Enable field workers with remote assistance

Organisations with essential frontline employees in the field are facing a unique set of challenges responding to the COVID-19 crisis. With travel restrictions and many technicians working remotely, the challenge is to keep employees safe and healthy while maintaining business-critical functions and continuing to support customers.

Challenges:

• Some frontline employees must continue to work onsite and may require critical information or expertise from those located elsewhere.
• Many companies are working to balance travel restrictions with business continuity including critical repairs, maintenance, or training.
• Organisations are seeking solutions to train employees and provide coaching and expertise to staff working onsite or in the field.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist uses mixed reality to enable frontline workers across industries including healthcare, retail, and manufacturing to work together from different locations, accessing information and experts from anywhere, hands-free on Microsoft HoloLens, Android, or iOS devices.

Use cases：

• Complete critical repairs and maintenance by allowing an onsite worker to share real-time views of a job site or equipment with experts working remotely, helping to solve issues faster and eliminate travel.
• Enable clinicians who are self-isolating to continue to share valuable expertise by directing, coaching, and educating healthcare workers who are onsite.
• Empower onsite inspectors and auditors to collaborate with remote inspectors to evaluate and document asset quality.
• Solving an issue often requires providing experts located offsite with visuals, measurements, and views of the tasks at hand. In addition to getting the expert’s help directly, technicians can solve issues faster if they can receive instructions, diagrams, or photos from the collaborator.

If your organisation uses Dynamics 365 to manage field service work orders, or you are considering Dynamics 365 Field Service, SXiQ can help enable your first-line workers using Remote Assist on mobile devices and even HoloLens.

A proven framework for end-to-end field service enablement:

Enabling Remote Assist within Dynamics 365 Field Service requires careful planning and strategy. The key is determining business priorities for deployment of frontline workers and the devices and communication channels they are going to use, to optimise rosters and results. Having a well-planned and executed implementation path is an absolute necessity, you really don’t want to leave it to improvisation what it takes to “put hands” on business-critical machineries when delivering a maintenance work. Our experience in enabling remote workers follows a few and clear steps and takes advantage of the tips we learned along the way:

1. Understand your customer & field service processes and plan the deployment of remote assistance tools.
2. Optionally, move any existing roster calendars to Dynamics 365, minimizing downtime and ensuring continuity of operation.
3. Optimise your Field Service deployment with Remote Assist capability, on any supported device.
4. Continue to secure and manage all your Dynamics 365 products consistently.

Speak to us if your organisation could do with assistance to plan and implement Dynamics 365 Field Service to successfully and optimally support your field staff during Covid-19 and beyond.