What Is Field Service Management?
Credit to Author: Atin Chhabra| Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2019 14:17:04 +0000
Field services is an umbrella term that consists of multiple services offered to industry for seamless functioning. Industries that have modern day infrastructure and machinery are more prone to breakdown. To optimise the operations, one needs to have field services in place.
While talking about field services, one largely refers to services like:
- Repair: If equipment is broken or a machine does not perform the required tasks, a service technician makes a field visit to solve the problem, or the machine is sent to the service centre.
- Maintenance: Maintenance is done to ensure that the parts that can undergo any wear and tear are in place. It is the preventive part of Field Service. In order to prevent any breakdown in the machinery, certain activities are performed such as replacing wear parts and performing inspections. Inspection and servicing on regular intervals help to minimise breakdowns and operational downtime due to any shortcomings in the machine. There are three types of maintenance field service:
- Preventive: Keeping a regular routine check will avoid any sudden or serious breakdown. The service providing company schedules these preventive maintenance visits based on working and statistics of specific parts of the machine and extent to which they are used. Using accumulated data, they can estimate the best time for replacements to avoid serious operational problems.
- Predictive: Predictive maintenance can be installed in an industrial setup to avoid an unwanted breakdown in the machinery. It works on the basis of data provided by machine sensors and SCADA Systems.
- Corrective: If a machine, equipment or device does not work to irs capacity, it calls for corrective maintenance. In this case, the service provider sends a field service technician who will assess the issue and perform the necessary amends or take it to the service centre.
- Installation and commissioning: Complex machinery needs assistance in installation and initiation. For heavy duty machines, the technician runs a series of tests to make sure the equipment is fully operational and yields the required output.
Schneider Electric India offers a complete set of services from design studies to modernisation. It also offers automation training for employees to induce them to the domain of automated machinery, HMI analytics and helps them understand the functioning of the machine. The aim is to help in maximising the output from the existing business infrastructure. In addition to the traditional services they also offer detailed reporting, testing and analytics of system and the related components. The services have largely contributed to reducing the OpEx, lowered down the operational costs through data centres. It has upscaled what the industry could deliver in consideration to the product or service, employees and the end user.
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