ARCHIVE FOR THE ‘features’ CATEGORY

Sergey Krasovski, Strategic Marketing Analyst, Trimble explores the opportunities that augmented reality can present for field service organisations... 

The mass and wide-scale adoption of augmented and mixed realities are gathering pace across a multitude of industries. To define, augmented reality refers to the process of superimposing a computer-generated image on a user's view of the real world. Mixed reality is the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualizations.

In the field service industry, this emerging technology can play a significant role in changing the way field technicians and the business collaborates to resolve technical issues, provide support and access documentation. Indeed, technologies such as AR smart glasses can overlay digital information (such as text, video or audio) onto the human field of view, interactively and in real-time. ABI Research sees a turning point for AR smart glasses, predicting that 21 million units of AR smart glasses will be shipped in 2020, with sales expected to reach $100 billion.

 

Optimizing Service Workflows

Mixed and AR technologies present strong use cases for the field service industry for optimizing service workflows. The ability to perform time-critical jobs thoroughly, quickly and first time around, by obtaining the right information from the correct source, is one.

Historically, service technicians had to sift through paper manuals or search their own memories to find a fix for complex equipment issues. This was an onerous process to go through and often resulted in a disgruntled customer. Today, however, Augmented Reality headsets provide technicians with the ability to communicate, collaborate and solve issues more efficiently. They could be dispatched to a job where they could see the service manual, real-time data and technical details about the product directly overlaid on it. There would be no need for a clunky laptop, phoning a colleague for assistance or contacting the back office for customer information; everything they need would be accessible with a flick of their head.

There is a big place for Augmented Reality in optimising service workflows. However, deploying new technology takes careful planning to realise the full benefits.

 

Empowering Less Skilled and Ageing Workforces

In mission-critical industries, such as construction, manufacturing and agriculture, ensuring that the service team captures knowledge and transfers it efficiently across the organization is a ‘must have’, not a ‘nice to have’. Asset downtime or system failure is not an option as it may result in entire projects grinding to a halt and monetary losses. Issue resolution needs to be quick and this is where collaborative video tools can best support a less skilled and ageing workforce.

 

"Video collaboration with augmented peer-to-peer help is being designed and implemented to connect less skilled technicians with more skilled ones remotely..."

 

Video collaboration with augmented peer-to-peer help is being designed and implemented to connect less skilled technicians with more skilled ones remotely. A technician with specific areas of expertise may reside in an office and virtually walk an apprentice through a service call, step-by-step. Markups can be made during a video call between an expert and field technician to visually show what needs doing and to be sure the field technician is clear about what to perform service on. The expert can draw a circle or arrow on a screen to highlight a specific area, eliminating costly mistakes.

There are parts of the world where you can’t get the right expertise for a job or flying out a specialist may prove too costly for a company. Augmented reality eradicates these concerns by allowing experts to take those of less skill through the entire process. Not with a manual and not on the phone, but they can actually see what they are doing.

Many technicians are performing this peer-to-peer help in ad hoc ways today; using tools like Facetime and Skype. This, however, has resulted in issues. For example, sending a facetime request to another technician can be very disruptive. It is also difficult for the technician requesting help to know who to contact and if they are available. Whilst the time spent by the expert is not often tracked. For organizations that want to successfully scale this technology, they need to consider how to integrate it more tightly into the service workflow.

 

"As technicians age and a new crop of workers join the business, it is imperative that the latter be able to leverage past knowledge. An ageing workforce is putting pressure on service organisations..."

 

As technicians age and a new crop of workers joins the business, it is imperative that the latter be able to leverage past knowledge. An ageing workforce is putting pressure on service organisations. The benefit of augmented or virtual reality is its potential as a highly detailed, highly visual training tool. Companies are recording repairs being performed on older pieces of equipment to be used as a reference by less experienced technicians. By utilising augmented reality to make markups pointing to specific equipment details, service companies can create a searchable library using descriptive metadata, and hashtags for quick access. This is a great way to offer on-the-job training and avoids the downtime and loss of productivity associated with having the entire team come into the office to learn new techniques.

