ARCHIVE FOR THE ‘best-of-breed’ CATEGORY

Bill Pollock, President & Principal Consulting Analyst at Strategies For GrowthSM, takes a look at the biggest two tools being used for field service management and explore the merits of each...

In today’s business environment, too much attention is often focused on new technologies on the horizon, and whatever else might be “hot” in the blogs or other social media, rather than on the core attributes of substance and sustainability.

However, when it comes down to selecting the right Field Service Management (FSM) solution for your organisation, one thing remains very clear – it must “fit” your organisation with respect to functionality, application, accessibility, scalability and – of course – cost.

While some organisations may prefer an all-encompassing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution that addresses all areas within the company (e.g., manufacturing, engineering, distribution, sales, marketing, etc.) in addition to services, others may prefer to use a Best-of-Breed FSM solution that serves as a custom “fit” to its services operations.

Differentiators that Distinguish Best-of-Breed vs. ERP solutions:

There are many definitions of Best-of-Breed currently being used in the global services community, ranging from “best in segment”, to “best anywhere”, to “best currently available”, and so on.

However, much too often, “best in segment” may not necessarily reflect “Best Practices”; “best anywhere” may be too elusive, and “best currently available” may not be quite good enough. With so many alternative definitions, some organisations may eventually end up not quite knowing which “best” they should be aspiring to.

Further, what may be “best-of-breed” in the manufacturing sector may not even be relevant in the medical device sector, and vice versa.

The complexity of the concept of “best” as it pertains specifically to a field services organisation can cloud the ability of management to choose either the precise goals to target, or the appropriate technology solutions that will be required to attain them.

Research has shown that the ability to pick and choose the specific components to support an organisation’s FSM activities offers a much more tailored solution that is able to address all facets of this service-centric process.Research has shown that the ability to pick and choose the specific components to support an organisation’s FSM activities offers a much more tailored solution that is able to address all facets of this service-centric process.

That is not necessarily to say that an ERP solution will not, or cannot, support FSM – rather, that a robust, application-specific, Best-of-Breed solution may be able to do it better.

Further, many ERP solution providers go-to-market with messages that proclaim “everything your organisation needs to support its services activities”. However, the “everything” that is offered by some of these vendors may only follow the 80/20 rule; that is, providing only “80% of the FSM functionality required”, but delivered by a “brand name” company typically as an add-on to a more extensive – and expensive – ERP solution.

On the other hand, a Best-of-Breed FSM solution typically offers 100% – or close to it – of the specific functionality required by the field services organisation from a services-oriented solution provider that truly understands the user’s needs from the requisite functional specs; to the terminology and buzzwords to the requirements for installation and training; and ongoing technical and customer support.

In addition, Best-of-Breed solution providers in the services segment have typically supported clients in their field for decades, gaining a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of the market space including who the key and niche players are (i.e., vendors and users), how customers’ service organisations operate, what specific functionalities are required (and available), how usage has been and will be evolving over time, and what the key pain points are for all parties involved.

Most of today’s Best-of-Breed vendors represent the ones that have been successful in differentiating themselves beyond the enterprise-wide capabilities of the ERP generalists and the 80/20 CRM vendors.

Evaluating and Comparing Best-of-Breed vs. ERP Alternatives

Just as “you cannot tell a book by its cover”, it is uncertain – and unwise – to try to assess a solution provider simply by its marketing collateral.

Just because they say they can do it all, does not necessarily mean they can – and just because they say they support the field services segment does not mean they are specialists in doing so.

Many organisations have found that the difference between a generalist and a specialist can make all the difference in the world.

That is why it is so important to make sure that when selecting an FSM solution provider, the organisation evaluates all vendors with the same high level of due diligence – that is, assessing and comparing all vendors using the same criteria, and holding them to the same standards whether they are ERP generalists, FSM Best-of-Breed specialists, or anything else in-between.

