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 IoT will change field service from reactive to proactive: one of three key take-aways from the Servicemax's inaugural MaxLive Europe event in Paris. Marc Ambasna-Jones reports.

Customer events are always a mixed bag given the nature of the crowd. You can never please everyone but they are also a good indicator of how well a company is actually doing beyond its sheen of marketing.

Pacing the specially erected stage in the Salon Opera ballroom at Le Grand Paris hotel, ServiceMax CEO Dave Yarnold told the 270 people gathered about his dream.  When he first came to Europe to pursue a few leads in the early days of the company, he hoped that one day ServiceMax would host an event just like this in a grand setting and full of customers.

Dream achieved, the company now has another goal, to turn the service software industry into a billion dollar global market with ServiceMax at its head. Ambitious? Yes of course. Achievable?

Perhaps. The numbers came thick and fast – the third largest Salesforce.com ISV, 150 new customers in the last 12 months, 300 per cent year on year growth, 90 plus parent consultants and so on. In its own words, ServiceMax is “evolving from a reactive, to a proactive, to a predictive business.”

In a nutshell, this sums up the demands of the rapidly changing service profession.  New technologies are forcing change again but this time at unprecedented levels.

 

This event was about showcasing that change. It was an attempt to lay out a plan, to identify the future and reinforce the idea that the changes will be for the better.

We took three things from the event:

The Internet of Things is more than just a buzzword

Kevin Ashton is often credited with being the father of  the term "Internet of Things"  term after writing it on a presentation in 1999 while working at Procter and Gamble.  He had this idea that the company should put RFID tags onto its products to improve product tracking and create real time stock management.

However, Ashton does not claim to be the ‘father of IoT’. Rather, the term ‘IoT’, he says, was created by someone on Twitter, who had shortened the internet of things into an easily manageable hashtag.

His views on the future clearly captured the imagination and raised a few eyebrows too. His suggesting that by the next century more than half the world will be vegetarian prompted muttering in the audience but he wasn’t here to talk about food...

What did he think of IoT and its impact on the service industry?

“Well the irony in the service sector is that the best service person is the one you never need to see,” says Ashton.
“Fewer resources wasted on needless service and less downtime for someone using a piece of equipment because service can be done pro- actively,” he adds, suggesting that this is what ServiceMax is enabling by adopting an IoT approach to service.

Ashton predicts that in the age of IoT, software as a service will shift to ‘service as software’, with service becoming increasingly interrelated with software in new ways. According to Ashton, this phenomenon will generate both predictive and self-diagnosing service.

 

So what does ServiceMax CEO Dave Yarnold think?

“Field service is now the first industry to benefit from the disruption of IoT,” he says confidently, “transforming from under-funded afterthought to under pinning new business models, revenue creation, and influencing product design.”

New global research from Field Service News, commissioned by ServiceMax and IoT partner PTC, found that forty-five per cent of field service management professionals believe the IoT will likely have the biggest impact on field service by 2020 -- more than big data, smart glasses, augmented reality or any other technology.

More than half of field service professionals surveyed say they are already implementing or planning to implement an IoT-based strategy, and seventy-four per cent do not think the size of a company matters when implementing IoT field service strategies in their organisations.

The service model is being flipped on its head

“Moving forward, we will begin to see service outcomes designed into products at the R&D level, as well as the ability for equipment and devices to become capable of recommending companion products to customers for cross sell and upsell opportunities,” says Yarnold.

One of the customer examples Yarnold was most excited about was the one from Timo Okkonen of inspection, testing, certification consultancy services firm Inspecta.

Okkonen spoke brightly about “influencing everything for our kids.” The company’s vision, he says “is to save the planet through improved maintenance and service.”

It’s this idea that excites Yarnold because this customer is using his software to not just manage service engineers but actually helping to re-shape the company’s entire approach to business.

It’s a view shared by Jerome Piche, global customer service VP at medial diagnostics company bioMerieux in France. “How can we be more efficient to increase the first time fix?” He asked. “We are organised in silos but this is a way in which we can break the silos and have a more end-to-end view.”

Piche was referring to the idea that the mobilisation of the software and the ability to manage and analyse service data more efficiently is changing the game.

ServiceMax describes this as a transformation, where service is now starting to influence decision making and opening up new opportunities for businesses to increase efficiencies.

In fact the company believes in it so much it wrote an e-book called Diamonds in the Rough: Unleashing the Power of Field Service Transformation. Not your average bedtime tome but certainly something to get those transformational juices flowing.

People and skills are changing fast

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US, there will be 800,000 additional service workers in the US by 2022.

It seems that despite technology, the service industry is growing and we will need more techs than ever before.
But is this right? Is the industry really going to support a huge growth in personnel at a time when automation technology is starting to have such an impact on service efficiency?

If anything the role of the service professional is going to change more rapidly. The pressures to change will only increase with technology advancements.

 

“How do we stop the technicians talking in ‘techlish’ and ensure service permeates through a business? How do we make it sexy to them because I think it’s the sexiest business in the world,” says  ServiceMax CTO Hari Subramanian.

John Cooper, head of service for Sony Professional Solutions Europe supported the idea that attitudes towards service professionals have changed and professionals themselves need to evolve to meet the new demands and expectations of customers.

