Mize announce the availability of a new Health Check designed to monitor the health of technicians and protect the safety of end customers.

 

Developed in response to COVID-19, this application enables organizations to assign service orders based on the health of their technicians.

At the beginning of each day, organizations can use the Health Check feature to collect vital health signs from each individual technician and automatically determine if the technician’s Health Check status is “Fit” or “Unfit”.

Health Check utilizes an intuitive user interface to capture information including the technician’s temperature and any COVID-19 symptoms the technician may be experiencing that day:

• Dry cough
• Lost or diminished smell
• Sore throat
• Weakness
• Change in appetite
• Difficulty breathing

Technicians receive a Health Check Status of “Fit” if their temperate is normal (96.0 to 98.6 degrees), and they have no symptoms.  Otherwise, their status is “Unfit”. 

Business Rules allocate and assign service orders based on the technician’s status.

Key features of the Health Check application include

• Automatically allocate and assign Service Orders to Technicians with a Fit status.
• Prevent allocation of Service Orders to Technicians with Unfit status
• Real time update and notification to dispatch schedule if a previously assigned technician’s status changes to Unfit
• Block Technicians with Unfit Status or who have not completed daily Health Check from starting work on a Service Order
• Enable Technicians with Fit Status to accept Service Orders from their mobile device
• Ability to access additional COVID-19 knowledge resources (e.g., checklists, videos, pdfs., presentations, etc.)
• Advanced Search capabilities enable an organization to search Health Check information by date, technician name, symptoms, and temperature

Health Check is now available as a free feature within Mize Service Smart Blox and Field Service Management Solution.

Click here to request a Free Demonstration of Mize Service Smart Blox and Health Check feature to learn more.

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Further Reading:

• To find out more about Mize click here.
• Read more about health and safety in service @ www.fieldservicenews.com/safety
• Read more about Field Service Software @ www.fieldservicenews.com/Field_Service_Software
• Connect with Michael Blumberg, CMO Mize on Linked In @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/blumberg1/
• Follow Mize on twitter @ https://twitter.com/mizecom

It’s well documented that happier and more engaged employees significantly boost customer experience. While plenty of workforce experts are armed with advice on management style, culture, and incentivization as a way to boost engagement, our customers and partners in the service industry also look at another factor — workforce experience. 

In the service industry, much of what drives customer satisfaction is directly related to the experience of the field service engineer on the job.

And right now, the average tenure of the workforce in the service industry is declining due to all the reasons that service leaders lament daily, including retiring Baby Boomers, higher turnover for younger workers, and a changing job market. 

It’s important to improve the collective knowledge of the entire workforce. Once you’ve bridged the knowledge gap, then it’s easier to improve service delivery. Here’s why: 

 

Experience and Training Builds Confident Employees 

If your employee isn’t sure how to make the correct fix or spends the bulk of their time on the job swapping out parts until the issue is resolved, they won’t be able to move forward and develop customer relationships. It’s also been shown that those with lower confidence levels project lower confidence to others around them. 

Ensuring field technicians are trained, mentored, and given tools to help them do their job right the first time, builds a positive reinforcement loop. Providing up-to-date technology also further engages Millennials and Gen Z who are motivated to master technology, seeing it as a career advancement step. And once they’ve mastered it themselves, they’re more likely to share tips and hacks with colleagues, creating an informal learning environment that increases confidence and workforce proficiency.

Studies have also shown that confident employees boost the bottom line. Employees that show greater confidence levels, on average, have 22% higher sales.

At a time when service models are moving away from break/fix work and towards proactive plans that rely on consistent service, and require some upselling on the part of service technicians, confidence and experience is key.

 

The Power of Tribal Knowledge - Equal Access to Knowledge is Key

Your most experienced employees have the most institutional knowledge, but they are also retiring in droves. There are ways to quickly upskill less tenured employees by using the deep expertise that has historically been locked in the minds of your best veterans. This is how to share tribal knowledge.

AI technology captures siloed tribal knowledge, makes that knowledge accessible across your workforce, and empowers junior employees with the wisdom of your experts. It’s also a way to effectively listen to the advice from your most tenured employees and work with them to put their wisdom into practice — showing them how their skills directly result in better customer experience. 

How can you transfer workforce knowledge quickly? AI combined with natural language processing does the work of years of in-the-field training. It takes historical data (including technician notes and other free text) and tribal knowledge, and turns that into prescriptive and actionable insights, accessible to everyone including customer service agents and field technicians on the job.

