Watch the ServiceMax 20.1 Release webinar on-demand here

As the digital transformation is picking up speed and becomes more pervasive, even companies who were slow to embrace this phenomenon are now in the race. Manufacturers in asset-centric industries recognize that in addition to having a comprehensive understanding of their customers, they must also have this level of understanding when it comes to their assets. This means knowing how their equipment is doing once it has left their premises, as well as enabling their workforce with the right tools to keep the equipment up and running. For asset-centric service companies, ensuring consistent uptime for customers is everything.

To help companies achieve their uptime goals, the ServiceMax 20.1 release delivers new asset-driven features and enhancements that improve service operations and drive the productivity of technicians, dispatchers, and administrative staff.

Below are the key innovations in the 20.1 release:

ServiceMax Go: Mobile Activity Space

Release 20.1 introduces Mobile Activity Space, a framework that allows customers to extend and customize the ServiceMax Go app to meet unique requirements. This new functionality drives maximum productivity for technicians by enabling them to do things faster and more effortlessly.

Fully embedded in ServiceMax Go, Mobile Activity Space has access to ServiceMax data, works in offline mode, and works side by side with other ServiceMax service flows.

Service Board: Project Scheduling

Available as part of the ServiceMax Complex Jobs add on, Project Scheduling supports service organizations that handle installations, overhauls, and decommissions. These service scenarios require multiple visits in a defined sequence by multiple technicians over more than one day. Dispatchers scheduling this type of work have to manually translate a project management plan into work orders on their technicians’ calendars—a task that is both cumbersome and time-consuming. Levering the new feature Project Scheduling, dispatchers can now easily:

  • Import projects tasks from Microsoft Project into Service Board, our state-of-the-art scheduling tool
  • View and assign resources either manually or automatically through Schedule Optimization
  • Publish the project for execution, thereby creating and assigning work orders

Service Board: Long-Term Planner

Another new feature that lightens the burden of dispatchers is the Long-Term Planner. Many service organizations create preventive maintenance jobs 12 or 18 months in advance rather than month by month. Long-term planning helps them better understand how many resources and parts they will need, and also enables them to give plenty of notice to their customers. The downside is that manually scheduling thousands of preventive maintenance jobs will keep your dispatchers busy for a long time.

Service Board’s new feature now allows you to use our optimization engine to auto-schedule these work orders. Instead of requiring hours of work, scheduling preventive maintenance jobs now only takes a few minutes to complete.

Service Flow Designer: Track Process Changes

Track Process Changes is a new feature of our Service Flow Designer. Now, when modifying Service Flow Management (SFM) transactions, all changes to the configuration are captured in a table that can be exported and shared with auditors. Track Process Changes addresses regulatory requirements such as SOX compliance and helps administrators to identify modified entities and the impact of changes on dependent entities.

Installed Base Management: Technical Attributes

No other feature of our platform signifies asset centricity better than Installed Base Management. Customers using Installed Base Management get real-time visibility into their equipment’s service history, usage, location, and performance. Release 20.1 enables customers to easily capture, view, and analyze Technical Attributes like temperature or Odometer readings.

Analyzing this historical data will help quality engineering understand what happened over a period of time and answer questions such as what led to a specific failure and when did the failure start.

Zinc Embedded Collaboration

In Zinc, conversations can be tied to an asset record, providing in-depth context around the asset for anyone who joins the conversation. Now all users of the ServiceMax platform—whether they are using the mobile or the browser-based version—can leverage Zinc’s complete feature set to easily and effectively communicate with each other.

Zinc Message Cards

Zinc Message Cards allow you to send formatted interactive content that gives the recipient the option to choose a desired action, such as triggering a dedicated service flow. Message cards can link directly to ServiceMax or other external systems, are fully configurable, and make it easy for ServiceMax users to collaborate and provide faster problem resolution for technicians.

The foundation of Zinc Message Cards is a framework that we will use to deliver more innovations in the near future. The Zinc Message Cards are but the first installment.

Watch the ServiceMax 20.1 Release webinar on-demand here to learn more about these new features!

ABOUT Katharina Streater

Avatar photoAs the former senior product marketing manager at ServiceMax, Katharina Streater drove the scheduling, contractor management, and analytics capabilities of the ServiceMax platform. Passionate about technology, Katharina had extensive knowledge in analytics, AI, and held several marketing positions over 14 years at OpenText, a leader in Enterprise Information Management solutions. A native of Germany, she deepened the international character of the ServiceMax product marketing team.