AUTHOR ARCHIVES: Marne Martin

Return on Investment and workforce management should go hand in hand but it can take careful application explains Marne Martin, CEO, ServicePower...

Return on Investment “ROI” is such a buzz word, especially in field service.

Most organisations, which offer some sort of field based services eventually realise that to achieve their productivity, customer satisfaction and cost metrics, some level of automated workforce management (WFM) technology is required. Even small productivity gains bring guaranteed benefits to any organisation.

Making the Case

The business cases for WFM vary, but generally, the most common goals are improved efficiency, increased customer satisfaction, decreased costs and streamlined processes, such as collaboration, inventory management and billing.

 

 

While WFM technology does require an investment of course, it can generate huge returns, in as little as nine months according to Gartner, throughout the field service process.

 

The most successful WFM deployments begin with a commitment to improving existing processes and a focus on productivity enhancements.

An example of the sorts of key performance indicators that are possible with the implementation of a WFM technology that includes configurable parameter-based optimisation include:

 

• Total capacity increased from 6,427 jobs to 8,579 jobs (33% uplift)
• % jobs completed late decreased from 78% to 33%
• Average jobs/day/tech increased from 4.72 to 7.18 (52% uplift)

 

To achieve these sort of improvement in your organisation through the implementation of a WFM including algorithm-based technology to maximise your productivity, it starts with well laid plans.

Evaluate WFM vendors:  Select a vendor based on supported deployment models, especially in 2016 when SaaS deployments are increasingly important due to speed of implementation, cost savings in terms of IT resources, hardware, licensing and security. Integration capabilities, and features such as schedule optimisation, mobile dispatch/support of on site processes and business intelligence are also important.

And, look to the future. Business models, customer expectations and technologies change.

The best WFM vendors offer technology which supports your current business model, but also provides a roadmap to support growth and evolution in the future.

Build a solid team: Cross functional project teams, which include executive sponsorship and a strong project leader with the relationships and negotiation skills to navigate across the teams are key to driving consensus and success. Don’t forget the tribe.

 

 

Much information about current operations and the ability to enforce the changes necessary from the bottom up depend on the techs, dispatch, call centre, finance and HR teams that general aren’t initially included in the project because they fall outside to the core field service and IT teams.

 

Every functional group will have its own goals (or not) for the project and varying commitment to it.

Document plans and goals: Drive commitment by attributing specific ROI metrics to each functional group and use a formal ROI model to measure the results.

Collect data: Ensure data is collected prior to launch so that recalculation of the metrics after can be calculated the same way to provide a solid, unquestionable analysis.

Calculating the results

Documenting a ROI on a WFM investment is an exercise which requires data from across the enterprise to accurately measure and understand where you started and the productivity gains that were the result.

Again, the most common data used to measure success and ROI on a WFM deployment are improved efficiency, increased customer satisfaction, decreased costs and streamlined processes.

Specifically, measure technician and dispatcher efficiency. Has the WFM solution increased the number of jobs scheduled per day, per technician?

Has the solution decreased the number of dispatchers required to manage field technicians?

Has technician utilisation improved based on the solution’s ability to handle intra-day schedule changes, decreasing non-working time and overtime?

 

Have field techs been able to improve their efficiency, completing more jobs per day or decreasing the time on the job site? Have first time fix rates improved?

 

Have fuel costs decreased due to more efficient routing? Has headcount been optimised such that resources can be reallocated to other tasks or eliminated? Has schedule compliance improved, decreasing missed or late appointments?

Have customer satisfaction scores increased due to shorter appointment windows, improved schedule compliance or proactive maintenance work supported by the WFM tool?

Collect baseline data and use a robust, integrated, in-memory business intelligence tool to measure the baseline and post deployment data against one another.

ServicePower recently helped a client evaluate the ROI on its deployment of ServiceScheduling.

The client documented increased productivity of 29% and a 32% return on its investment in ServicePower’s mobile workforce management software platform, including fewer miles driven,across the entire fleet, resulting in a $1,611,055 savings per year, and improved schedule compliance resulting in $165,600 in late penalty savings per year.

Continued Success

Mobile workforce management software solutions are critical to maximising the productivity and efficiency of employed resources. Measurable, sustainable ROI is absolutely possible. Positive ROI depends on solid planning, cross functional, deeply experienced teams, agreement on the metrics, data collection and robust, integrated BI. To learn what your ROI on a WFM investment could be, run the numbers with our ROI calculator.

 

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Marne Martin CEO of ServicePower argues that to be a thoroughbred amongst your competitors you must seek out the best-in-breed technologies...

