AUTHOR ARCHIVES: Kris Oldland

The field service industry never stands still: new technology, new market conditions, new entrants, new customer requirements…they all make it essential to keep a watching brief on the changing business and technology landscape...

To help field service professionals keep up to date with these ever shifting sands Advanced Field Service have produced their Service Manager Handbook, and Field Service News will be bringing you a selection of features from this excellent resource for Service Managers working in all verticals, for companies big and small, across the next few months.

You can also download the complete edition of The Service Manager Handbook by clicking here and completing the brief registration form.

It’s an interesting time to be in field service. We are on the cusp of exciting new technology becoming an integral part of the way business is conducted.

At the same time, field service companies still face pressures to achieve more, at less cost, on a day-to-day basis. Advanced Field Service believe that when we reflect on 2015/2016, we will see that it is a time of consolidation, in which managers concentrate on improving efficiency and productivity levels using their existing processes and optimising their existing technology, rather than rushing to adopt leading-edge solutions. In the second edition of the Service Manager Handbook from Advanced Field Service, is therefore focused on optimising your processes and making your systems work harder for your business.

 

It shows how gaining insight into every corner of your business equips you to identify and understand those areas that are under-performing and to uncover and model best practice within your organisation.

Having the power to access critical data across all areas of your service business, make informed instant decisions and manage your operation – from the time the customer logs a call to a satisfactory conclusion – will keep you at the front of a highly competitive field. In this the first part of this new series we take a look at the most important part of any service business… the customer. We’ve all heard the old adage that the customer is always right, but that only holds true if they are the right customer. 

Modelling your ideal customers

In an effort to maintain business viability – and keep your engineers working out in the field – it can be tempting to take on low-margin clients. If business is thin on the ground, this is understandable. However, to build a sustainable business, you need to focus your resources on the jobs, contracts and clients that have most potential for profit, rather than trying to be all things to all clients.

Furthermore, all the following whittle away at your profit margins, and you can probably think of other time and resource wasters:

• Scope creep, where the job is bigger than first appeared
• Doing favours for clients (“While you’re here, can you just look at this…”)
• Providing free credit to late payers who go beyond your payment terms
• Providing an ‘archiving’ service, whereby customers call you to find out when a service or repair was last done[unordered_list] 

It’s worth stepping back and analysing your client base to identify: Clients who are already profitable: 

• How can you quantify for them the work that you do, so that it is recognised and suitably remunerated?
• How can you keep these clients ‘locked in’ by delivering service beyond the agreed service level agreement (SLA) but without draining your resources and revenues?

Clients who could become more profitable:

• How could you better manage the time you spend on their projects?
• Can you identify where you are providing more than you agreed within the contract and budget?
• Do you have an evidence base that will support you in negotiating with clients to pay more or expect less?
• Can you let them self-serve on their documentation through a customer portal to reduce calls on administration matters?

Clients who are unlikely to ever become sustainably profitable: 

• How could you readdress the balance and bring these clients back within acceptable parameters?
• If the evidence shows these clients are always going to be an excessive drain on resources, do you need to make the difficult decision to agree to go your separate ways in order to free up your engineers’ valuable time for more profitable jobs?

 

By gaining a better understanding of every client’s worth to the business, you’ll be well placed to decide where to invest your resources for optimum return, both in retaining clients and pursuing new business.  

Want to know more? To download the full 40 page eBook edition of The Service Managers Handbook 2015 instantly click here and completing the brief registration form.

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The great and the good of the telematics industry arrived in Amsterdam for the TomTom Telematics' Developers Conference and left with a new vision of what telematics may look like in the not so distant future...

It’s a strange quirk of fate at the moment that almost every other event in the European field service calendar seems to be held in the wonderful city of Amsterdam. The Dutch capital has become something of a European hub for field service in recent years and another event to add to that list was this year’s TomTom Telematics’ Developers Conference.

