BENTO Intellectually Curious
Preparing the Field Service Sector for a Digital Revamp

The infamous Murphy’s law—whatever can go wrong, will go wrong—might be a business cliché but not for companies like plumbing, HVAC, utilities, cleaning, municipal services, industrial equipment service providers, and many others that dispatch workers to off-site locations in order to complete tasks. When teams are in the field, anything can change in an instant. And when the unexpected happens, managers and technicians need access to real-time data and alerts, all in one place, to stay abreast of the activities and keep the ball rolling, no matter what hurdles may surface on the job. Connected field service management (FSM) technology, in this regard, is the name of the game—giving companies full visibility into the completion of their on-field workers’ tasks while also allowing their customers to see updates as they happen.

Bento Field Service Management (FSM) helps businesses quickly plan, anticipate, and optimize their distributed field service operations from centralized locations with both web and mobile-based applications. But in a competitive market such as FSM, what makes Bento’s offering different?
Vlad Bodea, the managing partner of Bento, has the answer. He explains that many of the marketavailable FSM solutions fall on two extremes. They are either old-school, enterprise-grade FSM solutions that are only suited for large scale rollouts in traditional companies that do things their way, or they are too lightweight to accommodate all the necessary FSM functionalities. Changing this narrative, Bento’s FSM solution brings the best of both worlds. “Essentially, our FSM solution combines the robustness, integrability and complexity of an enterprise-grade system with the nimbleness and modern UX of more lightweight FSM tools” underscores Bodea. Bento’s FSM solution is built on a modern and somewhat reimagined field service architecture; it can be tweaked to meet any specific needs of the clients and brings lots of functionality already in place for particular use cases. Therefore, any companies offering field services—be it telcos, utilities, or service companies— can adjust the FSM solution according to their idiosyncratic needs and increase the overall productivity at reduced operational costs while improving the satisfaction of end customers.

A Solution Built from Rich Domain Experience

Notably, the inspiration for a nimble yet fully-equipped FSM solution is deeply intertwined with Bento’s journey in the domain so far. Bento started its operations as a custom software company,

but quickly began delivering services for ancillary domains. It has thus helped utilities businesses in implementing third-party workforce management solutions, back in the day. While working on different implementation projects, the Bento team saw a huge potential for an in-house FSM solution that could bridge the gap between the two extremes of rigid, industrygrade, and lightweight FSM solutions. This understanding led the management at Bento to start working on developing their own intellectual properties (IPs) as standard software products, one of which is Bento’s FSM, their flagship offering. In the last decade Bento developed different FSM prototypes and implemented those for a few clients, noticing a significant improvement in their field service operations and accumulating a ton of experience about their customers’ operations and how to optimize them. “Around the same time, one of our big clients commissioned us to tailor a custom FSM solution for them. It gave us an opportunity to try out our application at large enterprise-scale,” underscores Bodea. And the success of this partnership further eventually pushed Bento forward to rewrite the FSM arena with their unique solution that can serve various use cases and industry requirements.

The Bento FSM ecosystem can also be integrated with SAP or any other third party ERPs, CRMs, Asset Management systems and so on, thereby allowing real-time automatic integration of work order data in the user’s digital landscape. The dispatch team of a field service company can then view the work orders and their teams on a map and can assign the work to the most relevant teams, if they opt out of automatic assignment. In order to better automate the task assignments, Bento plans to infuse its FSM solution with machine learning algorithms that learn from a field service company’s manual task assignment pattern to develop custom rules and remove any manual operations associated with the assignment of everyday work orders.

On the technician’s end, the field service executive uses the mobile application associated with Bento’s FSM solution to walk through a step by step guide into task execution, that is correlated to the specifics of the task at hand and to the particularities found in the field. The technicians collect job completion data and photos, thus streamlining their tasks even further. The evolution of the task completion is synced back to the dispatchers and transferred back to ERP and CRM solutions, eliminating the need for a manual updates. Field technicians can even use the mobile interface of Bento’s FSM solution to issue or print certain service-related documents (such as, contracts, invoices, intervention sheets, estimates, and guarantees). The system also provides a complex stock management layer ensuring trackability for devices, materials and consumables used in the field.

By leveraging the features of our FSM on top of a well designed HR scheme, one of our clients was able to witness a 30 percent increase in operational efficiency,” says Bodea. This kind of impact, needless to say, has brought forth an ample number of client success stories for Bento over the years.

Even during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bento witnessed a significant surge in demand for its FSM solutions. As many field service companies were forced to maintain social distancing during their tasks, it highlighted the importance of the mobile applications (like that of Bento’s) in overcoming such scenarios. The company, therefore, is now looking to bring its solution to more SMBs around the world, particularly the ones in the European region. Besides these, Bento is also planning on listing itself on the Bucharest Stock Exchange. “To sum it all, alongside growing our company organically, our roadmap would also entail interacting with our clients to bring forth more features and functionalities that can easily adapt to specific FSM workflows with minimum resistance,” concludes Bodea.