The Internet of Things – what have you done for me lately?

A really great part of my job is talking to companies about what they wish they could do with technology.  Frequently by the time our solution specialist team allow me anywhere near a customer the sales team and the customer have been working together to come up with a solution which fixes a business challenge, or allows them to do something that they haven’t been able to do before.

One of the solution elements that has been coming up a lot in the last 18 months is the Internet of Things (IOT), especially since we were named as a finalist for World Wide Microsoft IOT Partner of the Year, based on the work we did with Berendsen.

A really interesting trend that has come up a lot from these conversations is the “so what?” question.  Organisations are pretty comfortable getting a new CRM, ERP or BI solution – after all they have probably had one for many years by now, but on the face of it IOT is something completely new, but is it really?  In my eyes all IOT gives you is a LOT of new data – interesting data I agree, but in reality it’s just a lot more of something you weren’t short of anyway!

An obvious area for our team at eBECS is how could we make use of IOT to help our field service customers gain incremental benefits by combining IOT, Field Service and Big Data to gain new benefits that you wouldn’t have been able to realise before – something Microsoft is calling “Connected Field Service”.

With Connected Field Service, which is part of the Field Service App in Microsoft Dynamics 365, organisations are going to potentially be able to gain some massive benefits including: 

• Reduced downtime – knowing that something is going to break before it does, and proactively fixing it is more than just better customer service, it offers customers a true differentiation between your products and the competition
• Address issues faster – wouldn’t it be great if rather than sending out someone to fix an issue you are notified that there is a problem and fix it remotely without your customer even knowing that something was wrong (as well as having an additional service to sell to your customers)?
• Reduce the number of calls – on average it costs around $300 to send out a field technician.  Making sure you have the right technician, with the right skills and the right tools every time when you do have to have someone onsite is not only a great service for your customers, but saves you money – how often do your field technicians have to do more than one visit?
• Visibility of your products – Do you actually know what your customers are doing with the products you have built?  Getting data from your product allows you to see where there are weaknesses, improving your products continuously based on how your customers use them, not just based on how you think they use them

Hopefully you enjoyed this article, and if so I would love to hear what you think in the comments below.

My key takeaways are below – what are yours?

• While a lot of people are talking about the Internet of Things, what do you actually want to do with the data?
• What services would you like to be able to offer your customers that you can’t today?
• Could these new services been an opportunity to cross or upsell your customers on a new service, or, even better offer something that your competition can’t do?

We have put together a short video about how you can stop stressing about Field Service – please have a look and let us know what you think!  And if you would like to find out more about Field Service in Microsoft Dynamics 365, please let us know, we would love to talk to you.