IFS Field Service Management vs. Oracle Service

IFS Field Service Management is well suited for ad-hoc reporting and querying of your dataset(s). It also is great for inventory management, processing orders, and handling EDI transaction sets to third party partners and suppliers.

Incentivized

Oracle Right (Oracle Service Cloud) was an important evolution in the group's ombudsman channel management processes. We brought the Oracle Service Cloud to digitize the processes for capturing and managing the group's ombudsman channel, no longer operating manually (MS Excel).

Oracle Service Cloud (Right Now) brought about an important evolution in the management processes of the group's ombudsman channel, where activities that were performed manually, repetitively and with risk of errors, are now operated by the Right Now platform itself, whether by API, or by automation of the tool.

Incentivized

• Order Placement - IFS makes placing orders quite easy. From the simple interface down to selecting inventory, the experience is simple and clean
• Reporting - Querying database records is straightforward and easy to do. Queries can then be drilled down to individual records or exported to excel for further manipulation and analysis.
• Customer Creation - Creating new customers and managing and maintaining existing records is a simple and easily repeatable exercise

Incentivized

• We can access the best-in-class features for cross-channel contact center management amd field service management.
• It provides a great way to mobilize agents and boost collaboration within the office which in turn improves the overall customer experience.
• Automation of back of the office repetitive tasks leading to a faster way of addressing customer concerns.

Incentivized

• Field Customization - Adding fields or inputs to particular entities is not very easy. In a world of point and click development, IFS is behind the curve
• Order Automation - for bulk order placement it would be nice to have an easy mechanism to upload orders via an Excel or csv template. We've written some custom programs to perform this, but a more user friendly, "out of box" solution would be welcomed.

Incentivized

• Oracle Service Cloud needs a better built in integration with Oracle Social Cloud or it needs to build in more Social network capabilities.
• SMS is handle via a third party application but could be built in as part of the product.
• The knowledge foundation product needs a better way to handle multiple languages. Currently you have to purchase an additional interface for each language. You can purchase the more expensive Knowledge Advance which does have a better language feature.

Although RightNow is extremely flexible, the flexibility comes with a price. It is often not intuitive which settings you need to change (and under which menus these setting are buried) to enable the system to do what you want. Also, sometimes the system can do things you need, but you don't initially realize it. When RightNow sells a system to a new customer, I think it should come with X hours of consulting time with a RightNow expert. The customer should be able to consult with this expert over the next year to get advice concerning how to configure the system to achieve desired needs. Often RightNow Support would just answer "no" when I asked if I could do something, but then I would find another way to achieve my goals after talking with other companies using RightNow.

The learning curve is fairly steep; but for something that has this much capability, it's nearly impossible to make it "easy". The layout and organization are at least reasonably intuitive. The hardest part-- the "weakest link"-- is the portal development (where you can build help centers and other end-user pages.) The capabilities there are significant, but the learning curve for that part is especially steep and it takes a fair amount of expertise to be able to update it.

We have never had issues with downtime or it not being available. Upgrades and maintenance also happens in weekends or at night.

Incentivized

We use a lot of tabs and fields on our incident workspace, which should slow the system down, but it's still quite fast, and we continue to optimize whatever is possible.

Incentivized

Technicians seem to be assessed based solely on how quickly they close the issues. I've had to reopen requests multiple times because they didn't actually solve my problem. Also, when the issue has even a moderate amount of complexity, the technicians often instruct me to "open another SR" to handle the other issue. I'm the customer, I shouldn't have to follow their processes, they should handle that for me. But even when I create the new SR, it seems like their right hand isn't talking to their left - they aren't reading back to the previous issue for context. So I get bounced around a lot, and I have to tell them how to do their job

Incentivized

Most of our training was given while doing user acceptance testing, and getting the system approved by the market. When ever we were in doubt, our implementer helped us along. Later on we started exploring by our selves.

Incentivized

Work with a RightNow expert during the implementation. Explain features that would you like to have. Often, somebody who really knows the system can show you what you need to do to achieve the desired results. Where a RightNow support engineer or a consultant might say "the system can't do that," a RightNow application engineer will listen to what you need, and often come up with an alternate path to achieve it

I was not part of the software selection process and cannot provide insight into any of the alternatives in this arena at this time.

Incentivized

TCS' customers who also selected Oracle Service Cloud over Salesforce Service Cloud and GE's ServiceMax in the Mfg. vertical in which I work, did so because of the robust ability of Oracle Service Cloud and its APIs to integrate with other value-add solutions for manufacturers such as IoT applications, Big Data Analytics, and Field Service applications.

Incentivized

We have never had any down time, slowness or anything. Any error or instability that has occurrred has so far has been caused by user errors.

Incentivized

• Positive - streamlined order processing has allowed our business to scale without requiring additional bodies for that specific need.
• Positive - Reporting has allowed valuable insight into historic business trends which has allowed us to be proactive instead of reactive in many areas.
• Negative - Customizations have proved costly and cumbersome when upgrading to the next version of the software.

Incentivized

• Since its, it has significantly reduced our training time of new agents. What used to take 6 weeks in the class room, went to 4 weeks.
• Service Cloud allows us to easily gather data to report to the other departments quickly.

Incentivized