Praxedo: Dedicated To Field Service Management

Stakeholders generally looking at some field service management software, are more likely to end up with a cloud-based solution. Not only are cloud-based solutions a more secure way of hosting data, but they can also trim costs from any business. They are a more efficient IT solution that does not limit any organisation to a 9-to-5 workday, but rather, allows for limitless possibilities. With demands growing in the fi eld service industry, service businesses must get it right when selecting software. And that means choosing the right platform in which to host it.

Enter Praxedo, a 100 per cent cloud-based solution available in SaaS model that optimises the management of field operations such as schedule optimisation, digital reports, tracking of used parts, among others. Founded in 2004 by Jean de Broissia and Pierre Lavigne, the Praxedo SaaS operations-management and geolocation platform lets firms use smartphones and tablets to keep in touch with mobile workers. Praxedo, which has headquarters in France, is a niche player based on its innovative approach to specific industry use cases, which is off set by its narrow geographical coverage. The solution caters to various industry verticals including telecommunications, energy, utilities, retail, facilities management and water management.

“ More than 800 fi eld service organisations and 33,000 users in a wide variety of industries, use Praxedo daily to optimise planning, scheduling, and tracking of work orders and field personnel”

What Led to its Inception?

“We created Praxedo in 2005, firmly convinced of the market potential for mobile technologies in field service,” begins Jean de Broissia, Managing Director of Praxedo. Back then, only integrators were offering solutions through specific app developments. The company was sure that the future would bring packaged software solutions meeting customer-specific needs of each industry via a simple configuration process.

“We believed in SaaS and cloud at a very early stage, because it helps reduce costs and shorten deployment times so companies can focus on their core business. We invested in mobile technologies to ensure that our users can access the Praxedo application on most mobile devices available on the market,” adds Pierre Lavigne, co-founder of Praxedo.

Since the beginning, the company has been supported by self-financing mechanisms and is still fully-owned and managed by its founders. The software is entirely developed in-house, and the cloud-based platform is operated internally by employees belonging to the organisation. The company has improved its thought leadership and added several features to improve its product’s extensibility and native reporting and performance management capabilities. Praxedo is best suited to customers with use cases that generate much communication between large organisations and even relatively unsophisticated subcontractor organisations.

A Game Changer for Field Service Companies

Using Praxedo, companies drastically increase their productivity and become more responsive in their field activities.

Praxedo is composed of two modules configurable and synchronised in real-time. The software consists of a web interface and a mobile application. This software allows users to stay connected with all of their field teams and simplifies many daily tasks such as planning or monitoring interventions.

The application is available on a wide range of terminals, both on smartphones, tablets and laptops. It also works on different Android, iOS, Windows and Chrome operating systems. This leaves a great deal of freedom for users who no longer need to worry about the portability of the application on their mobile terminals.

The Praxedo application does not need to have a permanent telecom network to operate as the application also works in offline mode. Part of the company’s clientele works in white areas, areas without a network or solely in places where the network is not available (elevator shaft, basement, among others).

Among the many features of Praxedo, it is also possible to consult and monitor interventions from the web, or even create responses directly from a smartphone. With a simple “drag and drop” with a computer mouse one can move interventions, change schedules or also plan mass interventions to its field staff.

The intervention management software allows to view in real-time the status during an intervention and to consult a posteriori all the activities of the employees such as time spent on the road and time spent in mediation, among others,-- thanks to its cleverly constructed web interface and mobile application.

Praxedo has added capabilities such as mobile workflow, Praxedo-to-Praxedo (for seamless bidirectional integration between an FSP and its contractors) and annotated image sharing between technicians and back-office experts. There is also support for Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) communications with wearables (for status updates) and straightforward communications. Praxedo offers a native “Cockpit” that contains several metrics and visualisations — such as for revenue trending and productivity — that help organisations operate and improve their businesses. It also offers native integrations with ERP, CRM and operations support systems (OSS, used in telecom) from vendors such as Intuit, Sage and Salesforce.

Geoscheduling Enabled Software Package

With Praxedo’s new geo-scheduling feature, a team leader can locate jobs on a map as requests come in, using Google Maps cartography. The leader can then display the nearest workers’ vehicles on the same map and efficiently allocate the right one for the job, according to availability or vehicle type. That means drivers’ and technicians’ rounds can be organised in real time, rerouting whenever necessary.

“We have developed a whole intelligence feature around the Google Maps API Premier mapping technology,” de Broissia says. Using a requester connected with Google Maps API Premier, a dispatcher or team leader brings up a map of all operations scheduled for the next day, positioning them as small lozenges. These jobs can be organised into bundles (rounds).

An operations schedule is then sent to each field worker over a simple web connection.

Team leaders can also bring up displays of all vehicle movements on a given day. Leaders can see significant features, colour-code the vehicles allocated according to the type of operation or degree of urgency, and generate daily, weekly, and monthly reports on trips, mileages, stops, and driving time, among others.

“We would like to help our customers more and more with scheduling their mobile workforce operations in the field, and give them the tools that enable them to make decisions even more rapidly and on the most relevant factors,” adds Lavigne. Additional features include an Excel report generator, a report builder, a contractor portal, calendar synchronisation, stock management, consumed-item monitoring, among others.

Why Praxedo?

Reference customers for Praxedo have scored it in the top quintile across all cost categories and gave it the highest scores of any vendor for deployment cost. Usage-based pricing, affordable entry points and the evaluation process encourage customers to choose Praxedo.

A turnkey solution, Praxedo has the shortest implementation times: That is because it is an easy-to-use, fully customisable, and open platform which interfaces seamlessly with third-party applications. Praxedo integrates with applications such as Sage 100, Sage Live, Sage X3, Salesforce and Intuit QuickBooks. The solution supports data exchange using web services as well.

More than 800 field service organisations and 33,000 users in a wide variety of industries, use Praxedo daily to optimise planning, scheduling, and tracking of work orders and field personnel. The platform has been designed in line with the SaaS (Software as a Service) On-demand computing model. Developed using Web 2.0 technologies, the platform can be used without the need for pre-installation and updates are carried out transparently for users.

As part of the Praxedo solution, user companies pay a flat monthly fee for each mobile terminal deployed, giving them complete control of costs. Praxedo is priced on a per user per month subscription basis, and support is provided via phone, email and an online help desk.

A Promising Future

The success of the SaaS distribution model has put the company in a prominent position in what is an extremely competitive market. “The Praxedo Intervention application has won admirers for the flexibility of the software and the reliability of our SaaS platform,” states de Broissia. “Thanks to its real-time control facility, it allows companies to optimise their use of resources and to enhance their response capacity.” The company was named a Young Innovative Enterprise by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research. It also won the Operational Performance and Excellence award at the 2008 Innovation Awards, presented by Orange Business Services and Syntec Informatique. Praxedo has been included in the Gartner Magic Quadrant since 2016, among the 15 world-leading software vendors for Field Service Management.

“Firms like ours, which offer ‘live’ scheduling, need to cater to the quickest possible reactions – when a technician is running late or when there is a cancellation, for example. We seek ways to develop the best solutions for our customers, using the finest tools we can get,” concludes Lavigne.