A leading white goods manufacturer implemented a field automation solution for their after-sales service by providing with an enterprise App on a mobile handset to the field technicians, which enabled them to be connected with the company and perform their routine day-to-day operations.
However, this could not solve the real business problems faced by the company in the field. There were no business validations happening on the service job resulting in wrong parts being replaced, and in turn causing revenue leakages. There was no visibility for the technician into customers’ past history, the inventory in the van-stock and the back-end system. Loss of revenue during collection of cash payments by the technician in the field further complicated the problem.
In order to address these challenges, the manufacturer implemented a full-fledged Feet-on-Street (FOS) Solution provided by Atos, a French multinational IT services corporation. The solution was more intelligent and had inbuilt critical business processes and validation rules applicable for the field technician. This solution, in addition to providing the technician a list of his assigned calls for the day also enabled the manufacturer to track the technician’s van-stock in real time and replenish it on a timely basis via the periodic EOD reports sent to the back-end systems from the technician’s handheld.
The solution also captured the availability of field technicians at any given point in time based on geographic location, thereby enabling the manufacturer to assign any additional call in the vicinity to the technician. With the increased enablement of the field force to perform the relevant actions along with triggering critical business processes from the field itself, there was a significant improvement in the operational performance by about 20 percent.
Furthermore, the solution provided a seamless integration with a Bluetooth printer, which helped in printing receipts and integration with payment gateway.

Smart Mobility Strategy
Atos Feet-on-Street (FOS) Solution is a part of the Atos Smart Mobility Strategy. The Smart Mobility Strategy aims at extending the enterprise process on the field and directly to where the customers are. Atos FOS Platform is a cloud based platform which can connect to any backend enterprise system (ERP, CRM,Legacy Systems etc.) and multiple front-end interfaces. This platform is built with the objective to provide agility and scalability of the solution architecture.“The platform can be hosted on Atos cloud or enterprise private cloud. With ready-to-connect adapters and built-in industry specific business rules and validation, Atos FOS is designed for Lead Management, After Sales Service, Project Management, Marketing, Compliance Management, IT Management and other tasks,” says Purshottam Purswani, Chief Architect, Atos India.
Atos goes with HTML5 core technology markup language developments for enterprise applications with cross platform requirements. The solutions make use of advancements in UI like HTML5 to achieve consistent and responsive user experience across platforms and screen resolutions. In addition, Atos has middleware, where it provides provisioning, messaging, integration and all the business logic is developed. The company has also developed innovative multi-channel messaging solution, where based on the bandwidth context, it switches from GPRS, SMS, offline-online sync solution, creating a seamless experience.
To overcome the challenges of testing mobile applications, Atos along with its partner, has created cloud based testing framework which is located inside the VPN, providing a highly secure testing environment.The Atos Cloud testing framework provides easy setup and quick response time with ability to connect to any type of devices.
With a platform tested for Indian conditions, Atos helps businesses run faster and cheaper with mobility. “Atos believes that true value comes from leveraging technical levers, what Atos terms as SOCLOMO, namely social, cloud, location, mobility, M2M, big data and analytics,” shares Milind Kamat, CEO, Atos India.

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Mobilization Methodology
The mobilization methodology followed by Atos consists of four steps. Firstly, the company defines business requirements and identifies the probable changes in business processes while considering possible solutions. When doing so, it checks which use case has the maximum business benefits.
After selecting the mobile platform and device, the company implements planning weighing the benefits and infrastructure implications. Being aligned with the functional requirements, the solution undergoes User Acceptance Testing (UAT). Finally, Atos rolls out the template and comprehends scope expansion as per the usability feedback for changing business requirements.

Context - The Key Driver in Mobility
Contextual computing is a new paradigm shift in mobile technology. It is the parallel to human brains, where our senses work with a multitude of information based on the concept of situational awareness of our conscious and unconscious mind. This fundamental capability of observation, interpretation and statistical analysis based on the location sensing applications and services will have an outcome that is directly the result of the dynamic context modeling.
With this fundamental line of thinking, Atos believes that, going forward, the key driver in mobility would be “context” and industries would be vouching for all sorts of contextual information gathering for providing an enriched and a mobile specific user experience to the end-users.