Release date: Monday, December 9, 2024

Dear Users,

Artificial Intelligence has been a highly discussed topic as of late, and its impressive potential across many areas is clear.

At Praxedo, we have long believed in the transformative potential of AI within the Field Service Management (FSM) software sector. After months of dedicated investment, we are thrilled to announce the launch of a new product range starting January 1st, 2025. Designed to streamline access to AI-powered features, this range will include 4 new plans: BASIC, ADVANCED, OPTIMIZED, and AUTOMATED.

AUTOMATED includes the most advanced AI-powered features, such as:

• Real-time scheduling automation that adapts to the unexpected events that may happen in the field.
• Automated image analysis for quality control & compliance,
• And the use of Generative AI to summarize video calls (via the ViiBE option).

These first features mark the starting point of our ambitious roadmap. Indeed, we aim to revolutionize how our customers manage their field operations, by improving the quality of service they deliver to their own end customers, thus driving significant productivity gains. 

Plans from the existing range (START, CLASSIC, and PREMIUM) will continue to be maintained and enhanced with new features, but will no longer be offered to new customers. The following release note explains in detail what is available in each plan. While no immediate action is required, you may find the new plans include valuable features for your organization. Please reach out to your Praxedo contact to discuss further.

Want to find out more?

Register to attend one of our webinars to learn more about the new products and features, or follow the links to our online documentation.

Finally, our Customer Care team is always at your service to answer any questions you may have (support@praxedo.com).  They will put you in touch with your account manager if needed.

Here is a sneak peak of this release!

• AI-driven real-time scheduling optimization: Let our AI engine optimize your schedule continuously on the current day, while taking into account unexpected changes in the field(cancellations, shorter or longer appointments…). AI allows you to make the best scheduling decisions at all times.  Learn more...
• New End Customer Portal: Enable your customers to book their appointments at their own convenience, while recommending time slots that are optimized for your  field resources’ schedules and routes. Your customer will also be able to monitor the ETA of your field resource in real-time.  Learn more...  Important: The End Customer Portal will be available in the first half of 2025 for our North American customers.

• AI for photo and video assistance: Use AI to summarize and extract key insights from ViiBE video calls. Enhance the quality of your field resources’ reports with AI-driven photo analysis. Learn more...

This release note also presents many other innovations regarding the web application, the mobile app, ViiBE and our connectors / APIs.

Fall 2024 Release

Improve real-time management of your field resources’ schedules

In your day-to-day operations, unexpected events happen: a field resource may call in sick, traffic delays may increase travel time, or a customer may reschedule last-minute. In all cases, the ability to adjust the current schedule quickly and effectively is crucial. With real-time management of your field resources’ schedules, you can better minimize daily issues and disruptions while boosting productivity. 

1. Identify at-risk work orders using the alerts module

🚩Available with the PREMIUM, OPTIMIZED and AUTOMATED plans

nothing worse, from a customer experience perspective, than your field team running late or missing an appointment and your office team not being able to anticipate it. 

With Praxedo, you can now proactively monitor your work orders with scheduled appointments to quickly identify those at risk or missed directly from the schedule view using a new alert module. So, if the field resource does not declare his “Traveling” activity on time, you will be alerted directly in the schedule. 

This allows you to contact your customer to make the best decision with him or her: maintain the appointment or reschedule the work order for a later date.

💡  For more details, please consult our technical guide.

👉 For advice on this new feature, please contact your account manager, if you already know who they are, or Customer Care (support@praxedo.com) if you do not.

2.  Continuous schedule optimization powered by AI

🚩 Available with the AUTOMATED plan

If you want to easily optimize your field resources’ routes, and also take into account unexpected changes in the field, let the SmartScheduler make real-time adjustments on its own. With the power of AI, our optimization engine can take over and continuously re-optimize schedules to address issues arising on certain routes:

• Less urgent work orders are rescheduled at a later date, while the SmartScheduler prioritizes the scheduling of high-priority work orders.
• You can always keep control of specific work orders by locking them if you do not want them to be rescheduled, or you can take advantage of alerts (see the previous item) to reschedule work orders yourself. 
• Finally, if a work order is rescheduled at the last minute from the Appointment Portal (more information in the next section), our AI-powered SmartScheduler automatically readjusts your field resource’s schedule to assign another work order to them.

Additionally, a new option lets you share only part of their route with a field resource, communicating the rest of his workload as the day progresses. This avoids overwhelming them with an ever-changing schedule.

💡  For more details, please refer to our technical guide.

👉 For advice on this new feature, please contact your account manager if you already know who they are, or Customer Care (support@praxedo.com) if you are unsure

3.  Automatically scheduled optimizations of your routes

🚩 Available with the AUTOMATED plan

Let the SmartScheduler handle your scheduling even when you are not around! Praxedo saves you even more time by offering the option to schedule one or more optimization strategies to run automatically on a recurring basis. Simply set up your strategy once and program it to run every morning with your predefined criteria. This way, optimizations are executed without needing manual intervention, even before your workday begins.

You can then take your time to check the results of the proposed optimization and make any necessary changes before sharing the routes with your field resources.

It is possible to program an optimization strategy for the same day or future days, for one time or on a recurring basis. 

💡For more details, please refer to our technical guide.

👉For advice on this new feature, please contact Customer Care (support@praxedo.com) to be connected to your account manager.

