ARCHIVE FOR THE ‘future-of-field-service’ CATEGORY

Field Service News Editor-in-Chief, Kris Oldland talks exclusively to Graeme Coyne of Siemens about why an attitude of exploring continuous improvement is ingrained in the company’s DNA...

The Aston Spring Servitization Conference is a unique event in that it brings together both industry practitioners and academics to discuss the evolving trends in servitization – a key shift in business thinking that puts field service at the heart of a businesses success.

The presentations come thick and fast, and as would be expected by a conference hosted by a leading industry focussed university, there is reasonably heavy bias towards the academics when it comes to speakers.

And whilst the rapid fire format (around 50 presentations in two days) can foster a great deal of discussion and cover a wide and varied number of research areas across the spectrum of servitization, there is always a danger of death by power point when trying to cover so much ground in such a short period.

Therefore, when Siemen’s Graeme Coyne took to the stage armed with a presentation that featured just three simple slides, it was not only a bold approach but a welcome one.

 

Coyne, has two key qualities that are essential in a senior field service exec.

He is both genuinely approachable and easy to talk to, whilst having a deep rooted desire to continuously look for improvement.

After his presentation I caught up with him to talk through some of the key points that he raised during his 30 minute key note, which was well received by both the academics and the practitioners in attendance.

One of the first things that I wanted to pick up with Coyne was how the culture of Siemens as an organisation mirrored his own attitude towards adopting an approach that is all about continuous improvement, and how that translates across both product development and service delivery.

“We do it [focus on continuous improvement] across the company in every process we do – so it could be service coordination, how we deal with spare parts, and how we manage our service engineers. But we always look at it from the point of view of how can we do it better?” Coyne replied

“We use ‘plan, do, check, act.’ or GEMBA. We have two meetings every week within our department to ask ‘how can we do the service coordination part better?’ Somebody comes up with an idea, it’s discussed in an open forum, and if we think it is worth investigating we ask them to go out and develop the idea further.”

“We’ve had this philosophy for many years. It’s all about what exactly is the problem - can you define it? What’s the root cause and what are the options?”

 

“The main thing is to launch it, monitor it and then evaluate it. You have to keep going round in this loop and it is embedded in our culture.”

One area of Coyne’s presentation that particularly caught my attention, was when he spoke out quite strongly against the productisation of services.

Given Coyne’s experience this was an area that I was interested to dig a little deeper into.

What was it that drove his thinking on this?

“We are centrally controlled and have products that are developed from our headquarters and this can lead a view on services that begins with the product and then looks at what services can we develop for them. You then end up with product people devising a lead service and saying sell that service,” Coyne begins.

“My view is different. I’m in a region, and dealing with end customers."

"Essentially we know what someone like Unilever, Coca-Cola or Ford Motor Company want and come at it from a the reverse point of view and it’s very difficult to slot a productised service into the customer’s needs. It may not fit; it may not be what they want.”

 

Pushing a bit further on this I was keen to see if Coyne felt that this was an issue felt more keenly by multi-nationals, who all too often are further removed from their customers than smaller, more localised competitors.

In fact whilst Coyne does admit there is a danger for larger organisations to become disengaged from their client base, he also believes that if multinationals approach cooperation between different regions correctly there can be huge benefits in terms of knowledge sharing.

“What I’ve seen is people from the regions bringing in new perspectives and ideas. For example, twenty years ago I was based in Germany and I brought in a perspective from the UK, other colleagues brought in opinions from other countries like Finland and Italy.

“More recently we have begun to have regular meetings using video conferencing for up to an hour at a time, where we do best practice sharing."

"Basically we pinch with pride!” He says with a wry grin.

“For example, we’ve just found out our team in Belgium have an approach for a particular customer type and product type and we realised they’ve been doing what we want to do now in the UK for the last 17 years.”

“They already know what works, how much it costs and what the benefits have been. So we can take best practice sharing and use it and implement it in our country to suit our customers needs.”

Given the setting of our conversation, I was also keen to understand just how far along the path Siemens is towards advanced services and servitization.

“In terms of the move from SLAs to performance based contracts we’ve done it from certain places, in the world,” he begins.

“Very often where the customer themselves doesn’t have the wherewithal to do it [manage the service chain] they may rely on us. They rely on our management skills to be able to deliver something where we can have KPIs based on the quality of product they’re producing, the volume of product and improving productivity.”

