Optimizing businesses through subscription management
Driving revenue growth through subscription business models powered by Oracle Cloud.
What do companies in manufacturing, high tech, waste management, oil and gas, telecom, healthcare, and utilities have in common? They all depend on specialised equipment that requires regular maintenance. While many have strong digital tools for managing maintenance and field services separately, most struggle to connect the two — creating gaps in efficiency, visibility, and performance.
This disconnect can lead to various pain points, including:
Technicians spending as much time logging repairs as completing them
Time wasted finding information needed for jobs, such as the asset work history and part/asset warranty coverage
Unnecessary site visits and rework, due to assigning technicians who lack the skills/certifications to complete the tasks
Highly skilled technicians bogged down with simple repairs
Increased labour costs and heavy reliance on subcontractors.
COOs and operations managers often struggle to find and retain skilled workers to provide maintenance service. To address this critical issue, we collaborated with Oracle to develop three offerings that streamline maintenance processes and reduce operational costs. Learn about those three developments:
Integrate technician planning, scheduling and execution with the asset management lifecycle
PwC is launching a new package of integrations that extend the full asset management lifecycle available in Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) maintenanceOpens in a new window. These integrations add a comprehensive planning, scheduling and execution process for technicians from Oracle Fusion Field ServicesOpens in a new window.
Here’s how it works. Companies can:
Automatically optimise maintenance schedules according to technicians’ skills, certifications and availability, as well as job location and priority. For example, imagine an urgent job comes in and a qualified technician is nearby with lower-priority tasks on their roster. The solution automatically adjusts the schedule to send the nearby worker to complete the repair, reducing travel time. This can boost productivity and reduces labour costs by avoiding unnecessary site visits, grouping together nearby jobs, and optimising routes between repairs. It also ensures that companies don’t waste money by getting highly compensated specialist technicians to complete straightforward tasks.
Reduce time technicians spend recording repairs. In collaboration with Oracle Product Development, PwC created a streamlined workflow that helps to guide technicians through completing the repair, installing parts, ordering and receiving parts, filling in applicable inspection checklists, and managing inventory of spare parts.
Minimise data entry and automate workflows. Technicians fill out information once in a user-friendly format, then the data is updated across all solution modules and the necessary work orders are generated automatically. This data can be used to streamline back-office workflows such as procurement or to generate follow-up work orders.
Let subcontractors record their own work so employees don’t have to. This improves data accuracy and avoids delays due to information hand-off.
Reduce time spent on inventory management of spare parts of spare parts by enabling staff to complete multiple actions from a single intuitive interface. Users can:
- Perform physical inventory and inventory cycle counts digitally with QR/barcode scanning capabilities to complete counts faster, with more accuracy and instant recount/approval workflows
- See open purchase orders, submit the quantity of goods received, generate or enter serial numbers, and print labels to attach to parts
- Transfer items to different sub inventory locations and print new labels
- Generate QR codes and labels for each part showing the supplier, part number, description, sub inventory, location and serial number. Users can print labels during the inventory management process – including for receiving goods, transferring inventory, and returning goods under warranty). These QR codes/labels can be scanned for inventory cycle/physical counting or to issue work orders.
These features benefit organisations by helping to lower maintenance costs, reduce the need for external labour, accelerate the ordering and replacement of spare parts, achieving compliance with industry regulations and internal policies, and reduce the need for separate apps for asset tracking and field services.
Maximise value from supplier warranties for spare parts
To complement the package of integrations, PwC worked with Oracle to extend Oracle’s warranty capabilities to support parts that enables clients to see whether failed parts are still under supplier warranties and automatically generate claims. Each time a part is fitted, it records the date, supplier, serial number, asset number and warranty terms (plus the meter readings at the time of installation for consumption-based warranties). This means that when the part requires replacement, it’s easy to see whether it’s under warranty.
The part warranty extension is particularly beneficial for companies that are reinventing their business models by providing customers the option to lease equipment and purchase maintenance services. In these cases, companies can manage subscription billing using our PwC Oracle Leasing solution, then route technicians to their end-customers using Oracle Field Services and Oracle ERP maintenance. This can help clients increase margins by capitalising on part warranties, while gaining better visibility into the profitability of subscription models (which has traditionally been hard to achieve due to incomplete and fragmented data).
Accelerate training and repairs using augmented reality
Today’s emerging technology permits solving industry challenges. One of the many applications of augmented reality (AR) can benefit your enterprise. With this in mind, PwC leveraged AR to develop a mixed reality experience for Oracle to help accelerate training and repair. Learn how this offering works:
Internet of Things (IoT) devices on equipment trigger alerts – for example, if a motor is overheating, vibrating too much, or making an unusual sound. The alerts generate maintenance work orders that feed into Oracle Field Services, which shows technicians which jobs can be completed using mixed reality. In these cases, the technician puts on the virtual reality (VR) headset, then the solution uses object recognition to identify the faulty equipment and guide the technician through the repair – for example, overlaying the image to show which parts need fixing. At the end, the repair completion details are automatically sent to Oracle Field Services and Oracle ERP maintenance.
This innovative use of emerging technology helps technicians quickly complete repairs that they haven’t encountered before, which is particularly useful for companies with apprentices. Plus, it can accelerate training by letting people practise repairs multiple times until they’re confident, without needing to wait for the same error to reoccur.
If you’re thinking about transforming your approach to asset management and maintenance, PwC can help. The integration package, part warranty extension and AR experience are available to organisations that leverage Oracle Integration Cloud.
In our experience helping organisations with their field service and maintenance needs leveraging Oracle Fusion Cloud applications, we have seen that oftentimes, companies can be:
Already using Oracle ERP Cloud maintenance and Oracle Field Services, in which case PwC can help them use Oracle’s new package of integrations to connect the two. This enables companies to combine planning and scheduling capabilities with robust maintenance functionality.
Use Oracle Field Services with on-prem Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) or a non-Oracle ERP solution, in which case PwC can help coordinate field services and maintenance operations, then support the move to a cloud-based ERP such as Oracle Fusion Cloud in the longer term.
Only looking to use Oracle for asset management, in which case PwC can help transform and optimise maintenance operations now, then deploy Oracle Field Services later to get additional benefits.
If you’d like to discuss how PwC can help you optimise your maintenance and field services to help reduce costs and boost asset uptime, please get in touch.
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