Want to know more? The full length video of this presentation is available as premium content to fieldservicenews.com subscribers...

sponsored by: 

Data usage note: By accessing this content you consent to the contact details submitted when you registered as a subscriber to fieldservicenews.com to be shared with the listed sponsor of this premium content who may contact you for legitimate business reasons to discuss the content of this content.  

In this first of four excerpts from an exclusive video presentation produced by Field Service News in partnership with Astea, Kris Oldland and John Hunt sit down to talk about the how the field service industry is evolving and what the critical drivers for this change.

"There is a significant change in the way manufacturers are viewing service, and it is quite a seismic change" Oldland states as the conversation opens up.

However, just how important is it that field service leaders not only understand the magnitude of this change but also embrace it with open arms?

"The changes that we are seeing are both substantive and palpable," comments Hunt. "We are seeing in it in our new business pipeline and hearing first hand from some of the world's leading manufacturers how their revenue model has flipped on its head from where it was as little as a few years ago."

"What were industrial equipment manufacturers driving most of their top and bottom line revenue from capital investments from their customers, they are transforming that increasingly to an OPEX business, essentially enabling their customers to subscribe to their equipment predicated on drivers such as units delivered from the equipment and uptime," Hunt adds.

The result of this shift in approach is that what was previously often a services organisation cost centre, run in many cases with a deeply entrenched homegrown system with custom complex integrations, has now given way to Hunt refers to as the profit enablement centre.

"We are entering an era of Everything as a Service, and it is hitting all verticals..."

"Their vision has shown these organisations that they must have a best-of-breed, total lifecycle solution covering people and parts to give them the speed to market with the changes that might occur or to adapt to changes that need to be introduced rapidly into their service lifecycle ecosphere," Hunt explains.Of course, manufacturing is often the sector that is given the lens when it comes to discussions around advanced services, as many of the case studies we see in the area of advanced services are from OEMs (incidentally operating in numerous separate verticals), but this shift in thinking is certainly not exclusive to the manufacturing side of the field service industry.

"We are entering an era of Everything as a Service, and it is hitting all verticals," Oldland expands.

"A lot of the early learnings around X as a Service (XaaS) came from the software world, where there were several innovations but also many mistakes and there was a lot of learning from there. Of course, the servitization movement has been gaining significant traction within manufacturing circles across the last few years as well, but we are seeing it everywhere now. Utilities, Telcos even Retail."

A large part of this is that the technology is now emerged to drive this evolution in service forwards. However, it is not technology alone that is enabling the move towards service-centric revenue strategies.

"Processes are led by technology. The technology is being driven by the processes. It is very much a cohesive unit," explains Oldland.

It is the classic chicken or the egg scenario.

"I think it is the intersection of the technology and the thinking," Hunt muses.

"The tech I think is the slightly bigger driver in my opinion. Just as the invention of the printing press in the 15th Century allowed the masses to read and learn which resulted in an unprecedented revolution in thinking that led directly to pivotal periods in human history such as the Renaissance and the manufacturing revolution, so has the current pace of technology innovation spawned the next 'Gutenberg' moment - and it has opened up opportunities for field service providers to innovate in order to differentiate."

"That aggressive push to innovate in field service has brought even more demand for fit for purpose innovations like Astea, to be brought rapidly to market and that intersection of tech supply and innovation is becoming more and more entwined."

Want to know more? The full length video of this presentation is available as premium content to fieldservicenews.com subscribers...

sponsored by: 

Data usage note: By accessing this content you consent to the contact details submitted when you registered as a subscriber to fieldservicenews.com to be shared with the listed sponsor of this premium content who may contact you for legitimate business reasons to discuss the content of this content.