Today, remote assistance and education platform Scope AR announced a partnership with field service management company ServiceMax.
The partnership is a significant step forward for both of these companies but also signifies a major development in terms of augmented reality adoption in industry.
Scope AR and Remote Assistance
“Remote assistance” is one of the biggest terms in enterprise XR. It refers to using mixed reality or augmented reality to provide technical support across distances.
In healthcare this could mean AR-assisted operations and other solutions. In enterprise, it most often means helping service providers in the field with real-time support from tech experts in an office or laboratory.
For fields in which information is widely dispersed (healthcare and other specialized fields) or specialists need to work in difficult terrain or environments (energy, automotive, etc.), remote assistance has long been a trending interest.
Remote assistance cuts time and costs, and helps to bridge the “skills gap” between incoming tech-savvy workers and outgoing more experienced workers.
“AR is uniquely positioned to help close the growing skills gap in field service across industries, and can deliver on-demand knowledge transfer and empower workers to become experts at any given task with very little training time,” Scope AR VP of Sales and Solutions, Dave Gosch, said in a release shared with ARPost.
Lately, demand for remote assistance solutions has also been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic pushing more industries further in the direction of more remote work.
Scope AR offers augmented reality solutions – including remote assistance – in aerospace and defense, life sciences, and manufacturing.
ServiceMax and Field Service Management
“Field service management” is the logistical organization that is necessitated when an organization has to orchestrate service providers distributed throughout the field. That could mean delivery drivers, repair technicians, etc.
ServiceMax is a provider of field service management solutions in medical device manufacturing, aviation, and other architecture, engineering, and construction industries.
For the most part, field service management has been efficiently handled in 2D platforms. However, there are some elements of the operation that could be augmented, namely many of the communication aspects between the agent in the field and a dispatcher.
This means that many people working in these industries use separate platforms for remote assistance and field service management.
A Streamlined Solution
The partnership announced today by Scope AR allows integration between their WorkLink solution and the Field Service Management solution offered by ServiceMax.
“Visual work instructions that leverage AR provide the ultimate form of knowledge transfer to both novice and expert front-line workers alike, helping them perform the job faster, thus increasing overall business agility,” ServiceMax VP of Global Customer Transformation, Joseph Kenny, said in the release.
The integration will help service experts, who will no longer need to juggle separate software suites in the field. It will also benefit the companies, who will be able to use data and insights from both solutions in tandem to monitor response time, gauge effectiveness of information, etc.
“With the integration of all systems that affect this experience – from field service management and learning and development, to competency management, team communications and now AR work instructions – organizations are finally able to achieve optimized service and skills management,” said Kenny.
Augmented Reality Is Value-Added
Augmented reality in enterprise can be seen as a tech version of the “value-added” principle. In most cases, augmented reality solutions aren’t new solutions, so much as “augmented” and improved versions of existing but now outdated approaches. The partnership between Scope AR and ServiceMax is a prime example.
By bringing AR technology solutions like remote assistance and bringing along adjacent industry solutions, the partnership shows how exponential technologies benefit industry – and consumers. By streamlining existing processes, at the production and service levels, augmented reality improves everything downstream.
