Resource Type: White Paper
Published by:  IFS
Title: The IFS Digital Change Survey

 

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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!

If you are a field service professional you can apply for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription and we will send you a copy of this white paper along instantly.

(Please note that by applying for your subscription via this link you accept the terms and conditions here and a plain english version is available from our main subscriptions page here) 

 

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Synopsis:

When a car leaves a factory, this no longer signifies the end of the relationship between manufacturer and vehicle. The car goes into the next stage of its lifecycle, where it must be maintained and serviced. Businesses are realising that this servicing offers a significant revenue stream. For example, automotive manufacturer margins on new vehicle sales range from eight to 14 per cent, whereas servicing a brake disc carries around a 65 per cent margin.

As businesses become service-oriented, digital transformation gives them the tools to change.

By enabling visibility of an asset using the Internet of Things (IoT), the provider can better understand its use in the real world and feed that back into its research and development (R&D) process. Any issues from the manufacturing process that affect usage and failure rates of equipment can be managed via the IoT feedback loop. Data analysis using business intelligence or big data and analytical tools can derive value from that data.

Historically, companies have seen service as a cost centre and a necessary evil. Now, Digital Transformation is enabling more organisations to realise the potential that service has as a profit centre. Yet there is considerable variation in maturity across the sector globally. This exclusive white paper by IFS offers key insights into their research of Digital Transformation and how it is being implemented.

Overview:

Service: Leading the Way

Across many industries, manufacturing and products have become commoditised; service is now the differentiator. The winners in the service sector are those able to stand apart through their ability to support a product across its lifecycle, or support a client whose services they manage.

When set against other sectors, service organisations are leading the field in innovation and transformation. It is the only sector in which respondents did not select ‘internal process efficiencies’ as being the key driver for digital transformation. The positive customer experience they offer is expected to allow them to increase margins and increase their customer base. Digital Transformation sits fully behind that growth, as it enables companies to innovate their offering, automate workload and build a picture of a customer’s world based on the data they receive.

 

The top five factors behind digital transformation reflect this potential, with four of the five being sales, innovation and customer relationship-driven. Chief among these is ‘growth opportunities in new markets’. In reality, these growth opportunities are not new but have been expanding for some 20+ years. What is changing is recognition of these opportunities. Many organisations have been slow to recognise service as being a key driver to their overall business success.

A  New Hope:

The service industry is reaching a critical point with its ageing workforce. An enormous level of knowledge, possessed by the veterans and gurus of the industry, is walking out of the door as these workers reach retirement, or are no longer effectively supported by the business. This can have more of an impact in service than anywhere else, as the level and quality of service on offer can be directly impacted by the individual that performs the service.

In developing and recruiting talent, DT has a significant role to play. Intelligent knowledge management systems can enable a six-month recruit to perform those maintenance or repair services that would have previously been the [quote float="right"]Where firms operate a service within a service, such as an elevator in a hotel, it is in the interest of both the hotel operator and the elevator service organisation to create the optimum customer experience, because they share the same end consumer

domain of a 10+ year veteran. Technologies such as augmented reality (in the form of Google Glass or Microsoft HoloLens), can be usedto virtually project onto the physical equipment an animated disassembly procedure for swapping out a part onto the physical equipment.

 

The greatest talent gaps reported by service providers are in the areas of business intelligence (BI) and cybersecurity, with the former particularly keenly felt in North America.

Big data/analytics and BI are crucial in supporting a quantifiable business, and unlike many other industries, service is very easy to measure. Metrics such as first-time fix rate, mean time to repair, mean time between services, and service level agreements are commonplace. It is crucial when marketing a service that the provider is able to cite a percentage level of service and agree that level with customers in their SLA.

Joining Forces:

The need for collaboration is higher in the services sector than in any other, based on the IFS cross-industry research. At a sector-wide level, the delta between desired levels of collaboration and actual levels of collaboration is 2.7 points on a ten-point scale, meaning there is a desire to increase levels of collaboration by 49 per cent.

 

Where firms operate a service within a service, such as an elevator in a hotel, it is in the interest of both the hotel operator and the elevator service organisation to create the optimum customer experience, because they share the same end consumer

 

The demand for close collaboration is not surprising – firms such as Dell have a fully outsourced service provision for their field technicians, which means a considerable source of potential revenue is in the hands of trusted third parties.

 

Where firms operate a service within a service, such as an elevator in a hotel, it is in the interest of both the hotel operator and the elevator service organisation to create the optimum customer experience, because they share the same end consumer, who is jointly judging the product and judging the service.

Given the delta, many firms are clearly still not optimised in their digital transformation and will need to achieve a stronger bond between their partners and their internal teams to realise the full value of servitization.

 

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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!

If you are a field service professional you can apply for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription and we will send you a copy of this white paper along instantly.

(Please note that by applying for your subscription via this link you accept the terms and conditions here and a plain english version is available from our main subscriptions page here) 

 

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In September this year Field Service News and ClickSoftware teamed up to launch the FSN Think Tank Sessions. The idea was simple to bring together a selection of senior field service professionals from different industries and and different company sizes and give them the opportunity to discuss the pain points, the challenges and their vision of the future of service and see where the similarities lay.

Across the following few months there will be a series of articles that will help share the insights discussed at this inaugural Think Tank Session beginning with this opening series in which we discuss whether the importance of the Field Service Engineer's role is growing or diminishing in importance in a world of automation and digitisation... 

