The digital transformation of companies operating in the field is underway. To optimize their end-to-end operational processes, from designing their infrastructures to planning interventions, deploying, and quality control, they rely on a range of digital solutions. In this article, we will explore how FSM, GIS, and Visual AI technologies are transforming field operations management and examine how this ecosystem of technologies tends to interconnect to meet the complex needs of modern enterprises.
Mapping Infrastructure with Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
GIS is targeted at companies deploying infrastructures. It is a digital mapping tool that allows them to visualize, analyze, and manage their network data. GIS is applicable to various use cases, including:
- Enhanced asset tracking: Extensive telecommunications or energy networks encompass a multitude of assets spread over large areas. GIS allows visualizing deployment progress and locating all assets.
- Optimization of fieldwork allocation: In case of issues, GIS enables precise asset localization. It provides field teams with the most efficient routes and relevant data (such as maintenance history) to resolve issues more quickly.
- Improvement of infrastructure planning: GIS facilitates the analysis of factors such as population density, existing infrastructure, and terrain to identify optimal locations for equipment installation or road works.
Optimizing Interventions with Field Service Management (FSM)
FSM caters to companies in various sectors: telecommunications, electricity, construction, transportation, facility management, plumbing, IT, and more. The promise of FSM is to save time through efficient intervention management. It allows, for example:
- Improved communication between the back office, field teams, and clients, ensuring better coordination and faster issue resolution.
- Optimization of routes to avoid unnecessary travel for technicians. FSM takes into account technicians' skills, availability, and location to optimally assign interventions.
- Digitization of forms by transitioning them to mobile to save paper and prevent input errors or omissions through mandatory fields.
- Automation of administrative tasks: work order creation, invoicing, inventory management, etc.
Automating Quality Control with Visual AI
Whether conducting tens of thousands or millions of field operations annually, manually auditing each one is impossible. Visual AI simply proposes to do it for you, on a large scale and at lower costs. By automating the quality control of operations when field employees are on site, it allows them to do their job right the first time and thus avoids costly re-interventions. This is why Deepomatic named its Visual AI platform "First Time Right Automation."
Visual AI analyzes photos, videos, or documents captured by field employees via their mobile devices and during their interventions in real-time to verify:
- The quality of the provided data: for example, the photo clearly shows the correct element, it is sufficiently clear, well-lit, and properly framed.
- The conformity of the work performed by the employee, through visual verification of the tasks they must carry out.
Multiple Technologies, More Value, in a Seamless User Journey
By connecting your FSM or GIS platform to a Visual AI solution, you ensure that the data (photos, videos, or documents) provided by field teams are reliable and actionable, and that your information system is properly documented. You also have direct access to the physical state of each equipment in your GIS platform.
Deepomatic has developed connectors to easily integrate our First Time Right Automation platform, and our solution is already integrated with partner platforms: Praxedo's FSM, as well as IQGeo's and ESRI's GIS.
Finally, these integrations between Visual AI and FSM or GIS should not create friction for their users. The journey should be simple, seamless, and the transition from one application to another transparent, to avoid impacting the adoption and proper use of these technologies.
In a context where the competitiveness of companies increasingly relies on their ability to innovate and optimize their processes, the technological ecosystem composed of FSM, GIS, and Visual AI solutions offers a concrete response to the challenges faced by companies operating in the field. But ultimately, it would be more appropriate to speak of integrated operational efficiency: multiple digital solutions, but functioning in symbiosis, to maximize their respective value.
