Ventyx has announced availability of Service Suite 8.1, the company's newest release of its enterprise mobile workforce management system. The new release offers compelling enhancements for clients constructing and maintaining transmission and distribution (T&D) assets, managing critical service outages, scheduling crews for complex multistep projects and other growing needs for supporting mobile workers in utilities, telecommunications/broadband and other demanding asset-intensive industries.
Service Suite is a true enterprisewide mobile workforce management and field service management (FSM) solution that manages all types of field work including service, maintenance, inspection, repair, trouble/outage and construction. Release 8.1 is a major update to the software, enabling improved communication and more efficient scheduling of mobile workers in the field. It adds key functionality with greater support for mobile personnel performing in-the-field construction, maintenance and inspection, and customer service, as well as those who require continuous optimization of mobile personnel schedules or integration of their FSM system to billing, outage management, geographic information systems (GIS) and other third-party systems.
"Service Suite 8.1 represents a tremendous improvement in scheduling, dispatch and mobility for existing clients, as well as for new clients searching for ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of all mobile workers across the enterprise," said Ventyx Chief Operating Officer Steve Carpenter. "Functional improvements to support long-cycle work projects common in construction and maintenance perfectly complement our market-leading capability in short-cycle customer service work. Furthermore, new integration touch points using Web services enable Service Suite to operate in an integrated Services-Oriented Architecture to facilitate seamless interoperability with multiple systems across the enterprise."
Ventyx made key enhancements in numerous functional areas of Service Suite 8.1, based on market research and client feedback. These features include the following:
- Complex, multi-step work. Integrated with the dispatch Gantt chart, enhanced features supporting complex work requiring multiple, interdependent steps include a graphical display of projects and dependencies in a new dispatch planner -- a feature especially important for dispatching and managing long-cycle work.
- Scheduling. New workforce optimization capabilities tentatively assign and allocate orders to technicians, automatically. Continuous optimization in the workforce optimization engine reevaluates the schedule throughout the day to automatically react to changes in the underlying resource availability or workload.
- Interface to third-party applications. A new interface to applications on the mobile device -- such as mapping, billing and timekeeping applications -- enables seamless communication from the mobile device when certain events occur, such as receiving an order, going en route or transmitting a completion form.
- Expanded Service Level Agreement (SLA) Support. This feature automates the scheduling of orders for clients with an SLA requiring a certain completion time. The system can also alert dispatchers if a required completion time is nearing or has passed.
- Back-Office enhancements. The new release offers enhanced back-office functionality, including support for technicians without mobile devices and new Web services to enable a services-oriented architecture.
Service Suite 8.1 is available immediately from Ventyx and its certified reseller partners.