Appointment Portal

🚩Option available with the PREMIUM, OPTIMIZED and AUTOMATED plans

Ever find your field resources losing precious time traveling to an appointment only to find the customer isn’t home or available? Using Praxedo’s new Appointment Portal, your customers can reschedule their appointment in the event of a problem, allowing you to improve service quality and customer satisfaction. Your customers will also be able to track the arrival time of your field resources in real-time.   

To reduce your customer service or operations’s workload, you can now grant your customers access to the Appointment Portal. Your customers will be able to choose and/or change their appointment independently, even at the last minute. Praxedo will automatically propose the best time slots based on your field resources availability and the travel time required to get to the work order location.

When you combine the Appointment Portal with our email and SMS functionality, you automate the entire process: when scheduling the work order, you automatically give your customer access to the portal to modify their appointment if needed, and when your field resource starts traveling to the work order, you automatically communicate the field resource's estimated time of arrival to the customer.

Finally, pairing the Appointment Portal with AI-powered continuous optimization ensures your field resources’ schedules are automatically updated in real time. Appointments cancelled by customers are automatically replaced with others. As a result, your schedules are always optimized, and your field resources only travel when required. 

Adopting the Appointment Portal improves your customers' experience and reduces your field resources’ lost travel time, while significantly lowering the volume of schedule-related calls received by your operations department. As a result, you will be able to increase your profitability while enhancing your customer satisfaction. 

Important: The Appointment Portal will be available in the first half of 2025 in North America.

💡For more details, please refer to our technical guide.

👉For advice on this new feature, please contact our Customer Care at (support@praxedo.com), they will connect you to your account manager.

AI applied to photo and video assistance

• Analyze photos taken by your field resources: in Praxedo, you can ask AI to analyze your photos to check their quality, to automatically retrieve data to be read on a measuring device or labels on machines (via OCR technology), or to perform conformity checks before and after a work order has been carried out. Determine your needs with our dedicated team, and put AI to work for you, based on the specifics of your industry. (🚩Available with the AUTOMATED plan)

• Analyze your video-assistance calls: when you make video calls using our ViiBE solution, they are saved on the platform and available for review. But to search for one call among the many you might have made, you have to know what happened during the call. For this reason, we have developed an AI tool capable of summarizing the video call and adding tags for each call. This makes it much easier and faster to search within your video repository. (🚩 Option available as part of the ViiBE add-on, with CLASSIC, PREMIUM, ADVANCED, OPTIMIZED and AUTOMATED plans)

These new functionalities, driven by artificial intelligence, require support for their integration. Determining your needs with our Product teams and consultants is essential. This way, we will help you create the most relevant prompts for the best AI results.

💡For more details, please refer to our technical guide.

👉 For advice on this feature, please contact our Customer Care  (support@praxedo.com) to be connected to your account manager.

In addition to the major new features outlined above, this release brings a number of upgrades to the web interface, mobile application and connectors/APIs.

Praxedo Web

Improvements to Praxedo Web 

• Use SmartScheduler to schedule specific work orders for certain field resources, based on their skills and/or preferred work order types. For more details
• In the Schedule, you now have a better view of the work of orders outside your office scope that have been scheduled for your field resources. For more details
• Export up to 5,000 work orders from Advanced Search. For more details
• On work order details page:
  • Click on the work order’s address to open Google Maps,
  • View the geolocation of activities declared by your field resources from the activity report list.
  • Retrieve time-stamp and geolocation information for photos taken on site
  • Add, modify or delete photos when you edit the report. 

💡 For more details

• Customer portal users now have the option to:
  • Add personal notes to a work order,
  • Change a work order status to Completed in order to complete the work order automatically

💡 For more details

• In the Settings menu:
  • Configure up to 30 flags, instead of the previous 16
  • Configure your route service orders to automatically validate upon the completion of all associated work orders. This way, management will not need to do it manually.

💡 For more details

Praxedo Mobile

Improvements to the new mobile application

• New languages are available: Italian, Dutch, Portuguese and Mandarin.
• Allow one or more of your field resources to carry out work orders when they are attached to service orders (Route service orders) and to declare items consumed. For more details
• Ensure that your field resource declares the start of the work order upon arrival at the site. For more details
• In order to offset the changes throughout the day, you can now indicate the number of work orders to be made available on the mobile app at a time, progressively throughout the day (as explained in this paragraph).
• Like every semester, check out the updated functions and new features of the new Praxedo mobile app.
• Please note that our former Praxedo mobile app will be decommissioned in June 2026. It will no longer be available to download, and maintenance by Praxedo’s technical team will be discontinued.

ViiBE

Improvements to ViiBE, video assistance solution

• Access your video calls history in your work order details on Praxedo’s web application,
• Notify field resources in Praxedo when someone tries to contact them via ViiBE during a work order,
• Allow a ViiBE user to create a work order request directly from ViiBE,
• View detailed dashboards of your ViiBE usage, including the number of calls, minutes consumed, and the amount of data stored. 

💡 For more details

WS and connectors

Improvements Made to Web Services and Connectors 

Web services

Update your priority work order types directly via Web Service.

💡 For more details

Microsoft Business Central Connector

With the latest version of the Microsoft Business Central connector, you can now synchronize:

• items declared as consumed in work orders reports, once the work order has been validated in Praxedo,
• activities declared by your field resources using the new mobile application.

💡 For more details

We hope these new features meet your expectations. Do not hesitate to create an account to consult our online documentation. Should you require any further explanation, activation of a feature or assistance, our Customer Care team is at your disposal via phone: +1 833-PRAXEDO / + 1 833-772-9336 or via email:  support@praxedo.com.