AUTHOR ARCHIVES: Marc Ambasna-Jones

In Part One of this Industry Leader interview, Dave Yarnold, CEO of ServiceMax, spoke about the company's rapid growth and the technology underpinning that rise to prominence. In Part Two, he talks to Marc Ambasna-Jones about the the changing world of field service and  the 4Ps he considers essential to success.

Service is not just considered a cost centre any longer, Yarnold points out. "Service people are getting involved in growth discussions. So you will have to know what is going with your customers and all these products will have to be calibrated and serviced and this means a field service tech is needed to go do it.

More of service will be on manufacturers now and they will want it because it’s an opportunity to evolve selling product into a service business model. Instead of just selling licenses and products up front, you now have powerful long term relationships because you offer upgrades and so on. There is more tie-in. It also gives manufacturers longer, recession-proof, financial models and you will see more field techs as a result.

The reality of course is that no one knows for sure how service will develop. All you can do is support the service teams with a set of tools that make them more central to the ongoing success of a business."

People, Products, Processes and Promise

FSN: While this sounds great, surely there are gaps in the ServiceMax arsenal?

DY: “All this stuff is deep. When you dive into the four Ps - People, Products, Processes and Promise - (ServiceMax’s key message), there’s just an incredible amount of depth that you can add into the platform. We built it with the 4 Ps in mind, so we can expand. I don’t see any huge gaps but the more we get into it, the more we peel back the onion and discover more about our customers’ needs, the more we can develop new features and pump out capabilities.”

FSN: Is Product IQ is an example of that?

DY: Yes, Product IQ enables companies to uncover, track and interact with their installed base and make it come alive.

How many companies have a handle on their installed base and their system of record for all their customer assets? Very few. It’s a big gap – all these companies growing through acquisitions with all these different sets of data in different systems. It’s not one of the first things that gets harmonised so we are hoping we can help.[quote float="left"]How many companies have a handle on their installed base and their system of record for all their customer assets? Very few.

 

Selling on Salesforce

FSN: Looking back, how important has Salesforce been to ServiceMax and what is the relationship now? They must look at you and think, ‘I wish we’d done that?’

“Well, yes, they have the platform on which to build but we have spent a lot of money and time to build ServiceMax. It’s taken years to understand the needs of a market, which is one of the reasons why it’s not been disrupted previously. From a system perspective it has all the complexities of an ERP system, multiple functions having to work together, multiple data sources, a lot of integration points.

Plus it has all the complexities of a CRM system in that you have to deliver a customer-facing app to enable customer-facing folks to do their jobs. So, it’s got to be simple, easy to use, easy to interact with and on top of that it has to be disconnected and mobile.

That of course means solving the problem of data synchronisation – you are talking about one of the most complex enterprise application domains ever – so it’s not trivial to go and build one of these.

“In terms of Salesforce, it has been an awesome enabling technology because we go into service organisations that are tasked with taking care of massive customer bases and they are not going to put that at risk. It’s reputation and a significant revenue stream, so organisations must be super conservative.

We are riding in on one of the best, well established cloud platforms and in many cases already tried and tested and used for sales and marketing, so building on the Salesforce platform has given us a tremendous head start. It’s allowed us to get over a lot of hurdles that we would have otherwise had to face in a very conservative target market.”[quote float="right"]Service people are in front of customers every day. They are generating revenue and performing this incredibly vital function. Why does nobody think about those guys?

 

FSN: ServiceMax growth has been impressive. Does it reflect the growing importance of the service industry?

“When we were a 40-50 person company I was having meetings with CIOs of $25bn Fortune 500 companies.
There were times when I was looking around thinking this is unbelievable. When we started the company we looked at the competitive landscape and realised nothing has really happened since the late 90s. No one had really cared about this market and that surprised me. Considering how much revenue comes out of service operations, it’s shocking.

I won’t share the logo but, when I spoke to the CIO and head of service one of the biggest companies in the world, I asked ‘why is it the case that when a new mobile device comes out everyone says, your sales people need these?’
Service people are in front of customers every day. They are generating revenue and performing this incredibly vital function. Why does nobody think about those guys? He shook his head and said, “I’m not sure.”

