Coresystems has been constantly working to adapt processes even more to customers. For this purpose, they have expanded the portfolio with a mobile Field Service Management solution. Coresystems’ cloud-based field service management solution was acquired by SAP in 2018. Coresystems remains on the market as an independent company.
Easy Engineering: Tell us about some of the most successful project/projects from this year.
Coresystems: We had a very successful project with Inicom Service GmbH, which is a pure service company. They provide service operations, repair services and equipment rental for well-known market leaders in the sanitary industry. With implementing the SAP FSM solution by Coresystems, Inicom is able to respond up to 90 % faster and more efficient, to increasing customer demands. Their reporting could be improved by 75 %. This leads to saving one working hour per service technician per day, that can now be used for serving more customers.
E.E: What were the challenges that you encountered?
Coresystems: One of the main challenges for Inicom was the planning itself and its complexity in allocating free capacity. Operational planning previously caused a lot of hassle, which led to a high rate of error. In order to schedule jobs with customers and coordinate service technician appointments, a lot of communication effort was required. Another challenge was the multi-level distribution in the sanitary business, where information about the service status has to be distributed between the parties’ end customer, installer, wholesaler and manufacturer. But not only the distribution of information was a challenge, at the end of each service process an accurate invoice should be issued. Unfortunately, it is not always known from the beginning who will pay for the material and/or service, e.g., it could be a combination of end customer and manufacturer.
E.E: How did you overcome the challenges?
Coresystems: Inicom looked for a suitable IT solution that allowed additions or changes to be made to individual work operations at any time and with flexibility—without restarting the entire route planning of service technicians. An additional important point in the Inicom specifications: The desired solution had to be intuitively accessible to every employee at any location. And Coresystems had the matching solution: all processes and procedures can now be transparently displayed. All customer information and photos of work locations can be collated there and easily downloaded – central aspects of SAP FSM that quickly convinced Inicom. Since introducing the SAP FSM solution, all important operational processes run remotely at Inicom.
E.E: What ranges of products/solutions helped the beneficiary in the project/projects?
Coresystems: For the planning, we relied on the planning board and the corresponding modules of the SAP FSM Cloud solution. This provides out-of-the-box tools for planning purposes. On the ERP side, we implemented our own solutions Coresuite Customize and Coresuite Designer to meet the requirements. These AddOns allow to define an individual Layout and to integrate it into the ERP system.
E.E: How were these products/solutions used to optimize the client’s business?
Coresystems: The SAP FSM planning board provides a set of tools to visualize and find free slots based on AI planning. We needed to set up logic based on distances and skills to help the dispatcher find the most suitable technician for the job. For all information purposes around the status of a service call, we created a mix of cloud-based business rules that can be triggered by almost any situation during service execution, and ERP-based customized rules that respond to changes in the system.
E.E: What innovative features do the products / solutions have?
Coresystems: On the FSM side, there is mainly automatic planning (AI planning), which offers a number of different policies to automate the planning process. A big plus here is the ability to easily customize the planning logic based on customizable planning policies, where you can even influence the importance/weight of the planning parameters. With Coresuite Customize, it is possible to react to many of the existing process steps in the ERP system. Once the trigger is known, the rules are able to change data or send an email or print something or many processes more.
E.E: What products / solutions are you going to launch in the future?
Coresystems: We are working on a new machine learning product that empowers service companies in unlocking the full potential of their field service data. This product will support our customers in better understanding their data and provide them with actionable insights guiding them in optimizing their service delivery processes.
E.E: How will these products / solutions help future clients?
Coresystems: While most large enterprise service originations have successfully digitized key parts of their field service process, the data that are gathered in these systems is often not utilized beyond basic metric reporting. Incoming service requests, dynamic availability changes of technicians and customers, accurately capturing and predicting the root cause of service requests, and understanding the parts and skills required to resolve these requests rely on the knowledge of your most experienced dispatchers. When multiple customers report equipment failures, routine maintenance schedules are compromised, making weeks of diligent manually planned tasks obsolete, Often, the issue is compounded because important scheduled maintenance tasks are delayed, leaving your planners frustrated and customers dissatisfied. At Coresystems we aim to help our clients unlock the true value of their service data and use it to learn from the past and predict the future.
E.E: What are your estimations for the end of the year?
Coresystems: In recent weeks and months, we have laid a good foundation. Especially for our new product suite we onboarded great developers who understand the complexity of AI and machine learning and get supported by our existing staff to bring this new product to life. Our teams are picking up speed now and next year we will launch our new product based on the foundation we have laid now.
Coresystems AG
Dorfstrasse 69, 5210 Windisch,
Switzerland
T: +41 56 500 22 22