ARCHIVE FOR THE ‘features’ CATEGORY

As we continue our exclusive serialisation of Jim Baston’s excellent service industry focussed book Beyond Great Service, our protagonist Charlie has begun to edge closer to an epiphany in his quest to establish a perfect balance between service and sales...

If you're new to this series then you can catch up on the story so far by clicking here

Last time Charlie and Ken had uncovered the four hurdles that could sabotage their efforts of engaging their technicians in making proactive recommendations and thereby identified the factors critical to their success.

We join Charlie as he works to put his plan together to implement the strategy.

That evening after dinner, Charlie retrieved his journal and sat down in the study. It was a busy day and Charlie had very little time to reflect on the discussions he’d been having with Ken, although they never quite left his mind. Thoughts kept popping back into his head at odd times throughout the day.

Had they really found the answer to generating more sales revenue through their field service technicians AND improving the level of customer service?

Could management really expect to enhance the customer’s experience by being more proactive in approaching the customer via the techs to do more business with them?

Could they truly differentiate the business through this strategy?

 

It almost seemed too simplistic. After all, managers with a lot more experience in technical services than Charlie have considered this opportunity to engage the technicians.

If it was such a good approach, why weren’t more companies successfully applying this strategy?

Looking at the four hurdles on the page in the journal, Charlie began to feel more confident that he was on the right track. Perhaps the reason many companies were not successfully differentiating their business through this proactive model was because they had not addressed all four of the hurdles.

Maybe they simply sent their techs on training courses on how to sell.

Maybe they did not have the systems and processes in place to support the increase in business opportunities brought in from the field. Perhaps they did not reinforce the training or the strategy on a regular basis. Whatever the explanation, Charlie began to realise that if Novus was going to be successful, they would have a lot of work to do.

Charlie knew they needed an implementation plan if they were going to make this work. He jotted down a few steps that he felt would be important to get the strategy right.

He intended to share these with Ken, fine-tune them as necessary and then create a schedule to put them into action. Charlie wrote:

1. Draft a plan to address the four hurdles.
2. Reduce the strategy to a short summary that could be shared with the technicians and customers.
3. Sound out the technicians to get their perspective and suggestions.
4. Identify some customers to visit to discuss the plan to help hone the approach and the unique service proposition.
5. Fine-tune the plan and put it into action.[/ordered_list]

Charlie then drew a chart on a blank page in the journal:

There were three columns and five rows. Across the top row, Charlie wrote Hurdle, Comments and Preliminary Action Plan. In each of the remaining four rows he put the four hurdles. When he finished a couple of hours later, the chart looked like the one laid out on the previous page.

Charlie looked at the table he had created and smiled. He knew that the hard part had just begun, but he felt good. He had the basic strategy in place, one that he felt would engage the techs and also be valued by Novus’ customers. The next step would be to review this with Ken and reduce the strategy to a simple statement. That would have to wait until another day.

Thinking about your business:

• Do you have a clear and concise plan to implement your proactive business approach with your technicians?
• Have you discussed the matter with your customers to get their input?
• What steps have you taken to fully engage your service team in the process?
• Next time we will touch base with Charlie as he explains the plan to the technicians.

 

---

 

Be social and share

Michael Blumberg, President, Blumberg Advisory Group, reflects on the seven most crucial considerations for service managers tasked with driving additional revenue in today’s market...

Revenue growth is probably the single most important objective for executives who are responsible for managing their company’s field service organisation (FSO) as a profit center or strategic line of business. “I want to double my service revenue in the next 3-5 years” is an incantation that I hear constantly from business owners and executives.

That equates to a 20% or more growth rate per year.

Sure, this type of growth is easily achievable if the market is growing at this rate or faster. I’ve found that these high growth targets are often triggered by management’s desire to take back market share from competitors or increase the share of service revenue contribution to overall corporate revenue.

While high revenue growth in a mature or declining market is difficult, it’s not impossible. A little work is usually required to achieve this type of performance.

To understand where the emphasis is needed, let’s look at where service market programs may fall short:

#1 - Service Portfolio not meeting customer needs:

Quite often service providers fail to meet their revenue objectives because their service portfolio is no longer meeting customer requirements. In other words, they have failed to offer services tailored to their customer needs. For example, offering only next day response when customers require same day.

#2 - Pricing not optimal:

If service revenue is flat or declining, a service provider might want to look at their pricing strategy and tactics. Perhaps their service prices are no longer competitive.

On the other hand, they may be underpricing their services in relation to the value they provide.

