AUTHOR ARCHIVES: Kris Oldland

The great and the good of the service management industry came together at this years Service Management Expo held in London's Exel and Field Service News was at the heart of the action hosting the Field Service Solutions Zone.

Here we bring you a selection of the speakers from Day One including: George De Boer, International Alliance Manager, TomTom Telematics, Professor Tim Baines, Aston Business School, Nick Frank, Principal Consultant at Frank Partners, Steve Foxley, Customer Services Director Siemens.

 

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The emergence of TomTom Telematics as a true platform-as-a-service provider is big news for field service companies.  In Part Two of our report from the company's Developers Conference, we ask whether it means evolution or revolution for the telematics sector in general.

In Part One of this report from TomTom Telematics' Developers Conference, we heard how the combination of open-architecture hardware and the launch of the its App Store is transforming the telematics giant into a true Platform-as-a-Service provider and one-stop shop for mobile workforce management

Here, we take a deeper look at the potential impact the development could have on the telematics market. Indeed, in the excitement of the day there was talk of revolution as well as evolution. Would TomTom becoming an all encompassing platform for telematics, change the way we build our telematics solutions in the not too distant future? What will be its role in the emergence of the connected vehicle?

“We want to make it as easy as iTunes or the Salesforce app exchange” claimed George De Boer, International Alliance Manager at TomTom Telematics. “You just go to your appstore, you download your software and you install it”

“As easy as consumers are finding it to install an app we want to make telematics as easy for them as well” he added.

Indeed, it is an interesting and attractive proposition: one that could mean each company could essentially cherry pick the right apps that are best suited to their organisation and then build a bespoke telematics solution that meets their exact requirements.

App partners

One of the developers that has opted to build an app for the TomTom platform is Magenta Technologies, whose Maxoptra tool provides companies with a dynamic scheduling engine, a key tool for many large field service companies. Alexei Badjanov, Head of Development for Magenta believes this new approach to building a telematics solution is absolutley the future.

“The platform is the key” Badjanov comments “There is a wide number of telematics providers in the world but the one that has the most applications will be the leader”

Indeed this is very true; in one sense TomTom have not broken new ground. Other telematics providers such as Telogis and Trimble have both developed something akin to a telematics based platform some time ago,. However, unlike TomTom, they opted to focus more on developing their own apps within an ecosystem as opposed to the open architecture approach taken by the Dutch firm.

Of course whilst TomTom’s move to position themselves as a central hub upon which to build a telematics solution is both a clever and forward looking one, there is a strong argument that it was forced upon them, as with the onset of the connected vehicle they faced a choice of evolve or die.

However, where as the imminent arrival of connected vehicles would once have possibly meant ringing the death bells for TomTom, now the connected vehicle brings with it opportunity for both the telematics provider and their field service customers alike.

The connected vehicle

At a telematics conference the connected vehicle was bound to be a key topic that dominated conversations throughout the day, with the consensus being that the connected vehicle has finally made the transition from exciting potential to tangible reality.

“It’s already happening, It’s already here” commented Taco van der Leij, Global VP of Marketing for TomTom Telematics.

But just what does the connected vehicle actually mean to field service companies? Is it not just a case of the same telematics, just now being fitted as standard by the vehicle OEMs? In fact Van der Leij thinks the impact of the connected fleet will be far wider. “What you will see is the number of applications in this industry will multiply, so you will get much bigger scope and different possibilities for field service companies to actually enhance their business.”

“Basically what you see with a normal business environment in the office, Cloud solutions are already there, driving more and more applications. With all commercial vehicles being connected we will see the same happening for mobile workers also”

De Boer also echoed his colleagues sentiments when the conversation turned to the connected car.

“I’m seeing even more possibilities” he says as we discuss some of the obvious benefits to workflows when having seamless connectivity between the vehicle and the office.

“The service engineer that goes to his customer and uses some of the spare parts in his van for example. If he uses the connection of a barcode scanner and our link.connect API, he can scan the spare parts and the warehouse can start preparing the box that he needs to have for the next day.” He explains before concluding “The connected vehicle is really all about further optimising the business process”

In fact this final summation acts well as headline for what the TomTom Developers Conference was all about: further optimising the business process.

But beyond that, it was a day when we saw TomTom evolve from a pure play telematics provider to fully fledged telematics platform and if the connected vehicle is going to change everything in the telematics industry, TomTom Telematics look set to be right there at the heart of the community continuing to drive change and innovation.

 

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Microsoft’s acquisition of FieldOne recently caught the headlines but other additions to the software giant’s portfolio could suggest that the plans for field service may not end there...

