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Mar 21, 2019 • Features • analytics • Artificial intelligence • Cognito iQ • Laurent Othacéhé • Machine Learning • management • Digitialisation • Strategy
Field service is undergoing what is in my opinion the biggest change the industry has seen in the last 25 years.
All of our customers, across a range of industries, want to talk to us about Digital Transformation, and how they can use digital technology to fundamentally transform the way they interact with their customers, and not just about the operational ‘nuts and bolts’ of delivering a service to them.
Some customers are only at the beginning, taking small steps towards transformation by, for example, moving away from traditional software ownership models towards cloud-based products and services, such as MS Office 365. Others are further along, with strategies that embrace technologies such as IoT, big data and AI.
But regardless of their progress, at the heart of all of these conversations is the recognition that Digital Transformation will bring them closer to the goal of providing exceptional field service.
The Art Of Field Service Ops
I often think that the role of a Field Service Manager is a complex mix of art and science, with a bit of magic thrown in for good luck.
Decision making needs to adjust constantly to changes in conditions – a sudden unseasonable cold snap, for example, or a contract with a new customer. Just as service delivery metrics point to success, something changes, and there is a whole new dynamic.
Without knowing what combination of factors triggered the change, it’s hard to know how best to respond.
Get the reaction to an emerging threat wrong – too great or too small a response – and the complex balance of the operational ‘ecosystem’ can be thrown out.
Recovering that balance and restoring the conditions required for ‘flawless’ field service can prove costly and time consuming.
Data doesn’t drive decisions
Most organisations capture a range of sources and types of data - workload planning, resource availability, schedule efficiency, service outcomes, customer satisfaction levels, asset profitability – and many are integrating new types, such as that offered by IoT.
However, this data is rarely delivered in the right form to support decision making, meaning that managers spend too much time aligning and manipulating data from disparate sources. Even then, many are frustrated to find that the root cause of issues is still unclear and the likely outcome of any decision is still uncertain.
AI, machine learning and predictive analytics
This is where the latest technologies, such as AI, machine learning and predictive analytics come in.
Valuable insights into the performance of an operation often lie at the intersections of these various datasets; these technologies can enable decision support applications to identify underlying patterns of performance in the Field Service operation, including long and short term trends, that were simply too complex for traditional applications to uncover. This is increasingly true as much larger data sets such as IoT have come online in recent years.
"Field service is undergoing what is in my opinion the biggest change the industry has seen in the last 25 years..."
This deep understanding of performance, combined with the power to highlight exceptions in real-time, enables the operations team to see the correct course of action to address each challenge as it arises. And beyond simple advice, these technologies make it possible for applications to automate ‘learned’ responses to common patterns of exceptions that occur.
The next generation of decision support
This next generation of applications will be used strategically to analyse, for example, which factors within a field service operation make engineers productive, and which inhibit productivity. Some of these factors will be within the control of the engineer, in which case performance can be addressed with initiatives such as better training or incentives.
Others will relate to company processes, in which case the applications will suggest tactical improvements, the impact of which can also be measured. Others still will be external factors which can’t be changed, but can be allowed for in planning and scheduling.
Such applications will be programmed with a knowledge base, but will be learning all the time, as the outcome of each decision is fed back into the performance data, effectively automating the process of continuous incremental improvement. This will take some of the challenge of blending art and science out of the hands of the Field Service Manager, leaving them free to concentrate on other activities.
Not just software suppliers
It is clear that this massive change in the industry requires those of us who supply and partner with field service companies to change too. We can’t just be technology suppliers.
We have to embrace our customers’ goals and work with them to add value; to weave their transformation strategies into the fabric of our products and services and to bring to the table our own blend of art, science and, yes, a little magic too.
Laurent Othacéhé is CEO at Cognito iQ.
May 25, 2018 • Features • Management • Cognito iQ • Laurent Othacéhé • white papers • Employee Engagement • Engage for Success • field service • service excellence • Service Management
Laurent Othacehe, CEO, Cognito iQ looks at why employee engagement is a critical pillar for achieving field service excellence and offers some crucial advice for field service companies seeking to how best to ensure they are getting the most out of...