“For many years in Siemens now we’ve had an approach to customers that says we focus on four things. Firstly can we improve their turn over? If they can make more things they could possibly sell more! We don’t control their market in the service world but we can give them the ability to do that.”

“We also look at how we can reduce their cost base, their utilisation of people, spare parts management; there are many things you can look at in reducing costs.”

“The third part is asset availability and using new technology like real time condition monitoring services to predict when assets need to be serviced and maintained. In that way we reduce downtime and become proactive rather than reactive.”

“The final part is to do with sustainability. Let’s look at the water industry for example - a regulated business that has to guarantee the quality of the water that they give to their consumers, if we can do something like putting in instrumentation products and calibrate them so that they don’t get penalised by their regulator, it further adds strength to our role in supporting their business and gives us greater customer loyalty.”

 

Of course whilst the shift towards delivering advanced services is heavily reliant upon changing the culture both within your own organisation but also amongst your customers also, technology – particularly the IoT is playing a critical role in enabling companies to be able to deliver such solutions.

But how big a challenge is it for a company like Siemens, with well over 100,000 assets out in the field globally (and some of these assets are 30 even 40 years old) moving to IoT?

“It can be hard but a lot of the equipment that is thirty or forty years old tends to be power related. Its drives, motors and other individual items that were never networked in any way shape or form” explains Coyne.

“Industry 4.0 is allowing everything to communicate. We have a lifecycle information service we offer where we will take the installed base from the customer, analyse it, and point out where they might be at risk.”

“We get situations such as a ship turning up in port with a bow thruster that needs a service - it might be thirty years old and they still expect us to do it.

There is no way that, that is connected in the internet and in future we will be much better at supporting our products as they will be fitted with Industry 4.0 compatible connectivity”

“But that is the dilemma we have in terms of looking after legacy products, and then looking to the future and saying if you specify this in these systems we are going to be able to support you way, way better. Rather than an adhoc approach you can plan it and manage it better.”

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature

Field service management software providers Coresystems showed us a glimpse into the not too distant future, bringing together field service and consumer IoT.

As smart homes become more prevalent one of the key hubs leading the way in integrating a variety of disparate smart devices is Amazon's Echo which features voice controlled personal assistant Alexa.

Commands such as 'Alexa switch off the downstairs lights' or 'Alexa turn the heating up to 68 degrees' allow the Echo to control the heating lighting, security and much more in your smart home.

And now as demonstrated in this video by Philipp Emmenegger, Deputy CEO and Head of Sales EMEA with Coresystems Alexa can schedule a field service call for you as well. 

In the brief demonstration above, filmed at Field Service Europe held in Amsterdam last week, Emmenegger is able to schedule a service call on the day of his choice simply by telling Alexa "Alexa, tell coresystems to schedule a service call'.

After a brief exchange a day is confirmed and we can see the appointment added into a dispatch schedule.

Of course, further development would be required to make this a solution rather than just a gimmick, for example identifying exactly what it is I want the engineer to come and fix, however, it is an interesting glimpse into how we could be arranging our field service schedules in the not so distant future...

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature

Prankul Middha, Head of Utilities & Strategic Partnerships at VideoYourNotes explains how they are accelerating productivity, improving compliance and boosting customer satisfaction for Global clients through utilising smart, storyboarded video notes...

For thousands of years the written word has been used to communicate the full range of human emotions: love; hate; longing; disappointment. This skill sets us apart from other life forms.

However, writing clear, unambiguous text requires time and experience. Time is something that is in short supply in our hectic working lives. It can be a real challenge for field services representatives when time pressured due to multiple jobs. This pressure to be productive can actually undermine efficiency through incomplete communications. Clear precise communication is difficult, under pressure it’s very difficult.

Field services suppliers are increasingly looking to digital tools to help solve this problem leading to the adoption of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Field Service Management (FSM) systems.

These systems are designed to create a unified place for customer data allowing the engineer or inspector to capture information as text or pictures into the customer record so that the correct resources and parts can be allocated to resolve the problem.

While this is great in principle, the right information does not always find its way into the CRM or FSM systems in practice. Trying to be clear and unambiguous can often result in long winded, dense prose that is difficult to understand - the very opposite of what is intended.

 

Even Winston Churchill once apologised for writing a long letter because he didn’t have time to write a short one! This can lead to higher failure rates and customer dissatisfaction – a situation that will be challenged further as more and more hand-held devices are introduced for text data capture.