“We were seen as a necessary evil in the service department,” says Cooper.

“We just took care of things. There was a lack of visibility but now with ServiceMax we can have visibility and prove we add value.” It is this justification of the role that fits with the general theme of the event – transformation through technology and using the data to increase an understanding of customer service requirements while reducing waste So should service people evolve into a sales role also? Should they really upsell the customer?

There was a certain degree of egg shell treading but the consensus is that service techs do have to evolve and embrace the idea of soft selling.

While Dave Hart, ServiceMax’s VP of global customer transformation urges caution for, quite rightly, concerns around undermining the service tech’s credibility and trusted status, he does concede that perhaps there needs to be a change, an evolution in roles as field sales team numbers dwindle across industries.

“In this new economy service is the difference,” said the introductory video, highlighting the change that is coming.
Technology and in particular IoT and data analytics are impacting all industries and you have hundreds if not thousands of businesses jumping on the train to try and capitalise, to forge niches, conquer markets.

ServiceMax is no different although in Field Service they have a head start on some of their peers. The industry, though, is surely in for a rollercoaster ride.

 

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Do Millennials and Augmented Reality hold the key to the future of field service?   Field Service News Editor-in-Chief speaks exclusively with Professor Howard Lightfoot of  Cranfield University School of Management to find out why field service organisations should ditch the chalkboard approach and embrace augmented reality

Augmented Reality (AR) is starting to make some serious waves in Field Service.

AR has made its way from being one of a number of potential technologies that we could see impacting in our market to perhaps the biggest conversation in field service circles, matched only by the emergence of a number of case studies of how Internet of Things.

One man who has been talking up the importance of AR within a field service environment for some time is Professor Howard Lightfoot.  Indeed, it was his forward-looking work at Cranfield University in embracing AR and it’s potential use amongst manufacturers and service organisations alike that garnered him a coveted place in this year’s FSN20 – a list of the most influential people within the field service industry globally.

However, whilst the potential for AR as a field service tool is vast, Lightfoot’s work has been in applying it in another area that will likely have just as big an impact on the field service industries globally: using AR as a training tool to bring in the next generation of field service engineers.

I took the opportunity to catch up with him after his presentation at this year’s Aftermarket Business Platform conference to find out more about the work he and his colleagues were doing and to ask the $64 billion question – is there a sufficient skill-set and talent pool amongst the millennials to ease our fears of an approaching ageing workforce crisis?

“What we’ve set up at Cranfield is a learning laboratory,” Lightfoot begins. It’s not a design laboratory laboratory or an engineering laboratory; it’s a learning laboratory and we are using virtual and augmented reality tools as part of training and teaching processes.”

Lightfoot, who is perhaps arguably more well known for some of his pioneering work in the field of Servitization, is part of a team at Cranfield who are very much ensconced in the world of manufacturing both at home in the UK and abroad.

“We are looking at how companies maintain products throughout their useful life and that can be ten, twenty, thirty year but also doing that at the right cost. So a lot of our research is on doing that,” he explains.

“So, how things work, degradation mechanisms, self-healing technology. The area I’m working in and the reason I’m interested in the aftermarket business and field service is in the application of augmented reality in training people and also getting data out into the field readily and easily.”

The application of AR in field service operations is potentially an absolutely massive game changer, he believes.

“It could de-skill the field service activity - and there will be parts of the world where you can’t get the right people. With augmented reality you can link them to a skilled technician back at base who can take them through the process, not with a manual, not on the phone but he can actually see what they are doing and he can overlay information for them, digitally point at things ‘that’s the nut, this is the one you turn. Don’t torque that one anymore than this, torque that one to this level or undo that cabinet first and make sure you disconnect this before you do that.”

 

Indeed as a tool for transmitting knowledge and experience from one corner of the globe to another it is a genuinely exciting technology that could really up the ante when it comes to improving productivity in the field.

AR: a fantastic training tool

However, it is the use of AR as a training tool that Lightfoot is truly passionate about.

“You can visualise things,” he begins when asked why it is such an important tool in future training techniques.
“They use it in chemistry teaching - you can visualise a molecule in virtual reality much more effectively than a two dimensional picture on a computer screen or in a book. Imagine augmented reality where you get a molecule and then start overlaying information for students on that and then it becomes much more meaningful. It becomes real.”

As mentioned above, whilst in many ways we are on the cusp of a glorious period for the advancement of field service with technologies such as AR and IoT begin to open up completely new ways of structuring field service operations, at the same time we are facing a crisis of unheralded proportions as huge swathes of our workforce edge ever closer to retirement age.

AR: recruitment appeal

I was interested to explore whether Lightfoot felt whether the use such bleeding edge technology such as AR could play a role in attracting and the brightest and best of the next generation away from the dominant careers of finance and law and towards the Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) subjects that could help field service organisations cope with the sudden loss of their baby-boomer workforce.

“There is certainly more of an interest now in manufacturing in the UK generally with brighter people,” he admits. “I think for years people wouldn’t go near something like manufacturing or even science and engineering because it was too difficult and manufacturing does seem to have a bad press. Everyone wanted to be in finance not manufacturing. Now things are starting to turn a bit. The UK government has realised you can’t build a country just based on financial services.”

