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September is a busy time for conferences, and if you are in the UK there's an opportunity to attend two very down to earth events.  Here’s a preview by Nick Frank,  who also reports on the latest developments in a campaign to re-invent manufacturing and service in the UK.

30th September: The Service Community

Hosted by the Aston University in Birmingham. A very different event for service industry professionals. We are expecting over 40 participants to discuss and debate how Big Data is being used to affect customer outcomes. Practitioners from Rolls Royce, Pitney Bowes and Inca will be discussing their personal experiences.  In addition we will have a view of the future from Andreas Schroeder of the Aston Business School. This event is unique: there are no sponsors, no hidden agendas, just professionals talking to professionals…a true community. To sign up see the Service Community website

6th October: Creating Value through Service.

A one-day conference hosed by the Cambridge Service Alliance . Although a paid conference, I always find the CSA events well worth going to as they present ideas that are on the leading edge of services development in industry.

Something up in UK manufacturing

There is something up in the UK which will have tremendous implication on field service in the future. I was at the House Commons with Professor Raj Roy and his team from Cranfield as well as senior leaders from some of the UK’s leading manufacturing and engineering companies when they presented a case for a National Policy for Through Life Engineering Services to MPs.

Through Life Engineering Services can be described as ‘Engineering for Life’ – making things work better for longer; delivering lifetime value from products, assets and infrastructure

Cranfield’s EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing has been working on the engineering expertise that underpins the ability for companies to provide their customers with AVAILABILITY and/or OUTCOME based contracts. These contracts reflect a world where customers no longer want to purchase the asset, but are redefining their needs in terms of outcomes - Rolls Royce’s Power by the Hour is one of the best known examples.

Research has shown that the TES market in the UK generated £23bn revenues for the UK. The exciting thing for the UK is that politicians, technology and industry are starting to realise that manufacturing must re-invent itself, if it is to be sustainable and competitive. They see that manufacturing is no longer just about the product. With the IoT, data and analytics it has become much much more fuzzy. This has tremendous implications for field service. A National Policy will speed up this change and hence the new skills sets required to effectively operate in these re-defined business environment. We will return to this subject at a later date.

Welcome back from summer!!

 

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Running across the 16^th, 17^th and 18^th of June the Service Management Expo remains one of Europe’s key field service events and Field Service News is pleased to be hosting the free educational sessions in the Field Service Solutions theatre once again this year.

So as we continue our series looking at what you can expect at this years Service Management Expo we turn to Day Two the 17^th of June where as well as an excellent calendar of events there will also be our daily networking session where you can continue the debates fostered by our mix of presentations, interviews and panel discussions over a beer or glass of wine amongst your peers.

Once again our day begins with an opening session from our theatre co-sponsors IFS and Field Service Management who open the proceedings with a presentation at 11:30am.

Following on from this session we turn to our first live interview of the day. Kris Oldland, Editor of Field Service News will be back in the hot seat as our question master and moderator for the day as he interviews Pitney Bowes, European Director of Customer Care, Andy Beer.

The session entitled “Service management 2.0 implementing a service management system across Europe” will have a focus on how the franking and posting giant’s recent pan-european implementation of a field service manager we will be looking at the pain points Beer and his colleagues went through when going through such a significant transformation to their field service operations, what they identified as key components of the new system and what benefits they have felt since making the transition.

We return to the presentation format once more as we welcome Sergio Barata of Telogis to the podium to give his 1.45pm presentation entitled "If you can connect it you can transform it" during which Barata will give us his expert insight into the fast paced, ever evolving and increasingly exciting world of the connected vehicle.

With vehicles now becoming central hubs for all applications the connected vehicle is no longer just driving transformation, but is now driving disruption. With experts predicting that by 2020 it's predicted over 50 billion things will be connected to the internet Barata’s session promises to give us vital insight into how we can keep in step with the revolution and still meet your customer's own ever increasing needs?

 

Importantly for us field service professionals we will be able to see how we can use connected intelligence to lead and differentiate our own service businesses and still double the ROI from our fleet operations.

Barata is not only has a deep background in fleet automation, but is also an intelligent and eloquent speaker so this promises to be a fantastic session for fleet and field service managers alike.

Following on from Barata’s presentation we return once more to the interview format with Oldland this time speaking to Professor Howard Lightfoot of Cranfield University. As well as being one of the founding thinkers in the area of Advanced Services, Lightfoot is now playing a critical role in the development of the next generation of engineers with the pioneering work he is doing at Cranfield University.

In a session entitled "Training the next generation of system engineers" we'll look at how Lightfoot is uing a mix of the latest technologies including both Augmented and Virtual reality to train tomorrow’s workforce so they are ready to deal with the explosion of technological evolution we are currently facing including IoT, Big Data and 3D Printing Lightfoot is in a unique place to give his insight into what makes the so-called millennial generation tick. What motivates them, what are their weaknesses, what are the skills they have that the ageing ‘boomer generation they are replacing lack? And most importantly how suited are they to the field service industries?

 

Lightfoot also returns for the final session of the day with Oldland moving form questioner to moderator as with hold the second panel session of the event. This panel discussion which also sees the return of Barata and Beer tackles the ‘Changing face of Field Service’. 

The aim of this panel discussion will be to asses just how big the threat of an ageing workforce really is for field service companies and is there really such a big difference between the outgoing and incoming generations of field workers? What are the common traits of the next generation of workers – both the good and the bad, not only from Lightfoot’s academic point of view but also from the real world perspective of Beer as a Senior Service Director? And finally how big a role will technology play not only in attracting the best of the next generation, but also in shaping the very format of the field engineer of tomorrow.

 

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Register for Service Management Expo by clicking this link 

 

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