We speak at 150 words per minute (wpm) but type on a laptop at 40 wpm and into a mobile device at a mere 20 wpm. That’s 7.5x less productive than speaking. Still images can also be problematic in handling a complex problem.

These very real challenges have led to CRM or FSM systems not delivering all the productivity gains they should be able to due to the poor quality of data in the system.

This is an issue we first helped overcome in sales organisations who faced similar data quality and compliance challenges for their mobile field sales teams.

Our SmartVideoNotes, which are short, structured and secure 30-60second videos are now being used in over 35 countries globally and in 8 languages. Leading companies like P&G, Cognizant, Unilever, Vodafone, etc. have discovered the power of smart, structured video to help them to make better and faster decisions.

Our solution could be deployed in an even more transformative manner to the challenges faced by field services providers. SmartVideoNotes capture the problem quickly (30-60seconds), show the real situation and can be shared with the right people or appropriate systems instantly.

Smart tagging of the data captured through speech to text recognition allows for valuable reports to be simply and quickly generated.

All this is done with the highest levels of security on systems that meet banking level security audits. Indeed SmartVideoNotes have just been awarded Cyber Essentials Certification.

Alan Harrison, Non Exec Director and previously Group CIO of a major Water Utility summarised it beautifully to me:

“When you have teams working remotely across wide geographic areas good communication is even more imperative. Video gives the opportunity to show the problem or issue very clearly. E.g. ‘when you walk into the plant room, this is what you will see, this is the valve that needs fixing’. You can remove the need to type an essay or try and draw a picture to explain the issue/need. This improves the effectiveness and efficiency of teams by saving time and increasing resolution on first visit, with a corresponding drop in requests for more data and clarification. If your eyes can see the problem, accurate, rapid, true communication will follow.”

 

Video is the single most powerful communication media, 5x as effective as any other media. Your organisation could now be harnessing this power to reduce failure rates, increase productivity and efficiency.

In a recent study of video by a major field services organisation, 87.5% of users used SmartVideoNotes and this resulted in a 50% time saving compared to completing their normal processes. Further, there was significant customer interest in our video solution and field services engineers reported greater customer confidence and improved perceptions of service.

Video into your workflow or CRM has the power to transform your field services teams today, not just in compliance, productivity and customer experience but imagine its power in Health & Safety.

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature

Tom DeVroy, senior product evangelist, Enterprise Service Management at IFS outlines three technology driven developments poised to disrupt field service...

Effective field service is about proactively managing your workforce and inventory in order to meet the constantly sliding scale of customer expectations. As a result, field service organisations are constantly looking to improve on the key metrics to better serve customers: first-time fix rate (FTF), mean time to service (MTTS) and mean time to repair (MTTR).

Three new technology driven developments are establishing themselves in the market, with the potential to dramatically impact these field service metrics to benefit both the customer and service provider:

• Advanced mobility: augmented reality, instant messaging platforms and native apps
• Predictive analytics enabling prescriptive maintenance
• Optimised scheduling and demand forecasting in an IoT world

First: Beyond mobility: augmented reality, instant messaging and native apps

A mobile workforce needs a mobile-driven field service strategy. In a recent study on mobility, performance and engagement, 60% of employees said mobile technology makes them more productive in the workplace. But field service organisations are now moving beyond simple mobility, looking for more intelligence and flexibility from their mobile computing platform in order to take full advantage of next generation devices.

Native apps are a key part of this - allowing engineers to receive instant updates, access repair information or collaborate with product experts without leaving the job site. Instant messaging platforms such as Slack and WeChat are also allowing field service engineers to keep connected, with more information and collaboration supported on their mobile device. Engineers are able to contact other colleagues for assistance in real-time – reducing the need to return to base for assistance.

Seeing is believing

 

 

ABI Research shows augmented reality is on the rise, and Gartner predicts businesses will purchase 53 million tablets by 2016. There are instant benefits for field service engineers. Mobile solutions now allow engineers to receive real-time feedback and expertise while on the job, enabling repairs to be completed more quickly and efficiently. An IFS partner, XMReality, is already working on pioneering augmented reality projects like this.

 

With this remote guidance, a support technician is able to watch and guide the engineer through every step of the repair without having to leave base. Using smartglasses, engineers are able to see a real-time and interactive demonstration of the repair job right in front of their eyes. These skills can be leveraged anywhere, any time with the capability of modern mobile technology – drastically improving FTF.