 

“Luckily with some of the technology emerging, like augmented reality technologies, these millennials, the guys going to university now are born into this technology. For them it’s just second nature. They tweet they send text messages at a faster speed then I can talk and so the use of that technology for them is completely there.”

Of course it is one thing attracting millennials, educating and training them is another matter entirely and if we are to harness the dynamism of this young demographic we must understand that the way they learn is fundamentally different to how their predecessors did.

As Lightfoot comments : “In our day, Google and the Internet weren’t around. If you had a project to do it was library and some really serious heavy detective work to get some information. Now the information is instantly accessible they spend the time learning rather than finding the material to learn from.”

Knowledge sharing the Millenial way

However, the biggest difference is not so much the access to information but the way information is disseminated. For a generation born into smartphones and social media, sharing and collaboration are simply parts of life. This is something Lightfoot believes Millennials can benefit from greatly.

“They’ll share with people, they’ll text somebody a message about what they’ve found, they’ll email somebody something they’ve got or they’ll send somebody a link through social media. So the technology is there for sharing, for learning quickly and for accessing information quickly. It’s incredible.”

Of course the flip side of this is whilst a generation that has such easy access to information has phenomenal opportunity to learn rapidly, there is also a danger of them being less focused. However, Lightfoot believes that the key to keeping Millennials engages is through the adoption of technology within the teaching environment.

“This is why things like virtual reality and augmented reality are so important.” He explains, “When you start using that to train them and educate them then that’s the technology they are familiar with. They’ll buy into that far more than giving them a book or standing somebody in front of them lecturing at them.”

 

“Learning via technology and these new techniques is going to feed their desire to want to learn. I picked up a study from Columbia state university on augmented reality and training and there study showed people picked things up twice as quickly when trained through augmented reality than being trained with the hardware and with a guy in front of them. Also they said they felt it was a more intuitive way of learning.”

Digitisation of knowledge bases

Given the above, Lightfoot also is a staunch advocate of ensuring the digitalisation of knowledge bases and integrating them with training programs sooner rather than later. “I think you’ve got to capture what you’ve got and make sure you retain that tacit knowledge, the knowledge learnt over the years. I recall talking to Rolls Royce many years ago about how they saved information on engine data. The problem was they saved it in different methods in different places. Spreadsheets, software, handwritten and in their heads so you must get the infrastructure right to capture knowledge from the guy in the field.”

“For example if you’re using AR to help an engineer in the field that can now be recorded. It doesn’t just disappear anymore. You can digitize the whole thing. So every time the guy speaks to someone my take would be: for God’s sake make sure it’s recorded. Once you’ve got that digitised you can share that information easily.”

You don’t tell your new engineers to go read the manual, you send him to these recordings and the trainee is happy because that’s the technology he is used to, he adds “You need them integrated, you need to make sure the knowledge capture and the knowledge sharing work together. There is nothing like learning from someone who knows what he is talking about whichever way you do it.”

And what about that $64Billion dollar question? Can millennials replace the ageing boomer workforce? Are they suited to field service engineering roles?

“Absolutely” Lightfoot states, “I think more than any other generation now because of the technology they are used to and the way are used to acquiring information. They are used to data sources and it matches quite well with the way systems have to be put together in terms of things like field service and maintenance.”

“So I think yes they are fit for the job. What we have to do is get them interested in manufacturing and technology industries so let's drive that on.”

 

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Smarter customer engagement, an interactive customer service hub and streamlined knowledge management are some of the enhancements Microsoft will introduce to its Dynamics CRM platform in 2016. Microsoft Dynamics General Manager Bill Patterson gave Field Service News Editor-in-Chief  Kris Oldland the low down on the innovations .

Having spent 2015 focusing on productivity improvements in Microsfot Dynamics, Microsoft is turning to customer service experience enhancements in 2016.  "It has probably been one of the most significant areas in innovation and investment we've been making in Microsoft," Patterson states.  "We see that organisations today are operating still like they were ten years ago. They are still trying to compete on the basis of price or on the strength of their product or service that they have for their offerings. But key data is really beginning to emerge that a lot of consumers today are largely beginning to stay with brands due to the customer experience and we see customer service playing a huge role in that realm of differentiation."

We have all been part of good customer services experiences but those that we remember oftentimes are the most extremely bad ones. What we are trying to do for enterprises today is really help them understand their customers, help them engage with their customers and help them empower their employees to really drive and centre that degree of engagement."

"While organisations may understand this dichotomy, the reality that they find themselves in today is that a lot of their tooling is dated, a lot of their systems have not been modernised to keep up with the needs of their customers and they are struggling with the proliferation and explosion of channels in the digitalisation of the service experience like never before."

Indeed,  in the modern world of the empowered consumer building a cohesive customer experience that translates across the multitude of different touch points with your organisation is critical. "This notion of digitalisation and the empowered consumer really is creating a juxtoposition with the enterprise, because the agent today is mostly dealing with technology and screens that were built for the last decade of computing."

 

This presents one of two key challenges for today's service-oriented organisations.  While the challenge to deliver the level of service excellence is spread across a growing number of channels, simultaneously there is the challenge of overcoming high employee churn rates within customer service roles which Microsoft analysis of labour statistics around the customer service role both in the US and the UK has revealed as worryingly high at around 27%. "If you think that one in four of your team is turning over every twelve months increasingly it's a really struggling proposition to keep employees engaged and empowered to ultimately to deal with customers. "

"And that meta-trend - the ability to engage with customers and to empower employees - is really what's driving Microsoft, what's driving our innovation force behind our set of releases."

