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Building software for the on-site deskless worker poses some unique challenges.
The deskless employee or contractor cannot be expected to do much data entry when working in excavations, inside columns, next to Exchangers, on high scaffoldings, working valves, blindings, flanges – with both hands. Something possibly built on AI/ML, should do the heavy lifting on data entry. The possibilities are many. Plants have been around for decades. Maintenance activities are standard. The taxonomy, SOPs, and best practices are all established. Filing work – be it for planning or reporting, should be largely automated. This is a natural language generation task, based on past plans, the large corpora of industry guidelines, permits, and more. In addition, there’s the hands-free mode of documenting work from the plant – voice to text.
Due to some of the reasons mentioned before, software usage cannot be mandated. The software has to be of tangible, immediate value to the very first user.
To illustrate, consider plant operations. Building a map of the asset hierarchy and the asset interrelationships helps create a knowledge graph connecting equipment and maintenance workflows, ensuring a particular item of work planning and execution happens in the context of the state of the plant and the many other work streams happening on site at a point in time. With a CRM solution, that no two salespeople approach the same account is achieved through a CRM administration function (most often with manual staffing) and rules governing territory – accounts manually assigned or rules manually authored, and above all a unique ID, a primary key for a unique client account.
In industrial operations, such manual work is often not practical. Therefore, making the software useful for the first user and setting in motion a virtuous cycle is the responsibility of the software maker. To continue with the CRM analogy, sales leadership wants to get reports out of the CRM system – what percentage of opportunities are at what stage of the sales pipeline. In CRM, this is achieved by much data entry by salespeople. Manually uploading contacts, and details about pursuit activities and interactions. The salesperson does this over and above the standard sales work week – busy with cold emails, cold calls, social media prospecting, travel, networking at events, and more. The data upload that the salesperson does yields no immediate, personal benefit. It is done for a higher purpose – managerial decision making. Such top-down mandates are hard to enforce in industrial operations.
There isn’t enough structure for a primary key either. The primary key could be an asset ID locked in an engineering diagram that needs to be extracted. This brings us to the next point.
Software for deskless last mile operations is therefore caught in a vicious cycle where the lack of structured data leads to lack of software, and the lack of software guarantees data will never be captured in a usable form. The entire discipline is therefore trapped in a low-level equilibrium where decision makers accept antiquated approaches to managing safety and production efficiency.
The difficulties involved in building software that helps improve industrial operations has led to software’s scope being limited to compliance, GHG reporting, and similar. These serve real needs, but the scope of industrial software can be much wider. It’s hardly the case that the banking software serves SOX compliance and nothing else. Retail, for a long time, was considered a hopeless tech laggard. That changed with e-commerce. We aim to be part of a similar paradigm shift in asset-heavy industries.