 

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There is also an exclusive Briefing Report from this session entitled Disruption, Development and Diversity in Field Service which is available for Field Service News subscribers.

If you are a field service professional you can apply for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription and we will send you a copy of this white paper along instantly. Click here to apply for your subscription now! (by applying for your subscription via this link you accept the terms and conditions here and a plain english version is available from our main subscriptions page here) 

 

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One of the most interesting things about the field service sector is that whilst as a discipline it sits across a huge variety of wide and highly disparate industries there remains overwhelmingly the same fundamental challenges, pain points and goals for every organisation operating a field service division.

 

Whether you operate in the print/copy market or heavy manufacturing, whether your engineers and technicians fix vending machines or jumbo jet engines, you will invariably find more common ground with other service leaders from different industries to your own than you will find differences.

In many ways the same is true whether you have 10 engineers in your territory or 10,000.

Yes, some of the challenges of running a larger field service operation are more complicated, as are some of the tools you may use to do so - but the fundamental elements of what is great service and its growing role within industry remains in organisations of all sizes.

Given the focus of companies across all industries on Digital Transformation has the importance of field service calls become even more important in terms of Customer Satisfaction and Customer Experience - as increasingly, the field service visit is now the sole (or at least most frequent) face-to-face interaction between an organisation and their customer base?

Has the role of the field service engineer become more important in this age of automation where digital customer interaction touch points are now heavily outweighing personal face to face human interactions?

Opening the conversation on this topic Steve Smith, CTO with Astro Communications, explained that for him and the team at Astro, the importance of great service and the field engineers role in delivering a good customer experience is something that has always just been part and parcel of the job.

“I’m not sure it’s more important, I think it is has always been important, especially if you’re in a customer service business,” he began.

“The only thing we have to compete against anybody else is our standard of customer service.”

“For us I think on that front it’s all about the diversity of people we employ which has been an important factor. We even taken people from a hospitality background and then teach them the technical side of the business, putting them through training or apprenticeship. We have also taken on ex-military people as they have the right mind-set, although again not necessarily a technical background per se, but we find that they have the personal organisational skills, the self-management skills that are important for a technician.”

It is an interesting opening point and one that is increasingly being echoed in a number of different service organisations. There are far more skills to being a good field service engineer than just the technical - and often it is easier to train the technical skills than it is to train softer skills such as communications and organisational skills.

“Ultimately, it really does stand out when you have good customer service,” Smith continues.

“For example, the MD of one of our own clients, TGI Fridays, always says that when you get great customer service, you feel it’ and that sums up our ethos as well. I think that for us, that approach has always been important, but perhaps with increasing competition more of a spotlight is being placed on service as a differentiator today.”

For Darren Thomas, Head of Service in Northern Europe for Waters Corporation, the growing levels of automation and remote maintenance driven by the fundamental economics of field service means that the importance of the field service engineer has indeed increased dramatically.

“It’s costs a lot to send an engineer to repair a broken system so we are investing a lot in what we are calling an ‘Expert Centre,” he explains.

The idea is one that many organisations have also adopted, a central destination where customers can discuss the issue at hand and go through some diagnostic tests with an expert which in an ideal world could help the customer get back up and running faster, whilst avoiding the need for an expensive truck roll for Waters. One nice element of the Waters’ approach is that many of their experts split their time between the expert centre and out in the field - so the field and repair skills of the expert centre staff are kept as high as possible.

However, whilst in theory it is a good solution that offers a potential win-win for customers dealing with simple issues, the flip side is in a situation where the resolution isn’t so straight forward, it can result in the customer having to perhaps feel like they are having to jump through a few hoops before they can get an engineer sent out to fix their problem.

 

“The negative feedback that we get from our customers when they contact the knowledge centre is that we ask them to carry out a lot of tests before we can dispatch an engineer and that can be frustrating when we are asking an experienced person have you done x,y and z?” Thomas explains.

“However, the point is that for our organisation it is the primary interaction that is important. So if a customer calls the Expert Centre then we can affect a good diagnostic or even a remote fix - so we are investing in tools to do that where possible. We are currently implementing a global initiative which we are calling ‘Knowledge Centre Support’, where we are pooling all of the first-time- fix reports - whether it be via an engineer in China , Europe or the USA.”

“Essentially, if one of our engineers comes across an issue that they haven’t faced before they are then tasked with writing up the resolution to that problem - which is then made available to all of our engineers and the Expert Centre, further helping us identify issues quickly.”

“We really are dedicating ourselves to that first-time-fix via remote support.” He adds.

At first glance, this may appear to be driving less importance to the field service engineer role, yet whilst it may potentially reduce the number of service calls Waters needs to make, the flip side of the same coin is that when an engineer is actually dispatched it means that all other routes have been exhausted. In which case by the time the engineer arrives on site the issue has become even more important in the eyes of the customer.

It is therefore vital the Field Service Engineer is able to deliver in this scenario.

This is something that Thomas firmly agrees with.

“At the end of the day once the engineer is sent out to our clients he or she then becomes the ambassador for our company. They become really  important in terms of ensuring the customer is fully satisfied,” he comments.

“I think their role is absolutely evolving in that sense.” He adds.

It is an interesting point for discussion and Keith Wilkinson, VP of Sales for ClickSoftware picks it up and carries the point further.

“We are all consumers of services whether it be from your bank, utilities providers , telco or media provider – we are all seeing this rise in automation and self-service, so you could look at it and ask – ultimately is that human touch point still important?”

