Not every service job is the same. On one hand, there’s the high-volume scenario where service technicians complete a high number (more than five) of relatively short and homogenous service jobs. In that scenario, efficiency gains typically result from schedule and routing optimization. On the other end of the spectrum are the bigger jobs servicing complex equipment, which requires thorough diagnosis and planning. Technicians usually perform fewer than four of these jobs each day.

But there are also service jobs that are, in order of magnitude, more complex: overhauls, installations, complex upgrades. Examples include upgrading a gas turbine that has to be taken off the grid for a week, or overhauling a jet engine that grounds the aircraft for a week or longer. Even though such jobs are often scheduled months in advance as part of planned maintenance, every offline hour represents an opportunity cost where the equipment isn’t delivering on its intended economic outcome.

These complex jobs require not just one technician but a crew or even multiple crews that will be working over several days or weeks around the clock, frequently in shifts. These jobs often involve many tasks that have to be planned and executed in the right order, considering various dependencies. This is a different class of complexity than a single technician handling two to three jobs per day alone.

Large service jobs are part of the planned maintenance regimen for both equipment operators (i.e. companies that own and service their own equipment and must anticipate service costs) and customers that use our field service management product (i.e. companies that typically service equipment owned and operated by their customers). We’ve introduced functionality to manage complex service jobs in our recently announced Asset Service Management (ASM) product, tailored to equipment operators, but our OEM customers that handle complex jobs could find this functionality useful, as well.

The new capabilities include crew management, allowing planners and dispatchers to assemble persistent crews of people with required skills, juggle daily availability issues in real-time, and even assign the entire crew to a job. These jobs might take days or weeks to complete, across multiple visits, and often require overnight stays onsite.

Shift planning is another new capability that enables planners to set up a shift schedule based on available templates, and schedule technicians or crews to the jobs based on their shift assignment. Those are just some of the new features introduced in the new ASM product from ServiceMax.

With the latest release, ServiceMax expands its use cases all the way to the ability to service jobs of various scale, all the way to the really complex ones that span multiple days and require teams of people working in multiple shifts on a multitude of tasks with interdependencies. Read more about how ServiceMax handles complex jobs.