 

Customer Success: How Becton Dickinson Accelerated Knowledge Transfer - They leveraged AI to boost employee morale and NPS scores.

While service teams across the nation need to consistently hone their technical skills, technicians at BD (Becton Dickinson) need to be even more in step with machinery. The group services two main types of medical instruments: research instruments that are often specially designed for each client, meaning many are unique and clinical instruments that fall under strict FDA regulation.

The problem: 

A few years ago morale was low, employee attrition hovered around 26% and the service teams were consistently failing to meet SLAs. This also caused rising expenses, falling revenues, and record low customer satisfaction, with a net promoter score around 40%

Nearly half of the BD service workforce had less than 3 years of tenure. More experienced service engineers had an overloaded schedule and didn’t have time to train or coach newer employees.

Steve Chamberland, Director, US Service Operations at Becton Dickinson explained in a webinar that the team took drastic measures to improve performance by focusing on employee experience and training. He notes that the company adopted the following outlook to guide a transformation, “Employee experience leads to improved customer experience and that led to improvements in financial performance, which drove profitability.”

The Solution: 

BD invested in a range of technology solutions, including Aquant, and implemented an internal technology panel that consisted of gathering feedback from seasoned field service engineers. The goal was to boost morale while simultaneously enacting a service transformation based on their internal expert advice combined with the aid of tech tools. 

When it came to specifically using Aquant to aid in service, even with specialized machines and terminology, the Aquant NLP engine learned the service language unique to BD. And then turned to the input of experts to help further train the system to ensure the suggested solutions are the most accurate.

The Results:

Employee service and morale improved significantly after they had access to tools that helped them do their job more accurately. They also felt more empowered to make good service decisions. 

• Employee attrition dropped from 26% to 1%
• SLA commitments shot up to 99%
• Net promoter score now averages 80%

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To learn more about how customers are using Aquant to build experience and improve the service experience, listen to the full webinar with Becton Dickinson. 

In this highlight form the Field Service Podcast, Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News talks to Kevin Green, former HR Director of the Royal Mail and author of the best selling book Competitive People Strategy about how we identify the core values within a business and what that means in times of crisis.

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Want to hear more head over to our podcast library @ www.fieldservicenews.com/podcasts and look for Series Five, Episode One 'Kevin Green on Leadership, Strategy and the Economic Impact of Lockdown' for the full episode...

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Leadership Values should be lived not put up on a wall

One of the things that has been evident amongst many organisations who have adapted best to the challenging operating conditions of the last few months is that there has been a genuine in the trenches approach to how we're all getting through this together.

One of the things that has really come to the fore in terms of good leadership has been a leadership method that has strengthened this message. The common mantra of many a leadership communication at this time is that so we're all pulling together, we're all moving in the same direction together and to achieve recovery we must embrace a very collegial approach.

As Green outlined in Season Five, Episode One of The Field Service Podcast the ability to not only convey such a message, but to actively live it, is something that is embedded in strong leadership.

“We talk a lot about behaviours and values within organisations,” he begins as we touch on the topic. “When organisations are tested, they're put under pressure, then it's how you behave that your people will remember. They won’t remember what's written down on a piece of paper or the value stuff up on a wall. They remember when there are tough decisions to be made, how our leaders made those decisions - did they live by their values?

“The obvious one is has the organisation tried to keep as many people employed as possible and get as many people to the other side?” He adds.

 

"When recovery comes and people have a choice about who they work for, will people will want to stay and work for your organisation?"

 

This consideration is something that has been echoed across much of the content here on Field Service News and beyond. The way an organisation acts towards their staff during crisis could have a significant impact on their ability to retain skilled field workers when the economies begin to reopen. Remember, many field service organisations will be seeking to catch up on capacity lost during the crisis and as such the field service engineer is likely to be a role very much in demand.

Green touched in this in the wider business context as he continued; “Staff don't forget, there's a long corporate memory within most organisations,” he explains.

“So leaders have got to think about the decisions they're making with a lens as to how does this play out to my people now, but as you mentioned, when recovery comes and people have a choice about who they work for, will people will want to stay and work for your organisation? A lot of that will be dependent on how the leadership behaved when the organisation was under huge pressure, and whether they did the right thing by the people.

“Now, that isn't to say that organisations don't make to make need to cut costs and make some people redundant because I think in this environment, some have had to do that. But it's also about how you communicate that and how do you engage your people?

“One Chief Executive I was talking to recently phoned every single member of staff that was made redundant, and had an individual conversation with them, and then said at the end of that conversation to every single one, and there were about 60 or 70 people, ‘this isn't your fault, and when we get back, then I'm going to prioritise and re employing you people. I really don't want to do this, but I had no choice’ and he explained the circumstances on a personal one to one level.

“Now, that is leadership. [He] still made the tough decision, but actually [he] implemented it in a way which means those people most probably will go back and work for him when the roles do become available again.”

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Further Reading:

• Find the full episode of this interview and the entire back catalogue of The Field Service Podcast @ www.fieldservicenews.com/podcasts
• Read more about Leadership and strategy @ www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/leadership-and-strategy
• Read more about the impact of Covid-19 on Field Service @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/en-gb/covid-19
• Connect with Kevin Green on LinkedIn @ www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-green-221a7522
• Follow Kevin Green on Twitter @ twitter.com/kevingreenwnc
• Buy Competitive People Strategy @ Competitive People Strategy: How to Attract, Develop and Retain the Staff You Need for Business Success

Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News and Kevin Green, former HR Director of Royal Mail and the best selling author of Competitive People Strategy discuss what culture is within an organisation and how to identify whether a corporate culture is strong or toxic...

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Want to hear more head over to our podcast library @ www.fieldservicenews.com/podcasts and look for Series Five, Episode One 'Kevin Green on Leadership, Strategy and the Economic Impact of Lockdown' for the full episode...

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Does your leadership team understand the Value of Nurturing culture within the business? 

In the few short months since the Covid-19 pandemic spread around the world and we went into a global lockdown everything has changed.

As Kevin Green explained in Season Five, Epsiode, One of the Field Service Podcast, it is as if a meteorite has hit us and the world of industry went into temporary shutdown operating at minimum capacity. There is talk that in terms of economics, we could potentially bounce back as sharply as we fell, although the majority of analysts are now predicting a longer more sustained road to recovery

However, the truth remains that we are collectively waking up into a different world than that which existed pre-pandemic and that will be the case no matter how quickly we get to the recovery.

There are fundamental things that will have changed, particularly in some of the service industries which have been hardest hit such as the hospitality sector.  Yet similarly we have seen a massive boost to the digital transformation projects that were dots on the horizon for many companies just a few months earlier which have become mission-critical necessities today.  

Equally we have seen businesses become adaptive, with those leading the way pivoting in some of the most remarkable way to help battle the pandemic but also to keep their teams in work and the revenue flowing even in these most challenging of years.

But how do we create an adaptive culture? How we make sure that our team are able to continue evolving throughout the recovery processes, we move beyond into a post COVID-19 world?

 

"The issue for me is whether the organisation has really spent time thinking about it [the corporate culture] and understanding it and do the leaders get that developing, enhancing and reinforcing a culture is what gets great results?"

 

“Every organisation has a culture, whether it's a well-articulated and something that's been designed or created over a period of time, or whether it's just how people behave within the business,” explained Green.

“One of the good examples I always use when I talk about culture is how do people behave when the manager is not there? Do they still work incredibly hard and do they still give discretionary effort? Or actually when the manager is not around, they just muck around, and not work hard? That will describe your culture, how people feel about the organisation.

“The other great example is when you meet someone that works for an organisation in a social setting and you ask them, what's it like to work there? What do they say? That's when you can, that's a real articulation of your culture,” Green adds.

For Green though the value of culture within an organisation goes far, far beyond coping within crisis – it is where the inherent value of the business lies and is something that absolutely needs to be nurtured by the leadership team.

“The issue for me is whether the organisation has really spent time thinking about it [the corporate culture] and understanding it and do the leaders get that developing, enhancing and reinforcing a culture is what gets great results?

“My belief is that most value in today's economy comes from human beings. It used to be about access to capital and machinery. But now it's about you know, and if you look at the PwC survey of Chief Execs globally, the number one issue is talent. Have I got the talent? Have I got more talent than my competitors? Can I find it? And can I retain it?

“To do that, you've got to have a culture where people want to work, where they can turn up and do good work, you and that's the fundamental thing about having an adaptive culture, you must articulate your purpose. Why does the organisation exist?”

As we continue to grow into a post Covid world, it is likely that it is those companies that understand what it is to establish and adaptable culture that are likely to thrive in the ‘new-normal’.

