e-merge Data Solutions: Mobilizing Field Service Management

Field Service Management is more than job allocation and staff management; instead, it is an amalgamation of planning, job distribution, and data collection, on the go decision support all the while monitoring performance metrics and enhancing the customer experience. It is in short a provision of Service and not just a “job”.

Fieldwork within disruptive industries requires more than just forms on glass or a generic job management system. What’s needed is an agile and adaptive solution that can be implemented and changed in a few hours, enabling rapid service improvement. All the while adapting business insights and respecting interfaces to legacy systems.

The utilities industry is a regulated space with changing rules and a constant drive for efficiency. e-merge Data Solutions began 14 years ago to support the revenue metering market with a Cloud provided wireless job management system – that now supports 60 percent of the existing market. Their versatile field services platform, Con-X Cloud, now helps drive field service outcomes for most energy retailers in New Zealand.

Over the years, the company has implemented smart metering projects, and retailer field service activities across New Zealand. The successful implementation of numerous field work projects, made possible with Con-X Cloud, puts e-merge in a unique position.

More field tasks were completed in New Zealand (4.25 million last year) on Con-X than any other system in the energy utility space. Con-X Cloud is a field intelligence platform that caters to job management, process and form design, business intelligence, asset data collection, field work, and associated KPIs.

From the onset, e-merge has adopted a cloud-first strategy and now Con-X Cloud on Microsoft Azure, enables faster implementation of field services. The Con-X platform's flexibility allows it to interface with legacy systems and popular third-party enterprise products such as Salesforce and SAP. Very often Con-X drives the heart of field services feeding information to and receiving input from asset management systems, planning tools, work management systems and financial systems. Con-X acts as the field work front end, keeping services adaptable and returning results to legacy systems – sweating previous investments.

e-merge Data Solutions, over the past 14 years, has employed an approach of industry collaboration and platform flexibility which has reaped dividends in experience working in Utility, Energy, and Environment sectors. e-merge’s Chief Strategy Officer, Hayden Wells, sums it up: "As we work with many verticals and not just utilities we get to cross pollinate solutions where many service issues have been solved in various ways in different industries."

As part of an expanding portfolio of services that have built around its core Field Services platform, e-merge offers a Field Service Consulting Review. This is usually the start point for an organisation’s mobility journey, where value added to a business is identified in the context of Compliance, Productivity, Quality, Health, and Safety. An additional service offering popular with customers is a managed Mobile Device Management Service Desk to look after customer mobile devices across operations.

e-merge is looking forward to the expansion of the IoT field, an area it has gained extensive experience in while implementing upwards of one million of the Smart Meter network in New Zealand. The company will be leveraging its experience and flexibility of the Con-X platform to contribute to field installation, maintenance, repair, and investigation of any IoT device for any industry.