Spring is the start of the racing season in some parts of the United States, especially in Kentucky where the Kentucky Derby, the first race of the Triple Crown, is run the first Saturday of May.

The 2015 race was historic.

American Pharaoh, a horse owned by an Egyptian immigrant, with half a tail, took the Triple Crown on Saturday, June 7, 2015 by winning the last and longest of the Triple Crown races, the mile and a half Belmont Stakes.

He’s only the 12th horse in history to ever win all three races: The Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the longest, the Belmont Stakes. And, he won that last race decidedly, taking it in 2:26:65 minutes and 5 ½ lengths ahead of the 8 horse field, the fastest Belmont since 2001 and 6th fastest time since Affirmed ran it in 2:26 4/5.

Only Secretariat, the legendary race horse featured in the movie Secretariat in 2010, ran the Belmont faster at 2:24 by 31 lengths in 1973.

The Pharaoh stands happily at stud now at Ashford, a 2,200-acre farm in Versailles, Kentucky, where, even as unproven, first-year stallion, he commands a record $200,000 stud fee. Thoroughbreds are athletes in every sense of the word.

They train for years and face stiff competition. Some of them are born with an edge, like Secretariat, whom had a larger than average heart rumoured to have contributed to his racing success. But, most winners are the product of preparation and execution including the latest, best tools and technology. Field service organisation are exactly the same.

 

We must focus on preparing our people and executing seamlessly by enabling ourselves with the tools and technology that ensure success.

Out of the gate, we must seek out the best in breed field resources. New technologies like social, mobile, cloud and IoT are second nature to the emerging millennial workforce. Find field technicians comfortable with new technologies and provide them with complementary tools which improve their personal success. Collaboration tools like video chat, mobile applications and wearables help them help your customers. Satisfied field resources, trained to use their technology, with access to tools and information to get the job done will increase your first time fix rates and customer satisfaction.

To beat the competition down the stretch, we must execute flawlessly by enabling ourselves with the best tools and technology. Mobile workforce management software is not optional. I think most enterprise level organisations, with several hundred or thousands of field resources get this.

But the necessity of scheduling technology is still nebulous for some small or medium sized enterprises. Every business, no matter the size absolutely can benefit from real time route and schedule optimisation, mobile dispatch and field service management software. There are many options for route optimisation, but not all are the same.

While some vendors offer ‘scheduling’, that doesn’t necessarily mean they offer real time, intra-day route optimisation like ServicePower. ServicePower has invested significant effort into enhancing our scheduling software, filing 4 patents on Quantum Annealing, the first new optimisation algorithm in decades, which offers all businesses more efficient, faster route optimisation by harnessing the cloud and distributed computing.

 

For those small, medium and even large enterprises whom do not or cannot deploy a full on MWFM software, Optimization on DemandTM released this summer provides improve productivity and reduced costs without a full workforce management software deployment. Optimization On Demand™ enables field service organisations to book jobs for customers, then pass a set of appointments to ServicePower to optimize, on demand, into the best, least costly order.

Optimization On Demand™ provides a more intelligent tool set, without the expenditure of an entire workforce management or field service optimisation software solution. NEXUS FS™ provides field service organisations of any size an enterprise quality, wholly configurable, cloud-based field service management solution with a comprehensive mobile application.

It supports work order management, dispatch, scheduling, inventory management, time sheet reporting and geolocation, enabling focus on providing high quality service to customers, while benefiting from productivity improvements.

Technology is available/accessible at any level of business operations and is the key to winning the race, beating the competition. To cross the finish line, use of technology is key.

Optimised scheduling, mobility and field service management are all critical components of mobile workforce management software. But, to cross that line, field service organisations must deploy collaborative, operational intelligence and real time control consoles to monitor ongoing operations from across the enterprise.

Monitoring what’s happening today ensures high compliance levels and happy customers. Mining the data, using custom scorecards and predictive analytics enables teams to manage work, coach staff and fine tune processes to get over the finish line today, setting up a successful tomorrow. Do all this, and your organisation will have also won the Triple Crown.

 

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Marne Martin CEO of ServicePower urges us to grasp the opportunity that technology affords us, but only to do so with a firm understanding of why we are doing so and how that technology can improve our service offerings...

I often hear from executives “We need big data”, “We need 3D printers”, “We need M2M”, don’t think like that.

In this article I want to inject a sense of urgency into the field service community to act now but also take the right approach towards digital technology, you’re not implementing it for the sake of it; you must implement it to do something truly noteworthy, something great.

