Inside Your Remote Operations Center: Six Signs You’re Not Realizing the Full Potential of Your Engineers

Dear Engineering leaders,

What’s your Remote Operations Center’s most valuable resource?

We believe it’s your engineers. If you feel the same, you know how important it is to ensure they have the right kind of environment to flourish.

Each one of your engineers is a reservoir of specialized knowledge and immense brainpower that needs to be channeled in the right direction. After all, they carry a huge responsibility on their shoulders and the success of your Remote Operations Center depends on how productive they can be.

Therefore, it boils down to how effectively you can utilize (or rather maximize) the time and skills of your engineers.

But in most remote operations setups, engineers spend less than 50% of their time on core engineering tasks and activities of high strategic value. And it’s not their fault.

Conventional tools and processes hinder productivity and waste precious engineering expertise causing companies to gravely miss out on the value their engineers can bring to the table. This article identifies six key reasons your ROC may be failing your engineers and explores solutions to overcome these challenges. Let’s dive right in.

Six Ways Your Existing Setup Is Failing Your Engineers (And Hampering Your Entire Operations)

Despite being the heart of your remote operations, engineers are unable to perform at their full potential due to inefficiencies in the existing setup. These inefficiencies don’t just impact the engineers; they ripple across your entire operation. Here are six ways your current setup may be failing your ROC engineers and hampering your overall performance:

1. Engineers are Bombarded With Irrelevant Alerts

One of the biggest reasons your engineers’ time and effort are not used to their full potential is that they get caught up in too many issues that don’t really need their attention. Engineers often find themselves inundated with a constant stream of alerts and notifications. Unfortunately, existing fault detection diagnostics or alarm management systems lack enough intelligence to identify, sort, and prioritize these issues effectively. No wonder your engineers spend precious time addressing low-priority non-critical alerts. As a result, irrelevant or one-off events draw focus away from recurring problems that have a greater impact on asset performance, reliability, energy consumption, and customer satisfaction.

2. Triaging is a Pain and Takes Too Much Time

Believe it or not, the good old triaging process in your Remote Operations Center is a real pain for engineers. They’re probably running the entire analysis manually, sifting through volumes of data spread across multiple systems or buried in silos to gather the information needed to qualify issues for investigation. One can only imagine how draining, time-consuming, error-prone, and inefficient this routine must be. What’s more, the delays and difficulties in reviewing the impact and urgency of alerts lead to prolonged downtime, faltering asset health, and frustration among engineers.

3. It’s Difficult to Make Decisions — Let Alone the Right Ones at the Right Time

Every day in a Remote Operations Center is a new challenge for engineers as they struggle to make timely and accurate decisions on urgent issues due to a lack of mission-critical context. Key information, such as historical performance records, maintenance schedules, and assessment data may be unavailable or simply too hard to fetch. It’s no secret that engineers get negligible decision support and actionable insights from existing SCADA / BMS, CMMS, and ticketing systems. This results in delayed and underinformed decisions and sometimes the non-conversion of critical issues into work orders, hindering operational efficiency and increasing the risk of asset failure.

4. Inefficient Communication Methods Stifle Collaboration

Seamless collaboration and flow of information between ROC engineers and onsite teams is critical to delivering corrective action swiftly and effectively. However, inefficient communication methods like manual emailing and follow-ups, back-and-forth phone calls, and messaging on different platforms make it difficult to convey clear instructions to technicians and keep a digital record of all progress. A significant amount of time is lost just to get the right stakeholders notified about what’s going on and what needs to be done to fix the issue, leading to delays and extra effort that could have been put to better use. In the end, no knowledge has been captured for future reference either.

5. Inconsistent, Poorly Designed Workflows Hamper Productivity

In a high-stakes environment where productivity and rapid response to issues are the norm, engineers encounter poorly designed workflows lacking standardization and engineering nuance. Engineers often face unclear processes, conflicting priorities, and inconsistent methodologies for handling similar tasks. This creates confusion and hampers productivity. Engineers spend more time navigating these bottlenecks, which detracts from their ability to focus on high-value tasks and disrupts the momentum of high-priority investigations. As a result, critical issues take longer to resolve and the promise of proactive service delivery goes out the window.

6. Repetitive Manual Tasks Constrain Engineers

Last but not the least, skilled engineers are bogged down by excessive manual administrative work and repetitive non-engineering tasks like data entry and reporting. This becomes overwhelming after a point and prevents engineers from applying their expertise to strategic initiatives. Engineering talent is meant for creative problem-solving and using their sophisticated knowledge to drive continuous improvements in asset performance, reliability, and energy outcomes for clients. This misallocation of human potential isn’t just inefficient—it's a tragedy.

