four walls of the enterprise

There needs to be a design and development strategy and a solution that can aggregate all of the various web services with the feeds from data collection equipment on the server side and on the mobile device side. This will become increasingly important as additional LBS (location based services) and consumable web services become available.

A mobile application on a Smart Phone or ruggedized handheld has access to a great deal of data. The value of the data comes from aggregating it in a standard way that can be used to make good business decisions. Today this takes a great deal of custom software development for each application. It is time for some good mobile software developers to solve these problems.

If you would like to discuss this topic in more detail please contact or hire me :-)

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Author Kevin Benedict
Mobile Computing, EDI and B2B Evangelist and Consultant
www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict
http://b2b-bpo.blogspot.com/
http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/
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