Field Service Management in the maintenance industry
Generally speaking, the primary goal of industrial maintenance is to ensure the availability of equipment and machines in a production environment. It can include several missions such as functional controls, maintenance, repair or replacement of equipment, machines or industrial infrastructures. These missions can be part of preventive or corrective maintenance.
Corrective maintenance very often involves interventions in the field, most often at customers’ sites. In order to optimize Field Service, most of the manufacturing companies have set up an organization and tools that allow them to coordinate the work of the technicians, to schedule the interventions and to monitor the operations and the possible interactions with the customers. But to evaluate the performance of the processes and tools implemented, it is important to track and measure Key Performance Indicators or KPIs.
These indicators can be specific to each company, but we have identified generic indicators relevant to industrial field service. The most important thing for you will be to choose the ones that are most relevant to your business and that can be acted upon to improve your productivity.
To determine the four or five most important KPIs, ask yourself the following questions:
- What are the most important goals for my service this year?
- How do we get the information we need?
- How do we get this information to the right people?