The current state of play

We are at a pivotal time in not just field service, but the world’s future, I believe we entering the ‘Age of Digital Enlightenment’.

We have a raft of emerging digital technologies like IoT (Internet of Things), mobile, cloud and social collaboration that are resetting what we think of as possible.

 

You may have seen this shared on social media but it’s worth reiterating: Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.

What does this mean for your business?

It is not a question of if service management will be disrupted, but when, it is inevitable. The mistake that taxi firms made with Uber is that they tried to fight it using traditional business and legal methods. Even now this continues to result in wasted energy and money, all the while Uber’s market share grows exponentially.

Without question your field service business is currently under threat from competitors that have grasped the enormity of what is happening and are plotting success based on enabling technologies.

What practical steps can you take? 

A threat is also an opportunity; to outpace the competition you need to adopt a positive and proactive mindset for your business. You also have to be pragmatic, to achieve transformational changes your business needs to step out of its comfort zone and embrace new ways of thinking.

Like the first ‘Age of Enlightenment’ we need to use our powers of reason, analysis and individualism.

We need to challenge what business means and bring together disparate technologies so that we can enable new, better ways of working.

Easier said than done.

However businesses that start early in this process will garner knowledge and experience that can help. Forward-thinking mining machinery leasing companies are using IoT to pro-actively monitor reliability issues so that engineers can be on-site fixing issues before they halt extraction.

 

Their customers are willing to pay a premium for this service and see it as a valuable differentiator.

This transformation is not realised using just IoT, there are several digital technologies (cloud, mobile, analytics) working together, the key is not to look at one technology but consider the optimal digital mix to create a symphony.

A good starting point would be to assemble a project team to analyse your business, the field sector you operate in and even other similar sectors to take a pulse of what is working ‘digitalwise’.

Your team should posses a mix of skills:

[ordered_list style="decimal"]

1. Creative – to push the envelope
2. Technical – to understand what is possible
3. Business– to decide what would deliver the greatest sustainable competitive advantage

[/ordered_list]

Above all else work with a field service vendor that understands digital, one that can give you a head start because it has existing experience and the three skills above.

Here at ServicePower we lead the way when it comes to innovation, we have long since created a service management platform that connects IOT, M2M, cloud mobile and all the other enabling technologies. Beyond that we are challenging what is possible with scheduling – which is still the hub of field service.

 

Scheduling technology hasn’t really changed much in the last decade, until now.

The KTP (Knowledge Transfer Partnership) initiative with Dr. Alan Crispin and Alex Syrichas from the Manchester Metropolitan University has developed a new algorithm with ServicePower for optimising the deployment of people and vehicles for field service companies that exploits “Quantum Annealing”.

It sounds hi-tech and it is. Previously Quantum Annealing was the preserve of the massive computing power of NASA and Google, now however ServicePower, via the cloud is enabling businesses of any size to channel its enormous power to optimise resources in the field.

It is the future, allowing real time modification to more easily and more quickly modify the parameters used in schedule optimisation to deliver unheard-of productivity and route efficiency.

It is not hyperbole to say that ServicePower is not just using technologies of the future, it is creating them.

So contact us so that together we can take stock of what you are doing, and what it is you hope to do.

We have dedicated many man-years to making the most of digital in field service, let’s talk about how this experience can help you decide what’s possible and the next move to make sure your company is destined for greatness.

 

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Marne Martin CEO of ServicePower explores how new challenges in field service are resulting in a delicate balance between digital innovation and industry pressures.

The field service industry is teetering on the edge of a precipice.

On one side are emerging technologies like mobile workforce management software, route optimisation, wearables, enterprise mobility software, operational analytics, IoT/M2M connected devices, and social collaboration. On the other is the shifting environment, including the changing workforce, the emergence of the millennials, legislative challenges and increasing competitive pressures.

Where the Age of Enlightenment that occurred from the 1600 to 1700’s was about cultural and intellectual change in Western Europe, based on new ideas around reasoning, analysis, and individualism, the ‘Age of Digital Enlightenment’ is very different.

It has created a digital effect on field service which requires that each organisation utilises technology, analysis and information together to enable new, better ways of delivering service, while meeting its business goals.

Emerging technologies, digital technologies, in particular can be transformational to field service. However, field service organisations must balance new technologies to meet compliance and productivity goals, and ultimately achieve the highest levels of customer satisfaction and profit for the business.

