Executive Perspective: Panasonic's Field Engineering Team Demonstrates Unmatched Support for Customers

Executive Perspective: Panasonic's Field Engineering Team Demonstrates Unmatched Support for Customers

Walt Chantlos

At the heart of the Panasonic promise is our dedication to putting our customers’ needs above all. For Panasonic Toughbook Professional Services, this means being there when extenuating circumstances arise, because even the toughest devices need a little support. With years of experience and expertise in all things mobility, Panasonic field engineers support customers from start to finish, ensuring Toughbook products operate in line with their needs. We sat down with Brian Kestenholz, Director of Mobility Field Operations for Panasonic Toughbook Mobility Solutions, to learn more about the work his team does and how it will alter in the future.

Panasonic is known for reliable hardware, but many aren’t aware of the ProServices teams that work behind the scenes. Can you describe your team’s role at Panasonic?

The field engineering team for Toughbook wears many hats within the company with important roles both before and after a sale is complete. From a field engineering standpoint, we’re focused on providing pre-sale solution support for our account management team to help them deliver the value proposition of Panasonic Toughbook products that set them apart from the crowd. For anything technical or service related, our certified technicians serve as the first responders to ensure that the Toughbook devices, application software and any accessory technology will meet the customer’s needs. If necessary we provide onsite technical review resources, available nationwide. Post sale, our team offers consulting services to ensure successful deployment and optimized performance of the mobile devices and operating systems within our customers’ existing infrastructure. Offered as a package or a la carte, the services offered by the team ensure that our customers have the support they need beginning the moment the device is purchased through years of use in the field.

When customers are looking for support in the field, why do they choose Panasonic?

There is no doubt that there is a science to a successful mobile device deployment. For about 80% of customers, the key issue of buying a rugged device is getting it out of the box and properly deployed with existing infrastructure and business applications. The field engineering team is dedicated to walking customers through this process step by step. Because all field engineers are ITIL certified, customers can trust they are receiving the highest quality of service possible.

Our field services team really stands above the rest because of the strong, personal relationships they establish with each of our customers. Our customers enjoy the peace of mind that they can pick up the phone and get in touch with their technical engineer directly, without having to go through multiple organizations and escalations to find the right level of support. On average, mobility field engineering team members have been with Panasonic for eleven years, demonstrating a deep understanding of our product lines and the ability to provide expertise and answers efficiently.

How is the role of Panasonic’s ProServices technicians evolving to meet the needs of customers?

Increasingly, we’re being called upon to act not only as a technology supplier, but as a technology consultant. For many organizations, IT staffing has been reduced and we are running into more customers who aren’t prepared to face the challenges that come up when buying a new rugged mobile device. They need a partner who comes to them with real mobility expertise not only about the devices, but about the way that their industry works. At Panasonic, our goal is to have a team that can truly help customers overcome the mobile technology deployment and IT challenges that they face on a day to day basis. That means working every day to ensure that our customers are happy with the product and support they receive, because building this relationship of trust is what keeps them coming back. But of course, this is part of the way we have worked for the past two decades, reminding ourselves that the customer must always be our first priority.

Visit us online to learn more about the services of Panasonic Toughbook and the mobility field engineering team.

The Internet of Vehicles

the-internet-of-vehicles

The Internet of Vehicles

3 minutes

As innovation accelerates, it isn’t hard to imagine a world where cars drive themselves, or even fly. But cars that talk and think? You might be shaking your head, but that’s exactly where mobility is headed.

At ITS World Congress that starts in mid-September in Copenhagen, Panasonic’s Jarrett Wendt will offer ideas on the connected vehicle ecosystem enabling cars to communicate with each other and the road around them. If your travels don’t include Denmark in September, here are a few highlights.

The world is changing at hyper speed

As anyone in the tech world understands, disruption is the new normal. Constant innovation is now the price of entry, and the rate of change is increasing exponentially. Adoption rates have also accelerated dramatically. As inventor and futurist and Ray Kurzweil noted, we won’t experience 100 years of progress in this century – at today’s accelerated pace, it will be more like 20,000 years worth.

In our recent “Moving Forward,” research series, Panasonic Corp. of North America assesses how senior technology decision makers in industries including automotive view the technologies they see driving us forward, and the impact of these technologies on future plans. By 2025, 10 disruptive technologies are expected to generate trillions of dollars of economic impact. Our new research reveals that tech decision makers in automotive, avionics industries and related government agencies say their companies have already adopted five of these technologies on average. And four have risen to the top of their innovation agendas – energy storage, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and sustainable energy. Panasonic is deeply engaged in all of them.

The future of transportation is integrated

There has been a great deal of prototyping and testing of Intelligent Transportation Systems, but working with the Colorado Dept. of Transportation, Panasonic has developed a phased approach that will allow DOTs to effectively deploy these technologies at scale. Not just a system for main highways and thoroughfares, but for all roadways and arteries throughout an entire state or region.

Our role? A technology-agnostic strategic consultant, general contractor and solution integrator.

We’re one year into our real-world deployment along a particularly challenging 90 mile stretch of I-70 in Colorado, connecting Denver to Vail, where Coloradans face steep grades, severe curves, often-extreme weather, visibility and congestion difficulties. This is a 5-year, $72 million V2X program featuring a road-operator managed data platform deployed on active, open roadways.