“But what inevitably happens is that automation, that self-service aspect will ultimately go wrong at some point and when it does go wrong we then we have that one brief moment of truth where the engineer is sent out into the home or work place to not only just solve a problem, but also to make an impression on the customer.”

“The customer will likely have tried some levels of self-service or even to self-fix the device because they just want to get it back operational again so they can get on with their own job – so now the engineer has all their trust and faith in your company riding on their shoulders.”

“So that engineer, from a digitisation perspective, needs to have all the tools, all the knowledge and information possible at his disposal so he can be empowered - so he can become that brand ambassador. I think those scenarios it can make a huge impact on whether or not, when the time comes to renew that specific contract you actually do so or whether you think ‘I had an important issue that wasn’t really resolved effectively’ in which case your advocacy of renewing that service may be less assured.”

 

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Want to know more? There is also an exclusive Briefing Report from this session entitled Disruption, Development and Diversity in Field Service available for Field Service News subscribers. If you are a field service professional you can apply for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription and we will send you a copy of this white paper along instantly. Click here to apply for your subscription now!

 

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Alex Alexander, founder of Alexander Consulting discusses one of the most important yet challenging transitions field service companies must make...

Alexander: What does it take to transition from free to fee?
Research Respondent: Kevlar vests and iron underwear.

Transitioning from free to fee has a nice ring to it, but how in the world do you do it without alienating your customers, de-motivating your sales force, and creating havoc in your organisation? What is the correct strategy for your organisation to start getting paid for the services you have been giving away?

By reading this article you will learn that your task is more difficult compared to those who have little history providing services because you have trained your customers and your salespeople that services are free, and since they are free they can’t be worth much! You’ll discover the need to be prepared for the inevitable pushback to this change and what you must do to be ready to deal with it. You’ll learn the five strategies for making this transition from free to fee and which strategy is most viable in most situations.

NOTE: Many readers of Field Service News have already made this difficult but vital transition. If that describes you and you are short of time, move on. However, this is also a chance to help your field service colleagues learn from your experiences. If you have lessons learned or tips to ease the pain, please pass them on by commenting.

The Five Strategies in Transitioning from Free to Fee

Strategy One: Don’t Do It!

Just kidding. But when you realise all the potential grief you may get for leading this change, you may wish you hadn’t started. More seriously, unless you are willing to rigorously do the steps outlined a little later, you may want to wait.

Ponder Point: If it is worth doing, it takes effort—lots of effort.

If there is any question at all in moving from free to fee, I suggest that you do a quick readiness review that looks at your customer issues, competitive position, internal capabilities, and executive priorities. There is no sense attempting this transition unless there is enough rational reason and emotional impetus to justify this effort.

In leading workshops on building profitable services organisations over the last decade, one of the first exercises that I ask the executive participants to do is to complete a high-level, free-to-fee readiness review of their organisation. It is a simple but powerful task that can be executed in less than 30 minutes. As the name implies, the readiness review helps determine how ready an organisation is to make this transition. It helps executives determine the factors in place today that will either help or hinder the future goal of selling services. The focus is on the biggest, most important factors that will impact this transition.

Figure 1 provides an example of an executive’s readiness review from one of my workshops. On the positive side, there were several helping factors in place that ideally could be leveraged to make the transition from free to fee successful.

Having a large installed base meant lots of prospects for selling services. Customers who buy high-priced, complex products are more likely to spend money on services such as an insurance policy to improve uptime. Strong consultants and technical support personnel probably have a level of customer trust already established, hence if they recommend to customers that they buy services, the customer is likely to do so.

Depending upon the new sales management’s background and mindset, sales leadership may be open to selling the value of services. Finally, competitors selling services might serve as a lever to get senior management feeling the need to meet this potential challenge. Again, if the decision is made to move ahead with the free-to-fee strategy, the task is to leverage these helping factors to either eliminate or minimise the hindering factors.

 

On the hindering side, there were some significant factors to consider. The organisation in this example had been giving services away forever, and customers expected it. The organisation had a strong product culture, and as I’ve already emphasised, this is a big deal when trying to introduce change. Furthermore, sellers that don’t want to sell services, don’t know how to sell services, and have no negative consequences if they don’t sell services are strong deterrents to getting customers to pay for services.

In this case, the services executive learned that his task of transitioning from free to fee was a huge challenge, and after completing the readiness review, one that he doubted could be accomplished at all. After some consultation with me and his workshop peers, he decided that he needed to approach his boss with his assessment that the move from free to fee was not doable at this time. However, he was first going to get some fact-based information to back-up his thinking and make a stronger business case. This 30-minute readiness review may have saved him months of toil and frustration.

How realistic is making the move from free to fee in your organisation today?

GIST: If the possibilities of success are small, wait for things to change—they always do.

Strategy Two: Flip the Switch

Ponder Point: If it seems easy, it probably won’t work.

If you feel that free to fee can work in your organisation, first consider flipping the switch.

This strategy is based on picking a date in the future and letting everyone know that from that day forward, all services have fees attached to them. The positive side is that it is simple, it is fair from the standpoint of treating everyone the same, and if successful, it will quickly add a new revenue stream.