However, given that the telematics giant have their headquarters in Amsterdam, perhaps the decision to host their annual conference in the City too, was more about taking advantage of being on home turf. The one-day conference was held at the De Hallen centre, a former tram depot. What better place then for members of the telematics industry to come together to discuss both the latest trends in technology and how they can help in overcoming the seemingly perennial challenges of reducing fuel costs, improving driver behaviour and of course getting field engineers to the right place, on time, everytime?

And whether it was a reflection of the sense of community in the area we found ourselves in or the ongoing effort of TomTom to bring those operating in various pockets of the telematics world together, there was a true sense of community across the day’s event.

It was fantastic to see developers, providers and end users from all across the continent and beyond – even as far as Malaysia and Morocco - all coming together to discuss best practices and new ideas across the break out sessions and in the networking zone throughout the day.

 

It would have been easy for TomTom to attempt to shoe-horn a number of sales pitches in throughout the day but instead the sessions were focused much more on problem solving, emerging technologies or case studies of how companies are using telematics to improve their workflow, including an excellent session with the Rotterdam Fire Service, which really brought home just how important a role technology can play for an organisation for whom getting to their next job on time really is a matter of life and death.

Platform-as-a-Service

Of those sessions that did focus on TomTom and their own offerings there was a very clear message that came through. TomTom Telematics is evolving, they are doing so rapidly and they are quite possibly going to change the way we view telematics forever as they do so.

A big statement? Perhaps but whilst the core technologies of vehicle tracking and routing of course remain a strong element of what TomTom Telematics offer, they can no longer be considered as simply a pure play telematics provider. Instead they have grown and developed, becoming very much a fully fledged Platform-as-a-Service provider within the telematics space in a move seemingly modeled on Salesforce’s approach to CRM.

It is a move that has been gaining momentum for a while: last year in an exclusive interview with Field Service News, Giles Margerison talked at length about the importance of their focus on establishing three separate APIs to make connectivity to the TomTom Telematics platform as simple as possible.

 

The TomTom app store

However, the momentum has now really kicked in with TomTom using the Developer Conference to officially launch their new app store. Even at launch this was full of various  apps provided by both the numerous developers attending and demonstrating their solutions at the conference, and the many, many more out in the wider TomTom ecosystem.

George De Boer, International Alliance Manager at TomTom Telematics commented: “We started out as a telematics company making sure fleet managers could manage their fleet but as soon as we introduced the connected navigation, together with telematics it soon became a solution that you could use for optimising your business processes.” “So we went from purely managing fuel and savings on the wear and tear on the vehicle to becoming an end-to-end manufacturer and supplier of a solution that could be used throughout the whole business process.”

Whilst TomTom have now placed themselves firmly at the heart of this telematics revolution, the responsibility for driving the technology forward seems to be very much shared between TomTom themselves, their developer partners and, most importantly, their customers.

 

The customer role

One such customer which has worked closely with TomTom in a relationship that sees both companies driving the use of telematics forward as they work alongside each other, is UK utilities company Scotia Gas Networks (SGN).

With a remit to maintain 74,000km of gas main pipe within the UK, and a fleet of over 2,000 vehicles, plus SLAs that include response times of just one hour, keeping track of the fleet is absolutely vital for SGN.

Having originally implemented the TomTom Telematics system for just point-to-point referencing - knowing where the vehicle is, and using the system for time sheet validation and so on - SGN soon realised that they could achieve much more with the WebFleet system.

“Straight away I knew what TomTom could do for us” recalls Chris Stone, SGN Head of Finance. “We’ve evolved now into a relationship where we are trying to do more and more. In fact we are pioneering a lot of what TomTom do and what they can do,” he adds

 

Indeed Stone, and SGN’s open approach to working closely with TomTom on their new developments is yielding far greater dividends than a more hands-off approach might. “I like to get two or three benefits out of a system I invest in.” states Stone “Yes we can put a tracking system in our vehicles and we can track them but what else can we get out of it? Well we can get driver behaviour, fuel efficiency, economy…. there are all these other bolt-ons”

However, whilst there are clear benefits for establishing such a close working relationship with your technology partners and adopting a leading edge appetite for utilising new technology, to continuously enhance your service standards and improve margins, it is not an approach all companies can take. After all, not every company has the influence of a utilities company with a fleet of  2,000.