Laurent Othacehe, CEO, Cognito iQ looks at why employee engagement is a critical pillar for achieving field service excellence and offers some crucial advice for field service companies seeking to how best to ensure they are getting the most out of their most important asset - their field service staff...
Field service is not just about IT and processes, nor is it just about parts and engineering. It is about people, this is why employee engagement is one of three fundamental aspects, alongside improving productivity and meeting customer expectations, that can lead to what we view at Cognito iQ as flawless field service.
If you want to know more about this topic there is a white paper available to fieldservicenews.com subscribers. Not a subscriber? If you are a field service professional you can apply for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription.
Click here to apply for your subscription and we'll send you a copy of the white paper Flawless Field Service: Employee Engagement as thanks for your application
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What is employee engagement?
So what do we mean by employee engagement?
If you Google it, you’ll get any number of definitions, but we like this one from not-for-profit organisation Engage for Success.
“Employee engagement is a workplace approach resulting in the right conditions for all members of an organisation to give their best each day, commit to their organisation’s goals and values and contribute to the organisational success, with an enhanced sense of their own well-being. Employee engagement is based on trust, integrity, two-way commitment and communication between an organisation and its members”.
It’s also important to say what employee engagement isn’t. It isn’t manipulative. It’s not a cynical attempt to wring productivity from employees with spurious benefits. It isn’t an annual employee engagement survey – although it can be measured - and it should only be measured if doing so leads to positive change.
This means that employee engagement must be win-win for employees and their employers. It can’t be imposed from above. It’s about creating a cultural shift in the way organisations behave.
Key drivers of employee engagement include the following:
- A culture of trust, fairness and respect for employees and management
- A culture of teamwork and co-operation
- Clarity on goals, constructive feedback and support to succeed
- Quality training and clear job progression
- Work-life balance and work that makes the most of people’s skills
- Empowerment, autonomy and a sense that people’s ideas are valued
Why employee engagement matters
In the UK, only around a third of employees are ‘engaged’. Engaged employees tend to be happy in their jobs, enthusiastic about their work, committed and driven.
This matters, not only for the wellbeing of the remaining two thirds of UK workers, but also because study after study has linked employee engagement to improved productivity, customer satisfaction, growth and profitability, as well as a whole raft of other business metrics, including employee retention; innovation; safety incidents; product quality and defects; shrinkage and theft; and sickness and absenteeism. And whilst engaged employees can bring business benefits, the reverse is also true.
A US study found that there are 51% of US workers who are not engaged, and a further 16% who can be defined as ‘actively disengaged’; whilst workers who are ‘not engaged’ tend to be indifferent – they are just showing up for their pay-check - those that are actively disengaged can be resentful and disruptive, taking up managers’ time, seeking out ways to ‘cheat the system’ and even sabotaging the work done by others.
Employee engagement in field service
1. The nature of the work:
Remote workers can feel isolated, which reduces engagement. It is important to ensure that they feel connected to the main office, and also feel part of a team, whether that is at a local or regional level, or by job specialisation.
Field service has traditionally been low-tech which has meant a lot of tedious paperwork – necessary but not as satisfying as helping customers and solving service issuesAs back-office management don’t always have good visibility of how work is actually done in the field, they might not understand how to empower and enable workers to do their jobs and may have created processes that are unhelpful or counter-productive.
In addition, field service has traditionally been low-tech which has meant a lot of tedious paperwork – necessary but not as satisfying as helping customers and solving service issues – so it is important to automate some of these admin tasks, as well as give workers electronic access to the information they need to do their jobs, such as product manuals and parts databases.
2. The nature of the workforce:
There is an ageing workforce, with the average age of the field service worker being 40 years old – and many of the older baby-boomer generation engineers are starting to retire.
To fill the skills gap in field service will mean both keeping older engineers on for the long haul by retraining and re-skilling them, as well as attracting and training new younger engineers. Engagement is essential here as it is costly to train up new workers only to have them job-hop to a competitor for a slightly better rate pay or better benefits.
