Welcome to the first edition of our exclusive content for users of Oracle Field Service (OFS). Through this regular communication, we’ll share our team’s OFS expertise, make suggestions for getting more from OFS’s powerful capabilities, and offer tips for making configuration easier and simpler.
We’d love to hear what you think, as well as your ideas for future themes or content. Equally, if you’d like to receive future editions direct to your mailbox, please subscribe.
As companies adjust to new, Covid-secure ways of working, many are giving additional consideration to the types of activities and jobs their people attend and complete. If this affects your business, here’s a few ideas to consider:
Create a property on an activity that flags a site or customer location as Covid-compliant and use skills to offer this to all resources who are not vulnerable.
Use a pre-work flow to allow a resource to ask the right questions before attending and to record the responses through Forms history.
For owned sites, consider creating them as an additional resource and use linked activities to ensure only one person is on site at a time.
Use skill levels to vary the ratio of risk to resources or preference to a resource.
You can use a filter on the Dispatch screen to only show Active resources by using the Activated / Deactivated conditions.
We find companies experience challenges in reconciling van stock with what the ERP thinks is in the van location. A powerful and often under-utilised area of OFS is Inventory Management, which helps resolve this, reducing costly stock write-offs. Here are some considerations.
If integration to your ERP is an issue, we can provide the Leadent Inventory Manager Service that ensures asset and stock data going into and coming out of OFSC is accurate. Contact us to find out more.
Use the Parts Catalog API to upload your product/spare parts range
Use a stock collection activity to trigger a workflow with the engineer
Use a Plug-In, or simple table in the activity, to show which parts should be Received.
Use a Plug-In or out the box, manual process to add parts to the Resource Inventory once they physically receive it
Use barcode scanner functions for accuracy
Use Collaboration to identify missing stock for immediate back office support, investigation or adjustment.
A commonly quoted problem from field engineers using OFS is the amount of travel allocated between activities:
How am I supposed to get to xxx in 12 minutes?
There may be several different reasons for this, but often it will be caused by inaccurate travel statistics that have been recorded over time and stored within OFS for future routing.
With the release of OFS 18C, some new APIs were made available to OFS customers with a Professional or Enterprise licence; this opens the opportunity to correct any statistics that are erroneous.
APIs are often inaccessible to operational user, but to help with this, we have developed a number of data tools that make this type of change simple and accessible to non-IT users.
Using our knowledge of OFS and field service processes, we’ve developed a range of tools and services to increase your efficiency and effectiveness in managing OFS.
See more about our OFSC Plug-ins & Enhancements
Migrate your OFS activities between environments to test routing, or upload new configuration in bulk.
Embrace the power of OFS forms by exporting the data to CSV for further analysis, or to PDF for presentation to stakeholders.
Identify the gaps between your resource and demand; see where you need to increase capacity and make insightful decisions.
Engage customers in your engineer’s visit, receive timely feedback and provide a great customer experience.
A question often asked is how to increase the number of activities, or Service Revenue by cold-calling near activities. OFS’s Non-Scheduled activities does just that:
A common reason for customer visits failing is that the engineer doesn’t have the required part. This can often be mitigated by:
A simple API transfer of required inventory from your order system ensures there is early visibility of activity requirements for both the back office and field teams.
Strategies can be set within routing plans to ensure that only resources with the required inventory are scheduled the activity. For back-office ‘moves’ warnings are provided.
If an on-site resource doesn’t have a part, OFS offers an easy way to search local colleagues who do hold it. Collaboration makes communication and stock transfer a doddle.
And finally, if the only result is the need for a rebook, why not allow the resource to schedule a new activity whilst still on-site, and use Required Parts to trigger an automatic API transfer to your ordering system.
Many organisations using OFS don’t appreciate, or have time to explore, the full functionality within the solution, or the different ways that it can be configured to make it work for their use case. We often find that with a few, relatively simple changes, we can have a big impact on workflow and the user experience.