Second: Beyond business analytics: predict and prescribe maintenance:

The rise of IoT sensors and integrated technology on equipment is also enabling more efficient field service. Instead of scheduling maintenance when a fault is recorded, predictive analytics and the remote monitoring of equipment through IoT means faults can be detected before they become a problem.

Combined with business intelligence to make sense of the big data being captured through IoT, predictive analytics can be used to find actionable data to inform business decisions. Enabling service organisations to be proactive in regard to equipment performance means moving away from calendar-based scheduling, and towards predictive maintenance.

IFS has a predictive maintenance capability embedded in its field service applications, allowing better allocation of an engineer's time. With sensors deployed on the factory floor, service organisations can monitor vibration analysis of bearings and predict when machine parts will start to degrade, then schedule maintenance proactively.

Field service solutions should be able to find and collect patterns of data from past actions and use this information to create generic rules to highlight how processes and services can be improved in the future - delivering new insight into operational efficiency.

Mobile devices are now able to run intelligent diagnostics and capture potential problems. Based on the diagnostic output, the mobile device is able to recommend a maintenance plan and the various tasks needed to be performed, before the engineer gets on site. This technology is going one step further than just predicting when faults will occur, and will prescribe which action needs to be taken in order to fully maintain that asset.

Prescriptive maintenance will take into account budget, time and other constraints and provide an optimal order of actions and the work orders to fully maintain that equipment – all in a matter of seconds.

Third: Staying ahead of schedule

First-time fix rates are an important KPI for field service organisations, but recent Blumberg research shows that the industry average for first-time fixes was under 80%, meaning 20% of jobs require additional follow-ups. Inefficient scheduling results in a lower first time fix rate and longer time to final resolution, as unqualified engineers can be sent and the necessary equipment may be unavailable.

Although not a new technology, schedule optimisation is a foundation on which new technologies can thrive. By combining scheduling with data from IoT devices, the next generation of schedule optimisation tools go much further and help to forecast field service demand, SLAs and potential resource needs – all in real-time.

IoT-enabled sensors can trigger actions when an event changes, and automatically re-schedule jobs around this. This combination allows field service organisations to improve FTF, MTTS and MTTR by consistently scheduling the right engineer for the right job, at the right time.

When one hand washes the other

Take one recent example. A custodial services company - that uses IFS to optimise their field scheduling - is responsible for maintaining and replenishing washroom supplies for a large number of hospitals, restaurants, and other commercial facilities. The company has a sizeable contingent of mobile workers who provide delivery and replenishment services.

Much of the work is done on a planned basis, so delivery schedules are organised in advance to streamline operations. In addition, the optimisation software analyses all SLA obligations, geographic considerations and other relevant parameters to design service routes that minimise travel times and costs, and produce the highest possible productivity levels.

 

Since optimising its field scheduling software, the company has saved nearly $3 million in fuel costs alone – thanks to the optimal routes and planning the software generates and its integration with field workers' mobile devices.

Don't get left behind

These new technologies are going to bring serious benefits to field service organisations because they are so tightly integrated with delivering improved customer service and improved bottom lines.

In what is a dynamic and changing market - with tech-savvy customers demanding higher and higher levels of service - it is vital for organisations to be able to implement these cutting edge technologies.

The new breed of enterprise solutions takes away the risk

Traditional field service management solutions are simply too cumbersome and inflexible to enable field service organisations to reap the benefits. To quickly benefit from these latest advances, organisations need the backing of a new generation of flexible, agile enterprise solutions.

Traditional enterprise solutions can take months or years to simply implement, let alone adapt to an entirely new technology. The new breed of modular enterprise solutions are designed to remove the time and pain of modifying existing processes, and instead maximise the opportunities of new technology. These agile systems negate the need to fully customise legacy systems - a costly and timely process - and are enabling organisations to quickly adopt new technology, without the risk of losing out on a competitive edge.

These disruptive technologies and the digital transformation they require offer benefits that resonate throughout the whole service organisation - from the top-down. Strategic planners have real-time visibility to plan tasks and schedule the workforce in an industry with many unknown elements, from customer unpredictability to traffic, and even the weather.

 

This, in turn, directly empowers technicians, providing them with the right tools and information at their fingertips to better perform their job. But ultimately the most important stakeholder reaps the benefits - the customer receives the best possible level of service.

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature

Resource Type: White Paper
Published by:  Astea
Title: What is the next phase of service innovation

---

Click here to download the white paper now

---

By downloading you agree to the T&Cs listed available here

Synopsis:

Innovation causes company evolution and every year service is becoming more important to companies not only as a source of revenue but also as a key driver of customer loyalty...