Microsoft has reached an agreement to acquire FieldOne Systems LLC (“FieldOne”), a provider of field service management solutions that allow organisations to better manage and deliver service to their customers in the field.

“In today’s connected world, people expect to engage and be engaged by organizations in new ways, in ways that are most convenient for them” commented Bob Stutz - Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Dynamics CRM on the official Microsoft Blog when announcing the acquisition.

“To help businesses respond to these changing expectations, we are committed to providing the most comprehensive customer service offering, and this includes the best field service capabilities.” He added

Stutz went on to comment “Field service management is a specific but critically important area of customer service, providing companies with the ability to deliver end-to-end field service.”

“This is a unique, and transformational point in time for these solutions as enterprises look to improve their responsiveness to customers with service in the field – taking service directly to the customer anytime a service cannot be managed by phone or other channels.”

 

“In this critical area, FieldOne really stands out. They have the baseline functionality that organizations need to drive a more effective field service operation.”

“They are a leading provider of end-to-end solutions that enable businesses to drive revenue, reduce costs and deliver great customer service. Their industry-leading solution specialises in delivering a full set of capabilities that include work order management, automated scheduling, asset contract, inventory and procurement management, workflow capabilities and mobile collaboration – providing enterprises with a comprehensive modern field service solution.”

In an announcement on the same day on their own blog FieldOne CEO Ilan Slasky stated “For FieldOne, having the breadth of the Microsoft sales and marketing organisation, and leveraging their product development group to augment our R&D efforts was instantly attractive.”

“Our ability to aggressively grow our business across the enterprise is much, much stronger partnered with Microsoft and they have identified field service management software as an enormous and rapidly growing market. For Microsoft, the opportunity to bring a fully integrated field service solution into the Microsoft Dynamics group, pairing it with the powerful capability of applications like Azure, Parature, Cortana Analytics and Power BI, led to a natural conclusion that it made perfect sense to acquire FieldOne.”

Indeed it seems as though Microsoft have certainly placed field service high on their agenda in the enterprise realm, having also announced a significant partnership with IFS in May this year.

 

In addition to this Microsoft have also made some acute acquisitions in the mobile productivity space this year acquiring calender app Sunrise, email app Acompli and most recently task manager app Wunderlist, with all three being cross platform tools that work across both IoS and Android.

With Acompli already being re-branded as Outlook and further integration across the three surely to follow it seems that Microsoft have quietly gone out and bought an excellent suite of mobile productivity tools that can help them establish a much broader stake of the growing enterprise mobility sector.

Whether or not these tools will also be integrated with Dynamics CRM and FieldOne remains to be seen, but they would certainly add further strength to an end-to-end a Microsoft field service offering.

 

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In this the second instalment of our on going series looking at some of the key insight delivered in Advanced Field Service’s Management Handbook 2016 we take a look at one of the most important areas of any field service operation… scheduling.  

You are also able to download the full 40 page ebook for free by simply clicking here and completing the brief registration form

Scheduling your field engineers is undoubtedly one of a service managers core key performance indicators (KPIs), central to business profitability, and a key target on which you and your staff are measured.

Get it right and you increase the chances of business success. Get it wrong and the consequences can be disastrous, with resources overstretched or your engineers and technicians ‘sitting on the bench’ waiting for the call. There are multiple factors to consider when getting the right scheduling solution for your organisation, such as...

What type of call are you doing?

Is your engineer being sent out as an urgent response to fix a breakdown in an emergency or are they preforming routine planned maintenance? And what type of service do your engineers deliver when they are on site? Is it your strategy to just fix the immediate problem before moving swiftly onto the next customer, trying to get as many jobs in per day as possible?

Or does your company take the viewpoint that a more sensible approach is to have your engineers go above and beyond when on site, so your engineer will take their time to make sure all potential problems are addressed in order to reduce the chances of another call-out in the near future? Finally what about your business model? Do you work on a pay per call basis or does the customer have a warranty, a service contract or a rental agreement?

What is your routing allocation model?

How can you ensure engineer days are utilised with maximum efficiency? Do you split your engineers into specific geographic regions? What about routing and tracking tools to help your engineers get from one job to the next? And what type of scheduling tools are you using – dynamic, assisted, none at all? Is this right for your business or should you be exploring scheduling options in greater detail?

Can you categorise the calls you do to plan the day effectively?

How do you optimise the number of calls per day your team is able to handle effectively? Also how do you balance the workload amongst your engineers? What considerations do you put in place to ensure you are getting this balance right? How should you be dividing your teams into large site service jobs? Is it better to concentrate on multi-location quick fixes or is a mix and match approach a better fit with your company and your team?

