It is a situation that many field service employees know all too well.
You are at the customer’s site, often somewhere in the warehouse or sales area, want to quickly record an order or document information, and suddenly the network is gone.
Edge.
No signal.
The loading bar stops.
What happens next is everyday reality in many companies.
Notes are quickly jotted down on a piece of paper or in a notebook, photos end up in the gallery, and in the evening at the hotel, the actual work starts all over again. All information must be transferred to the system retrospectively.
This costs time, leads to errors, and causes frustration in field service.
The Reality in Field Service
Many companies in field service face a similar challenge. Teams are on the road daily, managing sales areas, checking inventory, documenting on-site situations, or recording orders directly with the customer.
A large part of this work, however, takes place in areas where the internet connection is weak or non-existent. Particularly in warehouse areas, large sales floors, or buildings with poor network coverage, a stable connection is not a given.
For field service, this often means an unnecessary detour in the daily workflow. Information is first noted on paper or on a smartphone and later transferred to the system again.
The result is duplicate work steps, loss of time, and increased susceptibility to errors.
The Approach: From Practice for Practice
At Konsultec, we follow a clear principle.
Software must adapt to the daily workflow, not the other way around.
That is why we rethought the topic together with medium-sized companies.
The idea was deliberately simple.
Develop a field service app that is easy to use and also works when no internet connection is available.
Offline Capability Without Compromise
The central principle of the solution is Offline First.
This means
Orders can be recorded completely without an internet connection
Photos, notes, and inventory changes are stored locally
As soon as the network is available again, everything synchronizes automatically
The data flows directly into SAP Business One
For field service employees, this means one thing above all.
They can focus on their actual work again instead of on loading bars.
Integration into SAP Business One
A decisive point from the beginning was the clean connection to the existing ERP system.
The app was directly connected to SAP Business One. This prevents parallel data worlds from emerging.
Orders, inventory, and documentation automatically end up where they belong: in the central system.
This ensures current data in the ERP, less manual rework, and significantly better transparency for sales and back office.
What We Learned From This
Many digitalization projects in field service do not fail because of the technology, but because of a simple point.
They are built for an ideal world with stable internet, perfect processes, and unlimited time.
The reality in field service, however, looks different.
Anyone developing solutions must start exactly where the work actually takes place: with the employee on site.
In one of the next articles, we will show how the app is specifically structured and how the integration with SAP Business One was implemented.
