Digital Twin asset data optimize maintenance and support

Before the arrival of IIoT enabled asset monitoring, field service technicians would struggle with delays from unidentified malfunctions or inaccurate diagnosis resulting in high intervention bills, unnecessary truck rolls and a bad customer service reputation.
Businesses introducing new use cases based on connected assets, as part of their IIoT strategy, are incentivized by the opportunity to boost efficiency and reduce costs of their field service organization.
But what is the readiness level of your field service in real life and how can you push to a higher level of ROI maturity?

In this blog, you will learn how IIoT asset visibility can drastically improve field service efficiency if you manage these 7 key indicators of your field service success.

To learn more about Waylay Digital Twin, visit our Waylay Digital Twin Homepage
To find out how to create a strong business case for connecting IIoT and OT to Salesforce, read the 5 Key benefits of connected assets in Salesforce blog

1. Avoid truck rolls
Giving customer service departments a real-time view of the actual state of assets, asset alarms and asset environmental conditions is extremely powerful. This can be complemented by the execution of diagnostics tests to further assess and confirm the health of the asset. The cheapest truck roll is not having a truck roll at all. Remote problem resolution also minimizes health risks during the current COVID-19 pandemic.


2. Increase first-time right repair
Prior to the field service intervention, execute diagnostic tests based on digital twin asset data to identify the root cause of an issue. This ensures that field technicians have the right spare parts with them and hence increases the first time right repair, avoiding follow-up technician visits.

3. Decrease repair time & increase the number of interventions per day
Knowing the root cause helps to solve the problem faster. Giving a field service technician access to historical asset data while onsite helps to diagnose and resolve problems faster. Increasing the first time repair rate and decreasing the average repair time naturally leads to higher productivity and the ability to schedule more interventions on a daily basis.

4. Avoid an overload of senior field service technicians
With an aging population, more and more experienced field service technicians are retiring and their work needs to be taken over by either more junior colleagues or outsourced personnel. Having the appropriate level of preprocessing of IIoT data and root cause analysis can help to lower the threshold to get problems resolved and reduces the number of tickets and interventions that require a visit from the (more expensive) ‘expert team’.

5. Improve SLA compliance and increase customer satisfaction
Real-time IIoT asset visibility helps to increase the predictability of field service interventions and the number of interventions that can be done in time, compliant with the customer SLA and increasing overall customer satisfaction and customer service reputation.

6. Evolve from time-based to condition-based maintenance
Current field service interventions are still mainly planned according to a fixed schedule of minor or major maintenance interventions. Data on actual usage and performance of assets allows to do this in a more economical manner based on actual usage data.

7. Transform from break-and-fix to outcome-based service contracts
The traditional approach of the one-off sale of assets comes with an associated break-and-fix tactic where the customer is charged for the required field service interventions. From a customer perspective, any breakdown of equipment or interruption can lead to unplanned downtime and loss of revenues. Hence, the world is moving to outcome-based service contracts with an associated guaranteed performance level. Real-time asset visibility with condition-based and predictive maintenance are key components in this servitization of business models.

In brief, IIoT asset visibility helps businesses to reach a new level of field service maturity. Asset visibility empowers domain experts to better manage their asset portfolio, improve the planning of interventions or avoid them altogether. Service departments and call center agents can play a key role and initiate asset telemetry diagnosis before field service needs to be involved. Field service engineers and technicians will grow in more interesting roles, based on improved asset insights and better intervention planning. Thus, IIoT asset visibility will help to increase profitability, will improve customer service and will bring a significant boost to field service operations efficiency.

If you want to know more about how Waylay addresses the challenges of the Digital Twin concept, please get in touch with us and ask for a demo.

To learn more about Waylay Digital Twin for Salesforce, visit our Waylay Digital Twin Homepage

Read our next blog in this blog series: Understanding Waylay Digital Twin