However, the emergence of TomTom as a platform provider is big news for companies of all sizes.

Look out for Part 2 of our report, where we’ll hear more about TomTom’s new App Store. Is it set to revolutionise 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?

 

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As someone who has been involved in the growing trend towards Servitization and Advanced Services since their inception, Dr Michael Provost is perfectly placed to help make sense of what can be a complex topic in his new book “Everything Works Wonderfully: an Overview of Servitization and Physical Asset Management” (www.everythingworkswonderfully.com).
Mike’s book begins with an excellent short story that helps define Servitization in a clear and concise way. Click here to read the first part. Now Field Service News is pleased to publish the conclusion…

A Short Story (continued)

Peter Carpenter* managed to book some time with Anna Edwards* and they met two weeks later. Over coffee and sandwiches in Anna’s office, Peter went through the thinking he had been doing and showed Anna the ‘elevator speech’ that he had quickly put together during the train journey to HQ.

Anna stared at this for a minute or two before turning to Peter with a broad smile on her face. “I think you’ve cracked it, Peter!” she exclaimed. “I can see it now: our customers want what our power units do, not what they are. If we sell reliable power, not units, our customers will come to us rather than the competition to get what they really want and will pay us a fair price instead of ringing me up at all hours of the day and night demanding yet more concessions.”

“You realise, Anna, that this will mean the company will have to change its thinking, from top to bottom.” said Peter. “For example, we won’t be able to rely on profits from spares sales to offset any losses made on unit sales because spares usage will appear on our books, not the customers’. Our units will have to consume fewer spares than they do now. Engineering and Manufacturing will have to listen to inputs from Spares and Repairs and we will need to put comprehensive and robust systems in place to gather, store, process and output information about how our units are working in the field. It’s a whole different mindset and some of the current managers won’t get it.” “Don’t worry, Peter!” retorted Anna. “Those that don’t buy into this will either have to change their thinking or leave. I’ll need a plan, a budget and a list of the people you think you’ll need to help you for the next Board meeting, to which you are invited.”

“Would you like to be the director in charge of this?” Anna added. “Of course, Anna!” exclaimed Peter. “This looks like a real challenge and, with your backing, we can build this into something that will completely transform the organisation. It will also get me away from all the jobs that need doing at home.” They both laughed. “What do you think of Helen’s design for a logo?” enquired Peter, as he turned to leave. “I thought it showed real flair and imagination.” “That could be your first decision.” replied Anna. “Let’s discuss it with Marketing before the meeting.”

 

The Board poured cold water on Peter’s presentation, but Anna insisted that Peter’s initiative had to be pursued, made Peter the Board member responsible and gave him her full support. The next few years were hard, but genuine progress was made by Peter and his team and even the most sceptical Board members couldn’t brush aside the company’s much improved financial state. Peter set up a subsidiary to ensure that the initiative grew without being stifled by the old guard, who saw their power and status threatened and pushed back hard.  As predicted, those who didn’t fit into the new culture either left voluntarily or were asked to go.

MW4 grew rapidly: many managers and employees saw it as an opportunity to escape from the limitations imposed by existing corporate structures, the company was able to recruit many good people with the skills it required and those involved relished the chance to contribute fresh ideas. Eventually, as the market responded positively to the new way the organisation conducted its business and built more constructive relationships with its customers, sales and profits rose, the City started to take notice and the share price began to rise rapidly. Anna knew that she had turned the corner when she overheard a long-serving manager talk about product sales as the entry ticket to the true market, which was satisfying real customer needs rather than merely selling clever bits of metal.

