How will self-driving cars and drones change field service?

We’ll alternate terms in this post. You might be familiar with the concept of ‘drones,’ otherwise known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). A few years ago on 60 Minutes, Jeff Bezos showed Charlie Rose a future where drone delivery of a recent online order is a potential reality. Based on recent U.S. Senate bills, that reality might be closer than we all think.

Drones, though, are just a type of unmanned system. Self-driving cars are the same concept, although obviously they don’t fly. (We might need to give that some more time.)

How do these two major unmanned vehicles -- drones and self-driving cars -- fit into the future of field service organizations?

Self-driving cars

Numerous major companies are experimenting with this right now, and while the regulatory aspect is somewhat far off, this is almost guaranteed to be a fairly common element of society within a few generations.

Some people are terrified by a world of self-driving cars, and there are legitimate concerns there. However, it should be noted that human user error is responsible for almost all accidents on the road -- so self-driving cars would actually be safer.

Most of the benefits to a field service organization come on the technician side. The technician would be able to focus on other aspects of his or her next appointment, such as the logistics of what needs to be done or brushing up on manuals related to the part or machine being serviced. The focus is no longer on driving, as the car will do that.

If one of the features of self-driving cars becomes best-in-class navigation -- as opposed to a human being who believes he or she knows the best way, then runs into a traffic jam -- then this would also help with appointments and reduce any potential bullwhip effects. (A ‘bullwhip effect’ is when a technician has multiple appointments in a given day and the first one runs late, likely meaning all the rest will now run late as well.) Better appointment arrival will increase customer satisfaction, which is good for business.

Drones

Some of the immediate benefits of drones in field service include:

• Infrastructure monitoring
• The ability to look at machines and equipment in hard-to-reach places
• Aerial mapping
• Heat or thermal imaging, which could allow you to see if a machine was overheating
• Drones that follow the technician and record his or her progress and process for future training of new technicians

Simply put, both drones and self-driving cars would achieve two major goals for any field service business: they’d increase your access to information (good), while reducing the time it takes to garner that information (even better). Since most effective field service management is about better data and information achieved within a productive use of time, unmanned systems could be a huge value-add for your FSO.

That’s true of many emergent future technologies and innovations. All will change field service in some major way. But what are the core technologies emerging now? And how will they change field service? We put together an eBook on that exact topic, which you can download. 

Written by Shloma Baum