However, this is a difficult strategy to implement and manage. Within minutes of the announcement, the phones will start to ring as sellers call sales management, sales management calls your executives, and the execs call you (the services troublemaker, as you are beginning to be called), all saying the same thing: “Yes, we understand the need to charge for services, and as a rule I totally support it, but in this case, it is not a good idea, because ‘blah, blah, blah.’” The “blah, blah, blah” includes “we will lose a big pending sale because of our higher price,” “the competition gives it away, and this will give them a wedge inside the company,” or “the customer’s policy is not to pay for any services,” and similar-sounding reasons.

If you are initially able to fend off your people internally who are trying to twist your arm, the salespeople will collude and plot with customers, and soon the customers will start calling you, either pleading or threatening, or both. If you don’t meet their demands, they will call senior management and senior management will cave. Therefore, the rule of everyone paying for all services very quickly becomes the exception as more and more customers are waived from having to pay. You spend all your time in defensive mode, making it hard for you to get the real work done.

GIST: Just don’t do it. You will be hated, non-productive, and not much fun to be around.

Strategy Three: Grandfather Existing Customers

Ponder Point: You can fool some of the people some of the time, but not for long.

Under this strategy, all old customers are “grandfathered” and will continue to get services for free, however, all new customers are tagged to pay. The strength of this is that you don’t rock the boat with the installed base, and new customers don’t have a past history to compare what was and what is. Sold correctly, many new customers will pay, providing you with new revenue. The problem here, of course, is that customers talk, and new customers who find out about their second-class status will not be happy. They will see this approach as unfair and view themselves as victims. They will complain, and if they do it long enough and loud enough, they will probably get services for free as well. It will take a percentage of management time to deal with a problem that never goes away. Once again, you will be seen as “not a team player” and a “troublemaker.”

GIST: Don’t attempt this strategy either.

Strategy Four: Launch in New Markets

This strategy is a variation of Strategy Three, where all old customers are grandfathered in. However, if you are opening up new geographies or new market segments, this strategy can work, as customers in these spaces probably will be less likely to be in contact with your old customers. Plus, you can make the case with some credibility that their situation is different and justifies that you charge for services. This approach is more feasible than Strategy Two or Strategy Three, but it is still a challenge to manage.

Again, in most cases I do not recommend it, but it can work adequately in some situations.

Strategy Five: Productise the Old and Sell the New

Ponder Point: People will fight to keep what they have, so don’t try to take away something they feel they deserve.

The problem with the strategies outlined above is that they trigger a powerful, negative psychological response—no one likes to have things taken away from them or not be treated the same as others. Think of your reaction to small personal takeaways, such as when your bank starts charging you for checks that used to be free, or your airline makes you pay for blankets.

Hence, this is the strategy I recommend almost always: Productise the old and sell the new. The beauty of this is that it takes nothing away from your customers or your sellers.

In this scenario, all the services that have been given away continue to be given away, but in a cheaper, more manageable fashion. In addition, a new portfolio of value-adding services is developed, marketed, and sold. The other very positive psychology here is that it gives people an additional choice, and people like choices because it puts them more in control. The challenge is that this takes quite a bit of work in two areas:

 

1. Productise the old. Here the focus is to standardise the types of services that have been given away in the past to minimise the cost of these services and create a comparison that will make the new, fee-based, value-added services seem very desirable. For example, when hoping to land a deal, in the past, sales may have given away assessments that had no definition of time or quality. In other words, sales would have had a pre-sales specialist do the assessment or maybe they would even do the assessment themselves. It was based upon the availability of qualified people and the internal persuasion skills of the seller. Depending on the situation, it may have lasted anywhere from two days to five days at the customer’s site. The quality of the assessment was totally dependent on the person performing it. In this situation, the goal of delivering an assessment may have been accomplished, but it was probably done in a haphazard, non-standardised manner—one that was not repeatable and one of questionable quality.

So, the recommended shift is from an ill-defined, get-it-done-when-we-can, at-the-quality-level-of-whomever-we-can-get-to-do-it, on-average five-day assessment, to a one-day virtual assessment covering the 10 most important areas, delivered in a standardised, professional document, conducted by a qualified, trained professional. This new service and the other productised services (e.g., Quick Start installation for a software product, online core training for a product implementation) are developed by services and marketing but are categorised as a cost of sales and owned by the sales function.

2. Sell the new. Building a high-value portfolio of services offerings that customers want and will pay for and one you will make good money on takes considerable effort. Plus, correctly defining, packaging, and pricing these services may take skills not currently available in your organisation. However, if you want to successfully make the transition, find the time and the talent.

GIST: This is a lot of work and will take a few months of effort to accomplish. However, this approach is far superior to the other strategies, as it gives more to the customer and to sales without taking anything away.

 

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Author’s Note

Old pros: Please share your transitioning from free to fee lessons learned. Thank you.

Endnotes

This article was adapted from Seriously Selling Services: How to Build a Profitable Services Business in Any Industry, by James “Alex” Alexander, and can be purchased from Amazon.com or the Alexander Consulting website.

About the Author

James “Alex” Alexander is founder of Alexander Consulting, a management consultancy that helps product companies build brilliant service businesses. Contact him at 239-671-0740, alex@alexanderstrategists.com, or visit www.alexanderstrategists.com. Sign-up for Alex’s monthly newsletter, Alexander Insights, here.

 

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Claudine Mosseri, General Manager, ByBox explains how the use of technology and Big Data has allowed field service to lower emissions and reduce environmental impact...

Simply type the word emissions into Google news, and it’s clear that the issue of what’s coming out of our exhausts has never been so high on the agenda. Obviously, this has a tremendous impact on those who move items and parts around the country daily.

Recent news about the number of vehicle fleets looking at shifting the proportions of their alternative fuel vehicles is just the tip of this iceberg. However, the use of technology and big data has allowed field service to lower emissions and reduce the environmental impact of their, and others’, businesses, beyond simply looking at the fuel sources of their engines.

Operating in the sector that we do, of course we are all aware of the simple fact that moving goods from A to B creates emissions, and the vehicles used in large supply chains are often among the worst polluters. Heavy good vehicles and vans produce, on average 7% of the UK’s overall carbon emissions.

With that being said, the investment in technology and the better use of data has allowed us to find cost and resource effective ways to send replacements. The world is becoming ever more reliant on technological automation, especially given Gartner’s recent prediction that 8.7 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices will be installed by the end of this year. These connected devices and the data they produce are allowing business to pin point areas of improvement.

 

The industry’s environmental role goes well beyond head office commitments to carbon offsetting.

Our products, such as virtual warehouses, use data so that wherever your parts are, they can be accessed and moved to the right place. For example, in a busy field service supply chain, there will always be a significant amount of stock out in the field.

This might include good stock that an engineer has just picked up or it might also include returns which have just been taken off a customer site. This data tells you precisely what stock you have in the field and where it is. Clever stock systems, big data and tracking allow a logistics manager to raise an order, reroute and group together items, ultimately reducing congestion and reducing carbon emissions.

Away from cities, deliveries still require large vehicles, so to cut down on emissions, many are looking to instead limit their mileage. One approach involves investigating downtime data. For example, when replacing parts for a client, we spotted that typically, within a week of part A breaking and a replacement being issued, part B would also fail.

This allows us to be able to get our engineers to replace part A and part B simultaneously, which cuts down transport times, and ultimately reducing congestion due to fewer vehicles on the road.

 

ByBox has integrated technology and data to every part of its products, with Smart Boxes, our mobile applications, the use of our Thinventory™ platform and Stockonnect which has systematically allowed us to connect devices into our field services. With continuous changes like these occurring and influencing how we live our lives, there is a real demand on supply chains to ensure that when products or parts wear out or fail, they can be fixed or replaced quickly.

Of course, not all of these technological solutions will work for every business. Some face a lack of 24/7 access to their facilities, or have to factor in travel to remote locations. ByBox is lucky: point to point delivery is part of the DNA of the business, so we move the data, not the part.

However, by looking at the big picture and considering the influences of increasing automation on a number of different industries, it is clear that the field services sector has a bright and fascinating role to play in keeping businesses and devices running both effectively and environmentally.

 

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When Planned Lighting Maintenance (PLM) decided that its field service management system needed to be as smart as its lighting solutions, Tesseract came to light the way. Now Tesseract’s Service Centre 5.1 is brightening PLM’s days with super-fast scheduling and dispatch, instantaneous invoicing, and an end to coffee-stained job sheets.

A big change before a big birthday

Established in 1968, PLM is a family business that designs, installs and maintains lighting solutions for commercial premises and leading UK retailers. This year, finding itself approaching the big 50 in an increasingly service-oriented economy, PLM realised it was time for a change. Specifically, an overhaul of its long-winded, labour-intensive service management system.

The software PLM had before Tesseract was very limited in what it could do. Over the years PLM built an intranet to try and fill in the gaps, but there was no automation and everything took a lot of time.

Tracey Hughes, Business Support Services Director for PLM, says, “Our intranet reduced some of the data entry, but increased the checks we had to do. And it was slow, manual processes every step of the way. Dispatchers had to select an appropriate engineer for a job by remembering who was doing what, and which engineers were allocated to which postcode. Engineers would have to phone the office to let us know what stock they’d used, and to request more. And the whole system was heavily reliant on paper — handwritten job sheets from engineers that were sometimes unreadable or covered in coffee stains!”

 

These manual processes became increasingly onerous as PLM tried to keep up with the demands of the modern customer and stay profitable. It was losing revenue because of paperwork-related delays, and had to employ more people each time it took on a new contract. The trigger was losing confidence in its financial reporting. PLM’s admin teams would be gathering information from two, three or four different places — normally a slew of human error-prone Excel spreadsheets — and would have to decide which source was accurate. They eventually lost faith in what the data was telling them.

PLM decided it needed something with more automation, more accuracy and more efficiency — and far less reliance on paper.

The search for a new solution

To investigate options, PLM’s IT manager went to the annual Field Service Management Expo in London and met with five different software providers. These five were whittled down to three, one of which was Tesseract. PLM received a series of presentations about Service Centre 5.1 from Tesseract’s, which were attended by a team of eight from PLM, including several of its engineers.

Hughes explains, “We really liked Kevin. His presentations were simple and easy to follow and we were impressed by how quickly he understood our business.

We then met with one of Tesseract’s clients, Artic Building Services. We were completely bowled over by how well they were doing and how much they’d grown thanks to Tesseract. They were very, very enthusiastic and literally all of their issues and problems prior to implementation were gone. We felt like they were exactly the same as us, but five years on.”

Convinced, PLM took a phased approach to implementing the full suite of software that Tesseract offers, including Call Control, Customer Assets, Parts Centre, Invoice Centre, and Remote Engineer Access (REA).

More control, more visibility, more time to spare

Tesseract’s service management software has provided PLM with an end-to-end workflow that is automated, integrated and optimised. As soon as a call is logged, the system sources the contact information for that customer and tells you what you can and can’t do. Then the information is transmitted automatically to the phone of the engineer who is closest to the customer’s site.

