For every minute your enterprise experiences IT downtime, you pay a price, whether that’s a single failed switch at your branch location, a dead point-of-sale terminal at one of your retail sites, or an unresponsive server deep inside your regional data center. While remote IT support services may be able to address many issues, sometimes nothing beats having a qualified IT engineer onsite working hands-on to address critical outages.
Field IT services offer a unique opportunity to turn this issue into a competitive advantage. Here we break down exactly what field IT service providers do, and how their services help enterprises keep downtime and productivity loss to a minimum while providing a reliable solution for supporting distributed infrastructure.
What Are Field IT Services?
IT field services involve deploying trained and experienced IT engineers onsite at your business to install, repair, maintain or replace existing IT hardware and infrastructure.
It’s different from what you might expect from a call center help desk (over the telephone), because you get an engineer physically on-site at your company, whether this means at your corporate offices, warehouse, hospital or other facility, including possibly an unmanned site in a remote region.
Most organizations’ IT field services need fall into some combination of these categories:
• Hardware break-fix
• Network devices installation
• Server maintenance
• Structured cabling
• Device rollouts
• Site audits
However, if you contract with an outsourced provider to offer managed field services, they can become predictable, repeatable, and backed up by service-level agreements (SLAs).
How Field IT Services Reduce Downtime
A comprehensive understanding of how field IT services reduce downtime is vital in recognizing their importance. The most basic truths are often the most evident – if a hard drive has failed, a router is defective, a cable run is faulty, or an entire rack of hardware requires refreshing; it must be dealt with on site. In the absence of field service, the clock is ticking while someone scrambles to find a technician and the necessary hardware to fulfill the request.
A properly-structured field model has numerous advantages over the alternatives:
reduced mean time to resolution (MTTR)
proactive maintenance checks
and ensured availability of critical parts, all of which have a direct impact on downtimes.
Field IT Services Vs Remote IT Support
One of the questions frequently asked by IT managers is: how do remote IT support and field services relate to one another? The simplest answer is that they do not compete with one another – they complement each other in providing total support to the client.
Remote IT support is much faster and less expensive than field services, and is typically utilized for software-related issues, configurations and adjustments, and even password resets. However, there is a point at which remote services become insufficient at best and completely inappropriate at worst. The role of field service becomes critical when it comes to onsite computer repairs, installations, upgrades, replacements of any hardware (routers, switches, modems), or any work that requires a physical presence.
The benefits of on-site IT support for your business become most apparent when speaking about systems utilizing asset-intensive infrastructure, such as in manufacturing, retail, logistics, health care or financial services. In all of these cases, any downtime translates directly into lost revenue, which must be avoided at all costs. The truth is that the choice between remote and field IT services is rarely between the two in most cases: it is a combination, with remote support handling everything possible remotely and field services taking over when the situation requires it.
Supporting Multi-Location and Remote Sites
IT support for distributed operations presents a unique set of challenges. IT support for multiple locations usually involves managing dozens or hundreds of facilities both across the country and around the globe. This is especially true for organizations that do not have their own in-house IT department.
That is why enterprise field IT support is beneficial as it provides a single company that can manage the same level of support, standardized procedures, and local expertise in each country where the organization operates.
Field IT support is particularly vital for remote locations and sites that do not have their own technical staff. Things like branch offices, retail stores, ATMs, kiosks, and many other
facilities do not usually have dedicated IT resources but still require the same level of support as any other division.
Improving IT Uptime and Productivity
The value of field IT support extends far beyond simply responding to emergencies and incidents. In many ways, the way to increase employee productivity per dollar spent is to create the best possible balance between proactive maintenance, rapid response, and streamlined field service management.
These three components of enterprise field IT support enable the creation of a consistent and reliable support service that is appropriate to the company’s needs. Coordinated field service management is essential to balance the response to incidents and prevent future ones. The ability to plan engineer visits, track parts inventories, manage and optimize field service operations, and measure performance against time-and-cost-specific SLAs are just some of the advantages that contribute to enhanced productivity and uptime.
The reduction in downtime and the optimization of the repair process will directly contribute to the overall productivity and revenue of the company.
Field IT Support Providers: What Sets Them Apart?
When choosing which company to provide field IT services, this decision should have long-term implications on the organization’s operations. There are several factors that differentiate managed IT field services providers:
Having the right field service partners means having an IT support company that can provide coverage across all locations, has the necessary SLA commitments, possesses the required skill sets, has the parts inventory, and offers the reporting and transparency needed to continuously improve the support offering.
For companies that are considering the option of whether to rely on in-house resources versus outsourcing their IT needs, the choice is obvious in most cases. Outsourcing field IT support is much more cost-effective and easier to scale than trying to manage a team of engineers across different regions. Specialized enterprise field IT services providers offer
the option of managed field services that allow companies to rely on a single provider with the expertise and resources needed for their industry, location, and field service needs.
IT downtime is unacceptable in most cases as it usually results in lost productivity and employee frustration. Enterprise field IT support services bridge the gap between traditional remote technical support and the high level of support needed for on-premises equipment.
Field IT support enables companies to ensure uptime across all facilities and operations that require it, even when the company does not have their own engineers on staff. That is why, for companies with distributed operations, outsourced field IT support is an excellent way to optimize productivity. Partnering with Teceze will enable managed field services that turn unpredictable and disruptive events into a consistently reliable and affordable experience.