FSN: Do you see yourself as championing their cause? Is that what drives you and the business?

“It’s one of the drivers. Certainly for a long time service has been an afterthought. It goes back to the business model. If you generate a sale and from that sale, everything after cuts into that profit, so businesses want to minimise costs. Service has traditionally been viewed as a cost but times are changing fast and we believe we are a big part of that change.”

Yarnold talks a great game. He has enthusiasm and determination in abundance and that can only be applauded.
He has come a long way since his days with Clarify and there is a sense that he really does want to fly the flag for field service but it is the company’s land grab that is intriguing and also telling.

Offices in Europe and the Far East have been added to the roster. Although Salesforce may not be jockeying for position, the giants of Oracle and SAP are players yet to fully wake to the potential of the market. By the time they do ServiceMax could be an attractive acquisition target anyway. Certainly ServiceMax is not short on investors.

“There are a lot of service companies out there, millions of field technicians around the world who are trying to do their job but still don’t have great tools. They have clipboards, old Lotus Notes, applications that are simple and do not do a great job in terms of helping them do their job. There is a huge opportunity for us here. And as a place to invest technology dollars, that sentiment is starting to build.”

 

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Miss Part One of this interview? Find it here

 

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 In our continuing series on field service industry leaders, Dave Yarnold, CEO ServiceMax talks to Mark Ambasna Jones about the company's journey so far and the future of field service. 

When Dave Yarnold, ServiceMax CEO,  first ventured into Europe in search of business, ServiceMax were nothing more than a start up. Today it is one of the most successful field service management providers in the world. 

Still a relatively new kid on the block in software terms, ServiceMax is only eight years old. You get the feeling it’s still punching above its weight and Yarnold encapsulates the energy and excitement of the company that believes it is onto something.

ServiceMax has witnessed phenomenal growth (300% year on year with 150 new customers in 12 months, according to the company). Its inaugural ServiceMaxLive Europe customer event in Paris last year showed it has certainly arrived.

Yarnold was fresh back from Japan when we met. Was it easier to set-up in Japan than in Europe, I asked?

“Western Europe in particular and North America were clearly the top targets for us when we first started but then the next one in line terms of the number of manufacturers and the premium on service and quality was Japan. It’s always hard going into a new territory, a new country. No one wants to be the first to break a market but fortunately we have a number of companies that have done global roll outs and that has helped us and continues to do so.”

Did the company feel established in Europe now, I wondered, particularly in terms of business development and not just software sales?

 

“In our early days in Europe we were a small company with just a few use cases. To have people like Manish Gupta from Schneider Electric and John Cooper from Sony at ServiceMax Live was great and I think that says a lot about how far we have come. I have personally been working with Manish for five years, before we even had a team here, I was flying to Paris working on the details, looking at the installed base and helping find a solution. Schneider has over 20,000 field technicians.”

I asked why Yarnold had seemed particularly enamoured with Inspecta when its CCO Timo Okkonen spoke at the event.

“Timo has such a great story to tell. Inspecta is an interesting company and what it’s trying to do using ServiceMax is so interesting. It now has 1,600 users of  ServiceMax but it’s using the software for company transformation. The thing I love about his story is that it’s not just about service it’s a tool for collaboration, for employees to talk, to share important information. It’s really cool to see what different folks are doing with the platform.”

Service as a software

Transformation is a recurring theme. Yarnold’s suggestion that software as a service is becoming service as a software seems to fit with the Inspecta case study.  He believes ServiceMax has found itself at the heart of this changing landscape, partly by design but also partly as a result of being in the right place at the right time.

So does he see the company as a disruptor, ripping up the rule book?

“Ah yeah, certainly in making service a focal point in a technology world. No one else is doing that. Also catalysing this move towards a service model, we have a platform that allows companies to put these ideas and plans into place. We can take these grand ideas around IoT and make them usable, creating understandable user cases for IoT.”