With their latest roll out their Dynamics platform, Microsoft is looking to resolve these challenges with three new elements that Patterson describes as being at the centre of that employee empowerment and customer engagement problem set for an organisation. Perhaps the biggest of these changes, and one that is likely the headline grabbing development, is a complete overhaul of the user experience.

"Most CRM systems have been built over time with this notion of the relationship and relationships take time to emerge and unfold for an organisation," explains Patterson. "So it's s oftentimes that a CRM system is designed with lots of data, lots of forms and lots of views. For organisations who need to keep up with high scale but low amount of data within an interaction there was a dichotomy between the optimised user experience and the user experience we find today in most CRM systems."

"So we went back to the drawing board and back to the core of the user experience itself and designed what we think is the most productive user experience for customer service agents on the planet."

A bold statement indeed.  So what is the detail behind the hyperbole?

Interactive Service Hub

The UX Microsoft has introduced is called the interactive service hub. It has the ability to handle large screens of information, and to take a screen and easily turn it into an interaction. It's a technology that many will be familiar with in social solutions, Patterson readily admits. However bringing it into the customer service team at large to help them engage across all the digital channel - web, social email and so on - could be a very powerful tool.

"There is also a focus on building much tighter integration between what Microsoft refer to as Tier One agents (those who have to deal with the most volume) and Tier Two agents (those who have to deal with the escalations coming from the tier one team).  This could prove an important aid in increasing efficiency resulting in speedier resolutions for customers.

 

That interplay between tier one and tier two today for most organisations is where you see the highest degree of latency in closing a business operation. It is our belief that if we can bring the tier one and tier two teams together in a way that information is continuous and seamless throughout a service funnel, then we could help teams react, respond and resolve issues much easier than before.

Smarter customer engagement

2016 will see the release of what Microsoft calls smarter customer engagement.  It's an interesting concept that builds upon their own social engagement technology while addressing what is perhaps a key flaw. "What sentiment and social screens have proven is that it's a signal, a belief at a point in time but it may not get to the full unearthing of a customer perspective on things," Patterson begins. "So in addition to some advances we're making in the social engagement side we're introducing our Voice of Customer solution." This is based on some tech acquired last spring to go to the next level of voice-of-the-customer and feedback as part of the business process."

"When you combine the sentiment analytics with the enriched information on an interaction or on a survey perhaps, organisations can further understand their customers in a way that's not just only a point in time or what they might have said on a social network. The combination of these two is how we see organisations truly coming together to engage in new ways with their customers."

Knowledge capture and management

The third of the new developments particularly caught my attention as it is a tool capable of helping tackle a significant issue being faced by many, many field service companies: the challenge of capturing the knowledge, locked away in the heads of a workforce rapidly set to walk away from the business as they reach retirement age.

Again the challenge is two-fold, firstly there is the capture of this knowledge to ensure it remains in the organisation and secondly there is the need to make this knowledge easily accessible.

 

Microsoft's knowledge capture platform incorporates a WYSISYG designer to allow for simple and easy creation of content, as you'd expect, but perhaps more importantly they have also included social collaboration tools which allow companies to bring teams of people together to work in tandem on the creation of an article.

The upshot of this is that either each article becomes less disputed or you create fewer articles authored by individual experts who have distinct points of view. Either way it makes for a more streamlined approach to developing a knowledge bank and when the aim is to help deliver quicker understanding to your workforce and swifter resolution to customer problems, then quality should always trump quantity.

This is also something that Microsoft are acutely aware, says Patterson, pointing out that most knowledge management solutions have been built more as knowledge aggregators which end up taking in so much volume and so much data that agents really get lost in the cloud of information.

"Often what happens is an organisation will spend so much time indexing and not enough time thinking about the meaningful information that helps drive an interaction to a resolution.  Over time the knowledge index becomes less and less trusted by the customer service team."

"So our focus was putting the knowledge into the core hands of the agents and the experts inside an organisation who can put the right information into the hands of the customer service interaction team so it can become a more thoughtful and ambient experience for an agent."

Supported by a powerful machine learning engine, the knowledge management tool analyses the content of what an interaction is about and pro actively surfaces and pushes the right knowledge into the hands of the agent whilst they are taking the call. This ability to place focused content intelligently in the right place at the right time could hugely improve resolution times within a service centre. However, the magic doesn't end there as the system essentially continues to refine itself through each interaction.

"Once that intersection between knowledge and interaction come together that binding, that fusion if you will, actually tunes the machine learning engine even further and enriches it even further this article solves this problem," enthuses Patterson.

Each of these developments are exciting in their own right but together it looks like Microsoft Dynamics 2016 is certainly shaping up to be an impressive update to the platform.

However, when it is bundled together with Office 365, Microsoft’s productivity suite, for a cost of between £40 and £95 depending on your own configurations, this becomes a platform offering fantastic value. Long may it continue.

 

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What should field service companies focus on in 2016? Tom Bowe,  Industry Director, Enterprise Service Management, IFS, provides his expert insight

The holiday season is upon us, and beyond that, just around the corner, lies another year. You may already be suffering from a bombardment of messaging around “predictions for field service in 2016” or “top trends for field service in 2016.”