Customers began to ring Anna up with fulsome praise rather than complaints and the press and investment analysts began writing long, glowing articles about the ‘new’ Precision Powerplants*, which began to be seen as a model company that pointed the way to the future rather than a relic of past glories. Peter and Anna were in great demand to speak at industry and government events as other companies sought to emulate Precision Powerplant’s success. Marketing even produced a very concise summary of MW4, inspired by Japanese Haiku poetry: “We will both prosper if you buy what our products do, not what they are”.

 

Anna was just finishing off her last cup of ‘canteen cappuccino’ when Peter breezed in. “The Oracle has spoken!” he exclaimed. “I am the new boss! It wouldn’t have happened without your unwavering support over the last ten years, Anna. Thanks for everything!” Anna stood up to shake Peter’s hand, knowing that the company would grow and prosper under Peter’s wise guidance. As she left for the last time, a thought struck her as she turned on the windscreen wipers: perhaps she should use the proceeds from selling some of her share options to buy that villa near Saint-Tropez that Chris had seen advertised in the FT. It would make a good surprise birthday present for him and provide a much-needed bolthole from the atrocious UK weather.

* Note: the company and characters are fictitious, but the scenarios are based on experience.

Please note that this short story has been previously published in the following:-
Provost, M. (2014). Everything Works Wonderfully: an Overview of Servitization and Physical Asset Management - a Short Story. Asset Management and Maintenance Journal, Volume 27, Issue 5, September 2014, pp. 43-45. Mornington, Victoria, Australia: Engineering Information Transfer Pty Ltd.

 

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This excellent infographic created by field service software provider  The Service Manager  exploring the benefits of field service software which they have kindly allowed us to share with you...

Whilst the trend towards Servitization is rapidly becoming increasingly important for manufacturers and one that will have a significant impact on how field services operate, it is often viewed as a complex subject.

However, one man who has been involved with the movement since its early beginnings is Dr Michael Provost. His excellent book “Everything Works Wonderfully: an Overview of Servitization and Physical Asset Management” (www.everythingworkswonderfully.com) is a distillation of his knowledge and experience in this area built up over nearly four decades, making it a much more accessible topic.

As an introduction, Mike opens his book with an excellent short story that neatly summarises the concept of Servitization. Field Service News is pleased to be able to share it with you here…

A Short Story

Anna Edwards* was a very happy woman. It was her last day as Managing Director of Precision Powerplants* and she was looking forward to a few months of rest and relaxation on the sunny Côte d’Azur with her husband Chris* while she pondered her next move. She knew that she was leaving the company in good shape for her successor (whoever that happened to be: there were several candidates from both inside and outside the organisation who were being put through the on-going ‘beauty contest’) and felt very satisfied with the progress that the organisation had made on her watch and the transformation that she had overseen.

How different from the situation a decade ago, when she had taken over from the previous incumbent (now long forgotten) who really hadn’t understood the business and was forced to retire early. Sales and profits were falling, the share price had flat-lined for several years while the rest of the market soared and the City was muttering that the company had lost its way. A scathing analyst report entitled Always Jam Tomorrow: Beware of Perpetual Promises had ruffled a few feathers and made the Finance Director really angry. Competitors were offering deals that even the company’s most loyal customers couldn’t refuse and the organisation’s reputation for well-engineered power units just wasn’t being reflected in profitable sales. Great products (as even the writer of ‘that’ analyst report had acknowledged) but a lousy business, competing on nothing but price… Anna had taken on the job knowing that she was placing her professional reputation on the line. What should she do? She was starting to get worried.

 

She decided to bring in Peter Carpenter*, an old friend from university whom Anna admired for his out-of-the-box thinking, no-nonsense tell-it-how-it-is approach and excellent people and communication skills. She sent Peter home to have a ‘big think’, telling him to stay away from HQ and the alpha gorillas all trying to outdo each other with short-term slash-and-burn fixes which Anna felt were the painful road to corporate oblivion. Peter’s brief was simple: produce a plan for getting out of the ‘commodity trap’ that the company had fallen into and do it quickly before the inevitable crisis came and the whole organisation would be brought to its knees.

