How Konica Minolta Put Shift-Left at the Front and Centre of Field Service Strategy

Mar 08, 2021 • Features • Cognito iQ • Konica MInolta • Digital Transformation • Strategy • EMEA

The Konica Minolta field service operation has more than 2000 field service technicians across Europe in 30 National Operating Countries (NOCs), servicing over a million customer assets, such as office printers and commercial printing devices, as well as IT Hardware and Software. Cognito iQ provides mobile and analytics solutions that enable field service operations to drive efficiency and improve customer satisfaction.

Cognito iQ’s COO, Dave Webb, had an opportunity to interview Patrick Stucke Senior Manager, Service Strategy for Konica Minolta, Europe. Patrick talked about how the organisation has been working to systematically harmonize and improve field service for a number of years; their shift-left strategy focuses on the technologies and processes which enable them to reduce costs and enhance customer service.

SHIFT-LEFT IS THE FOCUS OF KONICA MINOLTA FIELD SERVICE STRATEGY

Shift left is one of those terms that means something different in different industries, or even in diverse organisations within the same industry, so Dave asked Patrick what the term means to Konica Minolta.

Patrick Stucke: Shift left is a strategy that we've been following for seven to eight years. Our approach was to look at how we serve our customers, and rank all the functions that work towards incident resolution according to the ‘cost to operate’ , and the time it takes to resolve. Then, we took the most costly and valuable resources that take the longest to fix an issue and put them all the way to the right. And we took the resources that offer the fastest fix at little-to-no cost and put it them all the way on the left. It will come as no surprise that field service technicians were very far on the right. They are precious resources: they’ve received lots of training, they are equipped with tools, they carry spare parts, and they spend a lot of time driving around in leased vehicles. By contrast, on the left, there were the systems that self-diagnose and use automatic troubleshooting and reset functions. And then between those two different poles - the service technician on the right and the automated systems on the left - there were a lot of different shades of support, such as dedicated remote support specialists and expert teams, customer care teams or end-users using self-service support.So we asked ourselves: how can we shift as much work effort from the right to the left? Doing so would enable us to reduce downtime for customers, and also operate at a more competitive price point.

Dave Webb: What sort of challenges did you face in implementing the shift-left strategy?

When we started on the process of improvement, we discovered that we had various different mobile solutions in place. In some countries, local offices would self-dispatch the technicians but in others there was a central dispatch and scheduling function. Some technicians had mobile devices, and we were getting live feedback, but at the other end of the scale, some were doing all their call processing offline, on laptops, which was quite tedious. So it was very hard to compare one operation to another, and it was also very hard for the service managers to keep up to date with what was happening in their fields.

DW: So what steps did you take to harmonize field service?

PS: When we started looking into it, we weren’t really aware what was possible, and how much having live information would improve our capabilities to serve our customers. One target we had was to give our service managers more transparency of what's happening in their field operations, and enabling them to better analyse performance. So we went looking for best practices across different countries, exploring how operations work there and what partners they were working with. The real eye opener was our UK operation, which was using Cognito iQ’s Operational Performance Analytics solution (OPA). I had not seen anything like it before. Having real-time reporting and seeing how calls move through different statuses on an easy-to-understand dashboard reinforced our conviction that we have to move to fully mobile working - mobile devices and live data. The other element that I had not seen in such intensity before was the culture of performance and thought leadership on service optimization that has been established: Cognito IQ and the Konica Minolta UK team are working in a very close relationship and mutually improving each other.

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Patrick Stucke, Konica Minolta

DW: What was it about the platform and the solution that particularly appealed to you?

PS: The platform itself is unique, I have not seen anything like it. Being able to start at the top of the organisation and get a quick overview of what's happening in the field, and then being able to drill down to the individual details - that was something I've not seen in any other tool. So we can see, for example, utilization of technicians - how much time is spent in front of the customer, how much time is spent in the car, how much time is spent idle because technicians are not utilized to the best of their capacity. And that enables us to maybe shift resources from one team to another during the day to get a better resource utilization and help the more busy areas out. That’s really actionable.The second part of the answer is the very close and good collaboration with everyone at Cognito iQ. We don't just get an off-the-shelf solution; you challenge our way of thinking, you listen to the requirements that we have and implement those into your development roadmap. And I think that's really valuable when forming a partnership between two organisations.

