What is Field Service Management: A Comprehensive Guide To Field Service (2023)

Field service management involves a set of activities where workers have to be dispatched to a job site to perform a task. To successfully complete the task, the workers may have to use certain types of tools that they must carry with them and ensure to reach the job location in a specified time frame. The task generally depends on the type of the operations, for instance, it could be a maintenance service delivery or quality testing, or installation of equipment or machinery.

Most of these tasks fall under the category of post-sales services, which is often considered a burden by manufacturers. Generally, independent service providers used to provide these services, but with the rise of outcome-as-a-service model, manufacturers today are more driven to deliver these services on their own.

But this does not mean an uprooting of independent on-site providers from the business landscape such as plumbers, electricians, roofers, and construction workers. In the coming era, we will see a more effective collaboration between manufacturers and service providers with aligned values towards customer service and customer experience.

However, they often face challenges such as increased cost of operations, bad customer experience, and profit leakages, which ultimately bring them to square one–service delivery being a burden. The recent technological developments in the field such as the use of fsm software powered by AI-based engines and data & analytics tools have addressed most of these challenges with effective solutions.

In this guide, you will discover all aspects concerning field management, including dispatching, order, inventory, scheduling, and contracting, and the role of field service software in making these tasks streamlined and efficient. It will be interesting to find how field service software acts as an enabler to achieve cost and value-driven benefits out of field service operations.

What Is Field Service Management?

FSM is a process of effective delivery of customer service in a planned and controlled environment. It covers a wide range of tasks, starting from acquiring information about the maintenance or service requirements, scheduling and dispatching of field workers, execution, and monitoring and reporting of service delivered.

Field service companies generally use field service software to manage these processes with ease, efficiency, and transparency. A typical field service software contains features to streamline the field service work order to effectively deliver the services. Some of the key benefits of using field service software application are:

• Work order management: Work order in fsm includes a set of tasks that must be completed to ensure the successful delivery of the services. A work order generally consists of a myriad of processes, such as scheduling, inventory management, and invoice and payment systems, depending on the service type. What field service software does is provides a centralized view of the entire work order, allowing the teams involved in the field service delivery to have a consolidated view of the service status.
• Schedule optimization: Optimization of the field service scheduling software is intended to remove redundant activities from the process for timely scheduling of field service workers, ensuring that the right technician is available at the right time at the right place with the right tools. Field service software enables optimization of scheduling processes that results in meeting the timelines of the tasks, including product deliveries, work execution, or dispatching terms.
• Adequate inventory, resource, and contract supervision: The FSM software is widely used for getting more control over inventory. The software enables users to visualize the entire inventory, manage stock-in and stock-out, and set alerts and notifications about stock levels.
• Total invoice and payment control: Invoice and payment management processes are integral to field service operations, however, companies generally use independent software to manage their accounting system. But this creates information silos and affects the decision-making process. Most FSM software either have tools to keep a record of invoice generated and payment collected or could be integrated with the internal finance and accounting software systems used by the field service company.
• Real-time information for decision-making process improvement. The automation systems collect and process a vast amount of data which allows for making informed decisions and improving turnaround time.
• Reliable customer-centric management: Building a strong customer-business relationship that drives customer loyalty and could be translated into revenue and profitability is the core objective of field service operations. Field service management software by bringing transparency, efficiency, and visibility into the process enables service managers to foster a solid customer-business relationship.
• On-the-go dashboards and visualized analytical dynamics: Visual objects, interactive charts, and diagrams in the dashboard of a field service application could interpret each indicator or operational factor. For instance, you may request the construction contract value conducted for the last five years in order to drive strategic decisions about the new tendering procedure.

Components And Features of Field Service Management

The fsm is subject to step-by-step tasks, which are broken down into daily business activities with strategic goals which must be achieved within a particular time frame. The entire field service operations have several key components that are differentiated on the basis of service type. Typical field services operations has the following components:

