ServiceMax Core 20.2 Release: Prepare for the Unexpected With Asset-Driven Change Order Management

At ServiceMax we are committed to adding new features to ServiceMax Core that drive value for our customers and enable them to explore new field service use cases. In release 20.2, we deliver key innovations to help service organizations tackle challenges around field change orders.

Field change orders (FCOs) are a fact of life for manufacturers worldwide due to the increasingly shorter cycles in which they bring products to market. By nature, FCOs are always unexpected and handling them is a costly affair. FCOs touch disparate systems, involve multiple stakeholders, and the manual effort required to manage them is immense.

Field change orders need an asset-centric approach. Once you know what is wrong and have defined remedial measures, you need to identify all the assets that are affected. Without the relevant asset data and workflow automation, you will be left with a lot of legwork.

ServiceMax Core 20.2 introduces features that allow you to streamline field change order processes and cut related costs, as well as provide you with a complete audit trail for compliance purposes.

Managing Field Change Orders with ServiceMax Core

Leveraging accurate installed base information—a key tenant of ServiceMax Core—release 20.2 adds a wizard-guided FCO process, automation, and tracking capabilities. Here are the new abilities in detail:

Create new change order – In the first step, you capture all FCO details including the remedial actions and swappable parts.
Define Search – Then you use a dedicated, modern user interface to quickly identify all affected assets by searching your installed base, technical asset attributes, and parts inventory (batch/lot, serialized/non-serialized). The search capabilities also include an easy-to-use expression builder.
Validate and Refine Search Results – After the search returns the list of assets, you confirm the results. In case of data-quality issues, you have the ability to manually add and remove assets from the list.
Trigger automated work order creation – In the last step, with the click of a button, you automatically create work orders for all selected assets.
Track FCO progress – List views give you complete traceability of all FCOs for compliance purposes.

What else is new in release 20.2?

Installed Base Management: Asset Attributes

With this latest release, we added more depth to the Technical Attribute features of Installed Base. Instead of zooming in on historical data by asset, now users can select multiple assets at once, select the attributes they want to track, and define how many data points they want to capture per day. By using the new feature See Attribute History, users have ready access to historical data in list and chart format. This makes it easy to determine the health of chosen assets in a selected date range and helps to monitor trends, detect defects, or inspect the working conditions of all assets.

Parts & Inventory Management

Release 20.2 not only boasts multiple UI improvements for a better user experience, but we also introduce the new Batch/Lot Tracking functionality for Installed Base and Parts Management. What that means is once a part or asset has been defined as stockable, you can further determine if said part/asset should be Batch/Lot Tracking enabled, and if it is Serialized or Non-Serialized. This capability will help service organizations to track parts, find faulty parts, and determine if parts have already been consumed or not.

Service Board

Appointment Proposals is a new assisted-scheduling feature that leverages Schedule Optimization. Based on your objectives, Service Board proposes the best time for work orders to be scheduled. This enables dispatchers to instantly pick the best appointment when interacting with customers.

In addition, Service Board now has a Message Center where dispatchers can quickly review all notifications they received and take appropriate actions.

Release 20.2 enhances our Assisted Scheduling capabilities by offering a smarter, more accurate Travel Time Calculation. Now, customers have the option to not only use a technician’s current location for the Nearest Resource Recommendation but also select a technician’s default location or the location of a prior appointment.

Partial Accept functionality is an enhancement to the Propose Schedule feature that GA’ed in release 20.1. It gives dispatchers more flexibility and saves them time. Now, when the system proposes a schedule, the dispatcher can choose to ‘unselect’ some suggestions before saving the schedule and generating the associated work orders.

In the 20.2 release, we are also launching a number of mobile app enhancements that help technicians be more productive.

ServiceMax Go

In this version of ServiceMax Go, we provide a new mobile Timesheets experience for technicians. That means they can leverage a purpose-built UI that makes it effortless for them to capture holidays, completed work, admin times, and more. This enhancement was driven by customers who need information captured in a certain way, often to fulfill regulatory requirements. The new user interface also reduces data entry errors and ensures that timesheets can be processed more effectively.

Just query and display – no more query, download, and display. With this release, Mobile Activity Space, meant to customize and extend ServiceMax Go, is no longer restricted to device data. Now it is possible to run queries against all data on the server. This new functionality allows you to display a subset of that data on the server any way you want without downloading it to the device. This is specifically important when you need to leverage large data sets.

Other usability improvements include:

Instead of one by one, technicians can now add multiple images to a work order at once
Send push notifications to a queue of people. This helps customers to replace more costly text messages
Improved search results by including server data

Zinc Real-Time Communication: Video Annotations

The 20.2 release builds on the Zinc AR capabilities we launched earlier this year. Now, instead of lengthy explanations, technicians can also—in addition to annotating photos—draw lines and highlight spots on the video feed during a video call.

ServiceMax Live: Head over to ServiceMax’s Linkedin for our next episode of ServiceMax Live on Monday, Oct 28 at 10:30 am PT to chat with experts and learn more about asset-driven change order management and other innovations of ServiceMax Core 20.2.