Episode 9: Route Optimization for Field Service with Featured Partner, Jason Johnson, Route 4 Me

Transcript

My name is Jason Johnson, I'm Director of strategic partnerships at Route 4 Me. So, Route 4 Me and MSI came to work together by taking the body of work that MSI data has so all these jobs that your customers have and we help figure out what's the best plan for getting those jobs done in a way that saves time and money.
If people are concerned about, you know, their data and their addresses being out there, why shouldn't they worry about that? So that's a fantastic question. And in this day and age, everybody should be concerned about their data and data security and like how their data is being managed. So Route 4 Me, as a partner, we've been in the route optimization space since 2009. So we've grown up doing this. Um, we've actually helped our customers over the years, uh, cover over 3 billion miles. We have over 40,000 happy customers around the world, and we've helped them visit over 750 million stops. So lots of lessons learned along the way. The key takeaway is from the data perspective is one the data is GEO coded. So the addresses are actually converted to lats and logs. So in the routing space specifically you want to be as accurate as you can. So when the information is passed to us all we're really getting is coordinates on those coordinates. Um will then be used in the solution and then return back as a sequence. No, what's handed back over to MSI is basically a group of stops in the specific order in which saves time, miles, and more money.

Is there anything else that we should know about Route 4 Me? Is anything going on that you'd like to share? The exciting things you have coming up, or particularly cool facts? Particularly cool facts? Um. Let's see. One of the interesting things that I think about when I think about routing in the last mile is the fact that it's very much a journey. It's not a destination. There's no such thing as perfect. So it with that understanding, the fact that people take different things into account for every solution is one of the things that makes it awesome. So whether you're in HVAC or generator service, it kind of doesn't matter where you are or what you do, how you do it is going to be very different. And as a platform, we are very, very horizontal. So our solvers will give MSI data and their clients future, future space down the roadmap to do a whole bunch of different things. And I think that speaks to the power of the partnership. And one of the really, really neat things that we can what we can do now and what we're capable of doing in the future, um, are, are miles and miles apart. But what's really neat is we have so super fun. I've enjoyed how well it's been put together. I attend a lot of different conferences and shows, and I just told your CEO quality speaks for itself and, you know, it's very well put together, very well organized and that I've been to some that aren't and I've been to some that are. And you guys are definitely in the well-organized, very well put together show experience. And if you are a user of MSI's platform, uh, based on what I've seen and what I've learned, very educational, you should attend. It's something where personal growth is, you know, built into the entire event.

And things I tell customers is it's important to understand that. AI is one of these subjective things where it's a buzzword today in the market, and there's AI, which is almost included, which means there is no actual intelligence, it's just something somebody included in a marketing material, and there's genuinely not even the slightest sniff of it anywhere in the software. There's automation included, which is also AI. However, that AI is just a whole bunch of fancy, if then statements. It's basically business rules. And then there's true artificial intelligence, and that's kind of the gold standard. So you're going to want to seek out a partner that really has an understanding of what that is. So when you feed the data in it's not just giving you back patterns, it's giving you back intelligence. And that's the big differentiator between like when you actually work with true AI and when you don't. So and there's a bunch of super interesting stuff coming out. One of the companies that I've had the privilege of working with is called Happy Robot, and they are a voice model where an AI voice agent can actually take customer service calls, reschedule customer service calls. In this case, they're very much logistics heavy. So there's a lot of it's package delivery, but they will actually be able to read the the agent can actually take the call, have the conversation, reschedule the call and turn out a happy customer experience at the end. And like that's kind of all in that toolset. The question that we have to ask ourselves and make sure we stay focused on is, how are we separating the signal from the noise? Because right now there's a lot of noise and it's really hard to truly find a signal. So I don't think it's something that we need to be worried about. But I think it's something that could if we're not paying attention.