mplsystems Secures Funding to Develop IoT Solution

mplsystems, the leading provider of field service management solutions, have announced that they have just won their second funding award from the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK. The ‘Advanced Engineer Scheduling Optimisation & Prediction’ (AESOP) project will prototype a pioneering customer service application to enable real-time responsive optimisation of field service technicians using Internet of Things (IoT) and other external feeds.

“Scheduling technicians and optimising routes in real time is a challenge for any business which provides service in the field. Couple that with unforeseen events such as traffic delays, overruns and customer changes and the result is that these companies are forced to trade off efficiency against customer service. Today companies rely on inefficient manual or partly automated internal processes and are therefore unable to react quickly. Our latest algorithms are changing the dynamics, plus we are combining the latest Internet of Things (IoT) devices to predict and resolve break-downs before they occur,” comments Paul White, CEO, mplsystems.

This pioneering project will combine real-time data feeds concerning traffic flows, the weather and calendar events, with data from deployed equipment through IoT devices. This will be correlated with customer preferences and information about engineer workload, location, parts and skill set. The scheduling will include optimised sequencing of the various field service activities and the best routes between them.

The anticipated benefits are dramatic, with organisations estimated to reduce their overall service maintenance, planning and administration costs by at least 50% and customers’ machine downtime to be reduced by in excess of 30%. Plus customers will have greater control over when their service visits are scheduled and will receive accurate updates, increasing customer satisfaction with the product and the company they are dealing with.

This funding follows on from mplsystems’ first funding award from Innovate UK, which focused on using text analytics to provide intelligent automated responses in today’s complex contact centre environments. This unique solution provides instant resolution and transformed service quality for requests from digital self-service, online chat, email and smartphone apps and combines these channels seamlessly in an omnichannel contact centre.

For more information about mplsystems, visit their website.