As David Krebs of VDC pointed earlier this week, rolling out mobile technology and BYOD solutions in field service is a bigger challenge than most think. Krebs’ findings, citing widespread lack of support for BYOD among surveyed companies, dovetails with another new report from IFS. In a survey it  conducted with North American industrial companies with $50 million in revenue or more, IFS found that the challenge doesn’t just reside with internal technology or devices — but rather lack of access to customers’ systems and databases, particularly in the medical sector, that would help streamline maintenance and repairs.
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Need for Mobile Data Access

According to a brief writeup in Today’s Medical Developments, “companies with field service management departments report low levels of access to systems used to manage work at customer sites.” According to the study, nearly 75 percent of surveyed companies with field service groups “report little to no mobile access to enterprise service and asset management data from mobile devices. The study also indicates that companies with teams of field service technicians only have marginally better mobile data access than those performing service management internally – on their own equipment and assets.”

As IFS North America Senior Vice President Larry Laux summed up: “Given that field service management work takes place at remote locations, it is obvious that the ability to interact with the software used to manage that work is extremely valuable. The vast majority of field service management software vendors offer mobile solutions, but these are clearly not being leveraged fully.”

Click here to register to download the full IFS report.