Data has the power to drive safety

With our Intelligent Transportation solution, we’re talking about empowering DOTs with the ability to analyze everything from speed and heading, to windshield wiper and traction control status – providing valuable context on road conditions.

Suddenly, a roadway operator can receive this data and make up-to-the-minute decisions about deploying snowplows during winter storms – or optimize how traffic flows through the city in real time.

This technology can also communicate instantly about emergency braking and crashes, and enables customized alerts to be sent to cars in specific locations instantaneously.

Imagine driving along the highway in the mountains and a crash occurs 1,000 feet down the road and around a blind turn. V2X will enable our vehicles to warn us or even react on our behalf – to prevent us from becoming a part of the incident even before the compromised vehicle is visible. And emergency services can be deployed more expeditiously, and more cost-effectively, than ever before.

Talking cars can reduce traffic

Connected vehicle technology will save lives through a significant reduction in the number of non-impaired crashes – estimates are as high as 80%. CDOT estimates as much as a 400% increase in roadway efficiency with wide scale deployment of connected vehicle technology – without the expense of widening roadways and adding lanes. The system is also expected to reduce the amount of time people spend in traffic and lessen the environmental impact of idling cars by mitigating congestion.

Read more about how disruptive technology is impacting transportation in The Year of the Smart Highway.

Authors
Tom Gebhardt - Chairman and CEO, Panasonic Corporation of North America

Building a wireless future that is far-reaching and accessible

Future of Bluetooth Mesh Networks

Building a wireless future that is far-reaching and accessible

4 minutes

The most inspiring example of the power of mesh networks, a distributed communication system, where each device acts as a node that can relay data to the others, lies in the island of Puerto Rico. That’s where a couple of volunteers with antennas, wireless mesh devices and solar panels helped to restore communications for relief effort coordinators in Barranquitas, a city battered by Hurricane Maria. “Within three days, volunteers were using both technologies to more effectively coordinate the delivery of food and medicine,” according to an article in Quartz.

Disaster management and public safety is one reason for the strong growth forecast for the global wireless mesh network market, but not the only one, according to a new report by Zion Market Research. Its study finds that the global wireless mesh network market was valued at $3.84 billion in 2017 and is expected to reach around $9.08 billion by 2024. The oil & gas Industry, video streaming and surveillance, smart mobility and smart city applications are among the biggest drivers of growth of mesh networking thanks to its promise of low-cost access to broadband services.

Bluetooth 5.0 was officially deployed in 2016 with a focus on enhancing the range, speed and data capacity for the connections. It also had another promising role: IoT connectivity. Where Bluetooth had previously been thought of as a 1-to-1 connection between devices, this concentration on IoT tech allows for the connection of multiple devices and, ultimately, the cloud.

Recent research on disruptive technology by Panasonic shows that many companies have adopted mobile devices, apps and commerce and the cloud, and three in five have adopted the Internet of Things (IoT). Senior tech decision makers believe these technologies are critical to their future success, according to our research. Clearly developments, such as mesh networking, that yield fruitful deployments of disruptive technology are important to these decision makers.

Wide-ranging applications

Bluetooth mesh network represents a major step towards a more accessible and wide-ranging wireless future. It allows for multiple devices to connect to the same network and all communicate seamlessly and in real time. A standard Bluetooth network is similar to a speaker presenting to an audience. The speaker may address the entire audience or individual members and audience members may address a question to the speaker, but audience members don’t communicate among themselves. In a Bluetooth mesh network audience members may address one another. This topology has two advantages. First, since a single message may travel along many routes to its destination, this dramatically increases the probability that the message arrives. The second advantage is the increased distance a message may travel – like one audience member speaking to another.

While standard Bluetooth recently upgraded its range in the Bluetooth 5.0 update, mesh networking hypothetically allows for infinite range if the proper chain links are in place.

Mesh networks in healthcare

There are pioneering Bluetooth mesh network examples in healthcare. Hospitals are using Bluetooth beacons to monitor and track equipment. But helping nurses locate equipment is just the surface of Bluetooth’s capabilities in the health system. Using this tech, doctors and nurses could monitor patients from anywhere, significantly reducing the need for hospital visits. These visits are both costly and potentially dangerous due to the risk of things like contagious diseases and infection. Not only would a doctor or nurse be able to monitor patients wirelessly, but a patient’s devices at home could do things like monitor temperature through biometric sensors and automatically notify the drug store to deliver medicine if the patient got a fever.

Benefits to manufacturing

There are also clear benefits from the Bluetooth mesh network in the manufacturing sector, especially where multiple machines operate simultaneously on the plant floor. Previously, if two devices situated beyond the range of a Bluetooth device needed to communicate, it would require either a wired connection or gateway that could connect to the cloud. This cloud connection requires Wi-Fi, which uses significantly more energy. Now with the mesh network, every single device in the entire factory can connect to each other via Bluetooth, and even the ones farthest away can communicate if necessary by bouncing the signal through other devices on the way.

Bluetooth mesh networking is just one piece of the wireless future that is to come. Read more in our Future of Wireless Everything series. 

Authors
Jeff Howell - President of Panasonic Industrial Devices Sales Company of America