3. The nature of the industry:
As products become commoditised, companies are relying on the quality of their service to differentiate from competitors. Field service workers are the face of the brand and often the only company representative that customers interact with. Engaged employees are more likely to give great customer service than disengaged employees.
The most forward-thinking companies are wise to the potential of field service workersThe most forward-thinking companies are wise to the potential of field service workers. They are considering ways to upsell other products and services during their visits and are turning field operations departments into profit centres. Technology is also changing the skills needed on the job. Connected devices are reducing some of the tasks that field workers need to do, such as routine maintenance checks, but they are creating new data, which means that workers will need analytical skills.
Technologies such as virtual or augmented reality are also changing the ways that workers carry out their tasks. Workers may see these new skill requirements as a threat – however, companies that are good at engaging their employees see these developments as opportunities to offer training, career progression and the satisfaction that comes from being part of an up-to-date and modern company.
If you want to know more about this topic there is a white paper available to fieldservicenews.com subscribers. Not a subscriber? If you are a field service professional you can apply for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription.
Click here to apply for your subscription and we'll send you a copy of the white paper Flawless Field Service: Employee Engagement as thanks for your application
To find out more about the many benefits of being a fieldservicenews.com subscriber and to understand how we store and may use your data please visit our subscriptions page here
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Nov 29, 2017 • Features • Cognito • Cognito iQ • Productivity • resources • White Paper • White Papers & eBooks • Employee Engagement • Software and Apps • Customer Satisfaction and Expectations
Resource Type: Written Guide Published by: Cognito iQ Title: Your Guide to Flawless Field Service - Perfecting Productivity
Resource Type: Written Guide
Published by: Cognito iQ
Title: Your Guide to Flawless Field Service - Perfecting Productivity
Want to know more? Access to this resource is available to Field Service News subscribers only - but if you are a Field Service Professional you may qualify for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription!
Synopsis:
Outside of the field service industry, the growth of big data and analytics is old news. The most advanced organisations have already gone beyond the hype and have developed strategies that are delivering exciting performance-enhancing results. For example, Leicester City’s surprise Premier League win was based on the club’s expert use of football data analytics. Stories such as this are why Gartner say “Data and analytics are taking centre stage as the single most powerful catalyst for change in the enterprise”.
However, field service companies have been slower to achieve similar levels of success from the use of advanced analytics. Whilst in many organisations there is plenty of data available, it can be hard to use effectively: the data may not be sufficiently accurate or timely, and service professionals may lack the skills and tools they need. But this is changing. Field service organisations are getting smarter with both the data they collect and how they use it.
Over this series of three special guides, Cognito iQ demonstrate how simple analytics can make a significant difference to three key components of field service excellence:
- Customer Satisfaction
- Employee Engagement
- Productivity (the subject of this first instalment)
Overview:
Topics covered and addressed in this white paper include:
Expectations of field service have never been higher
Customers are used to the speed of delivery and quality of service that they get from consumer companies such as Amazon; this has raised the bar for all service companies. Customers want a service appointment quickly, they want smaller appointment windows and they expect your field worker to have the right information as well as the skills, knowledge and parts to resolve their issue first time.
So how do field service organisations provide a better service to their customers, with fewer resources?
So how do you improve productivity?
To answer that question, you have to know what productivity means to your business. All businesses will have a different definition and an individual approach. For example, would you be happy to drive up the number of visits per day your field workers attend if that meant fewer first time fixes, or reduced customer satisfaction scores?
The old adage is that you can’t manage what you can’t measure but, these days, companies know that it is a bit more complicated than that – measurement for its own sake or using the wrong metrics to set targets can be counter-productive.
It is vital to know how to measure success: which metrics are useful and which aren’t, which can be accurately determined and which can’t, how metrics interact and how setting goals and targets will affect how employees go about their jobs.
Perfecting productivity
Continual improvement is a well-established practice that seeks to increase customer value, reduce waste and optimise resources via incremental change, feedback and analysis. These techniques originated in manufacturing; on a production line, it is relatively simple to measure variables such as number of defects, as you can easily see how the work is being done and you can observe the impact when you make changes to the process.
But as continual improvement methodologies have developed, they have been profitably applied in many other industries, so why not field service operations?