With REA, engineers can log in remotely using their smartphones, input service reports directly onto the system, and obtain electronic sign-off from customers in order to close down jobs. Use and replenishment of stock is also managed directly through the Tesseract system.

 

Hughes explains, “With Tesseract, there’s far less admin and data entry and we’ve managed to reduce the number of staff doing admin from seven to four. We have much better visibility of our engineers and their workloads, and can see what’s been completed and billed and what hasn’t without having to make a ton of phone calls. This lets us answer customer queries faster and easier because we’re able to see exactly what stage a job is at.”

Hughes adds, “We also have much faster turnaround on our invoicing. On the old system, it could take up to ten days because we had to wait for paperwork to come in from our engineers. Now that all the information we need is right there on the system, same-day invoicing is the new normal.”

 

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As part of his ongoing research what makes successful companies tick, Jan van Veen, co-founder of moreMomentum, has begun a series of interviews with proven managers across the globe who are successfully implementing the 4 Winning Habits to lead innovative, energised and engaged teams.

This time around he talks to Ashley Weller, UK Service Director, Mars Drinks...

Mars Drinks is one of the world’s biggest and most successful vending machine companies and a part of Mars Incorporated. It operates globally, supplying and maintaining machines in workplaces such as offices and manufacturing sites in North America, Europe and a growing business in China and Japan. Although the sector is in decline in the UK, Mars Drinks is beating the market trends by knowing their customers and playing to their strengths, and has now been keeping us all going with our favourite hot drinks for 45 years.

Ashley Weller took over as UK Service Director in 2015, with 20 years experience in the service industry, a degree in History of Art and a passionate but empathetic leadership style.

He came in as the business was starting to see intense competition from coffee shop chains embedded in offices as well as on the high street. Ashley took the visionary decision to challenge his people to elevate their role, transforming themselves into Brand Ambassadors and adding even more value to great customer relationships.

Now, the staff are energised, their customer satisfaction is way up and the company is supplying a much wider range of products than ever before.

The challenges facing Mars Drinks UK Customer Service

Apart from the general food industry trend to coffee shops, the UK Service Department also had its own challenges for Ashley.

After many years, the service engineers had become somewhat disengaged with the role they were playing within the company, and although they were highly engaged with their regular clients and maintained great relationships there, their role was solely to fix broken machines.

Furthermore, the company had been focusing its investment on sales and marketing, leaving the service department, with its good customer feedback, to continue operating with minimal investment. There was a feeling that that their impact wasn’t as valued as other departments and that the great work they’d been doing wasn’t getting the recognition it should.

The Strategy

Ashley wanted to bring the Service division back into the fold of the company and use the engineers’ knowledge and excellent client relationships as a USP to build more business. To do this, in a 3-year plan, he created a supportive, safe environment free from blame that enabled the engineers to be the drivers of that change, supporting them all the way along their journey to become Brand Ambassadors.

The service leadership team would be vital to the process, being the first to experience the new environment, supporting it from day one and learning first-hand how the new dialogue would work, so they could pass on their experiences to the teams.

 

Here we will show how Mars Drinks demonstrated each of the 4 Winning Habits in the implementation of its plan, creating Momentum for long-term sustainable success in its UK Service division. The strategy shows that Momentum can start anywhere when the 4 Winning Habits are employed. They soon spread to other departments when they see the positive impact.

 
 

Direction – the common cause that everyone can get behind

The main aim was to build the engineers up to be brand ambassadors, strengthening their strong client relationships even more but in a way that added value. Up to that point, the engineers were the customers’ white knights, fixing problems but not always recognised for the full value they could bring to the company.

The engineers feared they were being asked to sell and that this might harm their existing, genuine relationships, but in fact found customers love it when they talk to them and tell them about new products, and also then provide more feedback. It’s a win/win when the customer feels valued and provides information that improves the business.

Weller explains: “At the kick off conference, named ‘Stepping Out of the Shadows’, we created a platform of 3-S’s for our future vision: Service, Strengthen and Stimulate. They were built upon leveraging our service strengths by improving and standardising our operating practices, learning from the best in class to strengthen all aspects of our customer relationships, and then using these relationships built on trust and performance to then stimulate the conversation to create the ‘wow’ for our customers by being able to help them gain more from Mars Drinks.”

 

Now, it’s very important that new joiners are brought into the service culture so it can continue. The level of success achieved can only be maintained by ensuring new people can work in this type of environment so the onboarding process is very thorough.

Dialogue – open discussion at and between all levels to encourage new ideas

The team began by recognising they had to remove the fear of failure for suggesting or trying ideas and then include the engineers in the solution planning process. The message was “You want to be part of business and the business wants you”. It takes years to earn this level of trust however.

Ashley started by playing a video which the engineers had made about their work at a company conference. Suddenly, the engineers were given a stage – people around the company started talking about service and the engineers felt pride that the business was noticing them and their contribution.

The next step was to ask them their opinions. Throughout the 3-year plan, it was anticipated that there would be mistakes and course corrections needed, so the engineers were encouraged to say what was working and what wasn’t. The senior management team also bought in to the process and gave their support.

The engineers had great relationships with their clients, but how could they add more value to the customer and the company? This led to a long series of suggestions, one of which resulted in the creation of an iPad app to enable easier maintenance. The feedback was “You’ve given me IT that I can use!” while also enabling them to provide better service.

