Against a background of rising fuel prices, restricted budgets, a changing regulatory landscape and spiralling customer expectations, field service businesses have endured a tumultuous environment over the last few years. The ability to meet customer demands and achieve cost goals has become a more difficult balance, leading many struggling to achieve more with less in the battle to deliver field service excellence.

Technology today moves at such a fast pace that it is easy for us to sometimes take for granted what we have now compared to what we had only a few years ago. Take for instance the fact, in a world where one can download a whole movie in a matter of minutes, that before the first cable modem was introduced in 1997 it would have taken the average computer user over 28 hours to download the same sized file using a dial-up internet connection.

Located in eastern South Africa and sharing borders with Swaziland and Mozambique, the province of Mpumalanga constitutes approximately 6.5 percent of the country’s total land mass. A popular tourist destination, with visitors being particularly drawn to Kruger National Park, Mpumalanga is also home to a number of extensive mining operations.

Harvest FM has been broadcasting to the citizens of Lesotho since May 2003. Registered in November 2002 as a charity by the current station manager Malichaba Lekhoaba, Harvest broadcasts 24 hours a day producing a mixture of spiritual and current affairs programmes that rigorously tackle the nation’s leading social and political issues.

Headquartered in Bonn, Germany, and today employing in excess of 470,000 people in over 220 countries and territories worldwide, Deutsche Post DHL has become a name synonymous with couriering and logistics. The world’s leading mail and logistics group, it generated revenues of €55.5 billion during 2012, representing an increase of 5.1 percent comparing to previous year. This increase mainly reflects the exceptional market position that DHL maintains in the world’s growth regions, such as Asia and Africa.

“It was in 2006,” explains Clive Robinson, “that Curves first came to South Africa with a mission to launch the brand amongst the female population as an alternative to existing gyms and weight loss programmes. In 2007, the first Curves opened in Pietermaritzburg and within three years it had expanded to more than 100 franchises across the country, and ten franchises outside the borders of South Africa.”

“The US alone,” managing director, Gordon Stove enthuses, “represents the single largest geophysics space in the world, with a revenue generation of over $2.4 billion a year from geophysical survey services alone. This is just one of the reasons why we are so keen to expand into that part of the world.”

The Australian dollar is so strong that it is beginning to be looked at internationally as a reserve currency.

Whatever the reason it can’t be simply because it has been talked up by Julia Gillard. In February the Prime Minister predicted: “Our dollar is likely to remain relatively high for years to come.”

The proposed £14 billion power plant, to be built at Hinkley Point in Somerset, would eventually be capable of powering some five million homes.

It is believed that EDF hopes to build two new reactors at Hinkley that would provide approximately seven percent of the UK’s electricity needs, while employing 25,000 people on the construction of the project alone. The energy giant says the project would generate taxes equivalent to a few percentage points of what the entire financial sector yields for the exchequer.