 

What would that be, I asked?

“Quite simply it’s a machine talking to a machine, and when the machine says something is wrong, you take that data, dispatch a technician and fix the machine before the customer even knows there is a problem, eliminating unplanned downtime. We can help here and play a very disruptive role. We have the right tools to do that.” Banking on IoT makes sense and for service it’s an obvious fit.

ServiceMax had even rolled out Kevin Ashton, the guy credited for coining the term the Internet of Things to talk at the event and drive home the point. But isn’t everyone thinking along these lines?  And what makes ServiceMax so different?

“We’ve been looking at IoT for several years now, going back to when it was referred to as M2M – seemed like a good idea then but now it’s a better idea because it’s called IoT right? So we were always clear that we didn’t want to solve the data problem – all that data coming off of sensors, we didn’t want to get involved with sorting out the big data. We figured others would do that. We wanted to distil the data into something useful for service organisations. Our platform is geared to ultimately be agnostic, taking smart distilled data and to use in a service environment. This is where service becomes more strategic.”

ServiceMax has partnered with PTC to deliver the IoT bit, leaving it to focus on the service angle. Yarnold admits it’s still early days but you get the sense that this is a pivotal moment for the company and the industry as a whole.

Does Yarnold see a shifting role for field service technicians?

"There are two objectives here. One is to elevate the head of service so that service decisions are more strategic. We think that the Chief Service Officer  should be a C level position. The second objective is to determine the future role of the field service team.

 

We had 30 plus CSOs in a room and the liveliest discussion was on this – do your service people sell or serve and how best to generate revenues? Do you provide incentives to sell and potentially break the trust they have with customers?
Customers do trust their service techs. I’ve been in meeting s where customers have turned to the field service tech and asked, “should I buy this product?” There is a lot of power and trust here so you have to be careful.”

Are any companies doing this now?

“A lot of companies have armed the service teams with soft skills; they don’t call them sales skills. I think that some of the more forward thinking ServiceMax users have put some tools in place to coach field service people in what to look for, how to look for competitive equipment, for example, to identify a potential upsell opportunity and putting lead generation buttons in the system. It’s a delicate balance.”

Too delicate? Will it last?

“Service people are wary of pushing field teams towards selling too hard but they also seem excited by the fact they are relevant and generating revenue. Now service is not just considered a cost centre. Service people are getting involved in growth discussions.”

 

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Look out for part two of this Industry Leader article when Yarnold talks about the 4 Ps he considers essential to service success.

 

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Global energy management firm Schneider Electric is rolling out ServiceMax's service management solution to 6,000 engineers across the globe as part of its One Schneider customer support strategy in which IoT will also play a key role. Marc Ambasna- Jones caught up with both companies at MaxLive Europe.

As Manish Gupta, senior vice president of Schneider Electric took the stage in the Salon Opera in the 19th Century Le Grand Paris hotel, few of the 270 attendees at MaxLive Europe would have been aware that the company at which Gupta plies his trade is in fact older than the building in which they were sitting.

Le Grand Paris and its much celebrated Café de la Paix were opened in the 1860s and played host to local literary heavyweights Emile Zola, Victor Hugo and Maupassant. Thirty years earlier, and about 317km south in Le
Creusot, two brothers named Adolphe and Eugene Schneider acquired the local mines, forges and foundries. It was the start of what is today a $25bn business.

It is of course a very different business. Schneider Electric now defines itself as a specialist in energy management and automation.  Its client list spans the globe and covers a wide range of industries including utilities, manufacturing and distribution. This has led to rapid growth in its service teams which now numbers 20,000 tech support engineers. Understandably it has built up a complex service structure to manage its resources but not without a degree of pain.

According to Gupta, growth and acquisitions have led to the company having “lots of disparate systems from multiple vendors, including Excel spreadsheets.” Schneider Electric has, to be fair, been a very acquisitive company. It has bought and integrated 17 businesses in the last five years, including a £5 billion purchase of UK engineering firm Invensys earlier this year. This acquisition trail brings its own challenges and has been a contributor to the company’s service management conundrum.

