Results
- 75% admin reduction
- Same-day data availability
- Reduced truckrolls
When a global medical device manufacturer began its service journey five years ago, the company implemented a paper-based process that ended up being incompatible with the data-intensive demands of modern field service. The company was held back by the limited capabilities of its backend systems to address the realities of the field.
Turning to TrueContext, it has since achieved tremendous gains in field service engineer (FSE) efficiency, allowing frontline workers to focus on the work that matters. Today, the company looks ahead to expanding its service horizons by integrating emerging technologies like predictive analytics and AI to further improve productivity, efficiency, and compliance in the field and beyond — all supported by TrueContext as its trusted platform.
Challenges
With a manual, paper-based solution, the business saw its technicians get bogged down by intensive administrative work in the field, diverting their focus away from performing critical service and toward completing paperwork. “We have 42 pages of documentation for every field service visit,” its service solutions director told TrueContext. This was the primary challenge that the company needed to solve as it evolved its service program. It needed to reduce FSE documentation workload so they could dedicate their time to diagnosing and solving problems.
The paper-based process also demonstrated its inherent shortcomings in terms of operational visibility. “We had quality compliance issues because an FSE would walk away from the visit without completing the work order. The documentation would require about an hour to complete the required paperwork, and technicians would only get around to it 24 to 48 hours after the fact,” they continued. This scenario not only took FSEs longer to document service visits than necessary but also led to data gaps across the service organization, as information would be entered late, eliminating any possibility of real-time, on-site follow-up action.
“We used to do it on paper, so data integration was nearly non-existent. Technicians would send in a PDF for quality review, but they would still physically mail stacks of paper, coming from across the globe to a major city in Canada,” they explained.
Additionally, the disparate backend systems had no way to communicate with each other, creating information silos that prevented the organization from having complete visibility into the organization’s service operations.
Solution
The medical equipment manufacturer brought its challenges to the TrueContext team, and together, they built a solution that would drastically cut down administrative work — and how long it took to complete it — for the company’s hundreds of field service engineers in its global footprint. The organization fully leveraged the platform’s powerful conditional logic to create dynamic forms that adapt to the job, helping technicians breeze through digital forms instead of jotting everything down on paper. The company rolled out a global deployment of TrueContext for multiple use cases, including installations, preventive and corrective maintenance, software upgrades, device history records, and depot service.
The company designed the solution to integrate with several backend systems, including ServiceMax and Salesforce, as well as various IoT technologies, that would enable it to use sensor data to spot trends and patterns in its assets and model appropriate service intervals to get in front of potential device failures. “One really good benefit of having this much available asset data is how we’ve been able to trend overall product issues. After a certain time, we can start to look at work orders and maybe serial numbers and spot trends in the data,” the service director said. These insights allow the customer to perform just-in-time service on affected units and create a right-sized maintenance program, reducing unnecessary truck rolls and equipment downtime. “Reducing truck rolls reduces operating costs way more than cutting any administration because you’re eliminating unnecessary work,” they further added.
“One really good benefit of having this much available asset data is how we’ve been able to trend overall product issues. After a certain time, we can start to look at work orders and maybe serial numbers and spot trends in the data.”
DIRECTOR OF Service Solutions and Delivery
The TrueContext platform offers complete control in terms of where the analytics data is kept and how it is handled. The field operations team has the option to host the data within TrueContext or write it back to integrated systems like ServiceMax through data destinations, thereby overcoming the problem of siloing information between platforms.
Outcomes
Immediately after the deployment of TrueContext, the customer slashed the required time for administrative work in the field from at least one hour to just 15 minutes, reflecting a 75% decrease. The digital workflows also accelerated data input by days, going from up to 48 hours to same-day availability across the system. The reduction in administrative burden has allowed FSEs to keep their focus on delivering quality service at every customer touchpoint.
With full access to product trends through available device records and service histories, the customer is progressively advancing toward a predictive service model by performing preventive maintenance at just the right time to avoid asset downtime. Having a service engineer show up without being called, know that a critical part is about to go bad, and replace it in as little time as possible creates the great customer experience that the company strives to deliver in the coming years. “If you can get your corrective maintenance to near zero, you’re driving more things than you realize,” they remarked.
Looking forward, the customer is excited about further iterating on the already robust TrueContext deployment. Next in his blueprint are multi-language forms and documents that will significantly enhance information sharing across international teams. The team is also eager to explore how voice-based LLMs can not only reduce manual typing on the ground — cutting documentation time by a further 80%, down to one minute — but also accurately guide technicians on complex jobs by integrating AI into the broader field service tech stack.
In the end, the company’s objective is to deliver products that keep humming along to customers, performing optimally, and staying online with as little interruption as possible. “No product’s perfect, but if you can make the experience perfect, or near perfect, that’s where you want to be,” they concluded.
“Reducing truck rolls reduces operating costs way more than cutting any administration because you’re eliminating unnecessary work.”
DIRECTOR OF Service Solutions and Delivery