• Scheduling and dispatch: Field service workers are scheduled for the job, where the job could be service delivery or quality testing, or installation of equipment. Scheduling and dispatch processes are aimed at ensuring that the technicians or field workers reach the job site with the right tools and at the right time, so that reworks on the job are not required, and tasks are done with 100% accuracy and efficiency.
• Work order management: A consolidated process, starting from raising the service request to the closure is called work order management. For instance, HVAC maintenance agencies may get a call from a distressed customer about the poor functioning of the equipment. It depends on the agency whether they manually register the request for servicing of the equipment or use automated tools like FSM to keep a digital record of the service request and the actions taken on them for increased transparency.
• Assets and equipment management: Tracking of tools and equipment to conduct a periodic asset health check reduces downtime and increases the service life of the assets. Modern assets and equipment have IoT capabilities, consequently, they are trackable and generate loads of data that could be processed to generate insights.
• Customer management: Nurturing business customer relationships is a fundamental part of field service operations, as it offers a glimpse of company culture to customers, and simultaneously provides an opportunity for the company personnel to build a strong relationship with customers, and upsell or cross-sell products.
• Time-tracking and timesheets: Geofencing technologies today enable field service organizations to integrate the employee time clock with digital maps, revealing the exact location of the field service technicians at a particular time. Increased use of digital timesheets in the field service industry enables service managers to keep a digital record of work hours, including time-stamped visits. It gives them a deeper into productive hours and helps them make informed decisions about scheduling, expenses, compensation, and benefits.
• Contract and warranty management: Commercial relationships are legally bound and must be managed with attention to detail. Manual processes often put professionals in murky situations, causing profit leakages, missed opportunities, and failure in keeping deadlines. To avoid that, field service companies have started using automated tools, which organize the contracts and warranties in a way that managers get alerts of upcoming contract renewals, SLAs to determine the service charges, and the ability to identify new upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
• Claims and reimbursement: The work environment in the field is unpredictable. There are several factors that affect the daily workings of the field service technicians such as schedule, client availability, detection of the fault in the equipment, and vehicle and fuel conditions. These disruptions impact the time and quality of service delivered by the field workers, and consequently their compensation. Having easy claims and reimbursement management is imperative for the field service workers’ motivations and success.
• Route planning and tracking: Selecting the most efficient routes to client locations has several benefits. The key benefits are saving time and fuel costs. While manual processes for route planning and tracking could work for small teams, large teams would need automated route planners, which are generally integrated with fsm software.
• Pre/post inspection reports: Creating inspection reports is helpful in SWOT analysis, leading to making better decisions in the future and driving more effective strategies. Modern FSM tools are integrated with high-end data analytics capabilities, which enable the organizations to process asset, equipment, maintenance, and inspection data, and create dynamic and visually-pleasant reports.
• Preventive maintenance and inspections: Downtime is a dreaded problem in asset-intensive organizations. Preventive maintenance is an effective strategy to curb downtime by conducting pre-planned and periodic maintenance and inspection of equipment. Today, most of the equipment comes with sophisticated sensors that make the data collection process much easier.
• RFQ and quote management: Tracking procurement procedures cover a number of activities, such as creating purchasing orders, requesting for quotes, vendor selection, and getting the order at inventory. Chances of tripping off in the long process of RFQ and quote management are high and not something unheard of, mainly due to the lack of visibility into the process. Many field service organizations today are adopting field service tools to move effortlessly and rapidly.
• Invoice and payments: As payments are collected in the field, it becomes essential for the field service company to ensure accuracy while eliminating the time and communication gaps between office teams and field workers. Automation has displayed uncommon effectiveness in reducing this gap, making the invoice and payment processes more transparent, fast, and efficient.
• Inventory management: A physical trip down to inventories at multiple locations is not needed most of the time. For instance, to know the availability of a tool in the current stock or to determine whether the stock has reached the location or not, physical presence is not required. This information could be easily shared on a centralized fsm software. Inventory management has changed a lot in today’s time. Tracking stock levels, statuses of stock-in and stock-out, and receiving alerts and notifications for inventory replenishments have all become digitized processes.
• Reporting and analytics. What is working and what’s not, when is the right time to take an action, and what more needs to be done to make the field teams more effective–these are a few questions that give sleepless nights to field service managers. Today, managers use field service tools to find the answer to these questions in real-time, when it is not too late to take strong action. These tools are integrated with intuitive dashboards that enable interactive representation of the graphical data to stimulate decision-making factors.