“We had different solutions across different business units as well as different countries,” says Gupta. “As part of our global program for One Schneider,  our objective is to enable consistent and accessible visibility into our customers globally. This led us to purchasing Salesforce for CRM, and then we wanted to extend that single view of the customer to our field service. ServiceMax enables an end-to-end connected experience for our customers, techs and management and was on the Force.com platform.”

 

This fits with Gupta’s and Schneider Electric’s vision for the evolving role of the service engineer. “The installed base is key,” adds Gupta, “because we want to track how customers are using our products. We want to improve products and improve the experience.”

As well as the obvious potential for upselling, Gupta sees this ability to create a two-way conversation with customers an increasingly essential skill for service engineers. The premise is that retaining and upselling existing customers is easier than finding new customers.

Schneider Electric is currently in the process of rolling out ServiceMax for 6,000 of its service engineers and plans to review its contract when rollout is complete in 2017. Although still in mid-adoption, Gupta has identified a couple of pain points.

“Governance and training have probably been our biggest challenges,” he says. "It’s not unusual. Any large software deployment will have its sticking points and getting users up to speed quickly on new software tools is not easy. It’s time consuming and never moves as quickly as you want it to."

So what are the initial thoughts on dealing with ServiceMax?

“I like that fact that it aligns with our corporate strategy on standardisation, and the partnership we have with ServiceMax allows us to contribute to their roadmap. And ServiceMax’s functionality enables us to be more dynamic and support the business.”

What could be better?

“I’d like to see more systems integrators doing training as that will drive competitive pricing in PS resources. That will come in time as ServiceMax expands.”

It’s a fair point. It’s easy to forget that ServiceMax is still relatively new in software terms and new companies generally have a lot of energy and a willingness to go the extra mile to help customers. When Gupta was on the stage with ServiceMax CEO Dave Yarnold, it was clear from the outset that there was more to this arrangement than just a bit of back scratching.

 

So what does Schneider Electric get out of it beyond the original remit for buying software to manage its service teams? “The strength of partnership we have with them is enabling greater innovation in what we are doing with our service organisation. As a company, they think strategically about the software, which empowers us to do more strategic things with our service delivery.”

The industrial internet of things

One of the more strategic things is increased automation. Schneider Electric has been a massive advocate of the Internet of Things within its various customer industries, claiming that IoT is a driver for increased efficiency as well as increased sustainability.

Its own industrial IoT whitepaper talks about a “wrap and re-use approach” rather than a “rip and replace approach”, the idea being that this will enable greater business control through accurate machine intelligence.
This measured approach, it says, “will drive the evolution towards a smart manufacturing enterprise that is more efficient, safer, and sustainable.”

Gupta believes that IoT is a “fundamental strategy” that will significantly “change our service organisation.” In what way? “Technology is not the issue,” he says. “We can already do things quickly and efficiently. The biggest impact for us is the value we are able to give to the customer. This is where the biggest opportunity with IoT is for us – mitigating downtime, maintaining uptime and assets becoming predictive. IoT must become an operational strategy and not just be a vision. We are focused on scaling the innovation to an industrial level, not just pockets of visionaries doing isolated projects.”

As if to drive home the point, Schneider Electric also rolled out its VP of information process organisation, R&D and Innovation Efficiency. Twila Osborn, as well as having a long job title, is a mathematician. She worked on the space shuttle programme in the 1980s, using her problem solving skills on the well-publicised issues surrounding the shuttle’s heat-resistant tiles.

 

Today she works out of Boston in the US, designing processes across Schneider Electric’s data and technology platforms to ensure a lifecycle of data across the organisation. She has just finished with a proof of concept, she says, reaffirming that “R&D is relevant.”

Ground control

Her proof of concept is essentially about using automation to create a standard data flow across the organisation, “designing serviceability and scalability into the marketing attributes we need in the products from the very beginning,” she says.