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Further Reading:

• Find the full episode of this interview and the entire back catalogue of The Field Service Podcast @ www.fieldservicenews.com/podcasts
• Read more about Leadership and strategy @ www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/leadership-and-strategy
• Read more about the impact of Covid-19 on Field Service @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/en-gb/covid-19
• Connect with Kevin Green on LinkedIn @ www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-green-221a7522
• Follow Kevin Green on Twitter @ twitter.com/kevingreenwnc
• Buy Competitive People Strategy @ Competitive People Strategy: How to Attract, Develop and Retain the Staff You Need for Business Success

Workiz’s New Integration with Zoom Allows Service Businesses to Provide Estimates Remotely, Protecting Clients and Technicians during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Workiz, the leading field service management and communication software, announced today a new integration with Zoom, the video conferencing service. In response to a growing need, Workiz provided this new integration feature to enable service businesses, such as repair services, junk haulers, and carpet cleaners, to give video estimates to their customers.

Service Providers

By reducing  the need for physical interactions between service providers and their customers, this innovative solution helps maintain social distancing guidelines during the pandemic.

Video estimates allow service businesses to:

• Work more efficiently by having service providers give estimates remotely rather than traveling back and forth to customers’ homes.
• Protect the safety of both service providers and customers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Save recordings of estimates in Workiz, their scheduling and management software.
• Troubleshoot simple problems over video for a reduced rate

According to Workiz’s data, an average of 70% of service providers’ time is spent preparing and providing estimates, rather than actually performing their services. Only 28% of these estimates ultimately result in paying jobs. This new feature allows service businesses to do online estimates via video which saves them time, thereby improving their efficiency and helping them become more profitable.

“This Zoom integration allows customers ease of mind during this pandemic,” explained Thomas Dawson, Founder and Owner of Dumpster Intervention Patrol, a trash, recycle bin and dumpster sanitizing and cleaning service based in Peoria, Arizona. Furthermore, ”If somebody who lives 50 miles away called me and asked for a free home estimate — as a business it doesn’t make sense to drive 100 miles without knowing the job is guaranteed.” In the junk business sector, 76% of technicians’ time is spent on estimates rather than on actual jobs for which they get paid. An average estimate for the industry is $650, with a win rate of 27%. Therefore, the ability to do online estimates can be a game changer in this industry.

Workiz provides small to medium-sized, on-demand field service businesses with all the tools they need to manage their business, grow their revenues and improve customer experience. Its software as a service (SaaS) solution is being used by tens of thousands of service professionals, such as junk removal companies, carpet cleaners and appliance repair professionals in North America.

“Due to COVID-19, service companies are experiencing a 20-40% decline in new job orders, as clients think twice before calling in service professionals,” said Adi (Didi) Azaria, CEO of Workiz. “Real-time video can provide service companies the ability to answer questions and request information via a live stream with clients. They can guide clients to use their smartphone cameras to show them what needs to be done for better understanding, quick problem-solving and providing estimates.” Furthermore, “For clients who are more concerned with having service professionals enter their house, service businesses might look into offering paid video consulting for different types of projects.”

Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News talks to Kevin Green, former CEO Recruitment and Employment Confederation and the best selling author of Competitive People Strategy about what leadership looks like in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic and a global lockdown.

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Want to hear more head over to our podcast library @ www.fieldservicenews.com/podcasts and look for Series Five, Episode One 'Kevin Green on Leadership, Strategy and the Economic Impact of Lockdown' for the full episode...

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The Importance of Trust Within leadership

The role of leadership has perhaps never been under the microscope more than it is today.

It is in times of crisis that we see strong leadership come to the fore but is there a different type of leadership required for managing an organisation through a crisis. Winston Churchill for example, regarded by many as one of the world’s great leaders was able to galvanise the British during the second world war to somehow bring to a halt the apparently unstoppable might of the Nazi war machine. Yet, in the first election of peacetime in 1945 he led the Conservatives to a shocking landslide defeat at the hands of Clement Attlee’s Labour Party.

As we read, listen and watch about the impact of Covid-19 the war-time analogies continue to flow, it is hard for us to draw any other parallels as none really exist within living memory.

So, are the leadership traits that we're seeing emerge now different to what will be required after the pandemic? Or is it just that there is a magnifying glass on good leadership at the moment and what we are paying attention to is best practice in terms of leadership?

“I think the businesses that have responded most positively and have been the most agile and responsive in in the face of something which is a pretty extreme and very rare event are the organisations who have very clear ideas about how organisations should be run,” Kevin Green, commented on The Field Service Podcast, Season Five, Epiosde One.

 

"The centre of the organisation is responsible for strategy, long term thinking and some guiding principles and then they devolve decision making to people to in the appropriate place in the organisation to respond to customers wants and needs."

 

One of the common areas that Green has identified amongst such organisations is that there is an understanding that trust must be embedded across the organisation rather than the absolute approach of a more authoritarian leadership style.

“It's not command and control from the top,” he explains “it's not everything rises to the top but [these companies are applying] very dissipated decision making. Here the centre of the organisation is responsible for strategy, long term thinking and some guiding principles and then they devolve decision making to people to in the appropriate place in the organisation to respond to customers wants and needs.

“Those organisations that have already got that type of leadership, mentality and culture are the ones that have responded most quickly and most effectively. If you’ve got a command and control structure it's very, very difficult for one group of people, that don't have all the facts, [who] aren't in control of everything ,to make decisions on every data point,” he adds.

However, it is not just an efficiency challenge that Green sees in a command and control approach. There is also the heavy weight of burden that this can carry on the leadership team and this can have a significant impact on their own performance as well if left unchecked.  

As Green explains; “You get swamped and the pressure becomes quite profound.  [To avoid this] the centre of the organisation needs to create direction, clarity and communication for their people and then allow leaders at a local level to make decisions about how best to implement them.

“What this [Covid-19] has highlighted is that good leadership, where people trust their people and trust their managers to make the right decisions in 90% of circumstances and have got the benefit [of that approach] while those are perhaps a little bit more old fashioned [in their leadership structure] have struggled.”

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Further Reading:

• Find the full episode of this interview and the entire back catalogue of The Field Service Podcast @ www.fieldservicenews.com/podcasts
• Read more about Leadership and strategy @ www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/leadership-and-strategy
• Read more about the impact of Covid-19 on Field Service @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/en-gb/covid-19
• Connect with Kevin Green on LinkedIn @ www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-green-221a7522
• Follow Kevin Green on Twitter @ twitter.com/kevingreenwnc
• Buy Competitive People Strategy @ Competitive People Strategy: How to Attract, Develop and Retain the Staff You Need for Business Success

While the hope of a V-shaped dip in the economy is still a possibility, we cannot underestimate the sheer magnitude of the economic impact of the global lockdowns as Kevin Green explained in a episode of the Field Service Podcast...

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Want to hear more head over to our podcast library @ www.fieldservicenews.com/podcasts and look for Series Five, Episode One 'Kevin Green on Leadership, Strategy and the Economic Impact of Lockdown' for the full episode...

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Understanding the True Economic Impact of Covid-19

Talking to Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News during episode one of season five of the Field Service Podcast, Kevin Green outlined just why the challenge we face now is different from anything that has come before.

"I suppose the starting point, is recognising the difference from an economic perspective the Covid-19 health crisis has created in comparison to previous recessions," Green began.

Going on to draw on his own experience both as Chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Federation, as well as former HR Director for the UK's Royal Mail, Green continued "the recruitment industry always rises to the economic waves quite well. In that, it goes into recession early, but it also comes out early.

"I can remember in 2008, and that was a pretty unprecedented economic downturn, six quarters of contraction where our industry lost 30% of its revenue. However, in 2008 there was a period before we went into that recession. There was a debate going on, as to whether a recession was coming or not. So, most businesses had six to nine months to prepare for the downturn. The difference with COVID-19 is it happened within a week.

"The government first decided it was going to start asking people to self-isolate and close down parts of the economy. But actually, when we then entered lockdown, in reality with like an asteroid hit the planet, effectively we were switching off 70% of the economic activity of the country. What that has done to our economy is created a huge shock. We've not got any preparation. People weren't prepared at all, and we've just gone headlong into a recession, which will be pretty significant."

"Liquidity has become everything. It's not so much about profitability, or your P&L and your balance sheet. Now, it's more about how I got the cash to get the business and as many people as possible to the other side..."

The point Green makes is crucial for how we are to make the necessary adjustments as we prepare a road towards recovery. We cannot under-estimate the sheer magnitude of the impact of Covid-19 on the global economy and how that will have an ongoing effect on the business chains our organisations exist within.

As Green continues; "So [this recession] is clearly more severe than previous recessions and much faster. I suppose the obvious way to compare is if you think about unemployment. Within the first two weeks of the this crisis, we have had a million people [within the UK] register for Universal Credit. In the last recession, it took us nearly three years to get a million more people unemployed. So that gives you an indication of how rapid the changes be."

This is an eye-opening statistic. It does well to outline how the current scenario is not comparable to the global economic downturn in 2008, where we had a more generic, slower build into a recession. Something that allowed companies to make advance decisions around not hiring and cutting back on investment.

Green went on to describe the situation in 2020 as one where "businesses were, all of a sudden on a precipice, deciding whether they could survive. [They were] taking costs out having to make very draconian and hard decisions very, very quickly, just to survive.

"Liquidity has become everything. It's not so much about profitability, or your P&L and your balance sheet. Now, it's more about how I got the cash to get the business and as many people as possible to the other side."

It has been a period of testing times for all of us, and those in leadership roles have had hard, hard decisions to make. Green is closely connected to many involved in such conversations in his role as a serial entrepreneur.

"It's been a time of crisis, and it's been incredibly difficult for leaders and leadership teams," Green explains. "it's taken its toll in terms of stress, anxiety, and lots of sleepless nights as businesses have had to take really tough decisions."

Yet, despite being in the heat of 'battle' on many fronts and having a comprehensive viewpoint on how the challenges we face today are genuinely unprecedented, Green still sees a glimmer of optimism in the future.

"Hopefully there is some good news in that we can come out of recessions as quickly as we entered it. As soon as soon the government starts lifting some of the self-isolating and people having to work from home, then parts of the economy can and will switch back on again. I think what we all have to hope is that, while we've gone into recession very, very quickly, we will come out pretty fast on the other side as well."

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Further Reading:

• Find the full episode of this interview and the entire back catalogue of The Field Service Podcast @ www.fieldservicenews.com/podcasts
• Read more about Leadership and strategy @ www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/leadership-and-strategy
• Read more about the impact of Covid-19 on Field Service @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/en-gb/covid-19
• Connect with Kevin Green on LinkedIn @ www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-green-221a7522
• Follow Kevin Green on Twitter @ twitter.com/kevingreenwnc
• Buy Competitive People Strategy @ Competitive People Strategy: How to Attract, Develop and Retain the Staff You Need for Business Success

Mark Glover spoke to Roy Chikballapur about the role of edge computing in Industry 4.0, how a comparison with the cloud is not useful and why bringing the two technologies together could benefit the smart factory.

 

In a recent LinkedIn post I pondered if edge computing would ever replace the cloud. 

service innovation from Automation

A comment from Roy Chikballapur from MachIQ caught my eye. “I would say that they are heavily complementary, and neither can deliver without enough advancement of the other,” he wrote, “The edge hyperbole is an automation-industry led backlash that doesn’t fully capture the opportunity of the speed with which innovation can be implemented on the cloud and distributed to the edge.”

This was all great stuff. I quickly messaged Roy and we arranged an interview the following day. This was the kind of insight I was hoping for, however the Skype call we set up had other ideas, booting Roy off the line halfway through.

Skype operates via the cloud, having moved there in 2016 after existing primarily in P2P networks. However, as proven by my call with Roy, connections can drop out as the application gobbles up bandwidth. 

Our connection used a trickle of data compared to that of a connected smart factory and it seemed ironic that our video-chat set-up to discuss the role of cloud and edge computing should drop out.

“You can’t have (connection issues) like we just had right now,” Roy says, using our dis-connection as an example of what can’t happen in an industry setting. “You can’t afford that break in the network when you’re running any type of factory because machines just can’t stop.”

Roy is absolutely right. For manufacturers time is money and asset downtime is loss making. The digital sinews that connect smart factory assets need to work all the time and Roy’s initial comment in response to my LinkedIn post, that the cloud is unable to handle these intricacies (that it was unable to handle our Skype call is another article) made sense.

Of course, the cloud is not in the sky, it’s very much on the ground, stored on data centres and server farms, sometimes a long way from the asset that’s asking to communicate with it. It’s this geographical distance that causes ‘lag’ or latency in “cloud speak”- the time it takes to get the data sent, dealt with and then sent back. A lag of several seconds may seem trivial but for industry it’s pivotal.

The news item that prompted this piece, centred on an analyst report from GlobalData who suggested edge computing was primed for the Asia Pacific (APAC) region. 

"Edge computing operates by being physically closer to a device..."

The APAC consists of East and South Asia, South East Asia and Oceania and is made up of large sprawling countries like China and Australia. It covers approximately 2.8 billion hectares of land blanketing nearly 22% of the global land area. It’s huge.

In the report, GlobalData predicted benefits for the region’s manufacturing sector if it fully adopted the edge including the streamlining of industrial processes, supply chain improvement and more autonomous use of equipment.

The uptake, the report claims, is due to the widespread adoption of connected assets in the region including smart homes. It forecasts by 2024, given the current adoption rate, it will become the second-largest market of edge computing, second only to North America.

In contrast to the cloud, edge computing operates by being physically closer to a device, rather than stored in a data centre several hundred miles away; operating on the ‘edge’ of a network thus transporting the digital instructions quicker and negating lag. 

The report says China will spearhead the adoption, and given the country’s size (9.5 million km²), lag from a server in a Beijing datacentre for example to an end user in Shanghai could be avoided.

If, as the report claims, manufacturing is to benefit, it’s important to understand Industry 4.0; the fourth industrial revolution as it were, where data is the new coal and a natural environment for the edge to operate.

In our home, we tinker with the heating while on the train home from work; or look through our security camera while waiting for a bus. It’s this societal shift in the use of connected devices, Roy says, that has pushed the fourth industrial revolution forwards. 

“If you see where the Internet of Things came from, it has origins in implementations such as Google’s Nest,” he explains. “Here the sensors would send signals to the Cloud to make sense of the data, determine what action the device needed and carry them out.”

This was a step on from Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), the first industry-based conduit for connecting machines to networks and a significant step in manufacturing’s development. 

Pre-internet and pre-big data their use was limited but large B2C tech firms: Microsoft and, in this instance, Google, with the eventual advent of the cloud, took the technology further. Today can get your living room lights talking with your mobile phone. “That was basically how Nest really started,” Roy says.

"The industrial firms knew that the cloud alone could not sustain the real-time demands of smart factory operations..."

PLCs were game changers for of GE and Schneider in terms of industrial automation (Schneider would eventually purchase Modicon, the company credited with producing the first PLC), they understood the value of real-time data in a factory setting; that continuous uptime and production was paramount to their operations. Which bring us back to Roy’s point on industrial continuity and how the lag from cloud connectivity will not only affect output but, most importantly, employees’ wellbeing too.

“If it takes multiple seconds for data to travel back and forth, for instructions to be sent from a cloud-based controller to a device in the factory,” Roy says, “it can sometimes literally mean the difference between life and death as there are cases when worker safety inside the plant is affected. And that just can’t happen.”

The edge vs cloud debate was fuelled by industrial actors like GE, Schneider and Siemens responding to IT players including the aforementioned Google, Amazon and Microsoft’s assertion that the cloud could oversee everything, including industrial, operational technology.

The industrial firms knew that the cloud alone could not sustain the real-time demands of smart factory operations. It just wasn’t possible. The stand-off went on for some time until Moore’s law – his 1965 theory that over time, more and more transistors would fit into silicon chips - made it economical to embed sufficient data storage and processing capacity within the asset itself, enabling much of the real-time computing that make smart factories “smart”.

“Computing that was initially supposed to be carried out in the cloud could eventually be carried out on the device itself, by attaching a processor inside. This is basically what edge computing is.” Roy says before suggesting the technology could and should work in perfect harmony with the cloud, particularly in industrial environments. ”There is a space for both these technologies to operate side by side and complement each other perfectly well, to deliver exponentially higher value to industrial plants than either one being utilised alone.

There’s more to discuss here, particularly around edge and the Cloud working together, but I’m saving this for an episode of the Field Service Podcast with Roy as my guest.

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Further Reading: 

• Read more about cloud computing in field service @ www.fieldservicenews.com/edge
• Read more about customer servitization in field service @ www.fieldservicenews.com/servitization
• Read more articles by Mark Glover here.

What can we learn from the social environment of silicon valley and can it be adapted to service? Mark Glover finds out more...

In the 1960's, sunlight seeping into the bay area of San Francisco would glisten not only off the sea but, perhaps less evocatively, off the many silicon transistors being developed at the time.

Curating Innovation in Field Service

Since then, the area better known as silicon valley sparked with creativity from the world famous Stanford University and through a tech evolution that started in military equipment, straddling space research, radio equipment, computer software; stopping slightly to ease itself out of the dotcom bubble, has emerged as the technology capital of the world.

It now means that when we think of innovation, we think of silicon valley. It contains the largest concentration of high-tech companies in the United States. The area bristles with start-ups who have started or are about to; a place where ideas fizz creating some of the biggest trends and movements.

Its criss-cross of streets and avenues are dotted with famous tech companies.

Facebook, Google, Twitter all bloomed from its creative soil and it was while researching this article, using the aforementioned web-based search engine, my browser guided me to a picture of an unassuming garage in Palo Alto, the caption underneath reading: "The birthplace of Silicon Valley."

Further investigation revealed the garage had, in 1938, been where two college friends, William Hewlett and David Packard, began developing their audio oscillator. As I look around my office I see a printer with the pair's names on which is probably ubiquitous across many other offices up and down the land and another nod towards the global influence of the Valley.

Hewlett Packard, Facebook, Twitter base themselves or have a presence there. Google's 'Googleplex', the company's vast glass and chrome office-space shimmies and shines over 2,000,000 square feet in Mountain View, California.

Employees from the surrounding San Francisco areas are whizzed into work and back by a wi-fi enabled Google shuttle bus. It's not Google's main HQ, that's in New York City, but the company recognised the importance of embedding themselves here.

But why is this part of the world such a fertile area for creativity and big ideas? Of course, the weather, fine beeches and transport links all help - as does the location of of Stanford University, one of the finest education establishments in the world but the creativity has matured and eventually embedded itself over time.

 

"It's interacting heavily with each other, doing the same things and learning and inspiring each other and setting the same standards..."

 

The original sediment fused in silicon chips has, for those that work there, become an ingrained culture that is the envy of many a businesses and thought pieces in Wired and HBR. Those that find themselves working there can't help but be absorbed and locked into its social environment.

In a recent Field Service Podcast Jan van Veen discussed how an social environment like that of Silicon Valley's can lead to business success. "The environment you're in heavily dictates or defines your success," he said. "There is a ambition to it, there is a stretched goal that you are trying to pursue.

"An example of this is Silicon Valley. Everyone is there together, doing the same kind of thing and just by being so close to each other and interacting with each other and doing similar work and collaborating with each other and then all of a sudden that boosts development."

"There are buildings where start-ups join together and are based but it's not just about the office-space, it's interacting heavily with each other, doing the same things and learning and inspiring each other and setting the same standards for example, 'How do we run our business and develop our business and grow our business?'"

It all sounds great, even better if you're in the California sunshine sipping a smoothie while caressing the keypad of your Macbook pro, but what does it really look from a business perspective? "It's a social environment, an environment of people together," Jan suggests. "The environment is a group of people, either inside your business or outside or a combination of both, all sharing the same kind of aspirations and values and goals. And that they have a high-level of interaction and the exchange of information, insight and experiences and interact with each other," he paused at this point in the podcast, "but it's more than this."

"It's setting a culture and values and that way influencing each other's behaviours, mindsets and habits and the actions you take," he continued. "It can boost the things you do and how well you are able to succeed in achieving your goals."

 

"The demands from clients are changing and we see that business models are changing and we are seeing new entrants coming into the industries..."

 

As we move forward over the next twelve months what benefits can adopting such a culture bring to the service sector? van Veen thinks it can affect how successful we are in using innovation to develop a more service-orientated business model. "In manufacturing industries we are seeing more and more digital technologies coming in. The demands from clients are changing and we see that business models are changing and we are seeing new entrants coming into the industries."

What this new social environment signifies is a warning to those that choose not to or fail to follow. If manufacturers are not able to adapt quickly and escape from business-as-usual and fail to adapt to new models then they will drop behind the competition. How well are we able to change the way we innovate our businesses, drive that innovation and thrive in a rapidly changing world?

When Mr.Packard and Mr.Hewlett dusted away the cobwebs in a garage in Pala Alto, looked around and taken a deep breath, did they know what they would achieve? Probably not, but they would have driven each other on, confident their mini social environment would get them through.

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Further Reading: 

• Read more articles by Mark Glover @ www.fieldservicenews.com/markglover
• To listen to the podcast referenced in the article click here.
• Read more about Service Innovation and Design @ www.fieldservicenews.com/service-innovation-and-design
• Join Jan van Veen's Community @ moremomentum.eu/discovery-session
• Connect with Jan van Veen on Linked in @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/janvanveen1