Increasingly our field service technicians and engineers are by far and away our most valuable assets…

In a world of digitalisation they provide one of the few remaining person to person touch points and as such they are key ambassadors today more than they have ever been before.

At the same time, the threat of a workforce shortage is hurting our sector even beyond the ways we may have imagined as we discussed a looming ageing workforce crisis for the past decade – and so the battle is not just finding and developing new engineers, but also retaining those we have invested in, who are central to our success as service organisations.

Add to this that in times of economic uncertainty like we face in this post-pandemic world, service and maintenance operations are going to be under even greater pressure to achieve more with less and the role of the field service technician is becoming more and more aligned with the success of the service operation than ever before.

With this in mind we simply have to ensure that we are empowering our engineers with the tools for them to excel in their day to day roles. Much is discussed in our industry about the software tools that can do so, but what about the devices they use to access those tools?

In a world of everyday mobility, where the standard devices in each of our pockets has the compute power of the moon landings, so we need specialised devices anymore or has consumer finally overtaken enterprise when it comes to mobile computing?

Or perhaps, when it comes to the rigours of the field, are devices consumer devices just not fit-for-purpose?

To find out more Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News spoke with Ben Baum, VP Sales, Durabook a rugged computing veteran to see why rugged devices should still form the backbone of field service hardware.