Truth be told, it is an exciting time to be in field service.

The world is changing rapidly, the profile of your average consumer is ever evolving, and technology is changing the service landscape along with expectations, the market, and more.

Trends like augmented reality, IoT, wearable technology, and 3D printing are poised to change the entire approach to field service, rocking the fundamental structures and foundations of service delivery that have taken years to develop.

So how does an organisation brace for all this and navigate through the messaging to begin the path to a successful 2016?

 

We have sifted through all the messaging this year for you; surveys, industry articles, field service forums, and customer feedback, and boiled it down to four tips to help you achieve service delivery excellence next year.

Consider using these tips as a beacon to help you achieve customer delight while gaining market share and maximising service margin in 2016.

Establish a Baseline

Whether you are lacking in the analytics department or you have analytics coming out of your ears, the end of the year is a good time to conduct an audit of your service processes. Map out your service lifecycle and pinpoint where your strengths and weaknesses are. Here are some things that are always good to evaluate at the end of the year:

• Employees: Which of your customer facing employees are consistently performing above average? Are they being incentivised to continue their good work? What about those below average? Is there something in place to help them improve?
• Processes: Which parts of your service operations are working well and which aren’t? Are the process issues manual or software related? Where are there holes in your automation or lags in efficiency?
• Systems: How solid are your integrations? Is data being lost or corrupted between systems? Is everything talking to each other the way it should?

If evaluating your current operations and establishing a baseline is harder than you would like it to be, consider investing in enterprise operational intelligence software. The ability to visualise your entire operation and use real-time analytics to directly impact processes and solve issues will help drive intelligent decision making in 2016.

Go Back to the Basics

New field service trends like IoT have the potential to completely eliminate reactive service and save millions in operational costs, but if you don’t have efficient processes in place before adopting these trends, their potential will never be achieved.

It’s no good to have a piece of equipment out in the field triggering an urgent request for service if you don’t have the means to get the right technician, with the right skills and the right equipment there in a timely fashion.

Start with the Customer

Steve Jobs famously said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.”

Listening to your customers is more important than ever. Customer surveys and other forms of communication with your customer base are vital to helping you deliver the best customer service possible.

Let them tell you what they want and adjust your service delivery standards accordingly. It’s always important to remember that the escalator of service is always moving.

What might have been customer delight (unbelievable service) last year may be considered basic now. Keeping up with customer expectation and the scale of service will help you deliver continued service excellence.

Pick a Uniquely Inspired Future Path

Perhaps the most important tip that we can offer is don’t get swept up in the hype. Every service organisation is on a unique path with unique offerings and ultimately unique goals.

Service delivery excellence is best achieved when a balance is found between listening to your customers, keeping up with changing technology and its effect on the market, and operating your service centre as a profit centre.

Predictions and top trends for 2016 are only good on paper if they don’t fit your organisation’s vision. Don’t let that hold your innovation hostage…let your desire to provide your customers with unique, inspiring experience carve your path to service excellence in 2016.

Good luck and season’s greetings from IFS.

 

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The latest developments in remote workforce management are helping companies to get more from their field service teams, explains Paul Ridden, CEO, SmartTask .

For field service companies that provide contracted, scheduled staff to client sites, workforce costs are a significant overhead, especially when you consider the constant pressure on margins and the need to provide innovative services to win new contracts.

Remote workforce management has been around for some time, helping companies to capture proof of time, attendance and work completed, enabling them to monitor the status of their teams centrally. Now systems are emerging that bring all of these components in to a single package along with the other key back office functions required to effectively manage field service teams. As a result, they can now provide complete peace of mind that personnel are safe while ensuring they are delivering the services agreed.

Such tools can work alongside systems including payroll, invoicing and rostering, using real-time data to verify timesheets, provide accurate proof of work and overcome scheduling challenges. This is helping to maximise profitability of contracts using the most appropriate employees, billing correctly and not overpaying. Meanwhile, it is possible to integrate intelligent rostering and control room to automate and streamline operational processes as well as reduce office-based administration costs.

 

Based on a framework of electronic proof and attendance it is becoming possible for existing staff located at client sites to effectively take on additional tasks such as inspections or audits, enabling organisations to provide areas of differentiation to clients and make best use of resources to boost profitability. There is also an opportunity to provide a tool to register an operational issue or risk, irrespective of the remote worker’s core function, with an effective process included to encourage and simplify such an action.

Using smart forms, via a mobile application, an employee can quickly complete and submit an incident report, which triggers an email escalation process sent to the appropriate department so they can deal with the problem immediately. This means supervisors and managers can have a live-view of any issues, failures or wastage with details electronically captured including photographic evidence where appropriate. A copy of the incident can also be sent to an online portal where it can be monitored and managed through its lifecycle while providing data for trend analysis via the management information generated.

These flexible smart forms can be configured for a wide range of uses including alerts, inspections, audits, requests, job acceptance and job completion. In particular, it is possible to implement an electronic compliance solution for health and safety, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), COSHH hazardous substance procedures. These checks can replace existing manual processes to achieve immediate workplace compliance, while streamlining administration and saving money.

Typically, a paper-based solution is not only time consuming and costly to manage across multiple sites, but is easy to falsely or fraudulently complete. In contrast, a smart form registers the exact time it was completed and with signature capture shows which employee undertook the check. Furthermore, all the data is delivered to the online portal, so it is collected electronically in real-time without having to post hard copies and have someone collate manually.

The latest developments in remote workforce management is evolving beyond simply proof of attendance. It is providing the potential to enhance business performance and help overcome some of the operational challenges faced by companies in the field service marketplace in terms of revenue growth, customer satisfaction and compliance.

 

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In Part One of this feature, Brendan Viggers, head of product and sales support at IFS Aerospace & Defence Centre of Excellence, explained the potential of  Wearables and Context Aware technology to transform various maintenance and servicing tasks in the Aerospace and Defence sector. In Part Two, he explains why  Context Aware apps will be critical in delivering ROI and user satisfaction in wearables.

With device development enabling us to monitor activity in more detail, user context-awareness is being included in consumer devices to an ever-increasing degree. Imagine what could be achieved if technologies like cameras and the Kinect - a motion-sensing input device by Microsoft for the Xbox One video game console - were included in appliances and devices in your base maintenance facility or field location.

Recognising where people are and what they do will enable designers to create attentive applications that look at what is going on and react appropriately. For example, teleporting - sometimes called “follow- me” computing - is a tool available today to dynamically map the user interface onto the resources of the surrounding computer and communication facilities in office complexes.

In a maintenance environment, this could be adapted so that relevant applications can 'follow' a worker moving around maintenance locations or even different equipment and process bays in an aircraft, and be available as required. The maintenance station will recognise which member of your maintenance team is going to use it based on identity tag or even body profile, and pre-select that person’s authorised maintenance or repair task schedules. If directly linked to equipment health monitors, it could automatically add high priority preventative maintenance tasks to a repair schedule being undertaken in the same location.

 

So What?

CCS Insight predict that there will be up to 100million smartphone companions such as smartwatches by 2017. Research from Business Insider Intelligence indicates the global wearables market will grow at an annual compound rate of 35 percent over the next five years.

The advance of wearable technology seems unstoppable, but it isn't a new revolution - witness the use of emergency buttons to call for help after a fall. Its deployment has simply taken off over the past few years. We all understand that wearable blood glucose, heart rate, blood pressure monitors can help people stay healthier for longer. In Aerospace and Defence, future wearable technology must be demonstrably useful - both needed and wanted. To be wanted, we have got to have valuable applications that will benefit wearables and be contextually aware - only then can we truly demonstrate a real return on investment that warrants change and adoption of the technology.

Empowerment and the future with wearables

The key to this is not so much wearables, but the context aware applications that are accessed by or loaded onto them. Making applications more social and user friendly through context-aware wearable technology will surely be the way forward. Mobile applications, as a front end to powerful enterprise platforms, can be developed and made context aware in very short order.

Our experience shows that it is possible to develop and deliver mobile applications specific to a user’s requirements often in weeks rather than the traditional ERP software application that takes months or even years to deploy. In the forward space these apps must be optimised with functionality for the engineer depending on the operational environment. Overloading an engineer with full IS solution functionality doesn't make sense.

Mobile apps offer a solution to the problem of gaining essential feedback of operational information without inundating the engineer - they must be task-specific, in a recognisable format, optimised for specific equipment, easy to customise and devoid of superfluous overhead. The ability to add operational data relating to flight, crew and vehicle in real-time adds real value to ERP.

IFS is currently deploying a range of mobile apps, the next step would be to port mobile apps on to a wearable device that is sufficiently context aware so automatically records when and where a fault is logged – saving valuable time by negating the need for the engineer to 'down tools' in order to log on to a laptop or handheld device to gain access to back-office information.

Innovative wearable technology has matured over the past decades from 'fall monitors' to truly interactive, context aware support tools. We can give operators direct support at their fingertips, in their ears or in front of their eyes, and also intimately understand the challenges they are facing. The development of hardware and sensors to 'socialise' the technology is about to take off, but these are really just delivery and input points for information that allows context-tailored applications to link users to powerful enterprise processes.

The immediate benefits of delivering powerful computer support directly to users, and capturing contextual information to improve enterprise-level knowledge offers exciting opportunities in the immediate future to streamline MRO activity and allow supply chains to get ahead of the game.

IFS is at the forefront of integrating innovative wearable and context aware technology with an agile Aerospace and Defence ERP application which streamlines support and, critically, reduces costly operational downtime. The result is aircraft spend more time in the air with maintenance support tailored to suit any environment, at any time.

 

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The hyperbole around 3D printing has died down but can it be a viable tool in field service? Aberdeen Group's Aly Pinder takes a closer look

The interaction between the end customer and the field service team is changing quite rapidly.  In the not so distant past of just a few years ago, a technician was solely expected to show up on time. And that on time promise was somewhere between 8 hours and beyond.

This is no longer the environment we all live in. Customers demand answers fast, service even faster, and resolution on their schedules. The service organisation can no longer be reactive, it must have the resources, skills, and visibility to deliver when called upon. And the best service teams can be there before a problem is even detected.

This is all leading to the need for improvement in an often forgotten aspect of field service – spare parts. As noted in previous Aberdeen research, the #1 reason for a secondary truck roll is the technician doesn’t have the right part to resolve the issue.