Understanding the Impact of Inefficiencies on Your Remote Operations Center

The inefficiencies that limit the potential of engineers in Remote Operations Centers (ROCs) lead to a range of undesirable consequences and missed opportunities. Here’s a breakdown:

1. Slower Response Times to Critical Issues
Engineers stuck with repetitive manual tasks or navigating inefficient workflows may take longer to address and resolve issues. Delayed responses can exacerbate equipment problems or lead to safety risks. Delayed response times can escalate equipment damage and increase safety risks.

2. Low Ticket Throughput and First-Time Fix Rates
When engineers struggle with fragmented data and distractions, the number of tickets they can resolve in a given timeframe is significantly reduced. Additionally, without accurate insights, their ability to fix issues correctly on the first attempt is diminished, leading to repeated interventions and poor customer experience.

3. More Reactive Calls, High Maintenance Backlogs
Your existing setup pushes engineers to operate reactively, addressing issues only after they occur rather than preventing them. This increases the volume of unplanned calls and creates a backlog of deferred maintenance tasks, further straining your resources.

4. Low-Quality, High-Cost Maintenance Operations
A high percentage of reactive maintenance caused by prolonged troubleshooting and low first-time fix rates lead to higher maintenance costs and unoptimized resource utilization. It results in more frequent emergency repairs, higher spare parts consumption, and increased truck rolls and labour costs.

5. Increased Engineer Burnout and Attrition Rates
Overburdened engineers with increasing workloads can face increased stress and frustration, resulting in burnout and higher turnover rates. And when experienced engineers leave, their knowledge goes with them, disrupting operations and increasing hiring and training costs.

6. Limited Innovation and Improvement
Engineers preoccupied with low-level day-to-day operations lack the bandwidth to experiment with innovative techniques, explore new technologies, or refine existing processes. This stagnation prevents you from differentiating your services in a sea of sameness.

7. Reduced Scalability and Competitiveness
Inefficient workflows and manual processes limit your ROC’s ability to scale as the volume of assets and complexity of operations grow. Without utilizing engineers effectively, the ROC struggles to adapt to future demands or keep up with evolving industry standards, leading to reduced competitiveness.

Turning It Around: How a Specialized AI Agent Can Help Unlock Your Engineers’ Full Potential

If you’re still wondering, this is not a people problem. It’s a technology and process problem.

Reputed consulting firms and organizations — including McKinsey & Co., Deloitte, the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), the International Energy Agency (IEA), and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) have pointed out the benefit of integrating AI-powered ‘Agents’ in these situations. Specialized AI Agents for Remote Operations Centers can automate routine diagnostics, gather data-driven context on demand, generate instant actionable insights, and handle repetitive manual tasks, freeing 50-60% of your engineers’ time!

Instead of being constrained by low-level admin work, your engineers can then engage in higher-value strategic activities—such as advanced asset optimization, predictive maintenance planning, and premium consulting services. This reclaimed capacity and productivity gain can directly translate into significant revenue gains.

Quantifying the (Missed) Opportunity — In Potential Revenue

For firms in the United States, United Kingdom, and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) regions, conservative estimates show that these efficiency gains can equate to hundreds of thousands of dollars in incremental revenue per engineer annually.

Taking an average of 2080 annual working hours, here’s an estimation of extra revenue potential per engineer that can be generated by freeing up 50-60% of their time with AI-powered Agentic support and process automation.

*Disclaimer: This data is based on secondary research across all industries.

Beyond these gains, this reclaimed capacity enables your ROC to pivot toward advanced services like analytics, predictive maintenance, and performance optimization, commanding higher billing rates and securing long-term customer loyalty.

The Bottom Line: Let Your Engineers Focus on Engineering. Let Our AI Agent Handle the Rest.

The introduction of an AI Agent such as Xempla’s Agent for Remote Operations Centers represents a transformative step toward unlocking the full potential of your engineers. By automating repetitive tasks, ensuring data quality, and providing actionable insights in real-time, the Agent empowers engineers to focus on what they do best—engineering. Here’s what it can do:

• Automate & Improve Triaging
• Automate Data Gathering & Analysis
• Provide Contextual Insights & Recommendations
• Standardize Workflows
• Streamline Communications In One Place
• Automate Work Order Generation
• Automate Impact Assessment for Reporting
• And much more

Maximize your engineers’ time and augment their problem-solving skills with Xempla’s AI Agent for Remote Operations Centers. Book your demo or schedule a call with our expert today.