Gilbert Owusu – författare

Service chain management enables service organisations to improve customer satisfaction and reduce operational costs through intelligent and optimised forecasting, planning and scheduling of the service chain, and its associated resources such as people, networks and other assets. The area is quite broad, covering field force and workforce automation, network and asset planning and also aspects of customer relationship management, human resources systems and enterprise resource planning. Furthermore, it addresses the key challenge of how all these technologies and systems are integrated into a cohesive blueprint.

In this book, Christos Voudouris and his group together with experts from industry and academia present the latest innovations and technologies used to manage the operations of a service company. The viewpoints presented are, based on the BT experience and on associated research and development in collaborating universities and partner companies. The focus is on real-world challenges and how technologies can be used to overcome practical problems in a "don’t just survive, thrive!" approach.

The unique combination of technologies, experiences and systems, looked at from the different perspectives of service providers and users and combined with advice on successful benefit realisation and agile delivery of solutions, makes this an indispensable read for managers and system architects in the service industry.

The drive to realise operational efficiencies, improve customer service, develop new markets and accelerate the introduction of new products has substantially increased the complexity of field service operations. To maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of these operations, organisations have embarked on a wide range of transformation programmes that have sought to introduce automation through the use of workforce management technologies. Despite the potential business value that can be provided by such transformation programmes, too often, the automation technologies have not been fully utilised and their expected benefits have as such not been realised.

Scholars of organisation change argue that the success of any transformation programme is a function of how well the technical, political, structural and social aspects of a specific project have been managed. The objective of this edited book is to provide insights into how organisations might successfully transform their field service operations with the help of workforce management technologies. Accordingly, the book is organised into four sections: Section A “The Case for Transforming Service and Field Operations” explains the rationale as to why organisations should actively consider transforming their service and field operations, while Section B presents various “Methods, Models and Enabling Technologies for Transforming Service and Field Operations”. In Section C, a number of  “Case Studies” illustrate how new technologies can be applied to field and service operations to deliver concrete business benefits. Lastly, Section D considers “Challenges, Outcomes and Future Directions”.

Overall, this book provides valuable insights into how to successfully transform field service operations with automated technologies. It draws on years of experience from different industries and from different perspectives on realising change. It is aimed at managers, technologists, change agentsand scholars who are interested in field service operations in general and the use of advanced computing technologies in this area in particular.