Why predictive routing matters for field service management

The strategic partnership between HERE and SAP amplifies this impact, combining HERE's advanced mapping technology with SAP's robust enterprise solutions.

Looking ahead, the integration of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and ongoing innovations promises to further highlight the critical role of predictive routing in the field.

What is field service management?

Field service management (FSM) focuses on the coordination and optimization of field operations for service-oriented organizations. This entails scheduling and dispatching technicians, managing work orders, ensuring customer satisfaction and maintaining equipment. 

Effective FSM ensures that the right technician with the right skills arrives at the right location at the right time, leading to improved customer experiences and operational efficiencies. By streamlining tasks, FSM enables companies to deliver exceptional service, which keeps customers satisfied and operations running smoothly.

Understanding predictive routing

Predictive routing is a powerful feature in field service management solutions. By using historical data, real-time information and AI, it helps businesses make smarter routing decisions. This leads to more efficient dispatching and scheduling, cutting travel time and fuel costs, boosting technician productivity and improving customer satisfaction with shorter wait times and timely service.

Tackling real-world challenges

This technology addresses common issues like unpredictable traffic patterns, last-minute schedule changes and high operational costs from inefficient routing. By optimizing these aspects, businesses can achieve higher first-time fix rates, reduce operational expenses and enhance overall service quality and customer satisfaction.

Benefits of predictive routing for field service management

Using predictive routing offers several key advantages. It provides efficient routing by analyzing traffic patterns, weather conditions and historical data, which helps reduce travel time and operational costs for technicians. It also improves planning and scheduling by predicting job durations and potential delays, leading to more accurate schedules.

Overall, predictive routing enhances field service by enabling better resource allocation, increasing technician productivity and improving customer satisfaction through timely service delivery.

A strategic partnership

HERE Technologies and SAP FSM have forged a seamless partnership to advance predictive routing capabilities. HERE Technologies contributes precise geospatial data, real-time traffic information and advanced mapping services essential for predictive routing. This collaboration enables SAP FSM to provide real-time route optimizations based on current traffic conditions, offer detailed and updated maps for accurate navigation and facilitate easy integration with SAP FSM for a cohesive field service management experience.

Besides the field service management domain, HERE Technologies and SAP have a long-standing collaboration in many other product areas. To cite but a few examples, HERE products and services are integrated in SAP Transportation Management, SAP Data Services, SAP Business Network for Logistics, SAP Sales Cloud, and SAP Sustainability Footprint Management. HERE is committed to bring its best-in-class location technology to all SAP customers in all these domains.

Innovations to anticipate in 2024 and beyond

Technicians spend a significant portion of their time traveling between service locations. In bustling cities or on heavily trafficked highways, bumper-to-bumper congestion can lead to unpredictable journeys. To optimize travel time and better utilize technicians' expertise, SAP Field Service Management employs intelligent metrics to predict realistic driving distances and times incorporating historical and live traffic data during scheduling. This data is sourced from third-party partners including HERE.

Predictive routing offers several benefits: accurate technician arrival times based on real traffic data, reduced time spent in traffic and the potential to plan more activities by avoiding peak traffic periods.

The future of field service management especially with SAP looks promising. Enhanced AI features will further refine predictive routing, job predictions and equipment insights. There will be improved integration between FSM and other enterprise systems such as fleet management. User-centric enhancements will continue to be made based on customer feedback aimed at improving usability and functionality.

Additionally, SAP Field Service Management will continue to introduce more advanced AI features, building on its current capabilities such as AI-based scheduling, predictive routing, job duration prediction, natural language filtering and equipment insights.