This seemingly minor hiccup can cause any number of debilitating consequences from delayed resolution, bloated supply chains, hoarding of parts by technicians, and unsatisfied customers.

 

If this isn’t keeping you up night, be sure that your management team is beginning to recognise the enormity of this problem and will be calling you soon to wake you up.

The answer to this problem may be in the form of 3D printing technology. Now, I know this may seem like the chatter of sci-fi movies. But even right now there are some very interesting use cases of 3D printing in our B2B world. And as seen in Aberdeen’s See the Future of Field Service in 3D report, this future is not far off even for the field.

Granted only about 11% of top performers have this technology in place (as compared to even less for peers at 4%), the interest in this technology is growing quite rapidly.

The business case is simple, the cost of technicians hoarding parts to make sure they have what they need is too high and service organisations can’t afford to disappoint customers with a second truck roll because a technician didn’t happen to overstock his/ her truck with that needed part.

For business that have the following profile, 3D printing might be the way to go in the near future:[unordered_list style="bullet"]

• Mission critical field service environment – What is the cost of not fixing the problem for the customer? If downtime can result in millions of dollars lost, it is important to ensure you have the parts needed to solve the problem when the technician is scheduled and sent out.
• Parts are a revenue stream – Some companies have found that spare parts, if priced accurately, can be a lucrative revenue opportunity for the business. If this is the case, it is imperative that the organisation keep technicians from hoarding parts as this is no longer solely a cost issue.
• The cost of inventory is out of hand – Is it worth it for your business to carry parts to fix issues that may not come up that often?  Or maybe, revisions in equipment and parts happen frequently and it isn’t cost effective to carry parts which will be obsolete in just a couple of reporting quarters. 3D printing capabilities for the field team can help organisations cut down the cost of stocking low running parts and ensure the service organization can maintain its profitability goals.Place your list items here

3D printing as of today isn’t the right answer for everyone, as noted by the currently low adoption rates. But when it does make sense from a cost of deployment perspective, I think it can be a game changer in regard to the ability for the field team to always know they will have the right part to solve a customer need on the first time.

 

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 UK manufacturing is re-inventing itself with services as a core element of companies' growth strategies.  In an industry-led initiative, business leaders are seeking input from a wide variety of of companies to help develop a National Strategy for Manufacturing Services.  UK businesses can add their voice to the discussions via a series of free workshops.  Nick Frank, Frank and Partners, explains the strategy and how to get involved.

It is now widely accepted that technology and manufacturing impacts our economy far more than the 10% GDP often quoted. There is another 10% to be found in manufacturing services and probably a lot more, when you look at the full supply chain of support required to keep industry working. With digitalisation starting to enable dramatic changes in business models, products sales are slowly being replaced by services; ‘Power by the Hour’ being the well-known example with jet engines.

But manufacturing and product related services are also facing a chronic skills shortage, which will stifle future growth. If the UK is to prosper, then it must re-think its definition of manufacturing, the skills required and the value it brings. Critical is inspiring a new generation of our best young people to choose a career in industry because they see it as ‘sexy’, fulfilling and lucrative.

These are some of the reasons why leading UK companies such as Rolls-Royce, Bombardier Transportation, Siemens, BAE Systems and Babcock International are pushing for a National Strategy for Manufacturing Services. They are not alone, having teamed up with Ministry for Business Innovation and Skills, industry trade bodies as well as well as thought leaders from Cranfield, Aston and Cambridge universities. The fact that this initiative is led by industry is critical. Industry sees that with the mainstreaming of IoT technologies and the coming of a new millennial generation, which is more technology savvy and attuned to collaboration and networking, a new way to compete needs to be found.

As Dave Benbow, Head of Engineering for Services at Rolls-Royce and co-chair of the initiative passionately puts it;
“Collaborative development of capability in through-life engineering services will be key to future success in a world where technical innovation is demanded in both products and services.”

The truth is that we have to re-invent manufacturing in order to compete in the global market. Recently an excellent article in the Economist, ’How does Deutschland do digital?’ highlighted how Trumpf, a leading global supplier of machine tools, is building a new business vision based on ‘software and data’. The global market for what some call ‘through-life engineering services’ and others would describe as ‘making things work better for longer, delivering lifetime value from products, assets and infrastructure’, is worth over £1 trillion and the UK is estimated to only have maybe 5% of this share. It is clear that this sector will be key to manufacturing productivity and high value jobs in the circular economy of the future.

 

A recent study by Cranfield University revealed that in this market segment, the salaries are generally 55% higher than the UK industrial average! It is clear that with a bit of imagination, Manufacturing has the potential to be very attractive to young people with an incredibly diverse range of evolving well paid careers.

However it is also clear that if the UK wants to do more than just compete, it must be far more ambitious at a National level. As a nation we need to:

• Develop skills and behaviors that encourage the multi-functional and collaborative needs of the future work force
• Innovate better tools and techniques for data integration and analysis
• Create formal standards that enables knowledge transfer across industries and through the supply chain
• Revolutionize the supply chain to adapt to the circular economy

In short we need a National Strategy for the UK, where thinking and language on the specific actions the UK needs to succeed are aligned across the nation. Solutions to this challenge have become possible as the key stakeholders combine behind one initiative to develop manufacturing services as a driver for growth.

Now in a series of workshops led by the EPRSC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing at Cranfield, a series of free workshops are being held across the country to gain your input. We want businesses from the wide variety of industries that make up the UK’s industrial fabric, to talk and describe their needs. You will have a chance to mix with leaders in Services and learn about the business models developed by some of the leaders of UK’s industry. We need your feedback to develop a strategy that is truly representative of UK industry.

If you would like more information on this initiative you can contact Nick Frank,  a member of the steering group, at nick.frank@frank-partners.com or you can sign-up directly on the Through-life Engineering Services website.

 

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The Aerospace and Defence sector has a deserved reputation for being early adopters of new technology solutions for  servicing and maintenance. True to form, ground breaking developments in Wearables and Context Aware technology are expected to  streamline  maintenance operations in the sector and empower the supply chain.  In Part One of this two-part feature, Brendan Viggers, product and sales support at IFS Aerospace & Defence Centre of Excellence, explains the potential.

Aerospace and Defence support, whether that is maintenance, engineering, supply or transportation, is complicated by the challenges of distance from the home base, environmental and operating pressures, and even cultural constraints in deployed operating areas. Maintenance in the field is very different from at the depot or base.

Maintenance activity requires, as a basic minimum, the right information and technical support with the right functionality to support operations, so it is a no-brainer that this needs to be tailored for the environment where the maintenance is taking place. For many years vendors have deployed solutions forwards that are manifestly complex, full enterprise solutions on mobile devices.

But in-field maintenance bears little or no similarity to that back at base, the environment is unique and often extreme. Time pressure is often increased for field engineers who have to meet tight turn-round schedules, and have the right technical documentation and direction to hand, dependent on the task and time. In unique, and often restrictive, maintenance environments full enterprise solution functionality can become a hindrance to field engineers - tailored functionality for the specific environment is critical to meeting operational deadlines.

The need for tailored information and functionality

Speedy resolution of unusual problems can be massively enhanced if equipment and those in support can understand the multiple contexts the field engineer is encountering. These include 'user' context such as the user’s profile, location, people nearby, even the current social situation; 'physical' context such as lighting, noise levels, traffic conditions and temperature; and 'time' context such as time of a day, week, month, and season of the year at the deployed location; and finally an 'operational' context to monitor elements such as spare part availability and the maintenance task at hand.

This is where wearables and context aware technology enter the fray. According to recent Forrester research, 68 percent of global technology and business decision makers say that wearables are a priority for their firm, with 51 percent calling it a moderate, high or critical priority.

 

Wearables can sense the user's physical environment much more completely than previously possible, and in many more situations. This makes them excellent platforms for applications where the computer is working even when you aren't giving explicit commands. Future developments will introduce increased use of solutions that will automatically tailor their presentation and operation through recognition of the maintenance environment it is in.

Context Aware and Wearables in action - Civil Aviation

In the base environment, there are opportunities for application of the technology across production, quality assurance, safety, warehousing and logistics - for example, wearables can increase worker agility. Supporting the location of faulty wires or equipment on a grounded aircraft, and notifying workers about hazards such as the presence of other activities being conducted on the aircraft, are areas that could be addressed right now. Boeing is currently experimenting with augmented reality for aircraft maintenance, a hands-free device instructs workers where to find a product in the inventory.

This could be extended to giving mechanics virtual 'sight' of components hidden behind other systems or structures relative to their personal location - allowing them to remove, fit or adjust a component that they cannot physically see.

The instant effect on maintenance repair and overhaul (MRO)

Wearables with augmented reality have the potential to automatically identify the spare part required by a field engineer. Information on the appearance, known context and maintenance task required can then be fed through to the engineer's wearable device negating the need to barcode scan or consult technology documents in difficult maintenance environments - such as a dark submarine bilge or the underbelly of an aircraft - where movement is limited. It also removes the requirement for the intimate support of a base supply chain and logistician. This comes with the added bonus of not having to trek kilometres across an airfield to access catalogues in a maintenance hangar or planning office.

With context aware and wearable technology cross-matching bar codes, stock or part numbers - or even better integrating with electronic technical documents - the engineer can ensure that the right item is demanded or fitted, with the benefit of reducing time consuming document and database searches that introduce a greater opportunity for error. Increased autonomy thanks to wearables and context aware computing means the maintenance engineer spends less time 'downing tools' to consult collateral material, improving overall MRO efficiency.

Expertise on demand

Wearables can also be used for maintenance, repairs and over-the-shoulder coaching for remote engineers. Cargo and maintenance personal from a major airline have trialled the use of an optical head-mounted display (OHMD) to help inspect aircraft on the tarmac. They capture video and photos and send them to a central office where technical safety professionals assess an aircraft’s condition.

IFS is working with XM Reality to bring forward a remote expert to assist in complex maintenance to broaden the capabilities of maintenance engineers on the ground - 'augmenting' flight-line workers' skills. IFS believes adding cognitive applications and voice-controlled intelligent agents similar to Siri to wearable devices would further augment such workers' skills, helping them identify and act on specific problems with more autonomy.

Look out for Part Two of this feature which takes a closer look at the role Context-Aware mobile apps will have in achieving wider deployment of wearables.

 

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