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Our sector is one that continues to breed innovation and ingenuity; where ideas are stretched, tested and then stretched some more. Coupled with new technology these ideas are disrupting what has gone before and turning traditional service on its head.

To celebrate this, Field Service News is proud to announce 2019’s #FSN20, our annual list of the individuals at the coal face of the sector, the practitioners who are all pushing for the same goal: service excellence. We whittled down over one hundred nominations, submitted from academia, industry influencers and field service practitioners, to a short list of 20. It was tough - given the vast amount of excellent work taking place - but we think the final names represent a fine snapshot of service innovation taking place across the global service arena.

So in no particular order, ladies and gentlemen, we our proud to present to you this year’s #FSN20...

As our roads become increasingly congested, driven by several factors including the increasing urbanisation of our populations and the mega-trend of click to order replacing the bricks and mortar high street, field service engineers can face significant challenges just to get to the job on time. Is last-mile facing a cross-roads and if so, which technological route does it need to take? Mark Glover finds out more...

The topic of last mile service delivery can be a complex nut to crack. However, one company who has been at the vanguard of doing so for more than 20 years is ByBox. The company provides overnight delivery of spares to a network of smart lockers, making the last mile both cost-efficient and effective. To find out more Kris Oldland spoke with Richard Agostinelli, their newly appointed CEO...

We can only manage what we measure as the old adage goes. But in  dynamically evolving environment such as we find our selves in today the question as to what exactly it is we should be measuring in order to manage our field service operations may be up for some debate. 

In field service operations, what does it mean to put customer service at the heart of our business decision making? Customers who receive the highest standards of service spend on average 140% more and in business-to-business, customer retention will typically see profits increase by up to 95%. In the next article in this strategic series, Paul Smedley looks at our part in this transformation and where we can look for examples of best practice...

IDC’s Aly Pinder explores one of the most crucial conundrums facing field service organisations today - how to ensure knowledge transfer is seamless across the organisation...

At some point we will finally reach the moment when all the seasoned field service engineers retire. I know, we have been foretelling this for years and in my case more than a decade. Despite this seemingly ever-present anxiety around replacing a retiring field workforce, many manufacturers and service organizations still list knowledge loss as a top challenge yet to be successfully addressed.

IDC Manufacturing Insights’ 2019 Product and Service Innovation Survey highlighted one of the top drivers for manufacturer’s service lifecycle management efforts is a need to capture and make accessible service knowledge and best practices. Building a culture of shared intelligence and accessibility of service knowledge, nearly half of organizations (42.7%) sampled in this study plan to leverage mobile devices for the purpose of increased collaboration amongst technicians.

These investments and prioritization demonstrate how much risk is inherent with having an entire workforce which often goes out on its own for an extended period of time, rarely coming back into a centralized location, and is one of the closest resources interacting directly with customers. The scary part is the value technicians to the customer experience is becoming more not less critical for manufacturers and service organizations.

In advance of losing field workers, I recommend you consider a few things:

• Identify your workforce that is planning to retire in the near future. Do you survey your technicians, at least annually, to ask them when they plan to retire? Assuming your technicians will retire at the retirement age of your respective country is quite risky. Reaching out to your technicians to identify when they plan to retire allows the organization to identify the level and urgency of the risk, plan for the loss, and even proactively strategize to either retain or hire more aggressively in advance of the loss.
• Get creative with technician retention. Organizations should establish a program that enables technicians to be able to work as a centralized expert. This is where gamification and incentives can be used to create a bench of technicians that are willing to stay with the company, accelerate the rate of capturing best practices, and recognize the value of the decades of experience which is held in the brains of the technician. Organizations would be wise to establish a role which based on identify qualifications or attainment of a certain expertise level can extend the viability of a seasoned technician staying on the team.
• Show your newer workforce a career path which is rewarding and valued. Many organizations struggle with creating tangible and exciting career paths for the workforce. Career paths are difficult to detail as there  are so many variables, both for the employee and the organization. This is an even bigger challenge with a largely remote workforce at many service organizations. However, the ability to communicate a future for the field technician is a critical step in addressing the workforce skills gap which should go hand in hand with trying to retain more seasoned technicians. This practice will help create a culture that values the service technician experience and show the workforce where they will fit in the broader strategy of the organization.

Talking about the retiring field force mustn’t be the end of the story that we tell each other, organizations must act now. Technology is one of the ways to capture and make accessible service knowledge, but manufacturers and service organizations need to identify their respective risk and build a strategy around addressing the loss of critical service knowledge.

Collaboration and shared purpose will enable organizations to get in front of this pending wave of retiring workers.

Field service organizations are under constant pressure to do more with less. As customer expectations for competitively-priced, high-quality services continues to grow, companies are looking for innovative ways to complete more work without taking on additional overheads. Mynul Khan, CEO, Field Nation discusses...