Whether Best-of-Breed or ERP is better for your organisation will ultimately be your call – however, the results of a thorough needs assessment and long list/short list evaluation of potential solutions (and vendors) will take you to the point where you can make the right decision.

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Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News talks to Jeremy Squire of Fast Lean Smart about when a best-of-breed scheduling solution can be the right option over a broader, more generic Field Service Management platform as well as what types of field service companies will benefit from optimised scheduling.

Marne Martin, CEO of ServicePower, takes a lens to the recent spate of merger and acquisition activity amongst field service management solution providers and explores why it seems everyone is moving towards a fully integrated platform approach...

With a high velocity of M & A activity recently in the field service sector, many solution providers claim to be moving towards a “fully integrated platform” solution...

But just what does that mean and why would that be preferable to traditional best of breed solutions that tend to focus on specific functionality within field service management?

There’s a simple answer really.

It’s the customer. The customer is number one.

Customer satisfaction is the key to increasing profitability for organisations offering field based services. The analysts acknowledged this fact some time ago, and the industry has finally come around to acceptance.

 

To simplify service delivery and maximise profit, field service organisations must now consider customer satisfaction and the customer experience to be as or more important as the goal than the traditionally expected outputs from a mobile workforce management or field service management deployment.

To that end, field service organisations are looking to solution providers to offer truly end-to-end service and mobile workforce management functionality in a single cloud based platform, which addresses more than simply scheduling and mobility.

Service providers are looking for integrated self-entitlement and real time consumer communications, contract management, hybrid workforce management inclusive of optimisation and contract dispatching, warranty claim management, mobile dispatching for both employed and contracted labour, and integrated business intelligence, which increase productivity and reduce costs, while improving the customer experience and creating new ways to grow revenue from each customer.

Within the industry, solution providers have traditionally fallen into two categories. They were either a mile high and an inch deep, or a mile deep and an inch wide.

 

Mile wide solutions tend to offer more functionality to cover the spectrum from entitlement to scheduling, but failed to develop real expertise in must-have features like real time optimisation or hybrid workforce management.

So, though they offered more, they offered less, in terms of quality schedules, productivity and intelligent hybrid workforce dispatching.

Mile deep solutions tend to specialise, becoming expert in one or more functionalities, like enterprise mobility or schedule optimisation, but don’t offer end-to-end process support, like intelligent consumer portals, entitlement or warranty claims management.

As service providers realise that to grow, they need to simplify service delivery and offer more valuable services to customer to build loyalty, NPS and ultimately, more revenues long term, a single vendor solution which supports end-to-end process becomes very important.

Customers have driven service providers to offer more, and the service providers are driving solution providers, like ServicePower, to offer more, and offer best in breed functionality for the entire service process.

ServicePower realised this back in 2004.

Working with long term client, GE Appliances, we realised that offering mobile workforce software which only provided schedule and route optimisation, albeit the best optimisation on the market, wasn’t enough.

We began to develop additional functionality to provide mobile dispatching, asset tracking and most importantly SaaS hybrid workforce management. The industry realised that the best way to control service costs, while maintaining customer satisfaction was to integrate contractors within their labor models.

We also realised that managing contractors was very different than managing employees, so added functionality to intelligently select employees or contractors, dynamically selecting the best contractor based on ranking and rules logic.

We’ve also realised that ERPs, and many CRMs in fact, don’t provide the depth of service and maintenance contract management or entitlement logic needed when managing warranty reserves.

 

So, we’ve added that functionality, as well asset and inventory management.

Even more recently, we added an intelligent consumer portal which allows consumers to schedule jobs with our client’s hybrid workforces, increasing the number of digital touch points, creating a seamless, satisfying self-service experience, which increases the lifetime value of each customer by as much as 6 times.

So, are best of breed dead mobile workforce management providers dead? No. Best of breed means something different now than it did just two years ago.

To be best of breed, providers must offer end-to-end field service management capability that’s a mile high and a mile deep, to ensure every single part of the process is digital, optimised, and fast and offers more than the customer expected.

 

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