 

Of course, there were early adopters and laggards. With support and attention from the company comes accountability, meaning some couldn’t hide any more. Strong people managers helped staff on that journey and some became exemplars for the new role. The proof is in the practice: “people need to see it delivered to understand that this is now the norm.”

Personal objectives are an effective way to include people, and in Mars Drinks they waterfall down from higher company goals, helping people to see why they matter. People aren’t only measured on targets, but also on trying new ideas, adding value and learning from other colleagues or learning from failure. Of course, this also means you can’t give bad reviews if an experiment fails.

Decision-making – local decision-making empowerment

Engineers saw things on a day to day basis that they wanted to improve and many, it turns out, had already started working on small improvement projects in their own time. These hadn’t been shared due to a fear of failure. Once more trust had been established, implementing some of these ideas across the UK saved thousands of pounds and many hundreds of working hours. Now, the engineers are keen to make more suggestions and so far, 30% have been implemented.

Another approach was to get the engineers to compare working methods between teams and analyse the differences. As a result, standardising some processes has led to improved machine reliability. They also moved from 30 to 90-day reliability targets and started seeing new trends in the data about certain parts that then enabled new processes and product improvements.

The company is supporting the engineers in their new role, including training them to spot opportunities for new machines on site. Customers are more likely to engage with them as they have a high level of trust, and the conversion rates for leads originating this way is higher than from the sales team.

Discovery – Looking for new external trends, opportunities and threats

Everyone in the Service Department is now keenly involved in looking for new innovation opportunities that will benefit customers, but more than that, they are open to new ideas and ways of working, because very often they have been suggested by one of their own.

Weller comments; “If we kept the customer at the very heart of what we were trying to achieve, the person the engineers wanted to serve the best, then we’d always have a central pivot point to navigate by. That’s been critical”

Business Outcomes

As a result of the team’s work over several years, the new processes are now a living, breathing animal and are running smoothly under the control of the regional managers. The new brand ambassadors are a true USP for the company and are loved by their customers. The engineers are proud that they’ve achieved all this – it’s what their customers wanted.

The new culture has translated into more machine orders and wider ranges of drinks being supplied that customers want to consume. Comparing 2016 to 2017, there’s been a 33% increase in new products added to machines and a 150% increase in leads for new machines compared to inbound or outbound sales, with higher conversion rates too.

 

Next Steps

Next, there is going to be a stronger focus on building discovery capabilities to enable the service team to connect more with customers and back with the business, putting them in control of demand, not the other way around.

Learning from other industries, technology such as Internet of Things and cashless payments generate rich streams of data to provide much deeper understanding and help predict requirements. The engineers will be highly involved too, being given the ability, for instance, to offer contract renewals on site within their trusted relationship.

The future is looking bright for the Mars Drinks Service team.

 

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Digital Twins have a big role to play in field service management and will be essential for creating business intelligence writes Mark Homer at ServiceMax, a GE Digital Company

We often hear the phrase, ‘you cannot account for human error’ but that seems illogical in today’s connected world. We have the technology to not just account for human error but to eradicate it.

The Internet of Things with the proliferation of affordable and reliable sensors is changing the way in which we can view, manage, service and support technology, processes and any physical object. By mirroring a process, product or service into a virtual world, we can create environments in which machines can automatically analyse performance, warn of impending issues, identify existing or potential errors and even suggest part upgrades or changes to procedures to make them more efficient.

This is the digital twin idea. As a concept, it’s been around for a while (NASA used it on early space missions) but the emergence of IoT has made it a commercial reality. Digital twin eliminates guesswork from determining the best course of action to service critical physical assets, from engines to power turbines.

 

Easy access to this combination of deep knowledge and intelligence about your assets paves the road to wider optimisation and business transformation.

Digital twin technology spans across all industries where the value is in assets and more generally complex systems. Its ability to deliver early warnings, predictions, and optimisation is fairly universal. In time, I think we’ll see the concept of a digital twin to be applied to human beings as well, playing a significant role in healthcare.

However just mirroring is not enough. If the aim is to achieve zero downtime or at the very least, overall insight into on-going product and process performance, the digital twin has to be analysed and that analysis has to feed other functions.

What the digital twin produces, when bundling data with intelligence, is a view of each asset’s history and its potential future performance.

This continuum of information leads to early warnings, predictions, ideas for optimisation, and most importantly a plan of action to keep assets in service longer will, sending commands to machines in response to those forecasts.

In other words, if you close the loop, with data and predictions, you can act directly on the asset itself. That’s where Asset Performance Management and Field Service Management are changing the way service operations run.

 

By combining APM with FSM tools, the digital twin idea is transformed into an intelligent agent. Businesses have, for the first time, a complete suite of intelligence at their fingertips, to understand potential equipment issues, and pre-empt them or act upon them quickly and efficiently with the correct tools and parts, should machinery need fixing.

This means field service is managed more efficiently, reducing costs and ensuring minimum downtime as engineers attend jobs with a full understanding of the problem, the right parts to hand and a complete knowledge of how to fix it.

This is the shift from an often blind and reactive approach to fixing broken products and services to a predictive model that should eliminate waste, reduce costs, downtime and importantly human error.

The digital twin idea has additional benefits too, as it can use historical data and current data to provide a complete picture of a particular asset, its past performance, what it should be achieving now and its likely end of life date, when it would be predicted to be less efficient.

