A New Era of Connected Field Service Addressing New Challenges
15
September 2020
by Avner Ziv
September at Cloud of Things continues to be an exciting month. Last week we announced an IoT solution developed with our partners AES/minIoT and Microsoft Azure IoT Cloud for Hortica, an Israel-based company with a breakthrough solution using sensors and data analytics to cultivate pharmaceutical-grade medical cannabis with “remote control,” enabling precision and productivity gains leveraging a full-stack solution.
Today we are proud to be a part of another Microsoft Azure solution, this time in close partnership with Prodware, an international digital transformation partner. With Prodware in the lead, Cloud of Things is contributing our DeviceTone IoT Suite and platform running on Microsoft Azure cloud to a positively disruptive end-to-end Connected Field Service offering based on Dynamics 365 CRM for CFS.
Prodware has been collaborating with Microsoft for decades, and is an expert in Dynamics / Field-Service, and selected Cloud of Things to easily & painlessly enable their customers to adopt and deploy IoT connectivity & capabilities to their field-service subjects, where devices generate real-time data which is pumped into the Dynamics domain and trigger actions based on policy (for example, if a connected water heater starts to malfunction, the sensor generates an automatic message that triggers a configurable rule that opens a field-service ticket, enabling the company providing maintenance on that water heater to address the issue before it becomes a problem).
DeviceTone IoT capabilities are delivered in an unrivaled time-to-market, producing a full-feature demonstration system in a week, and a full go to market in a month. With no development involved, but rather a “connect-configure-operate” approach.
In today’s Press Release, Prodware wrote, “The maintenance and field service sectors have, for some time, experienced changing demands from customers for more predictive and proactive service models, affecting manufacturers, energy providers, and facilities management to name a few. The Internet of Things has enabled this service model but has been out of reach for some organizations. In today’s COVID-19 world, companies with field technicians need to continue their service provision but reduce the number of service calls on-site.”
While we are very excited about the commercial potential for this new, partnered solution (as the Connected Field Service market continues to grow) – being able to contribute to a solution that also makes field service safer is naturally inspiring to our team and extended team.
We have enjoyed working with Arik Center, Innovation Director at Prodware Group, and the visionary leader behind this initiative. Arik said, “By helping our customers more easily inject practical innovation such as IoT in maintenance scenarios, Prodware continues our mission to help businesses prepare for the future by helping them build the business processes of tomorrow. This is another great example of our agile approach to bringing in innovation into how we practically help customers succeed, particularly in a period of high customer expectation and shifting contexts.”
You can read the full press release issued by Prodware here.
We are truly bringing together the best of several worlds to make life easier, businesses more profitable, and workplaces safer, especially when we can eliminate a “truck roll” and reduce the risk of sending technicians into the field by leveraging remote capabilities, or we can assist the technician on-site with the best information in advance, so they bring the right tools and keep their site visits as brief as possible.
The fusion of Microsoft Azure IoT and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for CFS is ingenious as it orchestrates the physical and digital worlds for more data, more insights, and greater innovation, as we have seen today coming from Prodware.
Collaborating with Microsoft, as we deepen and broaden our relationship with them, our DeviceTone IoT Suite is more accessible due to the availability of the solution on Microsoft Azure Marketplace and AppSource, platforms that help technology and business users find and try software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps from Microsoft and its partners.
This growing ecosystem is changing the way things work, and work gets done, for good.
Please reach out to me or Arik Center on LinkedIn, and we’ll schedule a personalized demo of the Prodware-Cloud of Things CFS solution and explore ideas on how you can turn a cost center into a profit center, leveraging a simply smarter, safer, and streamlined way to serve customers.
Originally posted on LinkedIn
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