As field technicians create and collect just as much data (and perhaps more) as staff in the office, field service management software has become a must-have for any organization with field staff. Your organization's ability to efficiently capture and leverage data - both back at the office and in the field - can have a significant impact on its competitiveness. Your customer and employee experiences can be significantly improved with well-designed mobile apps. However, a poorly-designed app, or one that doesn’t fit your unique requirements, can hamper or restrain your employees, making it imperative that you upgrade your mobile app ASAP.

Field service management software often offers only two unattractive options when organizations reach the limit of their mobile capabilities:

  • Wasting time: Because you are limited by what your field service management solution allows you to do, you’re at the mercy of their developers and update schedule. All you can do is hope they’ll update their software at some point in a way that unlocks the functionality you want.

  • Wasting money: If you can’t wait, you can create your own custom solution that enables your non-standard functionality and add it to your field service management solution. But in today’s competitive market, it can be extremely expensive to find someone who has the right skills for the job.

Luckily, there’s a third option. With a modern, low-code application development platform, the possibilities for rapidly developing custom, fit-for-purpose field service management software have grown exponentially.

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Check out these field service management software examples to see how three leading companies transformed their field service operations for greater efficiency and customer satisfaction by using OutSystems to create custom mobile field service apps.

 

Shawcor Streamlines Its Oil Field Asset Management Processes

As one of the world’s leading providers of pipeline services, Shawcor is responsible for managing more than 100 manufacturing and service facilities in 25 countries around the world. Its customers regularly have massive inventories of one million assets or more to manage and maintain, making it all but impossible to continue to use a paper-based asset management process. But in order to go digital, Shawcor would need to accomodate a 20-year-old legacy system used by its Oilfield Asset Management business.

Shawcor used OutSystems to develop customized mobile applications that connect directly to the company’s ERP backend, allowing it to shortcut the legacy system. The mobile app is used to inspect customer assets and connect inspection data with the ERP directly, instead of forcing staff to keystroke data later when they get back to a desk.

In addition, customers can now access asset information directly, in a self-service fashion, instead of contacting Shawcor.

“Instead of customers needing to email or call, they can quickly go into the customer portal and look up the job. They can access inspection reports and see the real-time status of each asset that we manage for them. The days are gone when we had to exchange documents or other files to answer questions. It’s such a better experience for our customers and has freed up a lot of productivity within our company.”
— Henri Tausch, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Solutions at Shawcor.

Read the full Shawcor story here.

Monadelphous Improves the Mobile Employee Experience

The Australian engineering firm Monadelphous is often called on to oversee massive maintenance projects known as “shut downs'' for its clients. These projects require a multidisciplinary team of more than 100 employees who must all be flown in, accommodated for the length of the project, and then flown out. Often there are multiple such projects running at once, with staff spread across the country.

The firm found that its workforce management system required too much clunky, manual labor to organize each project, schedule travel, and keep remote employees connected. Using OutSystems, Monadelphous built a mobile app called MonaWork that unified all work-related communication and scheduling. The app integrates with the company’s ERP system to ensure calendars, messages, contacts, travel, and accommodation details are always available and up-to-date.

Thanks to the company’s new app, Monadelphous employees are able to focus more on their work instead of sifting through emails, voicemails, and text messages to find critical information, making their lives easier when out in the field.

"We say, when you join Monadelphous, you're more than just an employee, you're part of the Monadelphous family. The MonaWork app, which we delivered on OutSystems, helps us stay true to that promise and has improved our employees' experiences.”
— Angus Hatton, Innovation Project Manager at Monadelphous.

Read the full Monadelphous story here.

Green Cargo Unlocks New Processes and Data for Field Workers

Green Cargo, a Swedish government-owned provider of sustainable rail logistics across Europe, adopted OutSystems as the engine of its digital innovation and cloud development strategy. After bringing development in-house with a new seven-member team, the company was able to quickly build several new applications that run using the data in its existing ERP platform and integrate with its legacy mainframe logistics system.

These applications include the Railyard Mobile App, which allows railyard team members to perform eight essential functions of their jobs directly on their mobile devices rather than using dedicated devices that easily become outdated. The app uses real-time information from the ERP and logistics systems and was built in just three months.

The Predictive Maintenance App uses IoT data from sensors on trains to alert teams to wear on brakes and wheel bearings, so that maintenance can be performed proactively during scheduled downtime. Built by two developers in three months using OutSystems, the app has reduced in-service wheel bearing failure by 50 percent—resulting in significant train operation cost savings.

And the new customer portal application, which Green Cargo is currently rolling out to customers, frees up its customer service team from entering orders manually while also dramatically improving the order experience for customers. The app integrates with customers’ ERP systems for greater transparency and speed, and will soon support additional capabilities, such as full track and trace of consignments, real-time information, and invoicing.

“The alternative for this portal project was to heavily tailor a major CRM package. That could have cost 10 to 15 times more and taken four or five times longer.”
— Ingo Paas, CIO of Green Cargo.

Read the full Green Cargo story here.

Will the Next Best Field Service App Be Yours?

The best field service management software is made, not packaged. OutSystems gives you everything you need to create a customized mobile app designed to help your field service team work faster, smarter, and better.

Learn how OutSystems can help you transform your field service operations for greater efficiency and customer experience.