Benefits of Field Service Management

Until a few years ago, fsm was considered a burden by manufacturers. It was a cost center for them, with no plausible benefits in investments. As a result, the field service landscape was dominated by local individual players or authorized service providers, if the equipment were slightly sophisticated. However, the dawn of new technologies and improved IT infrastructure has transformed the scenario. Manufacturers today are taking a keen interest in using fsm as a new revenue source. Some of the key benefits of effective management of field service operations are:

Drive revenue and profitability: The next-generation technologies have empowered manufacturers to track the performance of the product, not by their life and functionality, but by the value they deliver to the users. This has introduced a new service model, popularly known as outcome-as-a service model. It enables the manufacturers to measure the “value” consumed by the product users, and charge them based on the usage, thus allowing them to figure out new ways to generate revenue sources and drive profitability.

Improved customer experience: Field teams generally have in-person communication with customers. This sort of communication gives them a greater window of opportunity to paint an incredibly good picture of customer service–reflecting on the company’s willingness to take care of customers and provide them with continued service, resulting in superior customer experience and increased brand loyalty.

Achieve product or service excellence: While operational excellence is not directly correlated with fsm, it does give an insight into the efforts required to achieve excellence into the product or service category. This happens due to the opportunity of forming very close relationships with customers through continuous monitoring of product/service performance and direct interaction with customers.

Increased transparency and efficiency: The next-generation technology used in delivering field services to customers brings transparency into the purchasing process and insight into consumer behavior at different stages of the process. By analyzing those touch points, companies can understand consumer sentiments and make massive transformations in their products and services, from improving the turnaround time by increasing efficiency levels or reorganizing the product or service structure to increase customer satisfaction.

The Most Important Stakeholders in Field Service Operations

Field service management is a collection of processes. The end-to-end ownership of tasks with one person as a leader and the rest of the followers is close to impossible, mainly because the individual responsibilities of a task owner are critical. But thankfully it is conclusive, which makes room for forging leadership roles, entrusting the person with the responsibility to ensure that every stakeholder in the process has completed their tasks with quality and effectiveness. The key stakeholders in field service operations are:

• Field service technicians: It is the field workers who act as a bridge between field service and customers. They are the ones who are entrusted with the major responsibility of closing the service request, raised by customers.
• Field service managers: The role of the managers is to ensure that the right service technicians reach the right location at the right time. They are the gatekeepers, and guardians of the processes. Field service managers rely on field service tools and technologies to make sure that everything is where it needs to be, from tools in inventory to technicians at the client location and managing schedules and appointments to timesheets and expenses.

• Management: Leaders of operations management in a field service organization have the tough task to interpret the data collected from the systems, reading through them, and making informed decisions. It is important that they use the best tools and technologies to collect the right data for accurate and detailed analytical reports for on-the-go decisions and risk mitigation measures.
• Back-office staff. They are people who sit behind the fence to keep a tab on everything happening around the field service operations. They are facilitators–with discernible but significant contributions. People at back-office staff include CRM administrators, inventory managers, HRs, financial managers, etc. who support field service teams from behind.
• Contractors or subcontractors. They are an extended arm of field service teams. Contractors, subcontractors, and vendors play an integral role in the quality of services delivered to customers. They are engaged at business levels to support field service operations with tools, inventory items, and other products and services.

An Overview of Operations With Field Service Tools

Field services tools are advancing with time. The next generation technologies have significantly improved the capabilities of field services tools and thus have resulted in a major transformation in how services are delivered in the field service sector. Some of the key benefits of field service tools are:

• Operational excellence: Modern field service tools have successfully managed to create a synthesis of scattered field service processes, back office teams, field service workers, inventory items, and assets; turning them into one functional, efficient, nimble, and fast field service operations.

• Field service team empowerment: Service teams are empowered with truly advanced capabilities to complete their tasks in time. The key empowerment areas include dispatching, inventory management, and route planning and scheduling. Field service teams face several problems due to a lack of visibility and transparency. Sophisticated FSM tools enable field workers to track their appointments, client availability, and tools to be used in service delivery. They can select the most efficient routes, generate digital invoices and collect payment in the field, and track their visit-in and visit-out time to better manage their productivity.
• Transparency and visibility: Transparency and visibility are axiomatic to field service management software. This software is designed to increase visualization and accountability in the process. Using FSM tools makes the process streamlined, by removing the redundancy and repetitive tasks from the processes.
• Digitalization of field service processes: No hard copies or paper works are required in the cloud environment deliverables. Minimizing paper works not only reduces manual errors but also speeds up the processes, leading to an increase in efficiency.
• Collaboration: Effective collaboration between field service teams and back-office staff is key to the success of field service operations. With the FSM mobile app, collaboration is enabled across the organization, which is helpful in tracking statuses and taking action on them in real time.
• Online and offline support:

What All Industries Have Field Service Processes

Indeed, each industry or business entity with a scalable target audience and multiphased project activities must integrate the field service software. This technology harmonically adopts the determined tasks and proves its efficiency in the following economic sectors:

• Machinery and equipment engineering and manufacturing. Vehicle, facility, or equipment production comprise different processes which should be adjusted to eliminate shipment delays or brand quality threats;
• HVAC. Public utilities, including municipal or private manufacturers and distributors, oversee several vital business directions. The field service optimized company could simultaneously treat the GIS surveys, leakage fixing, and individual maintenance claims;
• Oil and gas industries. The field service managers prefer to leverage this technology to investigate the new mining landmarks and market scaling opportunities;
• Construction. From the architectural design certification to commission works, any building holding could be aware of the project implementation stage and coordinate the skilled teamwork;
• Facility management. Team, resource, and finance mobilization become effective and tolerant to the project budget size.

See more industries acceptable for FSM software integration

Biggest Challenges Businesses Face in Managing Field Service Operations

Before installing the FSM system, focus on the several field service management challenges that could jeopardize your ongoing business operations:

• Permanent customer satisfaction. Do not forget to update the installed version and leverage new opportunities for meeting client expectations. In practice, follow the requirements of at least 20% of the total clients to keep the business competitive and profit-making;
• Ultimate paperless processes. Choose the field service software with full report and visibility generation options. But for digital analysis fact-findings, you may reduce administrative costs and optimize the document management system;
• Measuring KPIs. It would help if you coped with SLAs (service level agreements), FTFR (first-time fix rates), other scheduling indicators, and customer satisfaction goals. For instance, a customer highly assesses your services and recommends your company to friends, colleagues, or family members if your staff solves the issues after the first call and during the previously agreed deadline;
• Easy synchronization with the existing software solutions. The best field service application should supplement CRM (customer relationship management) and ERP (enterprise resource planning) technologies using well-adapted desktop, mobile, and web APIs.

Discover more obstacles and complicated cases your business should overcome in managing the field service operations

Best Practices Industries Follow to Optimize Field Service Operations

Under global management trends, industries should improve their off-site technologies and upgrade field service operators. Here you find the affirmative techniques which give you a significant competitive advantage and engage more target groups:

• Adapt mobile environment. Mobile devices allow us to work outside the office and collect data in real-time without redundant tasks or overestimated resources;
• Big data integration. The business scaling perspective requires following software trends that align your managerial activities with cloud environment solutions and vast volumes of information processing;
• Customer service prioritization. Every operational optimization should be customer-centric and put their needs and claims as a priority;
• Real-time inputs processing. The fsm market is full of effective technologies ranked by their speed and time to process and transmit input data without omissions;
• Streamlined communication adjustment. Communication with different stakeholders arranges the project management cycle by agile approaches. Therefore, the final product or task goal could be attained by fixed deadlines.

See more successful cases which contribute to your field service manager activities

How to Hire and Build a Great Field Service Team?

Creating a skillful field service team is a complicated issue any business could face. Thus, you need to involve the experienced outsourcing staff or train a company’s unit skilled enough to handle the field service proceedings. To this end, fulfill the following recommendations and build a healthy working environment:

• Practice rewards and intangible stimulations. When integrating the field service technologies, explain to the appropriate operators and senior managers the rewarding principles for scheduling, task performance, and client satisfaction purposes;
• Encourage training sessions. Introduce periodic skill upgrading training for the staff in charge. These educational activities improve their knowledge and perfect their hard and soft skills;
• Do not neglect traineeship. Engage the graduating students or trainees to join your team and differentiate the workforce capacities with mindset enthusiasts;
• Peer-to-peer collaboration. The field service managers should be ready to demonstrate their professional achievements at the thematic events or during the internal cross-cutting meetings to achieve the overall goals;
• Draft the hiring criteria. Set the so-called checklists to evaluate candidates for the fsm sector.