Collaborative video tools not only provide the field team with the real-time assistance when solving complex issues, they also connect field service to the entire organization. Indeed, video content, such as markups and screenshots, can be captured by augmented reality tools and stored in a cloud. The stored data can then be tied with a work order and include valuable metadata such as geolocation, type of equipment, date of last service etc. If such data is centrally stored and can be easily accessed, it could be used for purposes like new technician training, proof of work and so on.

For more information on how you can look to roll out augmented reality across your field service operations, visit: www.trimblepulse.com

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Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News talks to Pål Rodseth, CEO of Asolvi about how he has brought together three key companies serving the SMB field servicer market across Europe, the meaning behind the new brand name Asolvi, how their customers are benefiting from the collectively shared learnings of a wider pool of peers and what the future holds for Asolvi.

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Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News, reflects his thoughts on the impact of Artificial Intelligence in the field service sector during his leader in the May/June issue Field Service News...

A recurring theme across this leader across the first few issues of this year has been around the perfect storm of technology that has evolved around us and how the field service sector is embracing technology at a faster rate than ever...

In fact, I’ve often gone to great lengths to stress that it is not about any one technology, in particular, that is driving field service delivery to ever increasing heights but in fact how these technologies can come together in a service-centric ecosystem.

However, one thing that I keep coming back around to when I’m thinking about this topic is that there is actually one key technology that whilst isn’t perhaps a technology that we can explore on its own is in fact perhaps the most important piece of the puzzle.

That, of course, is Artificial Intelligence or AI.

Of course, in field service, AI is nothing that new.

It could be argued that the complex and intricate algorithms that sit within and enable fully optimised and dynamic scheduling engines to do their thing are AI. They learn, they adapt and they do it largely by themselves (if set up correctly). Sounds like AI to me, and dynamic scheduling has been around for a long time.

There is for sure some degree of truth in this, and AI is to some degrees a nice catchy name for a whole raft of different algorithms all designed to do something different. In some circles we throw in the words Machine Learning as well, which for those that know about this type of thing will almost certainly have a nuanced difference from AI - but speaking on behalf of laymen and troglodytes everywhere - I’m damned if I can work out what it is.

However, what I can do is get my head around just why AI is so important.

As I said earlier it is the various other technologies that are feeding into each other in one ecosystem that will allow us to drive our service standards forwards.

For example, IoT has been a huge talking point in the industry now for quite some time, but the sheer volume of data we now create has made it almost impossible to extrapolate meaningful insight from that data.

Step forward AI.

“Whilst meaningful insight is good to have, surely it becomes a moot point unless we can drive action from it as well...”Similarly, whilst meaningful insight is good to have, surely it becomes a moot point unless we can drive action from it as well. Automation is a phrase that comes in and out of the buzz-word lexicon but it has substance - ultimately we want to be able to automate where ever possible if we are to increase efficiency. But getting data flowing from a to b to trigger c can be a cumbersome and clunky task.

Again step forward AI.

Or how about within the contact centre space allowing your chat-bots to actually prove useful and complete some considerable triage before assessing whether a real human needs to get involved?

Or finally being able to see the true potential of smart-glasses for your engineers by enabling a voice control that actually works and contextual layering of Augmented Reality information when asked for.

Step forward once more AI.

You see it is my belief that AI will become the glue that binds all of our other technologies together. It is the brain that makes the body work.

And perhaps here is the perfect analogy because a brain all by itself is a fairly useless thing - just a big, pink, wrinkly sponge that can’t do anything at all - but give it a body and it can really make things happen.

The same goes for AI - it is not something we should consider as it’s own independent entity. But it is the secret sauce that will make everything else work properly.

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Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News talks to Ulrika Lindberg, Vice President, Global Service at Alfa Laval AB following on from her keynote presentation at the Spring Servitization Conference, about why having a customer-centric strategy is key to developing advanced services...

One thing stood out very clearly when Ulrika Lindberg, Vice President, Global Service at Alfa Laval AB posted up her organisations mission statement during her presentation at the Spring Servitization Conference, hosted by Copenhagen Business School and the Advanced Services Group, part of Aston University in the UK, that was that even within this small, yet carefully crafted sentence which captures Alfa Laval's corporate identity, it is clear the value they place on their customers.

