It is often said that data will be the true currency of future businesses across all sectors, but have we already reached a point where the seamless flow of data within an organisation is now essential for effective service delivery?
ARCHIVE FOR THE ‘dave-webb’ CATEGORY
Jun 28, 2019 • Features • Cognito iQ • Data Analytics • Future of FIeld Service • Konica MInolta • David Bochenski • Dave Webb • Ged Cranny
It is often said that data will be the true currency of future businesses across all sectors, but have we already reached a point where the seamless flow of data within an organisation is now essential for effective service delivery?
Want to know more? There is a video with Konica Minolta's Head of Direct Service, Ged Cranny outlining how they have revolutionised their business through data analytics available exclusively to fieldservicenews.com subscribers on the link below...
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 modern field service, it is impossible to ignore the power of data and its potential to drive businesses forward.
One company that has been able to harness that power effectively to push their own service delivery levels to new levels of efficiency, has been print and copy giant Konica Minolta and in a forthcoming exclusive Field Service News webcast we were joined by Ged Cranny, Head of Direct Service for Konica Minolta as well as Dave Bochenski and David Webb of Cognito iQ - the organisation providing Konica Minolta with the tools that have allowed them to fully embrace data-driven service.
Cranny often speaks about the importance of transparency that adopting such a data-centric approach has yielded and how such visibility has empowered important conversations around their service delivery in multiple layers across the organisation - and it is the seamless flow of data across an organisation that is crucial to being able to reach such levels of transparency across the various business units within an organisation.
So is this smooth movement of data across different divisions within an organisation the fundamental building block of modern service excellence?
Have we now reached a point where it is imperative for field service businesses to break down the data silos that often exist within their systems in order to remain competitive?
“I think transparency of data is important in the service world because service can often be viewed by the rest of the business as something of a dark art,” explains Cranny.
"Transparency of data is important in the service world because service can often be viewed by the rest of the business as something of a dark art.."
This is indeed true for a vast majority of organisations. Whilst for those of us engaged within the sector, we can absolutely see the key strategic importance of having an effective and efficient field service operation, which increasingly can become a significant contributor to overall revenues, the fact remains that within many organisations field service is all too often still viewed merely as a necessary evil and something that is a huge red line on the P&L sheets.
However, by being able to clearly outline the various complexities and benefits of a field service operation, supported by robust, accurate data that can be viewed in real-time, it is far easier to make the case as to why field service should be a key area of strategic focus within any customer-centric organisation.
“One of the most important things for me when we got the data from Cognito iQ during the trial phase, was that we were able to show it to our Financial Director and Managing Director and straight away they were able to see the value of that data across the business. Essentially it took away the ‘dark art’ element of what we do,” Cranny continues.
However, it is not just at the exec level that such visibility into the data can have an impact. Right across an organisation, there are wins to be had from being able to share data-led insights with various different stakeholders.
“We’ve actually opened up the data to anybody who wants to look into the top level figures within the business. For example, our CX manager can see the information relevant to customer satisfaction levels. In fact, anybody can see how we are performing on any given day, in terms of how well we are meeting our SLAs. That openness has led to much more informed questions to us in the service department, which in turn raises the level of both our service engineers and our service managers,” Cranny explains.
“It is absolutely key that service organisations are able to harness field service teams as a whole and that they really encourage collaboration around the data,” concurs Webb.
“I think that is the nature of the world that we are operating in now. It is no longer the preserve of the management teams to manage the customer experience, to manage the performance of the business and to worry about all the dimensions of success for an organisation - it is now down to all contributors.”
"Openness and transparency are key, but also the way in which you engage teams in the discussion around that performance is critical..."
Field Service engineers are the people that interact the most closely with the customers and the old adage of the customer advisor is absolutely true today. Therefore being able to share with the engineers the impact that their contribution is having on the overall performance of the operation, to ensure that you have that openness of communication is hugely important.”
“What I’ve seen Ged and his team at Konica Minolta do so effectively is to make that performance discussion about the process in the operation. It is far less about people and far more about their contribution to the process and identifying those aspects of a process that are failing or that could be improved.”
“So openness and transparency are key, but also the way in which you engage teams in the discussion around that performance is critical.”
“If you use good data badly, then you’ll only get to use it once, if you use it well then the reality is it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, you get to see a continuous performance improvement mindset emerging within your teams - which makes a huge difference to the overall business.”
This of course also frees up management teams who can then offer a huge amount of value in other areas of the business as well such as new business development, key account management and other more strategic aspects of the role.
Essentially by freeing these key personnel up from the day to day service delivery, they are able to focus purely on management by exception around the operation and then really focus on where the next business development role is coming from and how they can contribute - essentially making the service operation come alive for their business development colleagues when they are dealing with prospects and customers.