With the right data, it is possible to adopt a proactive, systematic approach, breaking down the processes within the operation.
Want to know more? Access to this resource is available to Field Service News subscribers only - but if you are a Field Service Professional you may qualify for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription!
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Jun 14, 2016 • Features • Software & Apps • Cognito iQ • Konica MInolta • Case Studies • case study • Software and Apps
Rebecca Barnett, VP Marketing Cognito iQ guides us through how they worked with Konica Minolta to improve far more than just service standards...
Rebecca Barnett, VP Marketing Cognito iQ guides us through how they worked with Konica Minolta to improve far more than just service standards...
At Cognito iQ, we love seeing what we do, come to life in the businesses we are lucky enough to call customers.
Konica Minolta UK produces business and industrial imaging products, such as MFP’S (multifunctional peripherals), copiers, laser printers and digital product print.
The company has over 275 service engineers providing planned, reactive maintenance and support to businesses throughout the UK.
Over relationship with Konica Minolta started 15 years ago and exemplifies much of the recent history of mobile workforce technology. From simple automation to today’s solution which provides unrivalled visibility of operational and employee performance.
Konica Minolta originally selected the Cognito iQ mobile application to automate and mobilise their field operation. In 2004, following the merger of Konica and Minolta, the UK business implemented a Europe-wide SAP ERP system which replaced the incumbent mobility solution.
"With easy to understand dashboards and the ability to drill down into granular detail, be it at an individual employee or indeed at a task level, the team at Konica Minolta quickly understood how powerful this would be for them."
In 2014, Konica Minolta following a market review, we took the opportunity to showcase our new solution, Operational Performance Management (OPM). Cognito iQ OPM represents the very latest in field service analytics.
With easy to understand dashboards and the ability to drill down into granular detail, be it at an individual employee or indeed at a task level, the team at Konica Minolta quickly understood how powerful this would be for them.
18 months on and the Cognito iQ OPM solution is firmly embedded at the heart of the service operation. Here’s a snapshot of just some of the results.
Customer Service
Via their handheld devices engineers are able to request customer feedback on completion of their jobs. The number of customers giving NPS (Net Promoter Scores) scores has more than doubled over the past 18 months.
However, what’s really impressive is that, on average, the Konica Minolta field team are achieving an NPS score of 85.
"Managers have a KPI to call every customer who scores a 10 within an hour to say ‘thank you’ and enquire as to why they felt the service warranted such a high score."
In parallel, any customers scoring a 6 or below (NPS calls them Detractors) are called to enquire what the engineer could do better next time.
The insights from all calls are recorded and used to drive a programme of continuous improvement through training, feedback to the engineers and process change.
Productivity
The Cognito iQ OPM solution gives real-time visibility of what is happening in the field. With this comes a greater understanding of where improvements can be made.
By analysing the data through the Cognito iQ dashboards, significant savings have been made by reducing travel times between jobs. Over the course of year, small savings in time have added up to significant savings in pounds.
In addition, the team have measurably been able to service many more machines per man through improvements in training and process.
Employee Engagement
The Cognito iQ OPM solution produces what we call the Worker Scorecard. In simple terms, it measures each engineer against 6 Key Performance Areas and produces an overall, aggregated individual score at the end of each day.
This then feeds into the League Table which shows, at the click of button, who the highest performers are over whatever period of time you choose.
By understanding exactly where improvements in service needed to be made, Konica Minolta developed a whole new engineer career development programme.
"Sharing performance information transparently has enabled productive conversations and Konica Minolta have quickly developed a reputation for being an ‘Employer of Choice’..."
Sharing performance information transparently has enabled productive conversations and Konica Minolta have quickly developed a reputation for being an ‘Employer of Choice’ enjoying many benefits such as reduced recruitment costs, reduced attrition rates and a happy, motivated, loyal workforce.
Now, I’m not all that keen on tech buzzwords.
Frankly ‘transformation’ is about as overused as they come. However, having worked with team at Konica Minolta on this story, I really couldn’t justify using anything else.
Want to know more? You can read the full transformation story on www.cognitoiq.com/case-studies
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