Peter had been musing about how to save the company for a few weeks when Sara* burst in to his study as he was casually doodling on a notepad. “The boiler’s broken yet again, Peter!” she fumed. “I’ll have to cancel my day in town while I wait for the man to turn up to fix it. I bet he won’t even have the right parts in his van either! Why couldn’t the thing let me know that it was going to break, so I could arrange the repair at my convenience? Why can’t it tell the repair man what’s wrong? I don’t give a damn about boilers: all I want is hot water and a warm house! Looking after it is nothing but hassle!” She stormed out, clearly not at all pleased.

Just then, Peter had his ‘eureka moment’. Were customers thinking like this about power units? After all, they had businesses to run and their own customers to serve and didn’t want to worry at all about power sources. Were the units that they had bought just an irritating distraction to them, requiring time, effort and expertise to look after that they really didn’t have? What if Precision Powerplants used its expertise to look after the units it made (after all, the company had designed and built them, so no-one else should know them better) and charged for the power delivered, not the physical units? Would this idea get the company out of its death spiral?

Peter’s mind began racing as his thoughts kept flowing. Customers would probably be happier making regular payments for guaranteed power, which would smooth out ‘lumpy’ cash flows and could add up over time to more than anyone would pay for ‘bare’ units. The company could shut out the ‘cowboy’ sales and service providers who were beginning to eat into its aftermarket business. It could also build up expertise that could be used to make the next generation of power units currently under development more attractive to the market. The organisation might even be able to offer this service to the owners and operators of competing products (after all, the laws of physics were identical for everybody and there were plenty of staff that the company had ‘poached’ with experience of competitor offerings) and thus eat its competitors’ lunches as well. After a few sleepless nights, Peter had even come up with a name for his new initiative: Megawatts, when and where wanted, or MW4 for short. Perhaps Helen*, who had just graduated from that incredibly expensive art college in Venice, could help him design a logo…

 

Peter began to ask questions and research his idea in more detail and discovered that many of the capabilities needed were already in place: they just weren’t being brought together into a coherent whole. Peter found people in the organisation who had, despite some management objections and hostility from other co-workers, devised ways of mathematically modelling unit performance and creating actionable information from the data that could be gathered and transmitted from equipment in service: there were also experts in Spares and Repairs who knew how the units should be looked after. All this valuable and unique knowledge had been ignored by Engineering and Manufacturing who just wanted to design, make and sell units before pushing them out of the door ASAP. Something would have to be done to move the organisation from a product to a service mindset, Peter decided, if his idea was to succeed.
* Note: the company and characters are fictitious, but the scenarios are based on experience.

Look out for the second part of the story, coming soon!

Please note that this short story has been previously published in the following:-
Provost, M. (2014). Everything Works Wonderfully: an Overview of Servitization and Physical Asset Management - a Short Story. Asset Management and Maintenance Journal, Volume 27, Issue 5, September 2014, pp. 43-45. Mornington, Victoria, Australia: Engineering Information Transfer Pty Ltd.

 

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Servitization in some sectors and  for some companies is driven by market forces, not customer demand. In this exclusive interview with Field Service News, Des Evans, former Managing Director of MAN Truck and Bus UK and now Honorary  business professor at Aston University Business School, explains how the truck manufacturer transformed its business from a sales-led organisation to one focused on customer service. 

As we begin to hear more and more about servitization, often it is the same company names being held up as core examples of adopting this approach. What is interesting is that these companies often tend to be in very disparate industries, but what they all have in common is that they have been able to harness technology to allow themselves to become a disruptive influence within their sector.

For some companies - Rolls Royce, for example - the move to an advanced services model has been client driven.  For other companies such as truck manufacturer MAN Truck and Bus UK, however, the need to evolve has been very much market driven, as Des Evans explains.