#3 - Failure to understand competitive threats:

Many service providers, particularly those that are divisions of manufacturers, fail to understand the competitive threat of third party maintenance (TPM) companies and/or in-house service providers.

For example, they often under estimate the value that TPMs provide to their customer and/or fail to develop an effective value proposition to compete against them.

#4 - Failure to articulate value:

The single biggest reasons why customer don’t purchase service agreements is because they don’t understand their value. An FSO must ensure they have clearly articulated the value of their service offering to current and prospective customers.

Do customers the cost of downtime or the pain points that their services help solve?

It is important that FSOs not only articulate value to their customers but also make sure that their sales people understand it and sales people are provided with the appropriate sale aides and marketing collateral to support it.

#5 - Lack of communication & follow-up:

One way to increase service revenue is by improving contract renewal rates.

These rates often decline though lack of consistent communication and persistent follow-up about the value of services provided, when contracts are up for renewal, special incentives for renewing, and information on when they are about to expire.

Customers are likely to forget about their experiences even if they are positive ones after 30 days. That’s why it is important to follow-up once a month.

#6 - Not asking for referrals or testimonials:

A recent study by HubSpot, a marketing automation software provider, found that 85% of companies who achieve year over year revenue growth do so because they ask for and receive referrals from their customers. Referrals are the best and least expensive source of generating new business.

The problem is most FSOs forget to ask for them. Remember customers speak to each other. They may be involved in the same networks and trade associations, or call on each other for advice and guidance. Why not enlist them in your business development efforts, even if it is to influence their peers in other companies who already know about the services you offer.

#7 - Lack of customer appreciation:

Your customers will remain loyal to you and purchase more from you when you let them know how much you value and appreciate them.

It’s the simple things like a courtesy phone call/visit, thank you card, small gift (i.e., rewards program), or exclusive offer that let them know you value their business. These seven focus areas have one thing in common, they all benefit from market research.

Whether its information that will help redesign a service portfolio or modify pricing, market research provides an unbiased and unfiltered perspective on what customers are thinking and doing. More importantly, market research, when designed effectively will uncover valuable market intelligence that may not have otherwise been captured from a sale’s call or courtesy call made by a company executive.

By implementing all seven approaches to revenue growth, as outlined above, on a highly disciplined and consistent manner, an FSO can expect to achieve a 30% to 120% increase in sales in just one year alone.

 

---

 

Be social and share

Disruption has become a phrase so widely used it is in danger of becoming hackneyed, but in terms of asset maintenance, the IoT is bringing true, genuine disruption writes Servicemax’s Dave Hart...

If you had to pick a moniker for this decade, then “disruption” is a pretty good one. It’s now so pervasive that it’s almost become a cliché of itself.

Everywhere you look, from banking to music to taxis and hotels, traditional business models and markets are being disrupted. All driven by technology being applied in innovative new ways. Now it seems it’s the turn of capital equipment assets and the machines themselves to be disrupted – or at least the way we manage, use and maintain them.

Industrial downtime is no joke. Unplanned downtime in just about every industry has a significant impact. The Aberdeen Group last year reported that the cost of downtime across industries went up to $260,000 per hour on average between 2014 and 2016. That’s a huge jump with a considerable hit on any business.

Time typically isn’t kind to equipment and machines.

As assets get older, parts need maintaining or replacing and more can go wrong. And when it does go wrong, service technicians are typically sent out on site with very little insight other than something isn’t working. On top of that, most companies don’t know how best to optimise uptime availability in different conditions, such as managing volatility, meeting peak demand or managing performance in extreme conditions. It’s an area of business that’s historically been very inefficient, and had very little intelligence or investment applied to it.

 

As a tech-enabled society, we are better than that. And it was only a matter of time before the wave of technology innovation and disruption made its way to changing how we optimise equipment and capital assets, and predict their maintenance and service requirements. By harvesting and applying intelligence that previously would have been impossible to obtain, companies are seeing a major step change this area.

And it’s more than just a ‘nice to have’ scenario. For most industries, margins are too thin and competition is too fierce to simply guesstimate how much capacity a piece of equipment can cope with, and it seems positively archaic to run a reactive break/fix service mentality in today’s connected age.

The reality is that the Industrial Internet offers an opportunity to intelligently manage resources and manage performance. Machines with sensors feeding back performance data provide a raw pipe of potential intelligence that needs to be woven into the business. With the right tools, organisations can use this data to develop strategies that alleviate risk.

Asset-intensive companies always strive to reduce operating risk while improving efficiency, at the same as coping with regulatory demands and workforce development.