It is no longer enough to merely deliver quality service in a timely manner. Customer demands and competitive pressures are driving service companies toward service innovation – developing new service offerings and service delivery mechanisms that their customers will find valuable.

To remain competitive, service organisations need to make investments in developing and designing new service products, tapping into new markets, and finding new ways to deliver service – making innovation part of the culture, from the executive suite to the field technicians.

This White Paper published by Astea takes a look at best practices for companies looking to innovate their service and it covers:

• Where the best opportunities for service innovation exist
• How to institutionalise innovation with 'service innovation teams'
• What metrics to use to measure the ROI of innovation activities

Overview:

As service has grown in importance as a source of revenue and a key driver of customer loyalty, customer expectations of service delivery have increased. It is no longer enough to merely deliver quality service in a timely manner. Service organisations have to do more than simply keep costs low and maintain market share.

Customer demands and competitive pressures are driving service companies toward service innovation – developing new service offerings and service delivery mechanisms that their customers will find valuable.

This type of service innovation has become an increasingly vital component in a company’s competitive strategy. Executives recognise that focusing on cost control is not in line with long-term value creation. To grow, organisations need to reinvent customer relationships and embrace new technologies and business models.

Where is Service Innovation Needed?

In March 2016, The Service Council (TSC) conducted a survey on service innovation to gauge respondents’ perceptions of their own organisations.

When asked how innovative their entire organization was, the majority of respondents said their company was somewhat innovative (58%), while roughly one-third (31%) said their company was innovative. Asked specifically about their service organization, the responses were very close, with 23% responding “innovative,” 56% “somewhat innovative.” A slightly larger group said the service organization was not innovative (11% for service compared to 3% for the entire company).

Service companies can innovate on a number of levels: the service delivery process, customer management and communication, service design, new product/ service development, the client interface, and in their technological choices.

Institutionalise Innovation

According to The Service Council survey, just 31% of respondents have a service innovation team in place. For service organisations to thrive in a marketplace that puts greater value on innovation, that has to change.

Service organizations have to look at innovation on a strategic level, and at all the ways that the service team can innovate – from developing new services and process-oriented changes to focusing on external service delivery processes and finding more opportunities to provide service.

These companies need to develop a service innovation team focused on fostering such projects. The team should include input from supervisors and managers, frontline employees/technicians, VP-level service leaders, regional leaders, and C-level executives.

Measure Your Success

Those innovation investments can’t be made blindly, however. Establishing whether a given innovation provides a return on investment (ROI) requires metrics around those innovation activities and their results. In The Service Council survey, just 20% of respondents said they already had innovation metrics in place.

Measuring innovation is a combination of art and science, which makes those metrics difficult to develop. You have to find the right things to measure; every company has its own organizational culture, so every company must fine-tune what it measures to reinforce the goals, values, and norms that it finds critical for inspiring innovation and best practices.

Technology Enables Innovation

One key enabler of both new service products and new service delivery mechanisms has been technology. Digital technologies have driven radical change and disruption in the service sector.

These include customer self-service portals and mobile apps, mobile field service automation and work order management solutions, GPS-enabled fleet tracking/management systems, and automated dispatch and scheduling solutions.

Getting Started

Service organisations that want to improve these efforts should institutionalise innovation by establishing dedicated innovation teams and resources and develop metrics to measure the effect of innovation. Frontline employees should be involved, and customer needs and insights should be analysed to develop an innovation road map.

• Begin with customer insights
• Understand the funding mechanism
• Determine who will develop and deliver new innovative service products and models
• Track innovation activity
• Institutionalize innovation

---

Click here to download the white paper now

---

be social and share this feature

As a leading figure spearheading the servitization movement Professor Tim Baines of the Aston Centre for Servitization Research and Practice has seen manufacturers begin to focus far more heavily on service as a revenue stream in recent years...

Over the past few years servitization has become a topic of hot debate.

Several years ago, when I talked to businesses about my work on servitization, managers would look at me blankly and ask what it was all about.

Often they would get hung up on the spelling, or simply say ‘what’s new here? We offer services anyway’.

The concepts of advanced services, IOT and Industry 4.0 were largely unheard of, and the term servitization was often dismissed as ‘a bit too academic’.