Field Service Challenges

Field service organisations are continually challenged, by not only increasing competition, declining margin and changing customer expectations, but also a myriad of other issues, including:

• Evolving business strategy - Business strategy must be continuously adapted to address changes in the competitive environment, changes in customer’s communication preferences and changes in labor supply.
•   Legislation - Legislative changes absolutely impact how field service organisations operate. Legislation must be identified and business process designed or changed to accommodate them.
•   Emerging technologies - Social, mobile, analytics, cloud, wearables, and IoT/M2M are transformational and absolutely should be evaluated for impact to the business.
• Emerging millennial workforce - The workforce is aging. The millennials are increasing backfilling the ranks. They grew up with mobile and social technology. They are motivated differently than their more experienced peers.
• Competitive pressure - The competitive environment changes every day, with new entrants and early technology adopters, like Uber.

Impact on the sector

Field service doesn’t stand still. Established organisations continue to be threatened by new market players.

Meanwhile, the field service industry is reinventing itself, eliminating manual processes and schedules which are costly and inefficient. Field service recognises now the value of field based resources. People are our greatest opportunity and highest costs. We must fight for talent, especially as the labour pool shifts towards millennials.

There is confusion over which technologies to implement, in terms of legislation and productivity. In Europe, for instance, traveling to work is now considered part of reimbursable hours for employees. What workforce management software is best capable of handling accounting for this legislative change, and the new schedule complexity, while improving productivity and efficiency at the same time?

 

These challenges, these impacts on the industry, are the biggest threats to field service; they are also our biggest opportunity.

Navigating the Future of Field Service

All challenges that face field service organisations today can be addressed with emerging technology that transforms operations.

• Real time optimisation improves productivity and efficiency, while also reducing costs.
• Mobilised on-site processes improve first time fix rates and the customer experience.
• Operational and business analytics improve oversight and operational performance.
• IoT/M2M connected devices facilitate the evolution from reactive repair based models to proactive, less costly and more customer friendly models.
•  Social collaboration leverages the comfort of millennials workers to improve first time fix rates and reduce field based overhead.

Bridging the Divide

Bridging that precipice, between the digital effect and the industry challenges, requires quick and decisive action.

• Act strategically – Look at what technology delivers the greatest return on investment and prioritise your investment where it matters most.
• Recognise that field service (people, process, IT, parts, etc.) usually crosses multiple aspects of the organisation.
•  Be sure to gain alignment and recognise that every function has a vested interest in success.
• Don’t forget to build a business case and agree the metrics for success.
• Employ creative thinking to challenge the status quo and rethink how that strategy can be delivered.
•  Work with technology vendors that understand innovation and what’s possible.

Field Service is a critical part of most businesses today. Field based resources are often the only touch point with your customer post sale.

Take advantage of new technologies to build a platform for success which improves visibility and increases flexibility across the service value chain. Adapt faster and more efficiently to external change and new company strategies.

Productivity drives profits in your business!  Your competitors, and even businesses you don’t know about yet, are heading that way so Cross that bridge now before it is too late.

Marne Martin CEO of ServicePower gives us her insight into why the company continues to focus on evaluating and developing the latest technologies for field service...

Disruptive new, connected technologies are changing the workforce management industry, by leap and bounds.

ServicePower Technologies Plc, is incorporating the latest in technology innovations into its leading field management software solutions. These new technologies, including social, mobile, cloud, analytics, IoT and M2M, and collaboration, drive efficiencies and productivity, reduce costs and increase first time fix rates. Most importantly, they transform workforce management to improve customer satisfaction, recognized as the overall measurement of success.

Schedule optimisation is the cornerstone of workforce management software, and the key on which the success of operations rely. Without real optimisation, the software won’t deliver on its ROI promises. There are generally three types of scheduling approaches: 

1. Basic scheduling: Managers build and manage a schedule manually, using no logic to decide the best tech or the best place on a schedule for a job.
2. Automated/Simple Rules-Based Scheduling: Simple, rules based systems, including computerised logic automatically builds a schedule, filling an open slot on the schedule, with no reshuffling of existing jobs to achieve a less costly schedule.
3. Intelligent Route Optimisation, as offered by ServicePower.  The schedule is built automatically based on configurable parameters and sophisticated optimisation algorithms to minimise costs, maximise margins, reduce response times and improve customer satisfaction, while ensuring that the best field tech is assigned with the right skills and parts. It also re-optimises the schedule in order to reduce costs.Place your list items here

ServicePower pioneered true intelligent, configurable route optimisation,  providing its ServiceScheduling software since the late nineties. We’ve continuously enhanced the engine which is offered through competitive partners as well. In 2015, we incorporated a modern Management Console which provides managers the ability to monitor key metrics, scheduled jobs, staff location and collaborate with remote team members.