Find out more secrets for building productive field service staff

What’s a Field Service App: Benefits to Use It for Field Service Businesses

If the field service software does not support mobile or web services, do not integrate it with your exciting enterprise management technologies. Such engineering solutions give your business a range of benefits to performing off-site activities incredibly:

• All reports in one smartphone. When your staff is assigned to check HVAC issues in place, you may generate the appropriate reports and provide complete surveys outside the office;
• Comprehensive planner options. Each team member could manage individual tasks, orders, and deadlines synchronized with access-granted practitioners;
• Transparent task execution with 24/7 support. Your field service operators could change the task status in place, and amendments are automatically saved even if the Internet connection is suspended.

Find the best field service app to explore your business’s remote operations

Top 10 KPIs You Should Measure in Field Service Operations

You must distinguish the field service performance indicators to estimate your business success goals or strategy effectiveness. The defined metrics guarantee your customer satisfaction and employee empowerment for the broader market niche ratio occupation:

• Service request volume to sum up the tasks performed and analyze the priorities of the submitted calls;
• First-time fix rate to measure the client satisfaction degree from the issue resolution during the first maintenance visit;
• Technician utilization to calculate the average time spent to fix the particular issue;
• Inventory and spares turnover rate to keep accounting activities properly;
• Number of a job done to track strengths of the techs assigned;
• Repeat visit to assess the complexity of the issues and forecast their possible factors and consequences;
• Average reply time to determine the field service dispatcher effectiveness;
• Rescheduling ratio to indicate the reactive work number;
• Staff satisfaction to identify the self-motivation factors affecting task performance;
• Profit to estimate the financial capacity.

Discover the field service metrics to provide a comprehensive analytical survey of your operations.

Field Service Management Software Market

The field service management market occupied 3.2 billion USD in 2021, and market analysts expect its growth by 10.3 billion USD during the upcoming ten years. A range of external contributory factors explains such positive dynamics:

• globalization of the economic processes;
• burgeoning demand for the primary and secondary products;
• extremely sharp ups of the digital technologies development;
• reduction of the workload pressure on the employees;
• optimization of the office working conditions;
• the popularity of remote works;
• time management improvement.

All these triggers stimulate fsm software engineers to upgrade their products and integrate new operational functions. As such, transnational corporations or local small legal entities could work with coherent management optimization systems to:

• motivate their staff in qualitative task performance;
• execute more orders without shortcomings and delays;
• align with the scheduled timelines;
• save the finds by declining administrative and operational expenditures;
• invest in further business scaling and client database expansion.

Consequently, the final goal of the FSM merchants is to force the software deliverable to work for the business’s profit-making results. Therefore, this solution keeps its market ranking for the upcoming decades.

What Are Some of the Drivers in the FSM Software Market?

The off-site supervision market has a great perspective to increase its rates and involve more industries for its products. By 2032, economists forecast its ratio growth by three times; however, the global business and innovation development tendencies could increase that indicator more times.

According to the ongoing analytical surveys, the FSM market drivers include:

• Dependence on SaaS technologies. Cloud systems empower enterprises to keep vast volumes of information off-site. Therefore, these business entities seek solutions capable of managing numerous databases. Thus, the FSM applications started occupying a significant market share and gradually replaced the management software supplements;
• Mobile environment enlargement. Smartphones are long-term trends in the software markets because they provide remote work anywhere and time. Thus, mobile industries facilitate the FSM development and become the ideal accompanying tools for the dispatching activities;
• Cost-effectiveness. Any corporation strives to keep funds and invest them in future development. So, decreasing operational costs and project budget optimization are the primary triggers to encourage field service system integration.

Find more FSM stimulation factors in our blogs

FSM Software vs. CRM Comparison

Talking in commerce language, CRM treats the pre-acquisition and lead conversion processes, and fsm is dedicated to improving post-sale activities.

In most cases, the FSM software could be harmonically integrated with the existing CRM or EPM embedded solutions. However, the filed service functions have some significant advantages beyond the customer management systems:

• Tailored business process automation. Unlike CRM mediums, the FSM solutions cover the whole operational cycle, including staff, inventory, facility, sales, maintenance, and customer support operations;
• Comprehensive financial management. Using the filed service software, managers could be calm about payments and transactions with contractors or regulatory bodies;
• Improved time management. Task and order scheduling could be adjusted to satisfy the client’s expectations;
• Complete technician empowerment. The specialized workflow automation is optimized and increases efficiency indicators due to cross-cutting operational principles.