On the surface, it certainly seemed indicative of an organisation that already had a clear Outside-In philosophy with regards to how they view their relationship with their customers.

Against a backdrop of a conference where advanced services are the sole talking point, I was keen to see just how important Lindberg and her colleagues at Alfa Laval believe such a mindset is when seeking to establish service as a core strategy within an organisation.

“How important is it? Well it’s in our DNA,” begins Lindberg.

"Whilst we have a wide range of products, we have an even wider range of industries that we serve and we would never be able to do that successfully unless we understood our customers’ needs..."

“Part of the reason why that is, is because whilst we have a wide range of products, we have an even wider range of industries that we serve and we would never be able to do that successfully unless we understood our customers’ needs within their industry.”

“We need to understand how our products can benefit an industry and our customers’ within that industry - and if we don’t have that understanding then we wouldn’t be successful. That is how our whole company has grown, by actually finding where our products could benefit certain industries and how.”

“Some of our products, although customised are not that unique, but one of the things we’ve been able to be successful at is tailoring those to a certain customer or a certain industry.”

It is this industry knowledge, largely fed by a desire to get close to their customers and understand the challenges that they face that has become an intrinsic part of how Alfa Laval approach growth and development - and this is something that ultimately builds upon itself over time.

“The more critical it becomes for us to understand the needs of the sector, the bigger the industry becomes to us and then the further knowledge and insights we develop - which embeds us even further into the industry and into our customer’s processes,” Lindberg explains.

Of course, operating across such a wide array of vertical sectors means that Alfa Laval have to establish a flexible approach to their service offerings as what is good for the goose is not always good for the gander. This is something that becomes particularly prescient when we look at servitization.

One of the big discussions across the conference and beyond is whether there is a need for either a customer pull or a market in decline and in need of disruption for a company to successfully introduce advanced services.

We all see that data is going to be hugely important in the future and we need to build our services around that but I think that we have a lot of work to do to build on that“I’m not sure,” Lindberg responds, giving the question consideration when I put it to her.

“I think certain industries are more advanced and it is easier in those. Equally some geographies are more advanced and it is easier there also. Personally, I would say the geography dimension might influence more whether a company is able to introduce advanced services.”

"I think across the globe, in terms of data and analysing data, there is a big interest but I still think we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of the complexity this is going to drive in terms of who is going to look at the data and what kind of advice are they going to be delivering?"

"If we look at predictive maintenance who is going to be calling the customer and saying the service is required? If we need to go in and stop the machine what power do we have to do this in a critical environment for the customers where that maintenance might have significant consequences for the customer.”

“I think we all see that data is going to be hugely important in the future and we need to build our services around that but I think that we have a lot of work to do to build on that. The appetite for this is big all around the globe, but the most critical question is 'are we ready?' That is the question I would suggest most companies need to be asking themselves.”

 

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In this excerpt from a recent Field Service News webcast sponsored by rugged computing specialist Xplore Technologies FSN Editor-in-Chief, Kris Oldland is joined by Steve Priestly and Cliff Adams of Xplore and Bob Ashenbrenner of Durable Mobility Technologies as they discuss some of the key questions around device choices field service organisations should be making including asking whether the lines between rugged and consumer are blurring, how to decide which form factor is right for your service technicians and just how often should field service companies be seeking to update the devices that they have deployed within the field.

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Want to know more?

The full webcast is available to fieldservicenews.com subscribers and if you are a field service industry practitioner you may qualify for a complimentary industry subscription.

Visit fieldservicenews.com/subscribe to apply now!

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Grundfos is a well-established company with a 180-year heritage and some active assets in the field over 30 years old still requiring maintenance, at this year’s Spring Servitization Conference they outlined why they see advanced services at the heart of their future...

Grundfos is an organisation with a long, proud and traditional history, yet at this year’s Spring Servitization Conference in Copenhagen, it was their vision of a brave new world, a world in which advanced services sit at the heart of their offering that was the focus of their presentation.

Thomas Rosenkilde Anderson, Group Vice President for Services at Grundfos A/S outlined the thinking behind the Danish Pump Manufacturers shift towards a servitized business alongside his colleague Marianne Kjeldgaard Knudsen, Senior Director, Head of Digital Commercial Offerings at Grundfos A/S.