We’ve enhanced lat/long travel matrix capabilities, long and complex job functionality, as well as crew and third party scheduling, and are working on evolving our scheduling algorithms to the next generation in artificial intelligence technology.

We’ve improved planning and forecasting using the latest map layering technology and coupled it with a true, non-production modelling environment and robust, cloud self-service Business Intelligence to ensure results.

Most importantly, we’ve realised that at times integration budgets or timelines stand in the way of deployment. Optimisation as a Service (OaaS), our newest product, provides enterprises and SMBs alike the power of true, intelligent, automated, route optimisation, in the cloud and on demand, by offering schedule optimisation as a service, priced transactionally. For field service organisations that want the productivity and cost savings of optimised routing, but don’t necessarily require the power of continuous optimisation, OaaS enables them to book jobs, optimise them, creating the best, least costly schedule available.

OaaS enables any organisation, even SMBs which previously were priced out of the technology, to benefit from real optimisation, moving past manual or simple rules based solutions. Likewise, enterprises looking to supplement existing ERP or CRM solutions without a full workforce management software deployment, or those with sales, stocking, or depot work not requiring travel, will also have the option of utilising OaaS.  OaaS will revolutionise how route and schedule optimisation is deployed.

We’ve also extended our M2M Connected Service product through a partnership with UK-based Concirrus, a top 10 Platform-as-a-Service UK company, and named by Gartner in its report: Cool Vendor in the Internet of Things 2015.   Concirrus adds cloud based IoT services to our scheduling software, creating new opportunities in the insurance sector and other industries with high levels of early IoT adopters, as well as new countries around the world. Additional partnerships are also under discussion in interesting new segments of IoT and application development.

We’ve enhanced ServiceMobility, our cross-platform mobile application, with additional payment and pricing features, estimates, product catalogues real time collaboration and most importantly, configurable, rules based forms. Rules provide the ability to rapidly define when data or forms are to be visible to a technician on a job-by-job basis, deploying new strategies in the field without code changes.

On the back of OaaS and ServiceMobility,  ServicePower launched Nexus FS, in September, providing the same mobile features with a SaaS business management portal that any business, from enterprise to SMB, can use to manage customers, vendors, jobs, and field employees. Combined with OaaS, those enterprises seeking a true end-to-end mobile workforce management solution can rely on ServicePower as a single source vendor for all field service operations requirements.

ServicePower is continuously evaluating new technologies to ensure that clients achieve the highest levels of customer satisfaction today, as well as future proofing our workforce management software so it supports our clients tomorrow as well. In 2015, our new products and partnerships are leading the way in technology innovation for field service businesses.

 

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Last month, Marne Martin, CEO of Servicepower, evaluated the need to focus on the technology required to operate a field service operation and discussed recruiting, training, motivating, and retaining new Millennial employees (Technology and Technicans in field service). This month, Marne discusses the importance of performance management and how to implement it in your organisation.

Once the technology and staffing are taken care of, performance management is the next essential step to the success of a field service organisation (FSO). It involves accessing meaningful metrics, working across teams, and aligning execution to improve performance across the entire field service organisation. It involves having the right people communicate the key messages from the metrics and implement change, using analytical information to drive continuous technician improvement, business productivity goals, and customer satisfaction. This is where the best organisations differentiate themselves. Performance management provides the opportunity to train and encourage Millennials with a responsive performance culture in mind.

What is Performance Management?

Performance management is an employee centric program including metrics, leadership supported processes, and technology used to measure employee performance against pre-defined targets driven by company strategy and goals. A well-formed performance management programme incentivises employee behaviours that support company strategy and goals by measuring and reacting to positive or negative performance metrics. Flexible technology which provides easy to understand analytics that can be viewed conveniently, on a variety of devices, is essential. It also requires committed management that mentor and drive accountability, as well as a group of technicians that are motivated to continuously improve.

In the following sections, we define the building blocks of implementing performance management in your organisation.

 What are the Most Important Metrics for field service operations?

ServicePower has published several pieces on key performance indicators (KPIs) for field service, including a white paper, and a new infographic which defines the top KPIs measured by best practice field service organisations - those companies leading in service profitability.

The top KPIs include: customer satisfaction, total revenue, total service cost,  service revenue, mean time to repair, on site response time,revenues under SLA/contract, SLA compliance, contract renewal rates, field technician utilisation, first time fix rate, service parts revenue, customer retention.