“We can now look at the products and get metrics so we can develop competitive models now, looking at how we compare with rivals and plan accordingly. We can close the loop with our service team, so the engineer in the field can capture the data and look for upsell opportunities. It’s about service engineers getting the right product and parts while on site or maybe even like the Tesla, refresh the software without interrupting the user?”

She talks about value creation, not a standard phrase for a mathematician, and applies to the idea that the service technician has this increasingly important role in helping the company define its future.  “They are going to be critical in the chain,” she adds. “The speed of reaction will be huge and can alleviate customer problems quickly through the data telling you what is wrong – intelligence is becoming critical.”

So does she see service engineers selling or just good sources of raw ideas for R&D? “The automation will enable us to close the loop again with the service engineer who can see gaps in the market or problems and feed them back instantly to the product design people, so products will change based on real experiences in the field. So yes, the role of the service engineer will keep changing.” And selling?

 

ServiceMax’s Dave Hart, VP of global customer transformation steps in here. “It’s a fine line between serving and selling,” he says. “You don’t really want them to sell because they break the trusted adviser status. Empowering field service engineers to make more informed decisions thought, that’s different. A lot of companies don’t have direct sales forces anymore, so in many respects filed service is the touchpoint with the customer but not really a salesperson.”

Hart adds that if you speak to most field service leaders they will probably tell you that one of their biggest issues is data. They know it’s in there, they just can’t get it out the system in any meaningful way. “It’s usually in a bunch of disparate systems that don’t talk to each other,” he says.

And that is the problem Schneider Electric is trying to solve. It has a plan to coordinate the whole organisation; not a small task but if Osborn’s proof of concept flies you get the feeling it will be on that road relatively quickly.  She understands that you need meaningful data to glue a modern business together. It’s finding ways to make this data easily accessible and that makes Schneider, not for the first time, one to watch.

 

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 IoT will change field service from reactive to proactive: one of three key take-aways from the Servicemax's inaugural MaxLive Europe event in Paris. Marc Ambasna-Jones reports.

Customer events are always a mixed bag given the nature of the crowd. You can never please everyone but they are also a good indicator of how well a company is actually doing beyond its sheen of marketing.

Pacing the specially erected stage in the Salon Opera ballroom at Le Grand Paris hotel, ServiceMax CEO Dave Yarnold told the 270 people gathered about his dream.  When he first came to Europe to pursue a few leads in the early days of the company, he hoped that one day ServiceMax would host an event just like this in a grand setting and full of customers.

Dream achieved, the company now has another goal, to turn the service software industry into a billion dollar global market with ServiceMax at its head. Ambitious? Yes of course. Achievable?

Perhaps. The numbers came thick and fast – the third largest Salesforce.com ISV, 150 new customers in the last 12 months, 300 per cent year on year growth, 90 plus parent consultants and so on. In its own words, ServiceMax is “evolving from a reactive, to a proactive, to a predictive business.”

In a nutshell, this sums up the demands of the rapidly changing service profession.  New technologies are forcing change again but this time at unprecedented levels.

 

This event was about showcasing that change. It was an attempt to lay out a plan, to identify the future and reinforce the idea that the changes will be for the better.

We took three things from the event:

The Internet of Things is more than just a buzzword

Kevin Ashton is often credited with being the father of  the term "Internet of Things"  term after writing it on a presentation in 1999 while working at Procter and Gamble.  He had this idea that the company should put RFID tags onto its products to improve product tracking and create real time stock management.

However, Ashton does not claim to be the ‘father of IoT’. Rather, the term ‘IoT’, he says, was created by someone on Twitter, who had shortened the internet of things into an easily manageable hashtag.

His views on the future clearly captured the imagination and raised a few eyebrows too. His suggesting that by the next century more than half the world will be vegetarian prompted muttering in the audience but he wasn’t here to talk about food...

What did he think of IoT and its impact on the service industry?

“Well the irony in the service sector is that the best service person is the one you never need to see,” says Ashton.
“Fewer resources wasted on needless service and less downtime for someone using a piece of equipment because service can be done pro- actively,” he adds, suggesting that this is what ServiceMax is enabling by adopting an IoT approach to service.

Ashton predicts that in the age of IoT, software as a service will shift to ‘service as software’, with service becoming increasingly interrelated with software in new ways. According to Ashton, this phenomenon will generate both predictive and self-diagnosing service.

 

So what does ServiceMax CEO Dave Yarnold think?

“Field service is now the first industry to benefit from the disruption of IoT,” he says confidently, “transforming from under-funded afterthought to under pinning new business models, revenue creation, and influencing product design.”

New global research from Field Service News, commissioned by ServiceMax and IoT partner PTC, found that forty-five per cent of field service management professionals believe the IoT will likely have the biggest impact on field service by 2020 -- more than big data, smart glasses, augmented reality or any other technology.

More than half of field service professionals surveyed say they are already implementing or planning to implement an IoT-based strategy, and seventy-four per cent do not think the size of a company matters when implementing IoT field service strategies in their organisations.

The service model is being flipped on its head

“Moving forward, we will begin to see service outcomes designed into products at the R&D level, as well as the ability for equipment and devices to become capable of recommending companion products to customers for cross sell and upsell opportunities,” says Yarnold.

One of the customer examples Yarnold was most excited about was the one from Timo Okkonen of inspection, testing, certification consultancy services firm Inspecta.

Okkonen spoke brightly about “influencing everything for our kids.” The company’s vision, he says “is to save the planet through improved maintenance and service.”

It’s this idea that excites Yarnold because this customer is using his software to not just manage service engineers but actually helping to re-shape the company’s entire approach to business.

It’s a view shared by Jerome Piche, global customer service VP at medial diagnostics company bioMerieux in France. “How can we be more efficient to increase the first time fix?” He asked. “We are organised in silos but this is a way in which we can break the silos and have a more end-to-end view.”

Piche was referring to the idea that the mobilisation of the software and the ability to manage and analyse service data more efficiently is changing the game.

ServiceMax describes this as a transformation, where service is now starting to influence decision making and opening up new opportunities for businesses to increase efficiencies.

In fact the company believes in it so much it wrote an e-book called Diamonds in the Rough: Unleashing the Power of Field Service Transformation. Not your average bedtime tome but certainly something to get those transformational juices flowing.

People and skills are changing fast

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US, there will be 800,000 additional service workers in the US by 2022.

It seems that despite technology, the service industry is growing and we will need more techs than ever before.
But is this right? Is the industry really going to support a huge growth in personnel at a time when automation technology is starting to have such an impact on service efficiency?

If anything the role of the service professional is going to change more rapidly. The pressures to change will only increase with technology advancements.

 

“How do we stop the technicians talking in ‘techlish’ and ensure service permeates through a business? How do we make it sexy to them because I think it’s the sexiest business in the world,” says  ServiceMax CTO Hari Subramanian.

John Cooper, head of service for Sony Professional Solutions Europe supported the idea that attitudes towards service professionals have changed and professionals themselves need to evolve to meet the new demands and expectations of customers.

“We were seen as a necessary evil in the service department,” says Cooper.

“We just took care of things. There was a lack of visibility but now with ServiceMax we can have visibility and prove we add value.” It is this justification of the role that fits with the general theme of the event – transformation through technology and using the data to increase an understanding of customer service requirements while reducing waste So should service people evolve into a sales role also? Should they really upsell the customer?

There was a certain degree of egg shell treading but the consensus is that service techs do have to evolve and embrace the idea of soft selling.

While Dave Hart, ServiceMax’s VP of global customer transformation urges caution for, quite rightly, concerns around undermining the service tech’s credibility and trusted status, he does concede that perhaps there needs to be a change, an evolution in roles as field sales team numbers dwindle across industries.

“In this new economy service is the difference,” said the introductory video, highlighting the change that is coming.
Technology and in particular IoT and data analytics are impacting all industries and you have hundreds if not thousands of businesses jumping on the train to try and capitalise, to forge niches, conquer markets.

ServiceMax is no different although in Field Service they have a head start on some of their peers. The industry, though, is surely in for a rollercoaster ride.

 

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