“Service has already been embedded into the way we serve our customers,” Anderson begins as we sit down after his presentation and he gives me the opportunity to dig a little deeper into the conversation.

When we took the strategic decision from an executive level that now is the time to create a service business unit,“Previously, service was basically just a support function for our sales. It was also something that had evolved differently in each country we operate in. Sometimes it was well structured, sometimes it was very unstructured. So when we took the strategic decision from an executive level that now is the time to create a service business unit, it required a hell of a lot of planning and exercising on how to actually do it.”

“We actually held workshops across all countries across the globe in less than three months. We would be sitting together with the local country manager and their leadership teams and asking ‘how do you approach services here’, ‘who is doing service here?’”

“Then name by name, we went through the personnel undertaking any service work and identified those that were doing 50% of their role in a service capacity as someone who should become part of the service business unit. If they did less than 50% then they should stay where they are - and we did this all around the globe.”

“This was the first time that we really knew exactly how many service people we actually had. This was critical as when I first started I wanted to know what was our service business - how many people did we have and what was our profit margin, but we didn’t have easy access to those questions.”

It is interesting to note that at this point the service business was operated as a cost centre and it was Anderson’s drive to move the service operations to becoming a profit centre that demanded that such lack of visibility be overcome. However, moving to a profit centre was just part of the reasoning behind undertaking such a significant task as bringing transparency across the service operations globally for Grundfos.

However, one thing that Anderson stressed very clearly in his presentation was that such a significant shift in focus within an organisation is not possible overnight. It is a long iterative process - in his presentation, Anderson outlined Grundfos’ own roadmap which stretches across ten years.

Yet, when Anderson first arrived having transitioned from the high-tech sector, this was not necessarily the case.

We were selling basic service contracts in 15 different ways across 60 different locations across the globe, so there were a lot of basics such as tools and processes that we needed to fix first“Coming from a high-tech background I was used to working at a much faster pace, so such introducing change over such a long period wasn’t the original plan,” he explains.

“However, I realised that here the starting point was a bit more unstable, we were selling basic service contracts in 15 different ways across 60 different locations across the globe, so there were a lot of basics such as tools and processes that we needed to fix first. If we had tried to do everything at once and bring very advanced services to the market in one go there would have been chaos”

“In short, we needed to build a solid foundation before we could move forwards further and that takes time,” he adds.

The next phase of this development Anderson explains is to build financial transparency.

“We need to get a firm understanding and have total transparency on what is the cost of service, what revenue are we currently making from services? Then we can have a firm grasp of how service is impacting on our bottom line,” Anderson continued.

“Once this is all in place then we can start the big task of really fully developing our service portfolio and of course building out our tools, processes and customer support and getting that standardised across the globe.

“Then, of course, there is the consideration around the people part of this equation. Service businesses are people businesses. We need to make sure we take care of our people and that we attract the best people - so a lot of our investments are going into leadership positions.”

“We are looking at leadership development, financial training for those that will have commercial responsibilities and technical training for those who are focussed in that part of the sphere.”

What is clear is that whilst the end goal of a servitized business promises great opportunities the road to that goal is long and complex.

However, Anderson and his colleagues have a very thorough and well-defined roadmap to guide them on their way - something that it is essential for any company looking to follow in their path develop for themselves before they start the journey themselves.

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Gary Brooks, CMO, Syncron talks to Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News about how the discussion around uptime has shifted from how to why...

“Time is something that is incredibly perishable, it’s finite, we never seem to have enough of it and we always wish for more of it in dire times.”

This eternal maxim, that translates across all cultures in all corners of the world, was at the heart of an excellent keynote presentation given by Gary Brooks, CMO at Syncron at the Field Service USA Conference in Palm Springs earlier this year.

Time is something that is incredibly perishable, it’s finite, we never seem to have enough of it and we always wish for more of it in dire times“It is interesting to apply that thinking to our business of field service,” Brooks explained when I sat down with him to catch up over a coffee a little later in the day.