What about where in the week you try to place your planned maintenance work? Is it better to show a bias towards the latter half of the week to free up capacity for a start of week breakdown rush or is it more sensible to have an even spread across the week so you don’t face the possibility of preventative maintenance being continuously pushed back to accommodate emergency calls?

What is your skills/parts allocation model?

Of course it’s not just a case of getting an engineer to the job, we need to be getting the right engineer to the job. How easy is it for your team to dispatch jobs based on the engineers skill-set and knowledge base? Of course this is a two way street – do you know what skills each job requires and do you know what engineers have what skills?

How easy is it to access that information? Do you have systems in place to manage this or does your call centre team have to know all about your products and your engineers’ individual capabilities? What about building your engineers skill sets up - can you train all your engineers to do everything, and then keep them up to date? Is it plausible to do so? Or would it be more sensible to have area experts, specialists in certain maintenance and repairs? Is there a risk of over-utilising sought after individuals if you take this approach?

Do you understand the site access profile?

Finally what about the access your field service engineers will have to your customer’s site? Are the customers’ premises  open on a 24/7 basis, 9 to 5 or appointment only? Again are you relying on staff knowledge to ensure you don’t dispatch a field service engineer out to the job when he can’t get access or do you have automated systems in place to help avoid this?

All of these questions are key to helping you build up an understanding both of how your business is currently approaching scheduling and what changes you can make to get things running ever smoother…

Download the full 40 page ebook The Service Management Handbook 2016 no by clicking this link and completing the brief form.

 

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Big Data remains a big topic of conversation in field service but is it really all that different to business intelligence? Dan Barber of service management software providers Zafire gave us his thoughts as we caught up with him on his stand at this years Service Management Expo.

 

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Continuing our series of interviews with industry leaders, Kris Oldland speaks with John Cooper, Head of IT and Workflow Solutions in Sony’s Professional Solutions unit in Europe. 

John Cooper is man with not just one division to oversee but many. Each has particularly demanding service challenges and, of course, due to the high technology industries that Sony inhabit, each is also an ever evolving sector.

With a pan European team of around 110 field engineers working alongside other members of the wider Sony workforce and various third parties, Cooper’s responsibilities are essentially across the entirety of the non-consumer portfolio of the tech giant, and it seems service is an increasingly important part of the wider business strategies and plans.

The areas that fall under Cooper’s remit also each have their own unique service challenges.

Firstly there is Sony’s healthcare solutions unit which has evolved from simply producing medical printers to now working on much more adventurous projects with hospitals and surgeons such as transmitting operations as part of a training program and even potentially aiming towards remote surgery by utilising a mix of cameras, high quality displays and 3D technologies.  Of course in such an environment, uptime is essential. “As a service challenge it’s quite an interesting one as you don’t want anything to fail mid-cut as it were” Cooper comments wryly.

Another of the divisions in Cooper’s area of the business is the theatre solutions division, which is focused on digital cinema. Here the products include high-end 4K cinema projectors and the clients the likes of Vue and Everyman.

 

And whilst the pressure on the service operation here is perhaps not a matter of life and death as it is in Healthcare, it certainly still exists. Quite simply the clients in this division are reliant on the technology functioning for them to make any money at all, so if the projectors fail, then they don’t pay.

And of course then there is the Classic AV/Media side of the business, the largest of Cooper’s divisions and a key area for Sony as a whole. Again the pressure to deliver reliable uptime is paramount.

With high profile clients including the unusual (Sony is responsible for the archiving and recording solutions for Vatican City) to the more standard broadcast clients such as UK terrestrial provider ITV and Spain’s Telemadrid, there is an expectancy for the products and solutions they provide to be wholly reliable.

As Cooper states “if you think about News and just TV broadcast generally that whole industry was built around reliability. It’s so rare for the screen to go black and so it’s [100% uptime] an expectation.

Challenges of service complexity

To deliver these expectations Cooper’s team is comprised of a number of differing elements within the service -chain focused on maintaining the various different technologies at play. Firstly there is a service management team that focuses separately on those technologies with a team of field engineers with the requisite skills based in and around Europe. Then there are the other equally important components of Sony’s service delivery such as centralised repair locations, where they pull all sorts of technology back to a select number of places across the continent to get fast turnround time.

Essentially,  part of their service operation is in the field, part of it is remotely placed in terms of repair and then in addition to this they also employ a number of remote technologies that allow them to log in to systems quickly to make initial diagnosis.

And in the midst of all that there is an ever increasing complexity within their product set which in turn adds further complexities to the organisational structure, making the smooth handling of operations even harder.

