Untethered efficiencies:

The two critical information flows in field service pertain to getting technicians out to customer sites quickly, and getting timely reports back from the field.

At Toshiba America Medical Systems, a CRM system paired with an earlier generation of mobile technology—namely pagers and cell phones—was effective for the first part of that equation: rapid response.

What was lacking at the Tustin, Calif.-based provider of diagnostic imaging equipment was a better way of getting information back from the field. Now a new generation of mobile service software and devices delivers this real-time reporting.

Using a mobility solution from Antenna Software integrated with Toshiba's existing Clarify CRM system from Amdocs—along with wireless services from AT&T and BlackBerry devices from Research in Motion (RIM)—Toshiba no longer waits for engineers to get back to their home offices to file reports. The new mobile reporting, says Glenn Servis, senior director of IT for Toshiba America Medical Systems, is near-real time, and more accurate. The smart phones also take the place of the pagers and cell phones previously used to alert engineers.

“The main benefit of this application is allowing engineers to debrief their work activity while they are in the field, right there after a customer engagement,” Servis says. “By entering that work activity on these devices, we could collect more accurate data related to the cost of servicing our equipment.”

Toshiba's service mobility deployment points to emerging realities about wireless in manufacturing. First, sales force automation isn't the only high-value scenario. Other useful applications include field service, plant maintenance, equipment monitoring, and sensor communications.

Some end users also tap middleware products to integrate devices with ERP or enterprise asset management (EAM) systems. While large enterprise software vendors may have their own mobility solutions, the need to integrate a solution with more than one business system—as well as packaged mobility solutions—created a niche for providers that Stamford, Conn.-based analyst firm Gartner calls multichannel access gateway (MAG) vendors.

While mobility solutions often are thought of as “people-to-system,” on factory floors, mobility can be “machine-to-system,” wirelessly connecting sensors or instruments to plant systems. To meet this need, some process automation vendors are partnering with networking vendors such as Cisco Systems.

Despite the complexities, real benefits exist for mobility in manufacturing. Toshiba credits mobile field service with cutting the time it takes to close service cases from 13 days to about seven days. This improvement sprang from the real-time reporting.

Antenna's AMpower Service not only provides the user interfaces and workflows needed on the devices, but also integrates with Clarify CRM so that data entered through the handheld is immediately available within the system. Via this same integration, engineers look up data to determine, for example, whether engineers working in the same area might have a spare part.

Such mobility reduces the number of escalation procedures that need to be initiated when engineers do not respond to calls immediately, and overall, allows Toshiba to better manage its services resources, says David Croteau, senior manager of InTouch, Toshiba's customer call-center operation. “[Mobility] helps us decide if we have the right people in the right place at the right time,” he says.

Toshiba's Servis says the Clarify system is capable of very granular, detailed reporting, but the data-entry lag meant reports were less detailed and accurate than they otherwise might have been. With the needed reporting screens right on the BlackBerry devices, Toshiba engineers started reporting more hours and more details.

The Boeing Company is using wireless technology on plant floors to communicate with "crawlers" and robots (see sidebar, below).

Servis says Antenna and RIM also provide software that allows IT personnel to monitor the mobile devices and update and provision them centrally. The BlackBerry devices in use by Toshiba are some of the more rugged units in the RIM lineup, says Servis, and were deployed first for general phone use and email before the applications in field service.

Today, close to 500 engineers use the solution. “Our operational efficiency increased dramatically,” says Servis. “With these new methods, we continue to be responsive to the customers, but it takes less operational work to make sure that happens.”

The primary reason that companies choose middleware or a packaged mobile solution from a MAG vendor, says Bill Clark, a VP with Gartner, is that MAG vendors reduce the complexity of integrating mobile applications with back-end systems, as well as devices. MAG platforms contain software libraries that make it easier to configure hundreds of potential devices for wireless applications. Besides Antenna, other MAG vendors include Sybase and Syclo.

“It takes a fair amount of engineering to get the integration right, and get it tested,” says Clark. “Part of the value of MAG vendors is they have lived through all of these integrations.”

End-user companies can build and manage their own mobile applications, says Clark, but this becomes more challenging as mobile applications and devices proliferate within a company, or when a single mobile application needs to integrate with multiple back-end systems for different data sets. MAG software also can help when end users need to roam between cellular and Wi-Fi networks.

Wireless applications have to coexist and interoperate, requiring common systems management to address performance, security, and management concerns—most especially as applications scale over time.

Under its OneWireless plant mobility software platform, Honeywell can support mobile workers and mobile operator workstations, equipment health monitoring, and wireless field instrumentation.

Becker says Honeywell's wireless solutions grew out of user interest in wireless field instruments, but it soon saw the need for a common, plantwide platform.

“One of the things we've discovered—and we've installed wireless sensor networks at more than 500 sites—is our customers were using wireless for a number of different things,” he says. “We are a big believer that if you're going to do plantwide networks right, you need to standardize.”

Plant-floor wireless may involve different standards than the Wi-Fi variants found in most office settings. Two of these include ISA100, overseen by industry group ISA; and WirelessHART, overseen by HART Communication Foundation. Bob Karschnia, VP for wireless with Emerson Process Management, says Emerson supports WirelessHART for its wireless sensor network solutions, while also partnering with Cisco Systems to ensure the sensor network can plug into larger networks and the plant systems that run on them.

The WirelessHART standard, explains Karschnia, overcomes the interference challenges on metal and concrete plant floors awash with electrical currents, or interference resulting from chemicals. This is because WirelessHART makes use of advanced mesh networking technologies and intelligent routing that allows the network or “mesh” to essentially skip around points of interference.

Another big difference between a plant-focused standard such as WirelessHART, and 802.11 variants, says Karschnia, is hardware in a WirelessHART network is battery operated, as opposed to the 802.11 paradigm, where some components may need wired electrical power.

Battery power makes WirelessHART cost-effective to install in sprawling plants, but the real reason such networks are catching on, says Karschnia, is they allow manufacturers to collect more data than was possible with occasional manual reading, or costly—and thus often impractical—wired options.

As Karschnia sums up, “It just comes down to getting more information into the system so you can make intelligent decisions.”