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On April 25th, RWS and its partner, Fluid Topics held a session to educate their potential users on the ways in which their combined solution can deliver efficiency and cost savings to field service organizations. Both agreed that the content (core) and its usability are the two sides of the same coin and are essential to serving field service personnel efficiently.
RWS’s Tridion is world-renowned in managing content and is trusted by some of the largest global enterprises such as HP, Wells Fargo, Unilever and AMEX to list a few. Fluid Topics, on the other hand, is world-renowned for its cutting-edge Content Delivery Platform (CDP).
Fluid Topics and Tridion are loved by field service-intensive organizations and account for the bulk of their customers, spanning across BFSI, Manufacturing and Retail sectors. Fluid Topics’ solution is deployed by some of the world’s largest enterprises, such as Siemens, Teradata, Liebherr Mining, Ceridian, and Thermo Fischer Scientific
When we combine Tridion and Fluid Topics, we get a complete and cutting-edge end-to-end content solution that field service organizations today strive for. Tridion manages the product content and Fluid Topics connects all mobile workers to the technical & support content they need to get their job done right no matter where they are. Field service personnel benefit from uninterrupted and 24x7 access to the most accurate, up-to-date product documentation while on the field.
The combined solution addresses the two most pressing challenges such organizations today, ‘employee productivity’ and ‘customer satisfaction’, leading to revenue growth and lower costs/higher profit.
Fluid Topics’ Dynamic Content Delivery supercharges Tridion-generated content and drastically improves field service teams’ efficiency in three critical ways:
- Making Content Accessible Under any Circumstance
Accessibility is the key to even the best technical documentation. Technically, this permanent access to product information relies on two fundamentals: secured remote access to all essential resources and the capability to work offline, disconnected from any network.
Remote access and security
For field technicians, remote access to product information is not an option but a must. When working on the customer’s site, having access to the correct information leads to fewer truck rolls, fewer escalations to level 2 or 3 support and product experts, and more first-time fixes.
But this can be a significant technical challenge for IT teams to execute as most organizations produce and store their documentation on different systems and information is often scattered across multiple silos. Further, it is highly inefficient for an organization to grant each field personnel access to all these other systems individually. In particular, they give remote access beyond the internal network while managing diverse user groups and profiles. It requires high maintenance, involves high operation costs, and is error-prone.
Fluid Topics’ modern Content Delivery Platform gathers all the content sources that a company owns, including that stored on Tridion and provides a single knowledge hub with centralized user management, access rights and security. A single admin console makes it easy to:
- maintain the highest standards of security,
- modify or grant access rights,
- define groups with different access rights based on their profile,
- and even manage certifications-based access.
With this, IT teams get the means to guarantee information security and lower the admin efforts, while field service teams get remote access to their entire pool of resources.
Offline availability
Field technicians often find themselves in situations and locations where there is no/poor network. Elevator shafts, cellular dead spots, or overloaded networks can suddenly make the needed tech content inaccessible- interrupting and delaying the service call.
Documentation must be available offline directly on the technician’s device to serve field technicians effectively. Tridion integrates with Fluid Topics, which offers an “Offline Mode” feature to deliver this critical need. When connected to a network, a technician can sync either specific content or all of their content on their device. While offline, s/he can seamlessly access and read the same technical content as if s/he were online. When the technician gets internet connectivity back, s/he can sync his device once again and any changes s/he might have missed in the meantime are updated instantly.
Offline availability of technical documentation means that the field technicians can approach any service call or maintenance visit with full confidence, knowing that the content they need will always be there.
- Decreasing Search Time
Uptime is crucial for most industries as any interruption in service has a substantial and long-lasting impact on customer satisfaction and profitability, both being significant concerns for field service organizations. Enterprises work hard to reduce delays and the time to search for correct product information while servicing an installation/support request.
Search capabilities associated with the technical documentation portal make all the difference in service performance. It must match the standards of the best web search engines we are accustomed to today. Tridion with Fluid Topics offers a semantic search that understands the request and its context. As a result, it returns the most relevant answers and documents to search queries. It filters out the noise otherwise produced by traditional “keyword-based” search engines, keeping at bay thousands of similar documents on different products or versions, many of which are irrelevant.
Finding relevant answers from the technical documentation ensures a better first-time fix rate and a faster service. It delivers tangible results: such as a significant reduction in search time after switching to (Tridion and) Fluid Topics’ solution. Search results enormously benefit from RWS Tridion Docs’ structured content enriched with metadata.
Further, enterprises have cut search time to zero with Dynamic Content Delivery. By adding QR codes directly to the machines or equipment, technicians get immediate access to the correct product information, fit for purpose, and exactly match the installation requiring service.
- Providing Truly Mobile Content
Field technicians rely on more than just descriptions and written processes to get the job done right. Graphs, 2D and 3D images, or even videos are valuable resources for supporting them, and these must be correctly rendered in the field. The technical documentation must be readable on any mobile device, whether on a simple smartphone, a tablet, or a rugged field laptop.
Tech doc teams can struggle to anticipate such rendering and user experience with several screens and devices available worldwide. However, Dynamic Content Delivery technologies overcome this challenge. Fluid Topics is natively designed for a responsive mobile user experience and removes the burden of rethinking and reformatting content for every device. The application can deliver and display all technical content irrespective of the format or the screen the technician is using.
Seamless rendering of all formats on mobile devices dramatically improves the usability of product content in the field. It facilitates using the correct procedure during installation, maintenance, and repair services. This serves both the efficiency and safety of operations in the area.