Now the world has changed, and servitization has become more mainstream. I’ve always taken the view that servitization is simply ‘manufacturers growing their revenues and profits through services’ and that ultimately we are looking at a paradigm shift in our ideas about manufacturing.

Relax this definition a little and you will see that servitization is all around us; it might be Goodyear implementing proactive services in commercial trucking, GE following through on their digital industrialisation strategy in power generation, BMW offering a new MINI on a Personal Finance Plan with a package of services, or Brompton Bikes being offered to hire by the hour in the high street.

Servitization is happening in many guises, and technological innovations are helping to bring about rapid change.

Industry 4.0 is popular today, while just yesterday it was IOT and before that Big Data. Innovative use of technology is attractive, and understandably so for people within manufacturing who come from a technology background.

 

However I think there is also an element of fear; we’ve all witnessed the rise of IT giants, whether it’s UBER, Apple, Facebook or EBay- many businesses are anxious about the next innovation from Silicon Valley and what it might mean for them and I have heard IT vendors countless times pushing businesses to invest in IT and develop ‘the killer app’.

A word of warning here: remember that service is not an app or a new technology. Take a step back before you invest and think: How can you really make money through technology? What outcomes will it help you deliver to customers?

So my conversations about servitization have moved from ‘what is it?’ to ‘how do you do it?’ My team at Aston Business School and I have now worked with over 100 manufacturers helping them to discover and implement servitization.

There are four fundamental stages through which every company must go; Exploration, Traction, Acceleration and Exploitation.

Today, most want help with the first stage, and to those business leaders who want to get started with servitization we suggest three steps:

Step 1: Think clinically, and understand servitization as an innovation: 

The recent popularity of servitization has inspired some business leaders, consultants and vendors, to re-brand their older offerings and muddy the water in the process.

This can significantly undermine your chances of success.

Go to established sources such as the Aston Business School Servitization website (short url - fs-ne.ws/FOwP304KRAq) to tap into the wealth of critical and rigorous knowledge that exists in this field.

Understand that servitization embraces business model innovation, organisational change, and new technology adoption. That services exist in various forms, and represent differing values to both the customer and provider.

Also understand the limits of our knowledge, for instance large scale surveys will help to give you a sense for how the world is changing, but don’t expect any to tell you exactly how the revenue and profits will change for your own business.

Step 2: Allow yourself to imagine an advanced service proposition but only a little:

Imagine what types of services you might offer, but don’t get too drawn into the people, processes and technologies you might need to deliver these, in the same way that a design engineer will conceptualise the form and function of a car, rather than be constrained by design of the production line.

Keep it simple, don’t yet begin to think that these ideas will ultimately transpire into ‘the’ customer value proposition, just try to give your ideas a sense of realism.

Step 3: Explore, benchmark and validate your ideas:

Identify a business in your wider value chain that has moved forward with services- this might be a distributor, competitor, or one of your own suppliers that is asking to do more for your business.

Alternatively you may need to look to an analogous market sector which has some similarities to your own. In each case visit both the service providers and customers, and try to get a sense of how each collaborated to form a proposition, and how they have behaved to make services a success.

 

Compare your own thoughts on services against these, and use this insights to inform your own ideas, and so test whether your own thoughts are indeed realistic.

The outcome of these three steps is simply a better understanding of servitization and what it could mean for your business. They are elementary but they will improve realism and confidence.

After this, the hard work really begins, as you will need to develop new relationships with customers, innovate you customer value propositions, form new value chain relationships, adapt your business model and much more- and even these are still only part of the exploration phase.

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature

As the role of the Chief Service Officer begins to gain more prominence the focus for driving service excellence at the executive level must be data driven writes Manuel Grenacher, CEO of coresystems...

Delivering service that meets the satisfaction of ever-demanding customers is helping usher in a new C-Level role at service and manufacturing companies.

Meet the Chief Service Officer (CSO).

It’s a role that isn’t widespread yet, but one that has begun to make inroads into leading service companies as more organizations eye revenue opportunities beyond equipment sales.

As product margins slip, CSOs are tasked with orchestrating and executing the type of service that retains and creates loyal customers. Selling a piece of equipment -- even one with a multimillion- dollar price tag -- is a one-time win. Service, however, can create revenue streams that deliver profits each year until the equipment is replaced.

It’s a model that more companies are adopting.

According to McKinsey, by 2016, nearly half of manufacturing companies expect that service will account for a third of their total revenue. But as companies move from being a commodity supplier to offering an on-going service relationship, a clear strategy is necessary.

Target Areas for CSOs 

Successful service relationships require a number of teams working together within an organization.

Aberdeen Research has found that 8 out of ten Best-in-Class organizations (leading field service companies) have a VP-level or higher executive leading service.

CSOs must prioritize getting accurate insights to the right service people at the right time, so that they can solve problems for customers.

Aberdeen found that Best-in-Class organizations have four main target areas (in order of priority):

[unordered_list style="bullet"]

• Improve customer retention and loyalty
• Improve service-related profitability
• Improve quality / relevance of service data
• Improve service information capabilities (i.e. mobility, knowledge sharing)

[/unordered_list]

But what can companies do to help CSOs reach these goals? Data and its analysis are key. Specifically, here are the three data-driven actions that Best-in-Class companies do to empower their CSOs:

Real-Time Insight Drives Real-Time Performance

CSOs must come to grips with managing and orchestrating the efficient operations of a number of different departments and technicians. Best-in-Class companies empower their CSOs with the right data to help drive real-time performance, the ultimate goal of any service organization.

What data, in particular, do CSOs need to move toward real-time service delivery?

Collecting data isn’t the problem it once was. In fact, some CSOs are experiencing the opposite; they are drowning in a deluge of data. The tool used to solve this is a business intelligence and analysis tool that enables consistent benchmarking of service performance.

 

Other tools are needed that let integrated data flow seamlessly from the field to the back office.

CSOs need real-time monitoring of asset operating conditions, performance, and usage. Finally, the tools CSOs use should enable real-time service visibility for senior management.

Give Your Field Team Tools That Deliver Valuable Service Experiences

The ultimate goal of service is to deliver value to the end customer. Service technicians need to ensure that a work order is completed, preferably during their first visit to the customer. But field visits represent an important opportunity for capturing data from equipment performance to visit details.

Our customer GE Power in Switzerland is using our Field Service Mobile APP to record granular data like temperature, upload or comment on pictures. This customer data can help inform the next visit or additional service needs.

Use Data to Continuously Improve Service

Customer expectations will only continue to grow. Since they are under pressure to perform too, customers are demanding real-time solutions to their service issues.

Customers won’t only compare your organization to competing firms, but also to their own customer experiences elsewhere. CSOs must study best practices across the entire service ecosystem and ensure that they are implementing these offerings.

Data and the analytics gathered on machines, equipment, and customers will help create the baseline. From there, CSOs should be able to evaluate and continue to improve service operations.

Some industries have been transformed already by incorporating data analytics into their standard processes.

To give an example, telecom companies can forecast traffic patterns, peak period bottlenecks, commercial versus domestic split, and thus perform real-time optimization of their voice and data networks. They can route around congestion to improve performance and the whole customer experience.

They take constant readings from their network data switches and build a big database of all their devices and customers to get a holistic view of the complete environment.

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature

Run by the University of Cambridge, in the Institute for Manufacturing, this two-day workshop is designed for engineers, managers and senior executives involved in any aspect of the design and delivery of services.

 

---

 

Date: Wednesday 23 to Thursday 24 November 2016

 

---

 

Overview

Making the shift to services is difficult and remains an aspiration for many firms. Arriving at a clear vision of the service offering is often the first stumbling block. What will be offered and how? What are the risks? How do we deliver and create – as well as capture – value?

Drawing on the latest work from the Cambridge Service Alliance, this thought-provoking and practical two-day workshop considers how to design the shift to services.

What you will learn

By the end of the workshop, you will be able to use tools to design new services and improve existing ones and support the successful integration of services into your organisation.

The workshop covers topics including:

• New thinking for service design
• Understanding the ecosystem – expanding your strategic horizons
• Defining the business model – focusing on your customers’ needs
• Planning your service strategy journey
• Innovating the value delivery system – aligning resources and partners
• Service emotion – identifying and managing the customer’s ‘emotion journey’
• The role of big data – optimising service delivery and designing better solutions

Find out more

See the Institute for Manufacturing website for more information and to book your place

Comments from previous attendees

[unordered_list style="bullet"]

• "A key learning for me was how to take a structured approach to fleshing out and refining a new service or existing service"
• "The collaborative work created opportunities to learn different perspectives"
• "The tool set provided is practical and useful"
• "Great overall process of understanding how to develop new business opportunities and understanding the customer perspective"

[/unordered_list] 

 

---

 

Be social and share this update

Bill Pollock, President and Principal Consulting Analyst with Strategies for Growth^SM states the case for Augmented Reality being the next transformational technology in field service...