Cooper outlined three facets to this complexity.  One is the increasing challenge of potentially lots of different partners in the service chain. “IT workflow solutions for example, might well have an oracle database plus harmonic storage and we have to look at the whole piece,"  he explains

Then there is the issue of Sony’s customers reducing their own internal expertise with many shedding engineers, particularly as engineers retire and aren’t necessarily replaced. In the theatre business, for example, there is no need for a highly skilled projectionist who in the days of analogue might have had a greater understanding of the machines he worked with and the ability to potentially undertake maintenance himself or at least provide a detailed overview of the fault when reporting it.

 

In a modern cinema the technology is much simpler to operate so that skillset is lost on the client side, adding further emphasis on Cooper’s team to be able to work at optimum efficiency.  As Cooper asserts:  “Our ability to diagnose has to be very good because the fault diagnostics aren’t always fantastic as you might imagine.”

Finally, there is the fact that Sony themselves are also facing their own price pressures.  The price of a high end broadcast cameras for example, have fallen dramatically in the last ten years and this hit to the bottom line also is of course felt by the service division. “We used to be able to, in certain instances, give some of our service elements away for free because it was built into the margin, that’s no longer possible," Cooper concedes.

Bespoke service offering

And it is these challenges that have ultimately led to Sony having to adopt a much more focussed approach to their service.

“In order to protect our customers and to deliver the levels of service that we want to be recognised for, we give a fairly high level of service at point of sale but then we sell our additional service contract offerings up to any level including up to full bespoke.” Cooper explains

Add to this the growing trend of servitization, which for Sony at the moment is currently something of a pull market with their customers more and more frequently seeking to engage with Sony on a pay-per-usage basis.

 

A perfect example of this is a new system Sony have just implemented for Telemadrid.  Replacing a previous Sony system which was over a decade old, the suite contains the latest technology and is provided on a pay-per-usage basis. “It’s a fully managed system, and in that instance it’s all about the service - the technology is just an enabler.” Cooper explains. “And we are starting to see the pressures on the broadcasters, big lumps of cash are harder to come by, many are now starting to ask about pay per usage. Then it’s all about service delivery, ” he adds.

With such significant shifts in business principals, service is quite rightly becoming a much more fundamental part of Sony’s wider business strategy.

As a result of these shifts however, Cooper and his colleagues needed to revisit their existing service infrastructure, with a view to replacing their 15-year-old legacy system with something better suited to the growing complexity of their service organisation. “We used to be able to, in certain instances, give some of our service elements away for free because it was built into the margin, that’s no longer possible,“ Cooper concedes.

And it is these challenges that have ultimately led to Sony having to adopt a much more focused approach to their service. “In order to protect our customers and to deliver the levels of service that we want to be recognised for, we give a fairly high level of service at point of sale but then we sell our additional service contract offerings up to any level including up to full bespoke,” Cooper explains

Add to this the growing trend of servitization, which for Sony at the moment is currently something of a pull market with their customers more and more frequently seeking to engage with Sony on pay-per-usage basis.

As a result of these shifts however, Cooper and his colleagues needed to revisit their existing service infrastructure, with a view to replacing their 15-year-old legacy system with something better suited to the growing complexity of their service organisation.

 

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Look out for Part 2 of this interview, when Cooper will talk about how he and his team reviewed both off-the-shelf systems and customised solutions to determine which was fit-for-purpose, their reasons for making the choice they did and the impact on the service operation.

 

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Resource Type: White Paper
Published by: Field Service News (sponsored by Exel Computer Systems)
Title: Poor Relations: why you maybe overlooking profit if you overlook your service CRM 
Download: Click here to download the white paper

By downloading you agree to the T&Cs listed available here

Synopsis:

It’s been written many times, but the further we enter into the twenty first century the closer the relationship between business and technology becomes. For the largest enterprise level companies technology is driving innovation and efficiency in equal measure across all verticals.

At the other end of the spectrum technology is empowering small and medium sized businesses to thrive, with developments such as vastly increased mobile connectivity and the power and prevalence of the devices utilising it, enabling them to be on a truly level playing field with larger more established companies for the first time in history.

And for those companies with a field service division that link between technology and operations is perhaps even closer still.

Yet one area that is overlooked is Service CRM, an often neglected cousin of the traditional CRM that is a tool primarily for the sales division.

In this white paper we will look at why overlooking Service CRM is such a potentially dangerous mistake and why it is vital your Service CRM is fully integrated into your wider system infrastructure.

