5 Ways Service Maintenance Can Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
By Sar
A business blessing in disguise – visibility and traceability in field service are boosting carbon reporting and delivering performance improvements and financial efficiencies
Regulation has been a crucial part of carbon awareness, action and planning. In recent years, investors have been pushing companies to report on carbon neutrality and sustainability goals and progress against those goals.
But you still frequently hear from companies that they are not able to baseline and measure how they are doing against carbon reduction and sustainability targets. Reducing carbon equates to reduced energy consumption and increased efficiencies – and in the case of service teams that can also mean increased customer satisfaction.
For any company with field service teams, there are a lot of wins to be had through the implementation of intelligent service management tools. Field service management (FSM) can transform organisations and their relationship with customers. By its very nature of enabling visibility and traceability of assets and optimization of service teams, FSM has the ability to help businesses baseline, measure and manage their carbon footprint and sustainability goals. But it can also help reduce emissions. Here, we outline five reasons why.
Improving first-time fix rates
At the most basic level, FSM drives better visibility into a service provider’s installed base, the maintenance history of those assets, as well as their serviceable parts. This helps service organisations get the right tech, with the right parts and the right qualifications needed to fix assets the first time, therefore improving first time fix rates. This reduces carbon footprints by reducing truck rolls to customer sites and emergency shipments of parts needed for repairs.
Optimising call outs
Scheduling engines in FSM solutions are becoming smarter, leveraging AI to do assisted or automated scheduling. Algorithms can support route optimisation and reduce drive times, grouping technician visits according to proximity, as well as incorporating real time traffic information. With better visibility to technician skillsets, schedulers can make better decisions and ensure they are sending the technician with the skillsets needed to fix equipment the first time. Data from scheduling engines also allows service providers to make projections about how many engineers, with what skillets they will need in the future and where to place them, to optimize resource utilisation. By placing the right technicians with the right skillsets closer to the assets they need to support, service providers can further reduce their carbon footprint.
Using predictive analytics
FSM technology combined with remote monitoring and analytics enables organisations to become better at predicting when assets will fail. It allows organizations to implement preventative maintenance plans based on accurate asset data, reducing emergency call-outs and unexpected asset failures. It allows organizations to make better use of remote engineers to solve asset issues: When service providers have visibility to asset data, and can combine that information with the knowledge gained through years of hands-on experience of their field engineers, they are able to increase remote support of assets while at the same time helping customers make better long-term asset lifecycle decisions.
Creating intelligent inventory
Having a better understanding of why assets fail, and which parts trigger those failures, provides important insights that allow organisations to make better inventory management decisions. Parts supply chain management can be costly and create carbon impacts, so using data analytics to optimise inventory makes a lot of commercial and environmental sense. FSM can help organisations minimise emergency shipments and the associated carbon impact by using predictive data to identify key parts that will be needed for a service repair. With this intelligence, organisations can start to re-think inventory planning strategies, using localised stores to be nearer customers and their field engineers or even implement on-demand printing of 3D parts.
Enabling carbon-neutral R&D
Field service teams can be a source of product and part intelligence for R&D and reliability teams. Using FSM data to identify patterns in machine performance, service teams can collaborate with product research and development departments as well as reliability engineering teams to enable improvements, including more carbon-neutral, energy-efficient designs. This can also apply to upgrades, using performance data to identify where and how assets can be upgraded to improve efficiencies. Can products be modified or upgraded to be more sustainable? Asset data can enable a circular economy approach to products that reduces carbon impacts but also reduces cost and increases customer satisfaction by providing the data to make environmentally friendly asset lifecycle decisions. With the use of FMS technologies, service providers can baseline and measure how they are doing against carbon emission targets and provide concrete data touchpoints to validate their sustainability and carbon neutrality journey.
Companies can leverage their FSM solutions to baseline existing performance on KPIs, such as first-time fix rates, utilization rates, asset failure rates, emergency shipments and stranded or obsolete inventory. This has historically been challenging or impossible due to a lack of visibility and systems capability. By tracking the improvement to these metrics as they progress in their FSM usage and journey, organizations can get “real” data touchpoints to support their sustainability and carbon neutrality journey.