“Let's look at it through the lens of time being a cruel mistress and then imagine you're a farmer. Not just any farmer but a very excited farmer because it is the first day of the harvest season. You’re deploying your new half a million dollar combine to go out and harvest at a fantastic new rate - but then it fails.” “It is a Sunday morning and your 200 miles from the dealer and can’t get someone out to fix it - then shift your thinking from that scenario to a question around uptime.”

It is an important shift in thinking and one in which the manufacturer bears more of the burden of failure in return for greater profit and a stickier relationship with the customer.

“At Syncron we’re obsessed with coming up with solutions that help manufacturers improve their uptime levels,” Brooks continues.

“We recently worked with WBR to launch a research project that is looking into uptime. How important is it for the OEM? Do they consider it a strategic advantage? How important is it for the customer of the OEM? 

Do they consider it something that can make their business more competitive? How much are the end users willing to pay for maximised uptime? Are they even willing to pay at all for maximised up time?”

An overwhelming majority of OEMs believe that maximising uptime is a strategic advantage for them“The preliminary research findings have identified that an overwhelming majority of OEMs believe that maximising uptime is a strategic advantage for them. An overwhelming majority of the customers of the OEMs believe it would be a competitive advantage for them. Executives are demanding it from the OEM side. End customers are even willing to pay more for it but the OEM is not ready to maximise uptime.”

It seems clear that the conversation has moved somewhat beyond whether the shift towards uptime was the right path to follow - the question many organisations are now facing is how they make that shift. Although case studies are beginning to surface as Brooks alludes to himself.

“I came to my first field service event three years ago, there was very little mention of the product becoming service, of servitization. Last year there was a tiny bit, but this year we are seeing companies that have now gone out and done it. We’re seeing companies who have now fully evolved to that model.”

Just how important a factor within the move towards servitization is the industry that an organisation operates withinHowever, one consideration I have recently been discussing with the likes of Prof. Baines at Aston University and Ross Townsend of Ishida Europe is just how important a factor within the move towards servitization is the industry that an organisation operates within?

“I think you're absolutely right that it is industry specific,” replies Brooks when I put this to him.

“For example, there are lots of articles on how the automotive industry is transitioning to a new norm where rather than buy a vehicle customers now want to buy access to a vehicle - the end result of which is that the customers no longer become the end-user but a fleet owner whether that be an internal or external operator.”

“And of course a fleet manager will be far more demanding in terms of uptime, than a single end user, so the market disruption really is felt on numerous levels,” Brookes concludes.

Whilst this is a specific example of a vertical being disrupted there could be wider learnings for other industries in how a shift to servitization could impact there own sectors as some business models evolve and other new models that have yet to be considered emerging.

What is holding some sectors back, whilst others drive forwards to embrace advanced services?But what is holding some sectors back, whilst others drive forwards to embrace advanced services?

“Part of the reason for the lack of full adoption could be a mindset, the preliminary response that we are getting from the research suggest that an overwhelming majority of the OEMs view their ability to deliver maximum product uptime or a type of service that guarantees maximum uptime - it was almost 80% that said they would view that as a competitive advantage,” Brookes muses.

“So when things have words like competitive advantage and revenue maximisation tied with it you would think that it would be accelerated implementation - so there is some barrier. The desire exists both on the OEM and the customer side, the opportunity to differentiate your product exists, the technology exists so what are the other variables?”

It is an important question that many companies in many sectors are trying to grapple with and when whoever discovers the answer will hold the keys to the future of field service.

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Rolls Royce’s Andy Harrison has been playing a pivotal role in the Through Life Engineering Services Centre’s work in putting together a blueprint for how organisations can establish advanced services capabilities - a topic he recently discussed at this year’s Spring Servitization Conference. Kris Oldland sat down with him to find out more...

When the topic of servitization comes up it is usually only a matter of time before Rolls Royce and Power by the Hour is mentioned. Indeed, Rolls Royce alongside a select number of other organisations such as Caterpillar and Alstom have essentially become the de-facto poster boys for all things advanced services.

Who better then, to lead a multi-organisation committee created to help distil the complexities of servitization into a meaningful framework than one of one of their key service executives, Andy Harrison, Engineering Associate Fellow - life cycle engineering?

But what exactly is the Through Life Engineering Services Centre, which Harrison heads up?

“For a number of years here in the UK we have had a group of companies get together around through life engineering services. In essence, a sort of working club made up of people working in the services space and in particular services around complex long-life engineered products,” he explains.

“For a number of years, we had struggled to get a framework diagram around what we meant by that this particular space. Then in mid-2016 the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing Through Life Engineering Services, which was run out of Cranfield and Durham Universities, issued a strategy paper which called for the creation of a national council - something we have subsequently created.”

So what is the key function of this council?

One of the challenges we have taken on has been to develop a relatively simple explanation of what exactly through life engineering services are“One of the challenges we have taken on has been to develop a relatively simple explanation of what exactly through life engineering services are,” Harrison explains.

“In addition to this, we have also moved onto tackling the question of what a national educational program within this area would look like. If we wanted our engineering graduates to arrive at the doors of organisations already understanding the value of through life support, which we think is 16% + of GDP, then what would that involve?”

It’s an ambitious project, but one that is absolutely critical as we see economies both in the UK and beyond become increasingly more service-centric and Harrison has played an integral role in fulfilling the council’s vision, which is now coming together at pace.

“I’ve led the working group that has put that framework diagram and the education program that goes around it. That is in the process of being embodied into a publicly available specification by the British Standards Institute and it is due for publication sometime very soon,” he comments.

“Essentially what we’ve got is a framework diagram that outlines the topics that make up this thing called Though Life Service, then dividing those topics into further subheadings with information and direction as to what a company would need to know to understand each of those sub-headings.”

In fact, one of the highlights of The Spring Servitization Conference, held this year in Copenhagen, was when Harrison very eloquently and concisely walked the attendees through this framework.

“Basically, the framework diagram is essentially setting the scene when we talk about this space,” Harrison explains.

It’s a way of thinking about the big picture and breaking it out into commonly described terms so that when the industry practitioners review the academic material they have a frame of reference“It’s a way of thinking about the big picture and breaking it out into commonly described terms so that when the industry practitioners review the academic material they have a frame of reference - they can look at it and say ‘OK so this is addressing this part of the equation.’”

This is a huge part of the discussion that needs to come to the fore if the worlds of academia and industry are to fully align around the concept and strategies of servitization - a common language is essential. This is also why the bringing together of a number of different companies from disparate sectors to work on this project alongside Harrison and his team at Rolls Royce is also imperative.

“The fundamentally important part of this is that if you let any one organisation try to write this they would do it in their own language in their own context. It might work for them but it is unlikely to work for a broad range of companies,” Harrison explains.

We have deliberately forced ourselves to argue how to get this down to a small number of items“We have deliberately forced ourselves to argue how to get this down to a small number of items,” he adds.

Within the framework itself, the group has essentially identified three core areas of activity.

“Firstly, there is the business context where the sub-elements are all centred around if and how you understand your customers. Can you identify with them the value opportunities are - and this can be either getting more work out of a machine or spending less money obtaining that work,” Harrison begins.

“Do you have the organisational set up to deliver these benefits and do your customers have the right set up to receive those benefits? Do you have all of the underpinning capabilities that are required such as the consumable elements you need to deliver this level of service - for example, can you model x and predict y? Can you gather the data required? Do those things exist and do you have them within your organisation? We then have to consider what are the service value streams that you have to offer? We divide that up into four streams which are avoid, contain, recover and convert.”

The road to servitization is challenging and the journey for every company of course slightly different reflecting the unique needs, processes and goals an organisation may face“Avoid is can you change the reality of how much damage the product is accumulating and the likely consequences of that? Contain is about an organisation's ability to step in and make the decisions around when and what to do as intervention activities -  so there is no physical activity in this step, it is all around decision making. Recover is your ability to re-inject life back into the asset, through overhaul, repair and inspection. Finally Convert is about your ability to take the experience that you gain in the other three and to generate additional value out of those.”

“The final dimension is the basic life-cycle of the product and the service which talks about the need for planning throughout the life-cycle, the creation process of your products and service, standing up ready for operation, the operational activity of making the products and delivering the support service and eventually the retirement phase of the downturn of the supply chain, the de-commissioning of assets and the eventual retirement of the entire of service offering around them.”

The road to servitization is challenging and the journey for every company of course slightly different reflecting the unique needs, processes and goals an organisation may face.

However, the framework Harrison and his peers have put in place does an excellent job of signposting the way, to help companies navigate the path successfully.

 

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The threat of a genuine ageing workforce crisis is being discussed by field service organisations across all industry sectors and in all corners of the globe. Field Service News in partnership with Si2 Partners, Workammo and Service People Matters undertook research to establish exactly how real this threat is to ongoing service operations and how recruitment, development and progression trends within field service are evolving...

Part one of this research report which is available here explored the findings of this research exploring the reality of the ageing workforce crisis, how field service companies are tailoring their recruitment and development programs to court millennials and whether outsourcing is an answer to help field service companies meet increasing customer demands.

Now we turn to the second part of this report...

Reducing the time from classroom to customer site

Of course, when we consider the issues many companies are facing in replacing their existing workforce it is imperative that the time it takes to onboard a new recruit is minimised as much as possible so that the newly appointed service technicians are adding value to an organisation as quickly as possible.

Whilst, of course, this is somewhat dependent on the industry in which an organisation operates, with some service engineer roles requiring far more knowledge and training than others, it is interesting to see in broad strokes the average time service engineer on-boarding takes.

The most common amount of time stated was between three and six months which was the on-boarding time for just over half of companiesThe most common amount of time stated was between three and six months which was the on-boarding time for just over half of companies (55%) whilst 34% of companies took between one and two years.

One obvious solution to both reducing onboarding times and increasing the longevity of those engineers approaching retirement age is to actively utilise your more experienced service engineers in a mentoring capacity for new recruits.

This is a well-established practice within the field service sector which is evidenced by the fact that 93% of companies stated that this is a practice they have within there workplace.

A more recent introduction to this concept is the ability for the more seasoned engineer to deliver assistance remotely using tools such as video conferencing or augmented reality.However, a more recent introduction to this concept is the ability for the more seasoned engineer to deliver assistance remotely using tools such as video conferencing or augmented reality.

The advantages of such an approach are two-fold. Firstly, it allows for one experienced engineer to support multiple newer engineers at the same time.

Secondly, it also allows the older engineer to work either from a central location or even from home - something that can be a big lure in convincing them to stay within the company.

Again this was an area we explored in our previous research where we identified that 20% of companies were using their older engineers within a remote expert capacity and we have seen similar numbers again in this current research with a further 35% of the total respondents stating they are in the process of putting such a system in place.

What is particularly interesting here is that of those companies that currently do have such a system in place a fifth of them (20%) are utilising Augmented Reality (AR).

We have long been advocates of the use of this technology in exactly this manner at Field Service News for some time now, but across numerous research reports, we have been seeing that the uptake for AR has been to date somewhat stunted.

Yet with the AR market within the field service sector becoming increasingly competitive it seems that we may now eventually be seeing the first real signs of increasing adoption amongst field service companies.

Developing the next generation of service leaders

Of course, whilst it is important to understand where the next generation of field service engineers are coming from and how they are being developed it is equally important to understand how the next generation of service leaders are entering into our sector as well.

Anecdotally many of the service directors one might encounter within the industry do tend to have come from a service engineer background, often having been promoted from within and our research would appear to indicate that this is still a common development path.

59% of the companies that participated in the research stated that when looking to fill a service management role their organisation tends to predominantly try to recruit for the role internally. In fact, 59% of the companies that participated in the research stated that when looking to fill a service management role their organisation tends to predominantly try to recruit for the role internally.

So let’s take a look at some of the common skill-sets that companies are looking for in their service managers.

It is perhaps of little surprise that when we asked our respondents “what are the key attributes you look for in a service manager?” That the most commonly cited response was ‘leadership capabilities’ which 86% of companies identified as a key attribute.

What is interesting and perhaps indicative of the growing importance the field service division plays in generating excellent customer experiences is that the second most valued attribute was ‘having a customer-centric outlook’.

In fact with 79% of companies stating that this was a key attribute they look for in their service leadership this was not that far behind leadership capabilities - certainly suggesting that customer-centricity is a fundamental aspect of what makes a great service manager.

Another big aspect of the role is, of course, the ability to communicate with the technicians and to be able to relay the wider operational picture of the business to them as well as be a conduit for them to engage with the business.

This was again quite clearly referenced in the research findings. For example, 59% of companies stated that having a good rapport with the field engineers was a key attribute they look for in their service leaders whilst over three-quarters of companies (76%) identified strong technical knowledge and application - which is of course, crucial for service managers to understand their engineers challenges and identify weak spots and highlights within their performance.

Two-thirds of companies (66%) stated that they thought their service managers should have a strong operational understanding.Additionally, two-thirds of companies (66%) stated that they thought their service managers should have a strong operational understanding.

This again is important as it allows the service manager to not only see the bigger picture but also translate that to the field engineers - which is an important means of gaining company loyalty - something that is more important than ever considering the challenges that many companies are facing replacing their ageing workforce.

The need for these key attributes is also corroborated in the areas that field service companies are focussing their attention on when it comes to training their service managers.

Again we see leadership and technical skills as the most common area of training with 52% of companies offering such training to their service managers.

Just under a third of companies also provide FSM systems training for their service managers - again an important area for them to grasp as the FSM solution is generally at the heart of how their department will run so a reasonable understanding of how such a system works, what it is capable of and even what it is lacking, can be the key to driving as much efficiency via the FSM solution as possible.

In terms of how the training was applied the vast majority of companies tend to deliver training in an ongoing manner when on-site - an approach over three quarters (79%) of companies within the research adopt. However, only a quarter of companies (25%) offer regular off-site training.

The danger here for those that solely rely on on-the-job training is that by its very nature field service is a dynamic operation with many moving parts, often seeing the service manager fighting fires as part of his regular routine.

With the immediate need of ensuring the customer stays happy the obvious priority - how often will training sessions get pushed down the to-do list?

Initial Conclusions

Firstly, it certainly does appear that the threat of an ageing workforce remains a significant concern and this is something that must be addressed swiftly before that concern truly turns to crisis.

Outsourcing appears to be a sticky plaster that many companies are turning to and it could well be that we see a gradual shift in workforce dynamics across the next few years whereby the role of the field service engineer becomes increasingly outsourced.

But in a world where customer experience is sitting at the heart of business strategy, one might question if handing over control to one of your most important assets in the customer service equation - namely your engineers themselves, is actually the right path to head down.

For those companies that are facing the challenge of replacing their workforce - but are not keen to outsource their field service work, then the reality is they must adapt both their recruitment and development plans to be more in line with the incoming workforce of millennials.

In terms of management for the time being, at least, it seems that we are seeing less disruption of the status quo, with many companies still seeking to employ from withinIt is surprising that so few companies have actually undertaken this process as yet, although what is perhaps somewhat encouraging is a similar amount of companies are at least considering doing so.

In terms of management for the time being, at least, it seems that we are seeing less disruption of the status quo, with many companies still seeking to employ from within and the traditional blend of skill-sets being required - namely technical knowledge, rapport with engineers and operational understanding all still highly sought after.

However, the one element that has been really raised to the fore is the need for our service managers to understand customer-centricity, for whilst this has always been an important asset for service managers, the fact that it has become a key attribute on such a pervasive scale is perhaps the greatest signpost of where the field service unit’s most important role in the future - not just as a maintenance team, but as true brand ambassadors also.

It’s therefore perhaps vital to bear this in mind during all points of talent acquisition be it for technician, engineer or management.

Key statistics: 

• 53% of field service companies state that replacing an ageing workforce is a challenge for their organisation...
• 21% of field service companies have adapted their training and development to be more suited to millennials...
• 80% of field service companies who outsource their service engineer work state that they have increased the amount they outsource within the last three years...
• 55% of field service companies have an on-boarding time of between 3 and 6 months for new service engineers...
• 93% of field service companies are now using their more experienced engineers as mentors for new recruits...
• 59% of field service companies state that replacing an ageing predominantly try to fill service management roles from within their organisation...

 

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