The survey on which the infographic was based indicated that 62% of best practice FSOs list development and improvement of metrics or KPIs to measure field service performance as their top strategic action!  It also indicates that best practice FSOs measure field technician utilisation and productivity less frequently than peers, because they’ve already deployed intelligent scheduling and optimisation software.

 

So, assuming intelligent scheduling and optimisation technology is in place, what should a robust performance management plan look like?

Each plan should include the following:[ordered_list style="decimal"]

1. Defined targets:-The operations team must decide on the baseline, and define standards or targets for scoring technicians.The KPIs mentioned above are clearly important to the best practice, top performing FSOs. Other KPIs to consider include net promoter score,  quality/inspection score, and sales.
2. Defined scoring methodology:- Scoring  can be done a number of ways, but typically the process is similar to school grading scales, which takes individual scores and rolls them up to a total score for some time. For example:[unordered_list style="bullet"]
   • First time fix rate = 90%
   • 95-100% = Exceeds expectations
   • 85-95% = Meets expectations
   • 0<85% = Does Not Meet expectations

What are the Prerequisites for a successful performance management process?

The devil is in the details. Once targets or KPIs and scoring methodology is established for each field technician, it is a matter of measurement and issuing ‘grades’ for each technician. It is also necessary to establish the process which will be used to manage the plan.[quote float="right"]Ensure the plan is easy to use,  has a defined dispute process, recognises that money talks, and encourages collarboration and competition

 

Ensure the plan is: [ordered_list style="decimal"]

1. Easy to use. Measuring, scoring, delivering the results and incentivising behaviours must be easy to administer. The process must deliver score reviews regularly, using real time information delivered to the technician on his/her connected device. Subsequent coaching must be built into the process if technicians do not meet targets/KPIs following score reviews indicating shortfalls.
2. Has a defined dispute process. The plan should incorporate a defined process for technicians to dispute metrics, in a non-confrontational way. For instance, give technicians 5-10 days to dispute a score before closing out the report for the month. Providing technicians access to real time metrics, eliminates surprise. However, escalation processes need to be defined as they will be needed from time to time.
3.  Recognises that money talks. When possible, tie compensation to meeting or exceeding targets and also tie performance improvement plans to missing targets.
4. Encourages friendly competition and collaboration. Sometimes, creating competition associated with individual, team or department scores can drive additional motivation for improving scores. Likewise, collaboration can help share best practices especially if an organisation recruits new technicians often.

Utilise technology to make performance management programes easier to administer.

Technology solutions often offer integrated business intelligence tools.[quote float="left"]Analytics data may have a negative impact on some KPIs, but yield improved overall results for a company.

Take advantage of reporting and dashboards available in your field service management software to establish targets/KPIs, continuously measure them, and use the data back at all levels of the organisation, such that it can be used to fine tune operations. The analytics data will also help to quantify and communicate gains from collaboration with other departments, such as improving call center triage for improved first-time fix, or considering parts availability when dispatching a technician. Both may have a negative impact on some KPIs, but yield improved overall results for a company.

 

Ensure that your technology is simple to understand and use, and provides data to all silos within the organisation, including the individual technicians.

Ensure that the right security is in place to limit the technician view to his/her own scores.

Establish user hierarchies. Scores typically roll up from the technician, to a higher level. Set permissions such that each user may view data and scores for his or her own team members.

Perhaps most importantly, the analytics technology must be flexible so that management can adjust targets when needed, and use the data across function groups, such as operations, marketing and sales, to drive continuous improvement across the enterprise, as well as new business opportunities.

What are the keys to successful deployment of a performance management programme?

1. Agree on metrics across the company before discussing with technicians. It’s difficult to deliver concise, understandable targets/KPIs when they conflict, or business silos have different priorities. For instance, quality and productivity can be at odds. Agreement must be achieved before delivery to field technicians to avoid confusion and disputes.
2. In union environments, rolling out a process takes longer and requires more approvals. Understand the environment in which you are working and plan ahead to facilitate / enforce adoption.
3. Pilot the plan before rolling out to the entire field organizations.

Is Performance Management Applicable to 3rd Party Contractors too?

Absolutely! Though some employee KPIs, like those above, can be utilised to measure and score 3rd party contractors, often the metrics are slightly different. The following 3rd Party KPIs can also be used to measure the effectiveness of contractors:

• Jobs accepted, % work-in-progress, job status, repair turnaround time
• Claim submission time
• % Parts used on claims
•  Number of parts used on claims
• % Labour only claims
• % Trip charges
•  Fraud

Now About these Millennials: What is the performance management opportunity?