“Over the past forty years truck volumes have almost halved, so you have to run a lot faster to stand still,” Evans begins “If you are not going to sell more vehicles, or gain more market share (which is expensive) then you have to divert your energies into service operations and into your installed customer base.”

“That was the real focus for us to develop the service business: talking to the installed base that was already in the market,” he continues.

In fact, via the Trucknology generation of trucks and buses,  MAN not only transformed their own company considerably, they also transformed the market for ever. Only now are some of their competitors beginning to catch up.

 

However, being a pioneer involves radical thinking and such thinking really needs to be driven from the top if it is to prove a success. For MAN, fortunately, it was an approach all of the senior executive team believed in.

“I think the organisation was a far more collegiate organisation than most and everything was very much a team effort,” Evans explains. “We had to focus on how we could not only sustain the business model but actually to maintain it. When faced with market volumes halving, whilst it is not exactly a burning bridge, we also knew we had to do something different. When we introduced the new truck model it was the trigger really to introduce the new business model as well.”

 

“The catalyst was the Trucknology generation which introduced electronic, digital vehicles as opposed to analogue, mechanical vehicles. It gave us the opportunity to present a completely new business case to the operator by including three years servicing as standard, not something you charge for. However, it required a completely different service organisation to deliver that and a completely different sales force.”

“The challenge was interesting. It did help us move our market share from 8% to 12%, albeit in a smaller market, but that was what we had to do. We had to increase volume, not necessarily by price cut but by some added-value service.”

Still, despite the new strategy being born out of necessity, it was still reliant on the technology, although the wider picture was also reliant on the culture within an organisation.

“The technology was the driver and the enabler,” points out Evans. “But the cultural environment that you created was the real reason whether it worked or it didn’t. You had to create the right culture. You weren’t able as an executive team to impose this: this was something where you had to first of all assess the state of readiness, within the organisation and then do a hell of a lot of communicating and explaining what it is you were doing and why you were doing it.

 

Yet despite the approach being both complex and ground breaking at the time, the premise at the heart of everything was in fact incredibly simple, it seems.  “The main message for the customer both internally and externally was we were going to improve the profitability of the customer,” Evans explains. “Because we saw first hand that not only was the truck market itself going down but also the profitability of the operators was going down too. Simply, we could no longer afford to sell to a customer base that couldn’t afford to buy our products or services.”

“It was a case of trying to make your customers more profitable, and by doing so you could secure our future business,” Evans concludes.

Whatever the business driver, what MAN Truck and Bus UK has achieved in recent years has been both impressive and intelligent. They have revolutionised their industry and put service back at the heart it.

 

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Tecalemit is a leading UK supplier of vehicle servicing equipment. It first began using Tesseract’s service management software in 1999 and has been pursuing increased automation, greater efficiency and better service ever since assisted by its growing and developing relationship with Tesseract.

Tecalemit Garage Equipment Company Ltd is one of the most recognised brands in the automotive industry, both in the UK and worldwide, and has been operating for nearly a century. The company and its partners design, manufacture, supply and maintain a huge range of vehicle servicing equipment and MOT testing equipment, such as roller brake testers, vehicle lifts and emissions testers.

In the UK, equipment is stocked in two main warehouses and sold to Tecalemit’s ever-expanding network of customers across the country. They range from small and independent vehicle garages and workshops to major national and international car and motorcycle companies.

Once the equipment is sold, Tecalemit have a team of  60 factory trained and accredited engineers in charge of maintaining the equipment, from planning maintenance and servicing to remedying faults and breakdowns.

The customer  service centre is based in Plymouth and handles 500 calls a day from more than 50,000 customer sites across the country. With such an extensive customer bases, it is important for  Tecalemit to have an efficient service management system in place.[quote float="left"]The customer service centre handles 500 calls a day from more than 50,000 customer sites across the country.

