In a recent edition of the Field Service Podcast, Field Service News, Editor-in-Chief, Kris Oldland sat down with Patrick Jansen, Field Service Manager, VBR Turbines, about why they decided to undertake an in-depth build of their own bespoke IoT solution.

"It all started about 6 years ago. We are an MRO (maintenance and repair organisation)  so we do own anything, we don't produce anything, our business is service. We saw that our market was changing. There was knowledge drain, changes in the labour market and more." Jansen explained. 

"So we started to look at what our service deliver should be like ten years from now and alongside that how could we overcome the challenges that we face in the labour market and how could we address the knowledge drain with our customers. There were a couple of things that saw needed to be done.

"One of the main drivers for us was to create an additional tool to facilitate remote support for the customer but also do diagnostics on the assets. This is because in the energy market within Europe has changed significantly." he added.

One such change has been the shift within the energy sector is that the traditional way of working with a predictive maintenance schedule was to base the schedule on running hours, but this is no longer an appropriate methodology as the amount of running hours has reduced. 

However, there were other benefits that Jansen and the team at VBR Turbines were able to benefit from - including the reduction in training time for new engineers. 

"The remote solutions can help people to get trained faster, the time to training a field service engineer really dramatically reduced." Jansen added. 

 

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In this exclusive Field Service News video series published in partnership with HSO, we look at three key cases that can convince your board to invest in the systems that can drive your field service operations forward and to the standards expected of modern field service delivery.

 

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Part two of a new series of video excerpts from Field Service News, in partnership with Field Nation we will be breaking down the challenges of building a modern field service workforce...

 

 

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Want to know more? There is a full documentary that dives deeper into this whole topic, which is available as premium content to fieldservicenews.com subscribers...

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In a new series of video excerpts from Field Service News, in partnership with Field Nation we will be breaking down the challenges of building a modern field service workforce

 

 

 

In this opening episode of this series exploring what the field workforce of the 21st Century will look like, we establish the significant drivers that are changing the very landscape in which field service organisations operate within. 

 

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Want to know more? There is a full documentary that dives deeper into this whole topic, which is available as premium content to fieldservicenews.com subscribers...

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In the first part of a new series of features in which we will explore the latest exclusive field service research findings, we explore how KPIs are changing in a world of servitization, IoT and changing demographics... 

The shifting sands of Field Service Management

In a new series of articles by Field Service News Research, the current use of Key Performance Indicators used by field service organisations is assessed and the current trends within this area are identified. 

The independent research carried out by Field Service News in late 2019 sits agains a backdrop of a rapidly changing world in which field service organisations operate with major industrial trends such as servitization taking hold and new emergent technologies such as the Internet of Things and Augmented Reality shifting the way field service organisations are approaching the mission critical role of field service. 

 

The Average State of Play in Field Service Today

In the first part of this research analysis we discuss the critical headline finding of the research, which was that the data revealed that the most common practice amongst field service companies is to measure between 4 and 7 KPIs. However, the data does also show that we are beginning to see a trend in this number increasing. 

The research also reveals that move from field service being a cost-centre within an organisation to becoming a profit centre is now almost entirely complete, and this too has, of course, had an impact on the metrics field service companies are actively measuring.

The fact that just under a fifth of companies now identify a KPI based around profit as the most critical KPI they measure for their business is another signifier of this.

However, perhaps more crucially, we see the shift in importance from field service KPIs being purely operationally focussed to being far more focused on delivering customer satisfaction. Indeed, the shift towards a customer-centric approach to service is undoubtedly beginning to take hold.

 

Click here to check out part one of this research analysis in our dedicated Field Service News Research channel 

 

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 Want to know more? If you want to find out more about this research there is a full research report available for field service subscribers. Simply click the link below to access the full report now! 

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With an eye to the future and a desire to push today’s technologies to their limit, artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to creep into a variety of service technologies. On its surface, AI might still seem like science fiction, but the number of practical use cases will only increase over time. Are you ready to use AI to its fullest potential?

In this series, run in partnership with IFS, we will be looking to see exactly what impact AI will have on the field service sector and how your organisation can harness it. In part one of this series we looked at some of the AI basics and in part two we explored how tomorrow's advancements in AI can guide us through today's digital transformation. Now in the final part in this series we take a look to the future... 

With an eye to the future and a desire to push today’s technologies to their limit, artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to creep into a variety of service technologies. On its surface, AI might still seem like science fiction, but the number of practical use cases will only increase over time. Are you ready to use AI to its fullest potential?

In this series, run in partnership with IFS, we will be looking to see exactly what impact AI will have on the field service sector and how your organisation can harness it. In part one of this series we looked at some of the AI basics and now we look at how tomorrow's advancements in AI can guide us through today's digital transformation

With an eye to the future and a desire to push today’s technologies to their limit, artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to creep into a variety of service technologies. On its surface, AI might still seem like science fiction, but the number of practical use cases will only increase over time. Are you ready to use AI to its fullest potential?

In this series, run in partnership with IFS, we will be looking to see exactly what impact AI will have on the field service sector and how your organisation can harness it... 

Field Service in the early decades of the twenty-first century has become an increasingly tricky beast to tame. Customer expectations are hurtling forward at breakneck speed to what some companies view as almost impossible standards to reach. The customer of today is not only better informed than ever before, but via the widespread amplification of social media, more powerful also.

In this series, run in partnership with Localz, we look at precisely what these new challenges of modern field service are and how your organisation can adapt and thrive in this brave new world. Part one in the series explored the concept of Customer Expectations 4.0 and in part two we discussed a new approach to FSM systems and then in part three we will take a look at three examples of companies embracing 'Uberization."  Now in the final feature in this series we hear from Localz CEO Tim Andrew and explore why happy engineers equals happy customers.