Millennials grew up with technology, gaming, and social media. Find ways for the Millennial workforce to show self-expression by developing ideas for improved processes and efficiency. Facilitate sharing throughout the organisation.[quote float="right"]Make field service cool. Spending time around field service technicians is never boring

 

Make sure that they feel connected to their fellow technicians, even from the field. Encourage best practice sharing and competition to improve and be the best.

Make sure that the performance metrics tie into financial and other rewards so that your Millennial workers don’t become jaded about putting in the effort to sustain continuous improvement.

And lastly, make field service cool. Spending time around field service technicians is never boring. Their stories and humor are usually second to none, so facilitate interaction between the older generation that perhaps didn’t see technology as their friend, and the Millennials who couldn’t imagine being without it. This helps transfer knowledge from more experienced workers and drive KPIs achievement by new employees that need to learn about company assets, but also how to work in a world enabled by IoT.

 

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Field service organisations face increasing competition, declining margin and high customer expectations. But, they also are challenged by new technologies, such as social, mobile, cloud, analytics, IoT and M2M, and wearables. Each new technology has potential to revolutionise field service just as field mobility technology did several years ago. Marne Martin, CEO of ServicePower looks at why technology is just one ingredient in field service excellence.. 

ServicePower is spending much time and effort in innovating our field service management software. We are working hard to be innovative and stay ahead of the latest technologies such that our customers have the best in class FSM solution today, but are also positioned to take advantage of new advances as they hit the market. We are completely mobilising the field service call, enabling the field based tech to complete all onsite processes in one trip. We’re incorporating social collaboration to ensure that the tech has access to materials and expert assistance from the office to get the job finished. We’re partnering with one of the world’s leading research institutions, the University of Manchester, to further improve our scheduling algorithms.

Our hard work has been recognised through winning the 2014 M2M Evolution for IOT Excellence Award, and being named as a Visionary by Gartner in its 2014 Magic Quadrant for Field Service Management.

 

However, we cannot dismiss perhaps the most important element in the delivery of field based services: the field technician.

How does the emerging workforce, which is young, technically savvy and collaborative, affect your ability to provide exceptional field service? Let’s look at the following important issues regarding the technicians in your workforce.

Recruitment

One of the top challenges field service organisations face right now is the retiring workforce. However, according to Aberdeen more than half of field service organisations wait until there is an opening to fill to recruit a new technician, rather than doing so proactively. While it’s important to find a great technician with the skills required to perform the services offered by the organisation, it’s just as important to also understand the needs and motivations of its young (averaging 32 years old), technically savvy recruits, and do so prior to needing to fill a position. To that end, it’s also important to identify what will ensure the highest retention rates with the new workforce.

Technology Adoption

With the young, and we’re really talking about Millennials, which in 2015 are projected to surpass the Baby Boom generation as the largest living generation, comes adoption of more and more consumer oriented technologies. Aberdeen says that 62% of best-in-class field service organisations are incorporating some level of BYOD strategy. That’s happening because these young recruits are helping to speed the transition due to high adoption rates of mobile, connected technologies for personal use. As a matter of fact, in America, 2 of every 5 households only have wireless telephones. Technology is changing our personal and professional lives.

Service Evolution

The newest generation of young, tech savvy and collaborative field service technicians grew up with computers and social networks, text, email and chat. It’s how they communicate.

This isn’t a negative for field service. Adoption of these communication methods only improves customer service. As we field service management software vendors improve our ability to ensure the tech with the right skills and best knowledge of or proximity to the service location are intelligently scheduled, as with the ServicePower ServiceScheduling product, field technicians armed and comfortable with the latest mobile technologies can tap into the social, mobile and cloud technologies, as well as utilise wearables, to diagnose an issue while onsite, access the documentation or videos and chat or video chat with experts in the office whom can help ensure that the product is fixed in one truck roll.

 

For the customer, further downtime and inconvenience are eliminated. For the field service organisation, costs are minimised, customer satisfaction and brand loyalty are improved.

Strategy

Field technicians are your face to the customer. They are often the only point of contact a customer has with your organisation post sale. So, how do we find the best and brightest field technicians, and keep them?

• Proactively identify what your customers want.
• The Boomers are retiring. Proactively identify how to attract Millennials to your organisation.
• Identify how to keep workers engaged with your field service operation
  • Train them effectively
  • Offer and support utilisation new technologies such as wearables, which contribute to their success.
  • Provide access to the tools, information and experts to make them heroes to your customers
• Support social communications
  • Document how and when to use it for company purposes. A 140 character Tweet can be a huge PR success or a nightmare for your operation
• Encourage adoption of new technologies like route optimization, IoT and M2M and video. The business value of these tools empowers the field technician to create happy customers and make their own day a success![/unordered_list]

 

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Marne Martin, CEO of award winning software provider ServicePower takes a look at what the Field Service should look like in the not so distant future...

