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Friederike
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
576
This week on May 1st we celebrated Labour Day also known as the International Workers’ Day. I am thankful not to have experienced a time where it is normal to work up to 16 hours per day and 6 days per week. The 8-hour movement was a significant labour reform emerged in the 19th century. Today, the legacy still lives on and is celebrated on Labour Day as a reminder of the progress made in improving working conditions and workers' rights.

I wonder what the next big movements will be to improve working conditions and fulfill demands on the new generation. With a lack of skilled resources in many areas, companies find it more and more difficult to attract new talent and keep trained resources in the company. Organizations must find ways to differentiate and do more with less to stand out and innovate. I want to address in this blog two topics we often hear from our customers how they differentiate in the field service business.

  1. Modernize and digitize to attract the younger workforce

  2. Use AI to reduce repetitive boring tasks and make the work more interesting and challenging


Digitization is not a new movement, and many companies are very advanced. What I liked to see is how one of our SAP Field Service Management customers advertises how their service technicians work and why they like they job. The video is German only. The main message is that with digitization and modern software tools, technicians are empowered to make their own decisions and get new challenges every day.



For all German speakers there is also a webcast planned on May 10 where our customer is describing in more detail how they strengthened the role of a service technician by making field service processes more efficient. Register here

While AI has been around for decades, I see with the access to tools like OpenAI and ChatGPT a big jump is just ahead of us on how technology is used to make our jobs easier. Every developer, product owner, IT administrator and business owner is thinking about how to use this new tool in their existing solutions. Imagine a completely new way to search and filter data based on natural language instead of trying to find the right columns and define logical operator. An interesting read is also this blog post with a hands-on example how to automatically correct issue or resolution description entered by a field service technician to result in a professional report.

Interesting times are ahead of us. With the efficiency improvements supported by new technology and the demands of the new generation a four-day workweek or completely flexible worktimes might be the next movement for a better work life balance.

Disclaimer:
SAP notes that posts about potential uses of generative AI and large language models are merely the individual poster's ideas and opinions, and do not represent SAP's official position or future development roadmap. SAP has no legal obligation or other commitment to pursue any course of business, or develop or release any functionality, mentioned in any post or related content on this website.