Of course, this is the optimal end goal. However, it is not necessarily a simple path for an organisation to follow. It is clear that the relationship between Konica Minolta and Cognito IQ is one which is well grounded in a level of trust and openness and there is a clear willingness from both sides to work in tandem to help Konica Minolta unlock the insights held within their data.
But how much weight falls on the shoulders of a solution provider to be able to guide their clients on that path, and how much responsibility does the field service organisation have for plotting their own path themselves?
“I think the answer ultimately here is that it really depends on the dynamics within the relationship in any given scenario and either can have contributions on that level,” comments Bochenski when the topic comes up.
"If you can harness the data then the rewards are absolutely there..."
”It is certainly true that data is the new arms race within business and being able to marshal and gain insights into that data is really what can drive benefits and opportunities for you to beat your competition. If you can harness the data then the rewards are absolutely there,” he adds.
“That then comes into the two sides. You can have some insights yourself, but it also helps to have someone from the outside also looking at things that perhaps you might not have seen within your own data - sometimes companies can become a bit tunnel visioned about their data without that external viewpoint.”
“I see the role of service providers being to help with platforms to bring that data into a place where meaningful insight can be drawn from it - to establish one place where companies can access all of their data through APIs etc.”
“Then, when we have that the flow of data from different parts of the business available, a solution provider can not only help you access it, but also glean additional insights that you might not have necessarily got yourself.”
“Another benefit is that the data is also available to other parts of the business and often I find that when you have established this kind of structure within your data, you have emergent things happen that you may not have initially anticipated.”
“Essentially, if you have two different people looking at the same piece of data, very often you can find something that neither of them would have seen were they only looking at the data on their own.”
This is a hugely salient point as often companies are able to unearth unexpected value within their data - sometimes that can help them improve their own processes, but equally it can be insight that is intrinsically valuable for their clients as well - leading to ways to further increase an organisations stickiness with their customers, or even opening up completely new revenue streams entirely.
Indeed, the benefit of breaking down information silos within a business does appear to be perhaps one of the most crucial tasks field service organisations must undertake in today’s world of data-led field service.
By working alongside CognitoiQ Konica Minolta certainly seem to be an excellent example of a company that has achieved that and they are now positioned to reap the rewards of that forward.
Want to know more? There is a video with Konica Minolta's Head of Direct Service, Ged Cranny outlining how they have revolutionised their business through data analytics available exclusively to fieldservicenews.com subscribers on the link below...
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...
Jun 21, 2019 • Features • Cognito iQ • Future of FIeld Service • Dave Webb
Dave Webb, COO, Cognito reflects on what he thinks are the key challenges that field service companies are facing in today's business landscape and outlines how and where he believes technology can play a role in overcoming them
Dave Webb, COO, Cognito reflects on what he thinks are the key challenges that field service companies are facing in today's business landscape and outlines how and where he believes technology can play a role in overcoming them
.
Want to know more? There is a video with Konica Minolta's Head of Direct Service, Ged Cranny outlining how they have revolutionised their business through data analytics available exclusively to fieldservicenews.com subscribers on the link below...
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 my experience, most field service organisations are striving to deliver exceptional service, a complex, dynamic endeavour where few things remain constant for long, and decision making needs to adjust constantly to changing conditions.
Pressures acting on the operation from within and externally from customers in the broader market create a constant long term demand for more efficient and effective service delivery. Whilst even slight changes to operating conditions, the sudden impact of unseasonable weather conditions, the introduction of a new product line or a new customer can have an immediate and significant impact on the dynamics of the operation.
Too often, just as service delivery indicators point to success something changes and operational teams can find themselves facing a wholly new dynamic, often without absolute clarity as to precisely what combination of factors triggered the change and are left therefore unsure as to how best to respond.
With the long term drive for efficiency and effectiveness stripping most operations of excess capacity, their ability to flex to meet these challenges are significantly restrained.
Judging the right levers to pull and just how hard to pull them is something of an art form, a gift for which managers of field service operations are often noted. Get the action to an emerging threat wrong, too great or too little a response and the intricate balance of the ecosystem can be thrown out. Recovering that balance and restoring the operation to the conditions necessary for exceptional service often proves a costly and timely affair.
In my role, I get the opportunity to work with some exceptional management teams delivering field service across a diverse range of industry sectors and different geographies. When I start talking with new organisations about their field service operations, I am constantly reminded just how challenging their role can be as they describe having to make a complex array of day-to-day decisions often with an imperfect insight to the status of the operational dynamic on which their decisions are based.
Most organisations are capturing a broad range of data from across the various dimensions of their field service delivery. From workload planning, resource availability, schedule efficiency, service outcomes, customer satisfaction levels and asset profitability, most are embarking on initiatives to increase the range of data they are capturing. One such example would be with the large denormalised data sets offered by the Internet of Things.