Today, field service organisations face increasing competition, changing customer dynamics, reduced margins and are increasingly challenged to achieve corporate metrics. Each must look toward technology that will improve its competitive edge and increase productivity, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. Intelligent, integrated scheduling, mobile and business intelligence technologies must be deployed to:

• Intelligently schedule the best labour resource, whether that’s an employee in a company truck or a 3rd party contractor, to meet customer requirements
• Optimise employee schedules to achieve the greatest levels of productivity, efficiency and SLA compliance
• Fully mobilise onsite processes, ensuring the job is completed, to the customer’s satisfaction, in a single truck roll, driving down schedule costs and repeat trips
• Continuously analyse and fine tune the overall operation through real time, data driven decision making

All in a fully mobile way. Consumers, used to instant access to the web, expect field services to be provided now. They expect technicians to be provisioned with the necessary tools and technology to show up on time, access the parts and other resources needed.

Intelligent Scheduling

Only software solutions provide field service organization with the technology required to schedule field based resources to meet not only customer commitments but do so in such a way as to reduce its overcall costs through optimisation and intelligent deployment of both employed and third party labour.

Demand fluctuation caused by seasonality,for instance, creates unnecessary cost and dissatisfied customers if response time are extended. Additionally, parts, extra labor or helpers, and jobs which require compliance to strict SLAs can’t be efficiently scheduled without an intelligent scheduling application.

This is where intelligent software solutions are invaluable as they consider data and existing schedules to make the best scheduling decisions for the company.

Optimisation

Real time, or intra-day, optimisation is crucial to the achievement of the highest productivity and efficiency.

Manual scheduling, which relies on human capability and emotion, entails a user building and managing a schedule. It is labour intensive and rarely considers travel and cannot be automated to adapt to change or exception management. Manual scheduling just can’t scale for future growth.

 

Rules based scheduling automatically builds a schedule based on simple computer logic, filling an open schedule slot. However it does not continuously move previously scheduled jobs to ensure the least costly total schedule looking also at technician skills, parts availability or travel. Intelligent Scheduling, based on artificial intelligence, delivers true optimisation. In this scenario, schedules are created and continuously and automatically changed to achieve cost, margin, cycle time and customer satisfaction metrics. Priorities can also be dynamically adjusted to changing business needs or KPI goals using also real time mobile status reporting, GPS and other parts and job information.

Only solutions that offer true optimised scheduling including intelligent routing provide field service organisations with the technology to achieve its goals while improving satisfaction, building brand loyalty and positive social networks.

Real time, Data Driving Decision Making

Field service does not exist in a box where the environment never changes. Each operation must continuously collect data, from all parts of its service ecosystem, analyse that data, and use the data to fine tune operations. Field service is a continuously evolving entity that must adapt in order to compete and exceed customer expectations.

The Future is here. Right now. New technological innovations, such as connected machines, are driving further innovation within the within the field service industry.

For instance, sensor information (M2M data) from connected devices, like security systems, building systems and vending achines, can be used to initiate repairs based on a detected failure.

 

However, that same M2M data, as well as other information, such as manufacturing data, can be used to model and predict  equipment failure, enabling the field service organisation to predict the failure of an elevator or power generator, and send a technician to maintain it, before it breaks, minimising customer down time. New technologies are enabling an evolution from the

traditional break/fix repair model, to a proactive, preventative maintenance model, which reduces costs for the field service organisation through higher first time fix rates, and improves customer satisfaction and loyalty due to decreased down time.

ServicePower, named Visionary in the Gartner 2014 Magic Quadrant for Field Service and recipient of the 2014 M2M Evolution IoT Excellence Award provide connected mobile field services solutions that bring together all aspects of the field service value chain, including the customer and the dispatch center, technician, claims and warranty processes, parts, the contracted workforce, assets, mobility, business intelligence, and social collaboration.

Through continuous innovative, like M2M Connected Service, industry acknowledged optimisation technology and cutting edge mobility, our software accelerates business efficiency gains and customer satisfaction while reducing costs, on one underlying and consistent platform. We offer field service experts that have managed businesses and field teams understanding customer’s needs and pain points.

Don’t let your field service organisation be stuck in yesterday. Implement technology to meet your cost, margin, cycle time and customer satisfaction metrics today, and future proof your operation through deployment of the latest, continuously improved field service management technologies.

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