Overview:

Looking at some of the key technologies being used in field service this white paper helps clarify the role of a Service SCRM in bringing sales and service closer together and opening the doors to potential missing revenue streams. Sections in this white paper, written by Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Cheif, Field Service News include:

ERP: ERP forms the bedrock of most companies system infrastructure and will typically include a number of integrated applications that a company can use to store, manage and interpret data from a variety of differing business activities, such as production planning, manufacturing, marketing, sales, inventory management and payment processing.

It is this very ability to integrate such a breadth of organisational systems and tools that made ERP systems such a vital and important tool within the enterprise.

CRM: If an ERP system is what powers the back end operations of a company, allowing it to meet the demands of existing business with optimum efficiency, then it is CRM that allows the front facing, revenue generating salesforce to perform to their maximum potential.

As with ERP, the rise of CRM came to prominence in the nineties as companies began to fully embrace the importance of both collecting and utilising customer data, thanks in part to the technology emerging to be able to do so.

MOBILE: Without question the biggest single technology to push forward the efficiency productivity of field service engineers within the last decade, potentially ever, is the dramatic rise of the smart phone and mobile computing in general.

Within the last decade smartphones have become an ever present part of our lives.

 

In field service in particular they have revolutionised the way many companies work. Mobile apps can include a whole plethora of productivity tools, from job notifications, through to knowledge sharing and perhaps most importantly job completion tools that can dramatically reduce a field engineer’s time spent on administrative duties.

CLOUD & GREATER CONNECTIVITY: However the benefits of a modern field service solution in terms of improving efficiency and productivity of our mobile workforce are not solely the result of advances in mobile computing.

Another highly significant technology that has emerged as a key enabler within modern field service systems is that of Cloud computing.

Research by Field Service News revealed that whilst currently around a quarter of field service companies were using the Cloud for their field service operations, over half of those companies that were currently still using an on premise system indicated that their next iteration of field service software would indeed be Cloud based.

DATA, DATA EVERYWHERE: So, via mobile devices we are able to give engineers the ability to easily collect vast amounts of data that they have at their fingertips, data which otherwise may go no further than the engineer’s own heads.

Meanwhile, due to the aforementioned real-time data transfer to the back office we are able to take that data and instantly have access to it across the business for further interrogation leading to greater insight.

Whether it be data that helps Research & Development teams refine their product development by identifying common device faults, or data that helps sales teams easily identify new business opportunities, the data that our field engineers are able to capture when on site is absolutely vital to a companies ability to thrive in the modern business world.

THE SERVICE CRM: And it is when we look at systems that can play an instrumental part in the distribution of this data that the often overlooked and underused Service CRM can actually play a hugely significant role.

One which in turn can be the difference between a moderately well run organisation to being best-in-class with the profit margins and revenue growth to show for it.

 

“It’s all about joining up the processes” explained Simon Spriggs, of Exel Computer Systems in a recent Field Service News podcast “Historically, many processes such as the manufacturing process and the service process were divorced.”

“If you think about a joined up process it’s all about getting these process not just as lean as possible but also as efficient as possible and that’s where a modern field service solution can really drive a business forwards” he added.

Indeed Spriggs is a man with a long history working with field service solutions and for him Service CRM is an absolutely vital tool that we should not be overlooking and in the latter half of this white paper we bring you more from Spriggs on why Service CRM is such a key tool to any field service company.

 

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Click here and complete the brief registration form to access this exclusive field service news white paper now

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Click here to find out more about Exel Computer Systems in the Field Service News directory

 

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This excellent infographic from ServiceMax highlights some of the key facts you need to know about the Internet of things.

How is IoT impacting upon your business? Is it something you are even considering? Do you think connected devices will change the face of field operations as we know it? Is this still tomorrows technology or is it something we should be implementing today?

Take our brief survey and help us build a picture of how IoT will impact field service and you could win one of three £50 Amazon vouchers...

 

Field Service News recently ran a research project in partnership with ClickSoftware looking at the appetite for Cloud based field service management solutions. We had a great response with over 150 field service professionals giving us their insight. As a thank you for taking the time to give us their input all respondents were entered into a prize draw with three £50 Amazon vouchers to be won and we are pleased to announce the winners below:

• James Shepherd - It Director, Stonegate
• Antony Newton - Regional Service Director, Danwood Group
• Jesus Rodriguez - Service Manager, Daikin A.C SPAIN, SA

Thanks again to all of those who contributed to the research and look out for a series of features outlining the findings coming very soon.

 

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Why not help us with our current research project exploring the potential of IoT in Field Service sponsored by ServiceMax? Once again there is a prize draw with three £50 Amazon Vouchers available!

Click here to take part in our research into IoT and Field Service now and you could be the next winner!  

 

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