 

Tesseract: the early days

Back in 1999, the Millennium Bug was a popular fear for businesses relying on computers and software throughout the world and Tecalemit harboured growing concerns about their own Unix-based service management system. It was not particularly user-friendly or efficient and bore some functionality aches. The fear was that it was going to crash when the year 2000 hit. Therefore, Tecalemit opted to implement something new and browser-based, with much greater functionality and
flexibility.

Tesseract was shortlisted along with three other systems, and eventually selected on the basis of cost, user-friendliness and powerful functionality. Tecalemit incorporated Tesseract’s core system which managed the logging of calls, stored immediately accessible data, and gave Tecalemit the ability to generate countless reports, providing much greater visibility.

Moving into the 21st century

Development and evolution at Tesseract is constant and Tecalemit have benefited from evolving with them, regularly adding new software components. This development has been particular comprehensive in the last five years, with a move from paper-based systems to electronic ones.

For example, Tecalemit have replaced a paper-based diary system with Tesseract’s electronic diary. This gives them much greater visibility over what is going on with service activities, and receives regular upgrades. Another paper-based system that has been replaced with an electronic syustem is stock-taking, which is now faster and more accurate.

One of the most recent implementations is the Quote Centre, which enables and manages the generation of quotes and converts them easily into customer contracts.

Field service management overhaul

The biggest development, however, has been the overhaul of Tecalemit’s field service management system, thanks to the implementation of Tesseract’s Remote Engineer Access module (REA).

 

Tecalemit began using Remote Engineer Access (REA) in January 2014. Before this, Tecalemit's  allocation of jobs and deployment of  engineers to customer sites was a largely manual process. Tecalemit would receive a call, log it on the Tesseract system, and the office would fax, phone or post details of the job to the relevant engineer. Once a job was complete, the engineer would fill in a paper job sheet and post it to the office.  There was no visibility, no instant data, and processes such as parts ordering and invoicing took a lot longer.

“We wanted to streamline the system,” says David Monteith, the Service Office Supervisor for Tecalemit. “We wanted faster invoicing, faster ordering of parts, better visibility, and we wanted to be able to see jobs through to completion directly and with all the relevant information to hand. REA has totally delivered on all those counts.”

REA has allowed engineers to generate live reports, order parts, close down jobs and raise same-day invoices from their tablet devices. They can input their data into the Tesseract system – data which is then fed back to the office directly and instantaneously. In addition, REA has a useful offline function. This means engineers can input data even when they are working at sites with minimal or no communications signal: that data is sent through to Tecalemit as soon as the signal is restored.

Tecalemit has also started to use Tesseract's contract management system, which raises planned maintenance tasks for equipment that has been installed at customer sites. In total, the system raises approximately 500 planned maintenance tasks each month. These jobs are assigned to the engineers, who then use REA when carrying out and completing the job.

 

Next step: automatic job allocation

However, there is one undertaking that remains predominantly manual and is still part of this process, but it’s one that Tecalemit are looking to automate: deciding which engineer should attend to which job.  Currently the service controller decides who to assign, looking at skill set and geographical location, among other factors. The service controller then notifies the relevant engineer using the REA system. In all, this is a time consuming process with scope for human error.

Tecalemit are planning to incorporate Tesseract’s Diary Assist scheduling system to automate this task. It will assign engineers to particular jobs based on skill set, availability, travel time, work time and shift patterns, call response time and customer site cover times.[quote float="right"]We can see Diary Assist saving us a lot of time

 

“We can see it saving us a lot of time,” said David Monteith. “We plan to integrate it with our contract management system. That system will raise the calls, then Diary Assist will take over and allocate the call logically and geographically sensibly. Then we have REA to cover the job itself. It is just another step towards automating and streamlining what we do.”

The future is bright

Tecalemit have watched their processes develop, their efficiency rise and their service to customers improve since they welcomed Tesseract into the fold.

“We now have faster, more accurate information,” says Monteith. “We have cut down on admin, including paperwork and postage, and we can now respond to customers more efficiently. Our staff has better visibility as regards service history, what equipment they’ve got and what needs doing and,  with less admin requirements, can concentrate more on their overall role. We will continue to look at what Tesseract offers, too, because they are very good at driving change and there is always room for improvement.”

 

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In an exclusive interview with Field Service News, Alex Bill, Alstom Power explains to Kris Oldland how the servitization model works in the power generation industry.

For many the concept of servitization is both a new and challenging concept. Even the language around the movement can be confusing. Advanced Services, Outcome Based Solutions, Industrie 4.0 are all on the surface similar terms for the same thing.

At its bare bones it's a movement away from a one-off transaction based revenue stream to a more prolonged, long-tail service-focused revenue stream. Servitization is getting traction across the globe but for many it’s still in its infancy.

However, for a few companies it’s just the way they do business and has been for some time. One of those companies is across a number of their divisions including power generation and one man who has been right at the heart of this sector for some time is Alex Bill.

 

“For Alstom Power we have been doing these outcome-based services, or long-term service agreements since the early nineties and we’ve been very successful with these long-terms agreements, which we call operational service contracts. It’s something that we tie in with our upgrade packages,” Bill explains.

Of course the first challenge for a company trying to move towards such a solution is to answer what is often the customer's most important and usually most pressing question ‘What is in it for me?”

Continuous improvement

The way Alstom approach this equation is by continuously improving the service levels and outputs that they deliver to their client base.

“We do a lot of R&D and service R&D on improving the performance of our install- base products and then retrofitting that onto the install base” Bill explains.

Of course this R&D can feed not only the service division but also production of new solutions as well, Bill points out. “By doing this we are also making our new products better and then again tying that all together with long-term contracts which you could call outcome-based contracts.”

So from a customer perspective there could be a very compelling argument for moving to such a relationship. Rolls Royce, for example, is one of the other often-cited examples of a company pioneering an outcome-based solutions model, but it was driven by their customer American Airlines.

 

But what about from the service company's outlook?

“From my own personal perspective one of the key benefits is securing long-term business,” Bill asserts. “With an outcome-based contract you can secure business with a customer or a range of customers for ten to fifteen years.”

Such long-term financial security is of course the answer at the heart of the servitization argument. The aim is to move away from the one-hit transaction and by doing so both spreading and increasing profits over a longer period but, as Bill reveals, the beauty of such an approach is that it can become practically self-perpetuating.

“In exchange for that long-term security you have, of course, to guarantee certain outcomes but it’s thanks to that long-term security that you can invest in your service R&D. Suddenly you’ve got a business case to make which is in fact quite a profound one. By investing in those upgrades and bringing them to market essentially it becomes self-fulfilling,” Bill explains.

With his relaxed and conversational manner, the way Bill explains it makes it seem like child’s play. Of course the opposite is true. Establishing such a close relationship with your clients is key if you are going to be able to make such an approach work.

“If you look from contract to contract, you really have to be pretty good with customer intimacy and build the relationship with the customer at quite a few levels,” adds Bill.

 

“That relationship is a key differentiator for us. It begins when we sell the new product and from there we are with the customer from day one. We then need to build on it and improve it through the services we deliver.”

Having worked both on the manufacturing and services side of the fence Bill is also well placed to see the difference between the two sides of the customer relationship.

“The interesting part from coming from the manufacturing side of the business is the customer you don’t really see until you are coming to the end of the process,” Bill explains when asked about the difference in approaching both the new-build and then the long-term service contracts.

“In service the customer is there at the beginning, the middle, and the end. The variability between customers is also more apparent: in their processes, for example, and understanding their individual needs and so forth. It really does take a different mindset as that variability and the needs of customers can be quite different. That’s always an exciting challenge,” he concludes.

 

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Welcome to the latest edition of the Field Service News podcast. This month Field Service News Editor Kris Oldland and Paul Sparkes of Advanced Field Service discuss the findings of the latest Field Service News research which assessed the mobility tools being used by field service companies today.

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