DW: And how do you see Cognito IQ supporting you in your shift-left initiative?

PS: A lot of the metrics within OPA show us whether we have been successful in our attempt to try and shift left. So having, for example, live visibility of our first-time-fix rate. We have different teams collaborating with each other to try and achieve that: we would first try to help our customers remotely, but if we can’t achieve a remote fix, then we would send a technician out but we would pass along all the information that we have gained through the remote fix attempts. And we would at least make sure that we send the right technician, with the right training, and who has the right spare part to the customer. Just having that visibility and transparency in the field operations goes a long way in employing the shift-left strategy.

DW: And what has been the day-to-day impact on the team? The service desk, the field operation, the field engineers themselves? What has been the response to the shift-left strategy that you've introduced?

PS: This strategy has transformed our service organisations. As we were embarking on the shift-left journey, a lot of our organisations started putting remote support specialists in place. However, these were just field technicians who were on a rotating remote support duty. They would just scan through the call queues and pick prospects for a remote fix, and call customers proactively. And through that, we saw that they maybe decrease the burden on their field service colleagues a bit. But now, more and more countries are actually changing to dedicated remote support specialists who use all the great technology that we have in place to try and resolve incidents remotely as much as possible. And if they cannot fix an issue, they pass along all the information. So we see the service desk function and the field service function move a lot closer together and support each other. That's definitely a trend we're seeing throughout our business and in our growing IT service business. The clear cut between what's happening in the field and what's happening in the back office that we've had in the past - it's not really there anymore. So it’s become really important that they all look at the same set of data and intelligence. We need to all be working to the same service level agreements, from the first contact in the Customer Care Centre, through the field service operations in the countries, up to the European support organisations. We’re all working towards resolving our incidents according to our promises to the customers.

DW: How successful has your shift-left initiative been?

PS: Well, the way we have implemented that strategy has been a guiding principle for a lot of the initiatives that we have embarked on over the years. It’s also earned us some external recognition; we’ve won a BLI Pacesetter Award for Outstanding Serviceability in Western Europe twice. And it's of course, something we're proud of, because it shows the right strategy and the right guiding principle: to reduce our cost to operate and at the same time serve our customers better.

DW: Looking ahead, what other technologies are you expecting to adopt? And what do you expect those technologies to bring to your shift left strategy?

PS: One area that we have invested in already and want to grow is predictive analytics. We have systems in place already that notify us about possible downtimes, in advance. In some cases, we're able to resolve possible sources of a downtime for customers before anything happens. And we want to fine tune those algorithms even more and employ them for new use cases. We have also developed a lot of own technologies as part of the shift-left strategy implementation. One example is our AIRe Link platform, which is a remote video support system that enables us to connect to our end-users phone cameras, without them needing to install an app on their phone. That gives us a visual impression of what our end-users see when they try to operate the system, instead of just listening to the issues that they describe. And it's very easy to use due to the fact that we don't have to install applications on customer mobile phones.So that helps us a lot in our remote support attempts, especially at the moment where we are trying to avoid having to visit end customers at all, so we don’t put people in harm's way. This platform has been so successful that we're not only using it ourselves, but we're also offering it commercially. Together with Cognito iQ, we’re looking forward to the next generation platform of OPA, which will give us even better insights into operations. And because we can see trends developing throughout the day, in the dashboards that you provide to us, I think that soon you will be able to give us a glimpse into the future.

DW: As you say, the predictive aspect is very much a journey we're on together. At the moment OPA enables you to replay the operational day, but we're looking at playing it forward into predicting based on the data that we can see for tomorrow and beyond.

PS: That will certainly help us to serve our customers even better. And that's really an exciting prospect.

To find out more about any of the topics discussed in this interview please get in touch www.cognitoiq.com