 

This sort of knowledge is gold dust for product designers and manufacturers as it can feed back accurately, which parts work well and where machines would need improving or upgrading.

Combined with the knowledge of field service professionals this makes for a powerful tool for upselling products and services to customers. Any new ideas or enhancements can be fully supported with data analysis and perhaps even simulations to illustrate how new parts and functions would improve performance.

It offers justification and also accountability and should cut through irrelevant or unsuitable product or service ideas.

It’s transforming service at the edge by bringing together all the facets that make businesses and machines tick - and goes a long way to creating a world of zero unplanned downtime.

 

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Paul Whitelam at ClickSoftware, explains why the future if field service will be heavily based on the Internet of Things.

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Want to know more? A white paper from ClickSoftware on this topic 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!

Field Service Professional? Click here to apply for a complimentary industry subscription to Field Service News and get the white paper "Preparing for the Connected Customer" sent directly to your inbox now

 

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We take a look at how UK window and doors specialist SafeStyle UK improved their field service efficiency by turning to FSM provider Exel Computer Systems 

Business imperative

With 13 installation and 36 sales branches around the UK, and a 600-employee factory manufacturing over 6,000 doors and windows each week, Bradford-headquartered Safestyle is one of the country’s leading businesses in the replacement door and window market.

But by late 2013, the company recognised that it needed to update its aftersales customer service capabilities, which had become spread over three distinct systems, giving rise to inefficiencies and data duplication.

Challenge

The core system was a decade-old customer care system, directly fed from Safestyle’s ERP system, which handled maintenance work associated with the ten-year guarantee that Safestyle offers its customers.

In addition, any aftersales maintenance necessitated by customer complaints was handled by a second system. This did not benefit from a data feed from the ERP system, and so required manual data entry.

Finally, a specialist scheduling system handled service engineer scheduling and routing, creating the service engineers’ daily work programmes and vehicle routings.

While each system worked acceptably well when viewed in isolation, a very different picture emerged when they were viewed as a whole.

 

Service engineer visibility required enhancements to go to the next level, management reporting was limited, and opportunities for better scheduling were being missed.

In addition, adds Nick Stokes, Safestyle’s IT Change Manager, the whole process was overly reliant on paper, using printed work schedules against which service engineers would report progress by telephone, requiring headquarters staff to manually update the relevant system.

Clearly, schedules provided on tablet computers, and directly updated by the service engineers themselves, would be far more efficient, as well as providing real-time progress visibility.

Finally, adds Nick, the core legacy system was becoming both difficult and expensive to maintain.

“As a business, we’re passionate about customer service, and so retiring these various systems and replacing them with something that was both newer and better would be an obvious step forward,” he recalls.

The only question: replacing them with what, exactly?

Why Eagle Field Service? 

Consequently, in early 2014, Safestyle began surveying the marketplace for field service management systems, and subsequently invited a number of suppliers to submit quotations for supplying a replacement system.

The clear winner: Exel Computer Systems’ Eagle Field Service solution.

“From a functional and ease-of-use perspective, it offered all the functionality that we were looking for,” recalls Nick, “in addition, although this hadn’t been a formal requirement, we could see that we might, in future, want to be able to use elements of Exel’s EFACS E/8 ERP system. So for a variety of reasons, going with Exel and Eagle Field Service made good sense.”

This is due to the fact that Eagle Field Service is an element of the EFACS E/8 ERP solution, utilising the functionality and modules required, such as Document Management and Workflow.

Should a client require the manufacturing functionality, licences are bought, the modules implemented and the staff trained.

Implementation

Implementation began in early 2015, with a goal of commencing a phased rollout by the third quarter of the year.

Implementation was straightforward, recalls Nick, noting that as Eagle Field Service’s intuitive interface and ease-of-use is driven by a rules-based engine, time had to be devoted to creating the required rules. In addition, he points out, the move away from paper schedules to tablet computers called for careful testing, the provision of user training and thorough User Acceptance Testing.

 

“Customer service is important to us,” he stresses, “it was better to be right, than rushed.”

But with testing and training complete, rollout began as planned, and was completed within a few weeks.

Business benefits

The move to Eagle Field Service, relates Nick, has delivered a number of very distinct benefits. The user experience—both for headquarters staff, and service engineers—is far more intuitive, and enables people to work more efficiently.

“There’s no need to tab between different systems,” he explains, “all the information that people want is in one place.”

What’s more, in the case of Safestyle’s service engineers, that ‘one place’ is a simple and easy-to-use tablet interface—an interface that also provides real-time updates back to Safestyle’s headquarters, as jobs are completed.

Moreover, adds Nick, the scheduling of service engineers isn’t just easier than before, it’s also more powerful, resulting in a more efficient routing of engineer visits, and better optimisation of engineers’ time.

 

Roll it all together, and the combined effect of a reduction in paperwork, the elimination of duplication and data entry, and better engineer scheduling, has enabled a significant improvement in engineer utilisation, notes Nick.

Finally, the move to Eagle Field Service has delivered better reporting—reporting not just of metrics such as customer service levels and engineer efficiencies, but also the detailed reporting of faults and maintenance issues.

“By providing data on the underlying reasons for service calls, Eagle Field Service has given us an enhanced ability to perform root cause analysis, giving us much better visibility into particular parts that are subject to early failure, so that we can address this during design and manufacture.” concludes Nick.

“This has always been an objective—and now we have achieved it.”

 

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