At a UK Field Services Summit earlier this year, I was asked to cite what I believe would be the “next big thing” in field service. I suggested “Augmented Reality”, or AR. Why? Because we, as an industry, really cannot do things any quicker than in real time; and we can’t make repair tutorials any smaller, more compact and/or transportable than they already are.

What we can do, however, is make it easier for the field technician to “see” what needs to be done, in real time, and with an “augmented” view of what reality alone cannot, and does not, necessarily provide.

Companies like PTC, a global leader in Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) through its strategic partnership with ServiceMax believe that by leveraging the combination of “two transformational technology trends – Internet of Things (IoT) and Augmented Reality (AR)”, it can now deliver “a new class of products that merge the digital and physical worlds.”

The company further cites that when coupled with the IoT and analytics platforms, AR “unlocks a world of possibilities for creating new ways to design products, to monitor and control products, and to instruct operators and technicians in the appropriate methods of use and service.”

Historically, AR had largely focused in applications for the gaming industry; that is, for recreational and entertainment use, rather than for use in a more traditional B2B environment.

 

However, as more and more Millennials begin to enter the global field technician workforce, they bring along with them not only the skills required to take full advantage of the “new” technology, but also a full appreciation – and affinity for – the technology that has been powering their gaming activities for the last several years.

Even for the existing field technician workforce, the technology is eminently easy to learn, easy to use and fairly intuitive, as well.

According to Jim Heppelmann, CEO at PTC, AR is “a technology that superimposes computer-generated images on top of real world objects, ranging from video game characters to data fields” and, as such, a technology that “can extend a variety of experiences into new arenas as well as provide useful information to consumers” – and customers. Heppelmann further stated that “I think a lot of companies who make and service [products] want to be able to pass information downstream to consumers. [But] rather than a big PDF file, they [now] can say let me augment everything you need to know and nothing more” – and only through AR, is there a means for both explaining the need for service, as well as the actual procedures for performing the “fix”.

There is presently a great deal of “untapped potential for AR in B2B,” and Heppelmann believes that by “using an AR-assisted tool, users of a medical equipment device, for example, would be able to do a routine service inspection themselves, saving the time and cost of sending a service person out on a call (which can run thousands of dollars).”

In fact, “because of what IoT is enabling, more and more products are now a mixture of digital and part physical content. So, naturally, the ways in which we interact with these products will evolve toward a mixed-reality model that blends physical and digital interactions.”

 

But, isn’t this the same foundation upon which the gaming industry has built itself on over the last generation (i.e., Generation X) and beyond? The concept is really nothing very new – and the technology has already been available for a quite a while.

So, why not apply the same technology to a practical business application as well? In other words, why should the technology be restricted primarily to gamers primarily for recreational purposes?

Basically, AR works in conjunction with the digital twin concept “to enable a new generation of predictive and prescriptive analytics that bring about new business models where the equipment OEMs will retain ownership of its equipment and provide continuous and optimised service on a subscription-based model”.

Once in place, these capabilities can then be used to support the next generations of Augmented Reality applications as they emerge over time.

There is no question that AR will be able to assist in an SLM environment; that is, to provide the field technician (who may not ever have been called upon to service a particular piece of equipment) to still be able to perform the repair by “overlaying” an enhanced (again, augmented) reality – in 3D motion – over and above what he or she would otherwise be able to visualise, in order to make a quick, clean and complete fix. In fact, AR is already being used for these and myriad other purposes in the field.

Major global brands, including Band-Aid, Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), Mattel and Pepsi have already been using AR for some time. Other major users include Bumble Bee tuna, Guinness Book of World Records, Hyundai, John Deere, KTM Bike, Schneider Electric and Sysmex, etc.

For many field services organisations, AR is now routinely being used to assist field technicians in their ability to perform repairs on equipment they may not have been exposed to previously; have not had any formal, or individual, training or instruction on how to repair; and/or do not readily have access to product specs, schematics, repair manuals or service histories.

Augmented Reality has already made it easier to follow – and understand – otherwise complicated gaming scenarios and sports events for the millions of individuals that have been using the technology for years.

Isn’t time that it was also used to make it easier to perform field service activities? Based on what I have already seen (i.e., and you really do have to see it to believe it!) the answer is resoundingly, “Yes” – and the view from the bridge (i.e., between real-time and Augmented Reality) appears to be breathtaking

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature