Dan Hedstrom is vice president, System Solutions & Services, with Cubic Transportation Systems.
Making things go in the transportation business means tracking a lot of moving parts. All puns aside, from IT incident management, to field services, staying on top of issues as they arise, and preventing them whenever possible, is critical in order to provide top notch service and maintain efficiency.
One way to do this is to implement an Enterprise Service Management system to manage services throughout the organization. Cubic Transportation Systems recently did this, and the organization has increased visibility, efficiency and customer service.
From IT to Field Service
Cubic originally deployed ServiceNow’s ITSM solution to manage back-office systems in London, England, as part of an ISO 20000 certification initiative. Once this deployment went successfully, it expanded globally. In doing this, it felt that ServiceNow would also help better manage field service operations. After all, there is little process difference between servicing a ticketing machine and IT Infrastructure.
Cubic is currently tackling its third field service deployment in North America and has many other locations on the roadmap. When Cubic began, field service relied almost entirely on paper-driven processes, which prevented it from easily measuring and optimizing field service operations. The lag in updating records, along with the propensity for human error with manual transcription, left much to be desired in terms of precision and visibility.
Automation Drives Productivity and Visibility
Now, many aspects of field services are automated through ServiceNow’s Field Service Management (FSM) product. Cubic monitors all ticketing machines, raising an incident in ServiceNow when a machine reports an issue.
The dispatch center then assigns and dispatches technicians to repair the equipment through ServiceNow. Assignments are automatically pushed to the technician’s mobile device so the technician doesn’t need to check in to inquire about next assignments. If a technician is lightly loaded, dispatchers can also schedule preventive maintenance activities for the technician, maximizing their productivity.
When a technician arrives on site, they have the equipment’s full service history. Using their mobile device, they can find out who serviced the equipment previously, and exactly what they did. This allows the technician to diagnose and fix the issue more quickly. The technician can also use their mobile device to capture information — for example, images of the equipment — all of which is instantly recorded in the system. The data is real time, and the lag and error experienced before with a paper heavy system are no longer issues.
Real-Time Asset Tracking
Since deploying ServiceNow for field services, Cubic can also manage assets in real time. Technicians use their mobile devices to scan equipment barcodes when they replace failed components, instantly updating the equipment configuration in the system. The data is always accurate, since there is no possibility of manual transcription errors. Cubic has also switched to real-time stock transfers, so there is a complete picture of which components are in Cubic's storerooms, and which are on which trucks. Cubic's trucks are like roving storerooms in that sense, and Cubic can do this without regular stock checks.
A Global Platform, A Global Knowledge Base
Cubic looks forward to having a cohesive global platform with a worldwide view of operations. Cubic anticipates analyzing how components perform around the world, using predictive analysis to schedule preventive maintenance to, hopefully, replace devices nearing their lifespans before they fail. Cubic maintains very strict SLAs with its customers, and device outages can cost significant penalties. Cubic's goal is to track typical event patterns, then to predict failures with enough advance notice to replace or repair components beforehand.
By leveraging a global platform, Cubic will be able to sustain a global knowledge base. Efficiency will increase as disparate teams won’t need to reinvent the wheel when a challenge comes along that has already been addressed and overcome by another group. Sharing intelligence across the globe, with every technician, customer service is enhanced, money is saved and business charges forward.