These are key challenges that are difficult to achieve without an intelligent asset performance management (APM) approach. The more forward thinking companies also have field service management (FSM) strategies in place in an effort to streamline and automate their service departments. They are wise investments as both APM and FSM each deliver significant value in their own right.

But here’s the real disruptor: By combing these two disciplines, 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 for example.

No second guessing, no wasted investigative journeys and much lower risk of downtime.

Now take this one step further and think of a digital twin that mirrors of all your physical assets globally, giving you a dashboard that reports back to you on the status, health and performance of how each piece of equipment in each location is working. One that proactively alerts you, through intelligent APM, when action is required, and automatically takes preventative measures, through FSM, when an issue arises. Suddenly downtime looks much less of a threat.

That’s because predictive analytics and work management through APM enable businesses to plan, schedule, execute and feedback on problems and solutions. Which equipment is failing or about to fail and why? What parts are needed to fix the problem, where and by whom? And FSM then automatically triggers scheduling, ordering and dispatch of a service technician if required, to ensure everything is up and running and downtime is minimised.

 

It’s interesting that service businesses represent around seventy per cent of the world’s economy, yet to date, only about a third of the world’s large service businesses use just FSM solutions. They are missing a trick.

A combined APM and FSM approach optimises the equipment strategy for a company, analyses the risk and cost of how often equipment should be inspected, saving money, increasing productivity and reducing risk of downtime.

So what does all this mean in real terms? By proactively optimising and managing equipment assets, business can expect, on average, a 10 percent inventory cost reduction, 40 percent reduction in reactive maintenance, 25 percent gain in employee productivity and a 25 percent reduction in total cost of ownership.

Likewise, field service management can generate an average 13 percent boost in revenues and an 11 percent increase in customer satisfaction.

Why wouldn’t you want to join the dots on metrics like those? Throw in the potential savings from reduced transport and failure rates, less downtime, plus the sustainability benefits, and you have a recipe for future growth.

Now that is compelling, not to mention disruptive.

 

---

 

Be social and share

Resource Type: White Paper
Published by:  Field Service News (sponsored by Tesseract)
Title: Five fundamental elements to expect in a FSM system

---

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!

Click here to apply for your subscription now and we’ll send you this white paper to your inbox now instantly as a thank you for your time!

---

 

Synopsis:

Field Service Management technology has become essential to service delivery excellence. Service excellence is no longer a USP but a baseline requirement.

However, whilst technologies such as IoT and Augmented Reality are grabbing the headlines their potential is greatly diminished unless you have a fundamental layer of technology in place already.

This white paper explores what to expect from a FSM system and offers best-practice tips to help you get the most from your investment..

Overview

The white paper explores the following five key elements of a Field Service Management (FSM) System explaining the importance and offering best practice advice of how to get the most from your own system...

1. Contract Manager:

Contract management is often viewed as the starting point of almost everything within field service management operations. Without a view of your service contracts you cannot have to hand the answers for critical questions such as:

• What is the SLA on any given contract?
• Is a client under warranty or do they have an enhanced level of service contract?
• Does a contract include spare parts and/or consumables?
• Is the service contract due for renewal?[/unordered_list]

You could be at risk of potentially not meeting your clients expectations and so putting the potential of renewing or upselling service to that client in danger in the future – or on the other side of the coin, you could be giving valuable service away for free.

Therefore, Contract Management is perhaps the most important of the fundamental building blocks that you should expect to find within a modern field service management solution and perhaps the first area that you should make sure your team is fully versed in utilising.

2. Scheduling:

Scheduling comes in a number of different guises and the various different names given to types of scheduling options can be a somewhat confusing but broadly scheduling will come in three flavours:

• Assisted
• Optimised
• Dynamic

It is often assumed that a dynamic solution is required for a larger mobile workforce, but whilst the size of your workforce is certainly one consideration in which type of scheduling engine would best suit your service operation - this is not the only factor.

The complexity of the service work, as well as the variety of service jobs you undertake is another significant factor. For example an organisation that has a field workforce that services multiple different asset types – perhaps from multiple OEMs, and therefore has a number of different engineer requirements for differing jobs - would likely benefit far more from an optimised scheduling engine than an organisation that just fixes one or two types of assets for which all of their engineers are qualified to undertake repairs and maintenance.