"In spite of the effort that organisations place on data capture, few of the management teams that I deal with feel the data is delivered to them in a form which adequately supports the complex operational decision making they have to perform daily..."
In spite of the effort that organisations place on data capture, few of the management teams that I deal with feel the data is delivered to them in a form which adequately supports the complex operational decision making they have to perform daily.
Too often, these management teams talk about spending a large proportion of their available time gathering and aligning data from disparate sources. Moreover, then manipulating that data into a form in which it is capable of delivering reliable insight and then manipulating that data into a structure in which it is capable of providing reliable insight into the performance of the operation.
For all the hard work required to create that insight, management teams are left further frustrated as the insights available rarely isolate the root cause behind the dynamics of the challenges at hand and truly support the decisions they must make in response.
Time lost wrestling with the data leads many to refer to a sense of management in the rear view mirror. Decisions based on out of date, expired data sets leave them with the feeling they are chasing echoes in operation. All of that effort expended on getting to the insight also takes its toll on time available to spend at the front lines of the operation with their engineers and out with the customers adding value.
As Dave Bohenski described in an earlier video in this series, there are trends within current technology which if harnessed appropriately I believe can deliver the level of decision support field service teams as a whole require - and when I say as a whole I mean management, field workers and often integrating the customer too into that picture. It can do so in real time and in ways that can release them to better perform their roles with the benefit of that insight as opposed to spending their time on data preparation or reacting to performance nudges that echo from events no longer relevant.
To be considered truly useful decision applications for field service need to:
- Provide holistic, real-time insight into those dimensions of performance that influence the overall service delivery and
- Help to guide proportionate operational response in ways that collectively engage the entire operational team.
To be considered holistic, these applications need to draw on large, often disparate data sets from a variety of sources and from a range of things that make up the ecosystem of a typical field service operation.
Valuable insights into the performance of operation typically lie at the intersections in the relationships between those 'things' and data sets. Traditionally technology has found it challenging to normalise seemingly incompatible forms of data, deriving value, for example from the IoT revolution represents the latest and perhaps arguably one of the largest to date of these data challenges. Big Data technologies make this traditionally computing challenge increasingly possible. With Cloud providers such as Amazon offering unparalleled compute and data storage performance at scale, applications that are designed to harness this capability are breaking down some of the traditional barriers to visibility within the operation.
"Technologies such as machine learning and data analytics are proving capable of identifying underlying patterns of performance in the field service operation that was too complex for traditional applications to identify..."
Applications also need to consider performance trends across those data sets in both long and short time horizons, if their decision to support is to be considered sufficiently holistic. Technologies such as Machine learning and data analytics are proving capable of identifying underlying patterns of performance in the field service operation that was too complex for traditional applications to identify. This is increasingly true as much larger data sets such as IoT have come online in recent years.
Combining the deep understanding of long term performance with the compute power to highlight and match this with exceptions in real-time, these applications are capable of providing operational teams with clear direction as to the correct course of action to take to address the specific dynamics of each challenge as it arises.
Effective team collaboration is key to delivering exceptional service. Applications centred on a single real-time data set have the opportunity to align teams across the operation around a shared understanding of service delivery performance. Responsive artificial intelligence technologies offer the chance to take feeds from predictive analytics, for example, and combine them with the awareness of real-time exceptions to provide clear and concise decision support within the operation.
Beyond simple advice, technology is making it increasingly possible for applications to automate so-called learned responses to familiar patterns of exceptions that occur, freeing operational teams to tackle other more valuable activities.
To be an effective stimulus for collaboration within the operation decision support applications need to deliver performance insight in ways suited to the different roles within the operation, e.g. engineering, planning teams, scheduling teams, customer service, spares and logistics, account management. One size certainly does not fit all where insight into the performance of the operation is concerned.
For the engineering teams, for example, this should be increasing via mobile technologies which seamlessly link responses to exceptions that arise into the standard flow of their activities. Gone are the constant interruptions for updates or the need to sync with the centre, replaced by less intrusive delivery mechanisms that compliment, not disrupt engineering activities by providing key customer facing resources with greater situational context and awareness around the performance of the operation.
This is increasingly made possible as virtual and augmented reality technologies become more prevalent. The traditionally complex and challenging nature of field service operations when combined with the enhanced capabilities offered by the latest Cloud-based technologies certainly makes it an exciting time to be involved in this industry.
Want to know more? There is a video with Konica Minolta's Head of Direct Service, Ged Cranny outlining how they have revolutionised their business through data analytics available exclusively to fieldservicenews.com subscribers on the link below...
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...
Field Service News is published by 1927 Media Ltd, an independent publisher whose sole focus is on the field service sector. As such our entire resources are focused on helping drive the field service sector forwards and aiming to best serve our industry through honest, incisive and innovative media coverage of the global field service sector.
Leave a Reply