See more specific similarities and differences between these two business process optimization technologies

How to Choose the Best Field Service Software for Your Business

The field service managers are granted a large assortment of programming products to adjust the business planning, execution, and controlling mechanisms. However, a choice of the best FSM technology synchronized with the business specialization activities should be based on the following recommendations:

• Check the available functions in line with your business needs;
• Take care about the security options to protect your commercial secrets and customer data;
• Prefer the analytical tools integrated into the FSM system;
• Support the training programs to encourage the staff upgrading efforts;
• Compare the outcomes and KPIs generated by each system under consideration;
• Manage software solutions with profound forecasting capacities for visualizing ongoing business processes.

Discover the best field service software particularities to embed your business system

Accounting With QuickBooks and Field Service Management Software for QuickBooks

This effective accounting software simplifies financial management activities. This technological automation solution allows each accountant or financial manager to perform multitasking activities and supervise the real-time stats. In collaboration with the FSM mediums, QuickBooks enables vendors and manufacturing corporations to:

• Book resources and inventory tools;
• Pay the scheduled taxes and fees in terms of the well-organized schedule;
• Generate the analytical reports and dashboards to assess the ongoing workflow measures;
• Estimate revenues and losses resulting from the possible investment operations;
• Plan project budgets with justified schedules and intervention logic schemes;
• Draft tactics and strategic, operational field service programs for SMEs and large corporations.

Get familiarized with more benefits granted from the QuickBook and FSM software synchronization in our blogs per particular industries

Worth Investing in Field Service Software? Calculate Your ROI

To calculate ROI from field service software, gather the crucial inputs which assess your business’s financial, human, and inventory capacities. In particular, the ROI formula traditionally comprises the following parameters automatically calculated by the embedded estimation machines:

• Manpower values include technician, administrative, and reporting team indicators. Staff size, standard work hours, and payment ratio are basic measurements to evaluate the labor performance of the FSM employees;
• Primary resources consisting of fuel consumption and value to foresee the assets optimization plans;
• Warranty services associated with spare components which supplement the operational activities;
• After-sales revenues estimate the income per job or service and predict the customer satisfaction rates.

Explore your ROI value to assess your FSM software metrics

Top 10 Field Service Software in FSM Market

The field service industries can choose different FSM software products that differentiate their available package by the business size, scaling perspectives, and investment availability.

Upon a brief review of the on-demand dispatching and scheduling optimization technologies, draw your attention to the top ten cutting-edge deliverables which make your business processes transparent and effective:

• Salesforce is a universal tool to drive commercial productivity and increase sales for any industry;
• Jobber is a customized solution perfect for startups and small business entities;
• Kickserv is a free fsm facility to discover the aspects of the adjusted customer and job empowerment processes;
• ServiceTrade helps arrange commercial operations;
• FieldEdge is narrowly specialized software for HVAC industries;
• Housecall Pro is an excellent digital management solution to analyze the customer experience achievements due to off-site support;
• ServiceTitan is the best alternative for construction industries and small-in-size vendors;
• Field Nation takes the leading position in the FSM market and satisfies the investors with a flexible toolkit and multifunctional tasks;
• ZuperPro is a field management platform easily managed on your smartphone;
• FieldCircle is an all-in-one platform for optimizing tailored management functions and satisfying different stakeholders with valuable packages of available features.

See top field service management software for small businesses and enterprise facilities in our thematic blogging surveys

What’s the Future of Field Service Operations

In the post-pandemic phase, the fsm systems are expected to deal with a spectrum of responsibilities and tasks, including:

• Technological progress in SaaS solutions, Big Data introduction, AI optimization, and improving mobile APIs;
• Remote work tendencies for scheduling adjustment and cost-effectiveness;
• Decision-making flexibility under extreme global challenges;
• Financial system review in light of the popularization of blockchain technologies;
• No staff trends in retail and wholesale industries based on new Amazon offline stores.

Considering the FSM market ratio forecast for the upcoming 10-year period, any field service manager should be ready to update the current planning and monitoring systems. Such preventive actions help businesses stay competitive and fix any risky situation without bankruptcy-provoking triggers.

So, choosing the FSM software integration, consider the main features and your business development objectives to avoid expensive and weak technologies limited to specific functional capacities.