3. Mobile tools and communications::

It is fair to say that the biggest revolution in field service has come from the rapid explosion in mobile computing power. Today’s smartphones are capable of greater computing tasks than even the laptops of just a few years back. For the field service organisation this is fantastic as it puts information at the field service engineers finger tips, empowers them to spend more time on maintenance and repair and less on activities such as paper work and enables them to deliver a far more effective and impressive service experience for the customer. Also, with the advent of smart phones, and then latterly tablets, has come greater communications tools than we could have ever expected ten years ago.

For example, engineer to engineer communications are seamless in today’s world, whether it be using dedicated built-for-purpose business tools or even free to use consumer solutions such as WhatsApp or Skype. From a FSM solution standpoint again whilst a mobile app was a USP, an add on or even a separate solution entirely just a few short years ago, now almost all FSM solutions will come with some mobile offering included.

 

However, whilst the mobile element in FSM technology is constantly evolving, essentially the most fundamental and core aspect that you want a mobile aspect of a FSM solution to do is to mirror your back-end solution and to do so in real-time.

4. Parts & Inventory Management::

Parts and Inventory management is perhaps an area that in the past has not received the focus and attention that it requires. It has often been the mantra of field service organisations that they are aiming to the get the right engineer to the right job, at the right time.

But that all becomes moot if the right engineer doesn’t have the right parts to hand as well. Consistently at industry conferences parts management remains a hot button and a common pain point for a huge amount of organisations. So whilst it is exciting to talk about emerging technologies such as IoT and Augmented Reality - a primary focus should be on ensuring our field service operation is as efficient as possible at a fundamental level, and that means getting a grip on parts management.

And whilst of course there are supply chain and logistics aspects to the conversation which can make things complicated – especially when you are using third party contractors – one of the most crucial aspects of good parts and inventory management is utilising a system that can keep track of where your inventory, including van inventory, is at any given point.

5. Integration:

We are living in a world of data lakes, data rivers, data mountains and all other types of data topography it seems! But all these vast swathes of data are meaningless unless you are able to draw insight from it, and quite often that means being able to let the data flow seamlessly from one set of business applications to another.

 

Of course, our vision of the future is that everything will be plug and play and all technologies will play well together nicely, but we aren’t quite there yet.

 

This is why integration is absolutely key in any modern business system – including FSM. Of course, our vision of the future is that everything will be plug and play and all technologies will play well together nicely, but we aren’t quite there yet.

 

Integration varies from provider to provider but often it is led by the integrations they have been asked to undertake, so if your current provider or a provider you have identified as being a good fit for your business don’t advertise integration with a specific system you are using – it is worth discussing the possibilities with them - especially if it is a common platform as making their product integrate may be useful for other future clients also.

 

---

 

This White Paper offers further details on each of the above elements and how to get the most from them.

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!

Click here to apply for your subscription now and we’ll send you this white paper to your inbox now instantly as a thank you for your time!

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature

Kris Oldland talks to Felix Keiderling, General Manager responsible for Global Service Business Development and Product Management of ABB Turbocharging shortly after his presentation at the Spring Servitization Conference in Lucerne, to find out more about how ABB are approaching the introduction of an outcome based service offering for the merchant marine sector as well as for power plants.

KO: Having just given a fantastic presentation a little earlier this morning one of the things you highlighted was that you have an install base of 200,000 assets and you know exactly what is going on with each and every one of those assets.

How do you achieve that?

FK: Well, we do not have a real-time information about all turbochargers.

But basically, knowledge about the installed based is at the core of our business considering the long life cycles over which vessels and power plants are operated. In order to do this we have an intelligent product and service database for specific application data covering from cradle to grave the whole process. I.e. from day one how we manufacture with what materials, through to where it is installed, on which engines and then keeping track of the lifecycle of the asset - how we’ve serviced it, if there are any upgrades and also technical information such as the estimated running hours and scheduled maintenance.

All this information creates value in particular for our long-term customers as we can be available where and when the customer needs us, with the right parts and the right people, very effectively.

KO: The business model that you described today generated a significant chunk of the revenue from service, has that always been the case, i.e. has service always been a key element within your business model?

FK: Yes it has. From Day 1 on, if you look at the harsh operational environments these engines are operating in, of course our turbo chargers also face these environments - so wear and tear is always occurring and we have always had to do regular maintenance because of that.

Due to this, from the beginning service has been an important part of our business approach and our success.

KO: And has it also always been a driver for you strategically? Or was there a customer pull as well?

FK: In one sense, it was a clear strategic decision especially when we looked at how manufacturing was moving to Asia and the big growth in logistics that was coming along with that. The merchant marine sector that we support is also driving this demand for regular maintenance for turbochargers as well.

So whilst it was a strategic decision in that we saw this market developing and positioned ourselves accordingly, there was also the move to implement our service solutions globally which was in part a reaction to the changing demands of our customers.

 

KO: When you were speaking earlier on today you alluded to such change and that the shift in market forces had allowed to put yourselves in the position where you can begin to explore the potential of an outcome based solutions model - what exactly does that look like for your division in ABB and what is that appeals to you in such a model?

FK:We see certain things happening in the market- one is that uptake of service agreements is picking up in pure numbers, customers are increasingly willing to outsource their service needs to service providers, and in particular to the OEM.

Secondly, we see that there is an interest in customers engaging in much longer term service agreements because they see the leverage of reducing their total cost of ownership over the asset lifecycle by also outsourcing the associated risks.

 

Then thirdly, there is the customisation possibility that you have within the scope of these lifecycle agreements - customers are willing to engage if you can truly support their operations and are willing to adjust to their needs.

KO: Finally, one other area that was brought up in your presentation, was digital transformation, which is one of the buzz-terms of 2017 it seems, but what does digital transformation mean for ABB both company wide and in your division?

FK: From top down, ABB has recently announced ABB Ability as the platform where we plan to connect all Internet of Things related services, products and people into this one common platform to ultimately enable our customers to know more, do more, do better, together with us. Then talking about our own specific unit, we are of course part of that process and we are looking into blending our excellence in global service execution, with digital customer solutions to support customers’ operations to be most reliable and efficient.

These solutions are in the development and are yet to come to the market

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature

Jan Van Veen, continues his latest exclusive Field Service News series exploring the winning habits of long lasting achievers by outlining how a compelling direction can accelerate change...

Following our introductory article about the 4 Winning Habits in the previous publication of Field Service News, I will now elaborate on the first winning habit: Direction:

A common mistake: Lack of clarity where the company is heading 

A couple of years ago, I spoke with the management team of an international manufacturer of medical devices. They were disappointed because their employees were not taking the initiative to educate themselves on “digital” and IT related topics and to develop the business.

They knew that technology would continue to shift the market dramatically.

They even had a vision: to transition from a device manufacturer to a healthcare IT service provider. Unfortunately, little happened. Employees were too busy with operational fire-fighting and the initiatives they did start had hardly any relation to the company’s future and little coherence between them.

An important reason for this failure was that their vision was not clear and concrete enough for the employees to act upon. They were still unclear about what an IT service provider even was. Which customer problems would they solve? What kind of offerings needed to be developed? What capabilities would they need to develop? And which competencies?

As business leaders, we often think that it’s obvious to our teams what changes are needed in the business and why. After all, we spend a lot of time discussing challenges, priorities and ongoing initiatives. We typically have clear financial objectives for the next few years and other qualitative objectives like “being #1 choice of the customer”.

However, many of us do not provide a clear and compelling picture of where we should be heading and why, or how our organisation should look in a couple of years. So, what is missing?

• There are too few emotional triggers to spur our teams to be highly passionate and motivated.
• Our teams lack insight into which initiatives make sense and how they can contribute. The quality and quantity of the initiatives is far from optimal and there is a lack of coherence between them.
• Our staff have too many reasons to fear the downside of upcoming changes, or at least be uncertain about them. This pushes people into a defensive mode, which is destructive for change and innovation.

The solution: Establish a clear and compelling direction to accelerate change

Our research clearly shows that winning and dynamic manufacturers have declared a clear and compelling direction which results in high momentum for continuous, easy change from the inside.

This makes them more successful today and in the future. Ideally, this direction consists of:

 

• A meaningful mission
• A bold and inspiring strategic intent
• A concrete picture of the future state of the business

Engage your people with a meaningful mission

A compelling and meaningful mission expresses passion for a cause and has the best of intentions. It declares how you will be relevant for society or your target customers and connects to heart and mind. It also gives a clear indication of how to evolve the business and why. An important benefit of a meaningful mission is that all employees become highly engaged and passionate – they are proud to be part of such an organisation.

Tesla’s original mission was to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible”. Although you could argue whether “sustainable energy” is unique and differentiating for Tesla, it does trigger a lot of passion and eagerness in their staff. It also gives strong direction to their strategy, initiatives and focus. It shouts that Tesla will lead the automotive industry of the future with new technology, infrastructure and products on a global scale. Tesla will be visible, dominant and disruptive.

Rally your people with a bold objective 

Most leading companies have a bold objective or strategic intent which rallies their employees. They touch emotions, pride and potentially even the sense of doing right. And they drive focus on initiatives to innovate the business.

Well known examples are:

 

• Amazon: Every book ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.
• Google: Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
• Microsoft: “A computer on every desk and in every home.”
• Twitter: To become “the pulse of the planet”.
• Nike: “Beat Adidas”
• •Even though he’s not a company, John F. Kennedy: “Land a man on the moon by the end of this decade and return him safely”.

Some important characteristics of a good strategic intent are:

 

• They are externally oriented,
• They are hard to achieve, but not impossible,
• They trigger the imagination of employees (and shareholders),
• They define a “bigger game”, in which there is a prize to win

It will require hard work and moving away from comfort zones. Every step the team takes closer to the objective will give them a sense of pride, of belonging and will motivate them to take the next steps.

Focus and coherence with a picture of future state

Too often our vision of how the future business will look is too high level and vague for most of our staff.

They remain unclear about where the company is heading. How will it look in 5 years? Which clients will they be targeting? What are those customers’ needs? What kind of solutions will they be offering? How will they fit in, if at all?

Imagine the amount of momentum for ongoing change and innovation your teams could have, if they all shared the same concrete picture of the company’s future.

Including:

 

• The key industry trends, such as technology, impact on clients, the changing power of competitors, and potential new entrants.
• Changing needs of clients and other market segments that have not yet been served.
• Shifts in key stakeholders, of the client organisations they’ll be working with.
• Change of value propositions and offerings.
• Change of organisational capabilities and people competencies.
• Change of required technology.

Benefits

Winning companies benefit by having a clear and compelling direction in place. They have created the foundation for proud, engaged and committed employees who want to walk the extra mile, get out of their comfort zone and make innovation happen.

Their employees develop the right initiatives and understand the initiatives of others. This is crucial for coherency and alignment in the organisation without needing to dictate ideas and decisions from the top.

And finally, their employees have much less fear and uncertainty about the personal impact on them of upcoming changes, and therefore are much more open to drive change.

The Essence

If you assume this is about better telling your staff what to do and getting them on board, you have already missed the point: It is about creating a constructive and forward-thinking environment where your staff take the right initiatives and bring them to practice. Changes come from the ‘bottom-up’. I believe this is the power of combining business innovation on one hand, and talent development and empowerment on the other.

Are you interested in learning more about these 4 winning habits, having access to practical examples, and understanding how to implement them? Then Follow our next articles over the coming months and join us for one of our half-day Boardroom Sessions in Birmingham,

Manchester, Germany or the Netherlands. Reserve your seat @ http://fs-ne.ws/tvds30eenO6

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature

Sara Mueller, Field Service Portfolio Director, WBR, discusses why despite the growing importance of technology within our industry, the critical balance between using automation to meet tightening SLAs and losing the important human touch points field service visits offer the benefits they bring...

They say the only thing constant is change.

In just over a decade we’ve seen service organisations move from cost to profit centers. Now business models are evolving beyond product-centricity towards selling solutions or customer business outcomes. This shift in business model evolution and higher levels of customer service comes largely from the innovative technologies that are being widely adopted across global service organisations.

So much so that companies are quickly falling behind their competition and losing money to inefficiencies if they are too slow to adopt the cutting-edge technologies that have filled the service space in the last few years.

As the market analyst and director of program development for the Field Service USA and Europe events, I spend my time looking for trends that seem like they will stick, and uncovering the buzz behind buzz words.

I’d like to share with you three technology changes that have been popping across my radar lately, that seem to be here to stay.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one such buzz word.

Field service leaders are actively debating how it will impact the industry.

Do service executives believe robots will take the place of field technicians or customer service operators in the short-to-medium term future? No (though more service organisations are adopting the use of drones to carry out service inspections in a safer, more timely manner). There is a critical balance that must be maintained between the technology service organisations use to keep machines up and running, and the personal human touch points that often contributes to higher levels of customer satisfaction.

Instead of condition-based monitoring of equipment that crunches connected data in the cloud to predict equipment failure before it happens, machine learning is a way of monitoring similar data for abnormalities. It takes in huge sets of data about the equipment and identifies typical measurement ranges unique to the equipment being monitored. Then it monitors for abnormalities to see what the machine can learn about its own malfunctions. If a data set is out of range, the machine is able to flag it, knowing that something is off, and begin to uncover what the problem maybe.

 

Augmented Reality

Secondly, our Field Service events have been talking about the opportunity for augmented reality (AR) in service for a few years now. I am starting to see companies that have finally piloted or are using AR as a standard tool of their service organisation.

Early conversations around AR debated whether the technology should be given to customers, so they could be the eyes for the experienced service technician (rather than the service organisation having to pay to dispatch an engineer to the site).

But generally most service organisations have decided that from a liability and legal perspective, its best to send a more junior-level technician to the site with the AR glasses or hands-free device, rather than put the tools in the hands of the customer.

A reason that the adoption of AR by service organisations has finally picked up is that the technology has gotten better, cheaper, and with more choices available. Devices are lightweight and more intuitive as the technology has evolved.

One limitation of AR is connectivity bandwidth. While only a small bandwidth is necessary for AR to work, if your customer’s facility has limited Wi-Fi or an unstable signal, it could disrupt performance and communication. So service organisations are starting to build the use of AR into their service agreements, including ownership of Wi-Fi so they can control the Wi-Fi sources themselves to produce a more stable environment to support AR.

Parts Management

Finally, if you are in service you need to have the right parts in the right place at the right time in order to get the job done. This hasn’t changed. But the way service organisations are carrying out service parts planning has.

Several years ago organisations were managing parts on Excel spreadsheets and realised they needed a more robust tool to carry out planning effectively. Nowadays, since most service organisations have adopted field service management (FSM) systems, they are no longer integrating a parts planning tool into their ERP, they are integrating it into the FSM system.

They have been able to optimise the scheduling and dispatching of their technicians with the FSM, but are finding the right parts aren’t always where they need to be. Because of the optimisation, a technician no longer serves one account or needs a regular selection of parts in his vehicle.

 

Instead, it may now be more efficient for a technician to service a wider variety of products at different customer sites; therefore the inventory he needs to carry around is more complex. Even a technician’s training becomes part of the selection criteria in the FSM to determine which customer site he will be dispatched to; so this type of training data is being integrated into service inventory planning tools as well.

It’s an exciting time for field service technology, especially if you embrace change. But as I alluded to earlier, there is still a critical piece of service that comes from the human connection between technician and customer. No matter how technology evolves, the service industry will have to figure out the right balance of technology and human intimacy in order to maintain customer satisfaction and loyalty.

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature

In the Big Discussion we will take one topic, bring together three leading experts on that topic and put four key questions to them to help us better understand its potential impact on the field service sector...

This issue our topic is the relationship between Service and Sales and our experts are Nick Frank of Si2 Partners, Michael Blumberg of Blumberg Advisory Group and Jim Baston of BBA Consulting

In the first instalment of this topic our experts answered the question "It is often said service technicians are the greatest salesmen – what are your views on this?" the second time out the question was Is there a difference between selling service and selling products? and last time around the answered the question Is incentivising service technicians to “sell” opening up new revenue streams or putting their “trusted advisor” status at risk?

Now for the final question of this important topic...

 

---

 

What impact does the rising uptake in outcome based services have on the relationship between service and sales?

 

---

 

Selling outcome based services requires greater collaboration and communication between service and sales than ever before. Service needs to understand and support the solution that the sales force crafts for the customer.

The sales force needs to have a clear understanding of the capabilities of the service team to craft the right solution.

Basically, service and sales must work as a team. In addition, the service organisation must be proficient at sales so they can add-on additional services to better meet outcomes as these opportunities present themselves.

 

---

 

Outcome based services require one of the most sophisticated sales processes as the deliverable is a business outcome, not a well-defined ‘thing’.

Hence the whole process of defining the outcome and configuring a profitable delivery model is very different from a transactional product based sales process. The implications of switching to outcome based business models will challenge almost every aspect of the organisation in terms of mind-set & culture, skills & capabilities and processes & tools.

As the service organisation is such an integral part of the commercial success, it must be closely involved in the sales process from two perspectives. The first is to ensure that within the co-creation process that a delivery model is developed which profitably dovetails into the customer’s operations.

Secondly and probably more importantly, during the sales/co-creation process , to have people within the discussion that convinces the customer that you are the right business partner to deliver an outcome based contract.

 

---

 

In outcome based services, the service company generally is providing an agreed to outcome for a set fee and therefore takes the risk for delivering on their promise at a cost that they can profit from.

Any recommendations for improvements in delivering on that promise more effectively will typically benefit the service company rather than the customer. In these cases, therefore, the results of the field service professional’s efforts are internally focused.

Sales, however, remains externally focused. Their role is to bring more opportunities to the service organisation.

Therefore, the relationship between service and sales can be summarised as follows: In outcome based services, sales is responsible for generating the top line revenue by increasing the number of contracts whereas service is responsible for enhancing the profits on that revenue by improving their efficiency at delivering on those contracts.

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature

Nick Frank & Dag Gronevik of Si2 Partners explore the importance of face to face contact in management and ask if more business leaders should consider moving away from traditional training methodologies towards more free-flowing, dialogue based means of communication within their teams...

Winston Churchill stated ‘Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war’ This great leader understood that people can be influenced in two ways: either their minds have been opened or their heart broken. Opening minds requires talk, exchange of views and reflection. The ‘fear’ alternative of forcing conformity through hierarchies is in the long term destructive.

As a leader, what’s your style? Jaw Jaw or War War?

In today’s world this is a serious issue, as business leaders struggle to keep up with the technology whirlwind that is engulfing every aspect of our lives.

Leaders need to figure out how they adapt to the changing environment around them and in particular how their organisations and people can evolve.

Traditionalists tell their people they must change, offering incentives, assuming that people know exactly what is expected of them. Most people recognise that in world of the millennial and the internet, this approach is becoming less effective. Human beings are a contrary lot and cannot be told how to THINK. But how they THINK can be influenced by what we SAY and what we DO.

As Churchill knew, the way to change is to talk without fear of conflict.

In our own experience as business leaders, we have always placed a strong focus on communication, and in particular on meeting our people eye-ball to eye-ball. In hindsight the easy part is to meet, but how to turn this into true engagement?

In management speak, leaders turn to techniques such as ‘Off-Site’ meetings, ‘work shops’ or 1 on 1’s.

However, having worked as business leaders ourselves and now providing expert support to others, it is clear that to be successful, leaders must transfer control and responsibility to the team to find the solution for themselves.

 

Bluntly put, it means stop using PowerPoint material and similar to control direction (& remember details) and instead, start to think on your feet to develop free flowing yet structured debates. This is an approach many business leaders do not feel comfortable with, but it is critical if you want to engage people to change.

We call this slightly chaotic yet structured approach to group problem solving the ‘Boot Camp’. It is where a cross section of different individuals come together as a team to solve complex problems where the solution is not clear to all. It’s not meant to be a comfortable cosy environment, but one where everyone is challenged to find solutions under time pressure.

But how to achieve this outcome? There are at least five key areas to focus on:

[ordered_list style="decimal"]

1. Problem Definition and Outcomes: It may sound an obvious starting point, but clearly defining the problem, the business context and the expected outcome, is key to bringing smart people together to solve problems. In our experience don’t be afraid to take your time in this process, as it is the start of aligning your teams thinking and language behind a common challenge. Be very grounded in your approach so people find it relevant to their roles. A good way to think about the context is to define what is working in the business, and then what is not working. Break the problem into 4-5 related discussions about real tangible issues your team faces. In our experiences, the more tangible you make the discussion through use cases and everyday examples, the more you will channel the energy of your team towards the outcome you desire.
2. Generate Energy and Curiosity: This is where preparation really pays off. From the way you prime and prepare the participants, to the environment in which you work, all will help you engage interest and action. Most important is to remember that energy comes from people who talk and are active in the debate. Avoid lengthy detailed power points, in fact try to do without. Not using supporting material requires far more detailed preparation, but the result is an environment where the conversation, discussion and decision making, seem to effortlessly move towards your objectives.

3. Debate and Create: It’s when people are talking that they can create solutions together. Plan out the types of discussions and debate, which will move the participants towards your goal. Create opportunities where people can engage with each other. Bring in external perspectives to challenge thinking and the current paradigm. Invite input from customers or suppliers to build focus and urgency. Above all do not be afraid to alter the agenda as you move through the process.

   As long as you have a very clear view on the outcomes you expect, you can flex the conversation to suit the circumstances and the energy of the participants.

4.  Create Allies: It’s important to remember that building relationships will magnify the leaders impact on the business. Avoid the ‘yes, but’ syndrome and emphasise the positive. It is the alliances and relationships that are built that are critical to your success. No one person can change an organisation. Getting to the key influencers through creating a critical mass of thinking is vital.

5. Articulate Results: Great conversation will come to little, unless it is captured and channelled into actions. It is extremely powerful when the participants articulate the outcomes and present to senior management team. This brings focus to the collaboration, as well as a bit of edge to your event.[/ordered_list]

If you would like to know more about the Boot Camp process that helps you create engagement and commitment to tough business problems, please contact Nick Frank or Dag Gronevik through info@Si2partners.com

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature