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One of the most exciting developments in technology currently emerging the field service sector is the potential of Augmented Reality and at the vanguard driving the technology forward is US based company Help Lightning, with their own take on the tech ‘Mobile Merged Reality’. Kris Oldland spoke to founder Bart Guthrie to find out more about the origins of the technology and just how big it could potentially become...

Help Lightning has been a technology that has been causing conversations for some time now amongst field service organisations in the USA, fuelled primarily by a number of appearances by their charismatic founder Dr. Bart Guthrie on the US conference circuit alongside some slick booth demonstrations.

But what exactly is a neurosurgeon doing disrupting the field service technology space? I caught up with Guthrie at Field Service Medical in San Diego to find out more about the background on how Help Lightning was born.

 

“Early on when I started practicing, even during my training I it became apparent to me that there were opportunities for both technology and certain relationships to improve processes that could sustain or improve health.” Guthrie begins

“The earliest thing I became involved in was image-guided surgery. That is where you take a CT or CAT scan and you use the device to register to the patient’s head in surgery and then as you do the surgery you can see what you are doing on the MRI cast.”

“So I think what that did for me was to open my eyes to the capability of technology to bring information to bear and then after that I became pretty heavily involved in medical image distribution. In my field medical imaging is our currency. It is information dense and we will use it to make most of our decisions to get outcomes in terms of certain things that we do so we developed a system to acquire and manage medical imaging and formed a company around that which did very well.”

“Then right about that time when visualisation in the operating room was becoming usable – endoscopes, microscopes, video cameras and then this notion of connectivity... It’s one thing to have an operating microscope that is high res. but if you can’t connect it to anything you’re only as good as you.”

“So that started coming around I began thinking would it be possible to use connectivity to export information, whether that be medical information or guidance and movement.”

 

“We approached the Department of Energy about a call for technology development they issued around surgical robots and we got funding for around $1M for a pilot scheme. Needless to say the funds were completely insufficient but surgical robots are remarkable.”

“They are in the field, they work and they do what they are supposed to do which is take your movements, then gear it down and they’ll effectively make the same movement. They are going to be tremendously valuable.”

“For us though there were some limitations to the robot. One you can’t teach it very well, there is a time delay, there were all these technical issues that separate you from what is going on. And the other thing in my job is that I am constantly getting requests about remote calls with patients that have a problem. And those patients end up in healthcare systems that have the skills but not the experience.”

We have been speaking for barely a few minutes yet it is clear that Guthrie has a clear passion for technology and its ability to enhance the world we live in. As you would expect, he has the gentle tones of a experienced medical consultant, enhanced further by his soft Alabama accent.

However, he also clearly has a mind built for problem solving and out of the box thinking and it is this skill that led him to the concept of what was to become Help Lightning, the development of which was a direct response to a major problem Guthrie saw in his day to day working life.

Namely getting expertise where it is needed in an emergency situation.

As Guthrie explains “Any of the surgeons in a small hospital where someone has been in an automobile accident for example will know how to make an incision, how to sow, how to support a patient. But any surgeon may not know how to do that in the brain, or in the heart etc."

“Yet the movements and the principals are very similar, you just need the experience. So we started thinking about the idea of somehow capturing the experience of someone who has that skill set and transmitting it real time to a local task-force.”

“We came up with this idea of bi-directional video and if we could capture the remote task field view, look at it, insert instruments, hands, whatever, interact with it and then combine the two and distribute it back that may solve the problem.”

 

“It would allow us to impart a little bit more expertise remotely. It wouldn’t solve everything but it would be advancement over what we could do for example over a telephone, which is the standard conveyor of medical information remotely right now.”

And so Help Lightning was born (albeit originally under a different moniker of VIPAR) and with the support of his mechanical engineering and computer science departments at UAB the concept soon became a reality with pilots in operating rooms in both UAB and the Veterans Hospital.

In its initial configuration VIPAR (an acronym of Virtual Interactive Presence and Augmented Reality) was a high-end manifestation that worked superbly but simply wasn’t scalable.

So after the patents were written Guthrie took the concept and founded Help Lightning and sought to develop a lighter-weight version of the concept.

Modestly he states: “I procured enough funding to get it going and I sort of stepped back out of the way and hired a bunch of just excellent people to get it going and they’ve reduced the concept to a similar functionality on just a mobile device.”

What is certain however, is that the team Guthrie has put in place, headed up by CEO Drew Deaton, have done a quite remarkable job of scaling the technology down to an app - which of course makes the business incredibly scalable itself.

“It achieves a couple of things,” Guthrie explains when discussing the move to an app based approach.

 

“It gets this team out of the hardware business and it makes it available ubiquitously.”

So with the team and technology in place the challenge now is identifying the markets that Help lightning is best suited for. Given the origins of the product clinical care is of course one of those, and Guthrie is directly involved with the pilot program.

“That presentation I gave here where I presented those pilots was the very first step in trying to understand will the patients accept it? Will the providers accept is it? Will we find things at the physical visit that we didn’t find at the virtual visit. Or vice versa – is it safe or is it unsafe?”

Of course these same questions will apply to the initial projects within the field service space as well.

However, the potential for cost savings of using a tool such a Help Lightning could be truly remarkable. Particularly for those companies whose engineers have to travel long distances.

Indeed Help Lightning or other similar tools could have a huge impact on the way companies structure their field services workforce.

With the ability to dial experience in from a remote location to provide the key knowledge and expertise required for a complicated maintenance or repair job, it could make sense for companies to have their most experienced engineers in one office centrally and utilise cheaper, local technicians when it comes to remote locations?

 

Or simply it could be a tool to improve engineers work life-balance, whilst reducing the costs of travel and accommodation.

Another alternative could be to implement a new tier of service offering based around remote assistance whereby the engineer guides the customer themselves through maintenance?

Certainly the applications in field service are wide reaching.

“The way I see it is its all about the relationship you have,” Guthrie explains.

“If you just take two people as a construct and their relationship is remote and some kind of expertise or procedural expertise has to be conveyed from one to the other it’s a natural fit.”

“So any market where there is an existing relationship that is benefited by the transmission of expertise to a remote site in a manner that facilitates the relationship, that engages both people, I think is a natural market.”

“I feel patient care is a natural fit, field service is a natural fit. I think maybe the space shuttle even, wherever there is that kind of dynamic in the relationship, I think this concept could fit.”

 

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The way products are serviced is reshaping their design at the R&D level, and providing new insights into product usage, according to field service management specialist, ServiceMax. Service mechanisms are increasingly seen as the common denominator of accurate product development and maintenance.

The Internet of Things and intelligent field service automation is creating a connected service loop built into products, enabling manufacturers to track, pre-empt service requirements, understand usage and ultimately improve the way customers are using products.

“Before IoT, R&D teams relied mainly on interpretation and anecdotal input from field service engineers to get a full understanding of how products were faring out in the field,” said Mark Homer is Vice President, Global Customer Transformation for field service management specialist, ServiceMax. “But faced with competition and diminishing returns, manufacturers are using IoT and connected field service to make products more specific to consumer requirements.”

 

With IoT enabled field service automation, companies can collect data automatically from machines and devices to determine their condition, performance, potential for error or malfunction, foresee problems, identify troublesome parts, and equip field service techs with the right tools and materials.

Companies can also gain new levels of insight into how their products are actually used post purchase and aggregate the data for better design, maintenance and user experience, redefining the relationship between businesses and customers. The result is minimum product downtime, maximum customer satisfaction and greater insight into how consumers are using products.

 

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The global field service market is estimated to jump from $1.58 billion last year to more than $3.5 billion by 2019, according to research firm MarketsandMarkets. This three-part series will look at how cloud is an enabler for field service organisations, how technology is allowing central control and improving people management, rounding off with a look at how technology can improve customer service and the issue of privacy.

The series has emerged following a recent panel debate with experts and academics, hosted by ClickSoftware and chaired by Forrester’s senior analyst, Paul Miller. The panel included: Tim Faulkner, Senior Vice President at ClickSoftware, Dr Carsten Sorensen, Associate Professor in Digital Innovation at London School of Economics, Katelyn Burrill, Product Marketing Manager at ClickSoftware, and Phil Wainewright, Chair at Euro Cloud UK.

The cloud as an enabler and the automation landscape

 Paul Miller opened the debate: “We're here to talk about cloud and field service. A lot of the visible manifestations are out in the field, for instance the device the engineer is holding when they walk into your house is probably accessing applications and data held in the cloud – but do we really need the cloud for all that? Why is the cloud important?”

“We all get excited about new technology,” Phil Wainewright responds. “What's changed now is the Internet and that's brought two things – digital connectedness and extremely powerful and not so powerful smart devices. There are more computers in the world today than there are people; cheap devices, with the ability to be connected to each other and to the computing power of the cloud, are falling right into the hands of individuals. The final ingredient is the hugely elastic scalable power of the cloud. You can pool it into a vast cauldron of big data and pop out analytics and use the information to develop more efficient processes.”

 

“For ClickSoftware it's a different model and it brings down barriers to adopting field service solutions that were there before,” said Tim Faulkner. “Any company with its own IT department probably had a traditional approach of evaluating a solution, looking at the integrations needed, buying the hardware, setting it up and making that capex investment – as an organisation, you bank on seeing returns as you ramp up and roll out.”

Faulkner continued, “That's not easy for a small organisation to do though. Cloud is a leveller and enables small organisations to adopt the same applications. For large corporations it helps them to deploy different methods. Maybe not the big waterfall approach, but a more agile incremental way in shorter timeframes. Cloud is definitely an enabler for that, opening new opportunities for business units within larger corporations. Last year, in Europe, the adoption of our cloud-based solutions surpassed my forecasts at the beginning of the year – we expected 25% of new customers and it ended up being closer to 50%!”

Miller interjects: “Allowing smaller companies to adopt the same solution as their biggest competitors?”

“Using cloud based field service technology allows flexibility and speed,” said Dr Carsten Sorensen.  “If you look at manufacturing, in the old days you'd have a siloed approach – by the time you got to the last person to sign for a new component, they'd realise it couldn't be made within the constraints and they'd have to go back and start again.

Dr Sorensen continued, “We need to understand all of the constraints straight away. One of the key things in business is to allow individuals to make rapid decisions while at the same time making sure they don’t make bad decisions for the company. In the past, these individuals had information in a handbook or on their computer back at the office or depot. In the 21^st century, individuals, wherever they are, need to make the right choices and the infrastructure needs to be in their hands to make those informed decisions. We haven’t really worked out how to utilise this yet.”

 

“Business infrastructure is an important angle,” said Wainewright. “The way businesses are organised needs to be changed to take advantage of the new technologies.”

Sorensen jumped in at this point: “They need to balance ERP systems that automate the process that tells people what to do at what stage. It makes it possible to have flexible communication. The challenge is for big companies to manage this to facilitate processes but also enable discussions and flexibility. The more lightweight infrastructure you have the better it is for flexibility. Cloud technology makes it more lightweight.”

Rounding off the first part of the debate Miller asked Katelyn Burrell how organisations are changing how they deal with their own customers, with cloud playing a big part of that. “When prospects come to ClickSoftware looking for a cloud solution from you, is that recognition part of the solution? Are they thinking about the broader strategic shift?”

“They are absolutely thinking about the broader strategic shift,” said Burrell. “We started nearly 20 years’ ago with on premise solutions only, we're experts at that. It has to be a transformative project where all stakeholders are involved up-front. What the cloud has done now is enabled more experimentation within the organisation, possibly without the involvement of IT. A business unit might come to us and say they want to make this transformation and need help selling to the executives. The cloud has enabled them to do a pilot project before going on a bigger scale.

What's really driving it for our customers is that their products and services are becoming more commoditised, and how they deliver their services is a key differentiator. They need to improve their customer experience, but also keep their operations and costs in check, servicing the needs of the business and the customer.”

Look out for Part Two of the debate, when the focus switches to central control and people management, and how development of the devices available allows greater oversight and communications with workers out in the field.

 

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As the industry wide adoption of IoT comes ever closer, now is the time for companies to focus on service-led processes and reducing SLAs or be at risk of falling behind their peers warns Tom Bowe, Global Field Service Specialist with IFS...

The 15 minute SLA may seem like an impossible task but in his presentation at Field Service Medical recently Tom Bowe, IFS, highlighted two separate examples of companies doing just that.

Further more it is just a stepping stone on the way to companies offering 100% uptime he believes.

The two great examples of companies hitting 15 minute SLAs Bowe cited were firstly IFS customers Cubic Transportation Systems who in San Francisco are hitting 15 minute SLAs on the local transportation system and are doing so with a 100% record.

Meanwhile on the other side of the country the NYPD are hitting 7 minutes response times for life threatening calls and 9 minutes for non life threatening calls which is quite frankly incredible.

Of course not every company can hit these heights but how close should your average company be trying to get towards these kinds of numbers?

“If you’re looking at it from a company perspective then it’s very much a road you need to take – a journey from where you are today to where you want to be in the future with a number of key points along the way.” Bowe explains

 

“The goal should be to improve 20% a year. I don’t think it can be incremental, like 3% productivity per year. It’s more significant than that.”

“A total transformation is unnecessary, but I think you have to realise change is coming fast – the train has left the station. So where is it going to end up? Personally, I think it is going to be in realtime.”

So why does Bowe foresee such dramatic sea change?

Well like many in our industry he sees the impending arrival of the IoT as a seismic game changer within the way field service will operate.

“I believe equipment will be able to self-monitor themselves and leverage intelligence in the cloud to perform decision analysis and determine what actions to take, and to do that before any kind of serious failure.”

Bowe pauses just briefly to highlight the magnitude of the change.

“It’s going to take the SLAs and collapse them down to a fraction of what they are today. People are talking ‘predictive this’ and ‘proactive that’ and listening to the marketing wizards out there so expectations are already building."

“Whether or not a business changes in advance of this will determine how much pain their business will go through when it actually becomes mandatory for them to massively reduce their SLAs.”

 

Bowe speaks with a passion and it is clearly a topic he has given a lot of thought to.

But realistically how at risk are those companies who don’t adapt? How much is hyperbole?

“If you have a choice between two service providers where one is responsive in days and the other one is guaranteeing zero down-time and monitors it all the time…who wins? Imagine if a service provider could remove the customers’ concerns by saying, Hey, we’ve got you covered, we’re always watching, we’re always monitoring.  What if they didn’t have to worry about anything?” He replies wryly

“I think it is a complete game changer. People will make different choice for that level of service.”

One of the other big take aways from Bowe’s presentation was that whilst IoT is already beginning to happen, for those companies that begin to embrace the change it is bringing it is not just about getting sensors on all of your assets in the field.

“If we literally have to wait until everything is sensored up, we are talking about a decade from now.” Bowe explains.

“Companies can’t wait that long. They are going to be way behind competitors who have taken that first step.”

“That first step is changing your service business in evolutionary ways and incorporating the IoT elements, the theory of the case. So even though you don’t have a machine learning algorithm right now, that’s OK because you can still significantly improve by leveraging what you already know through past history and service maintenance.”

“How many service calls did you get (by product)? Don’t you already have condition reports on each piece of equipment and take the readings, record measurements, generate log files and create cases?”

“You probably have customer complaint records, and your field engineers enter notes like ‘there was a buzzing sound’ or ‘we had to reset a bunch of times,’ right? Well these are all key observations.”

"So you already have all this data, and as a software guy, it’s pretty easy to make some calculations and put together a score based upon your current existing knowledge.”

"And that score can help you respond faster. Sure, maybe it’s rudimentary today, maybe it’s not even worth getting that excited about – but with the score and some new service processes around it, you can start evolving your business to fit the eventuality of the IoT model, which is then going to take that score and significantly amplify the meaning and importance of it.”

 

“The benefit short-term is that you’ve started to build the infrastructure, you’ve started to incorporate IoT into your business model and you start thinking around new service offerings.”

“It is important to get a head start and be in front of the wave.”

Indeed the way Bowe describes his thinking is almost like a prep-school for IoT, essentially creating an additional route for service companies to be adopting as they wait for the unified standards that will facilitate the mass adoption of IoT to arrive.

“At the end of the day it’s better to start sooner rather than later.” Bowe comments.

However, he also warns of jumping into the technology too quickly before the standards are settled.

“If you go too far down a proprietary route when the standards do come into play you may be locked into that technology and have built processes in around that technology.”

“Then it becomes problematic – you are stuck with a Betamax.”

So how does Bowe see these standards emerging?

“I think right now it is moving towards a utility. The big guys are investing heavily in dozens of IoT services. They are coming out with data lakes, event hubs and machine learning and underneath that is a massive amount of technology.”

“It’s going to be a utility because you can’t expect every company to have a bunch of PHDs in the back room trying to work this stuff out. So we’ve got to standardise in order to be efficient.”

The normal model in the software industry is to build things in layers and you typically start with a few infrastructure providers that everyone can leverage which I think will be the large Cloud providers as soon as we have some standards.”

 

“IoT needs standards to help everyone with flexibility, re-use, enormous data volumes, analysis, cost efficiency and achieving the original objectives.”

“Without those standards we are kind of stuck in this proprietary high-cost model, which is not scalable. Without standards, IoT won’t become a life-changing type of technology.”

It’s an interesting point. All too often we talk about IoT as though it has already arrived but in reality how far are we away from universal standards being adopted because these are the true final barriers to mass adoption?

“I wish I could say that a solution is right around the corner, but there are still competing bodies and some very large organisations have gotten behind three or four different standards,” bemoans Bowe.

“But they’ve got to work it out, the opportunity is extraordinary and when they do IFS will be ready for it. I can’t wait.”

 

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Bill Pollock, President and Principal Consulting Analyst with Strategies for GrowthSM explains why Big Data isn’t the holy grail, instead focus on the quality, accuracy, accessibility and application of the data you routinely collect...

While much of the ongoing discourse in the global Information Technology (IT) community nowadays seems to center around hot topics, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) or “Big Data”, research has shown that it is not necessarily the size of the database that matters; but, rather, the quality, accuracy, accessibility and application of the relevant data that is being routinely collected, analysed and shared throughout the organisation.

In other words, data does not necessarily need to be “big”; it simply needs to be relevant, accessible and actionable, in order to be useful.

However, this is an important distinction that is missed by many!

First, let’s talk about what the “big” in “big data” really is. According to IBM, every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data – in fact, so much that 90% of the data resident in the world today has been created in just the last two years alone.

As a result, field service organisations now have access to an unprecedented amount of data about the performance of their technicians, their vehicles, the equipment they service and their business performance in general.

However, what differentiates the best practices organisations from all others is best expressed in terms of not only “how accessible is all this data?”, but, rather, “how can it be transformed into valuable information that contributes to increased revenue, reduced costs and improved customer satisfaction?”

 

Other questions are also bandied about, such as “how big is too big data?”, and “what constitutes “big enough” data?”

It is, typically, in their responses to these types of questions, where many field service organisations initially go wrong – that is, they incorrectly believe that since they have already collected mountains of data from multiple sources (i.e., service call activity records, closed call reports, technician generated utilisation and/or productivity reports, machine-to-machine communications; etc.) that they must use all of these data in as many scenarios as possible.

But, the rule of thumb is more a matter of focusing primarily on the data that you “need-to-know”,rather than collecting data that is only “nice-to-know”.

The difference between these two types of data may appear to be subtle at first glance, but it is an important distinction since data collection, in and of itself, requires a massive expenditure of time, resources and investment, both human and pound-wise; it must be gathered, analysed and disseminated through a highly organised and controlled process, with direct senior management oversight and accountability; and it must bridge virtually all areas within the organisation – both from the top-down, bottom-up, and all throughout.

This is what we call “business analytics” – not “big data”; but, rather, just “enough data”.

 

In fact, it is those services organisations that are most successful in managing their business analytics that can easily tell the difference between “big data” and “enough data”.

They are also the ones that can most easily recognise when the bar for data collection, analysis and sharing needs to be raised in order to accommodate anything from the normal evolution of the organisation’s evolving database needs, to more event-driven needs, such as to account for a new product/service launch; increases in the numbers of customers, installed base and/or field technicians; business mergers, acquisitions or consolidation; new strategic alliance partnerships; etc.).

So … how big does your data really need to be?

The answer is simple: Big enough to support the organisation’s ongoing business analytics needs and requirements in terms of the ability to collect, analyse and share all of the data that is deemed important (e.g., business-critical, or mission-critical, etc.); required as input into the organisation’s ongoing metrics, or Key Performance Indicator (KPI), program; as input to annual or other periodic planning and forecasting activities; and the like.

Whether your organisation finds itself “swimming” in a data lake of epic proportions, or simply maintaining a modest database that fully supports its front and back offices; its field technicians, customers, and partners; its management decision makers; strategic partners; or any other stakeholders within the organisation, it will still require a sound “data analytics” program in order to make it all work.

Once again, it does not need to be “big” – just “big enough”, relevant and actionable.

 

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Pegasystems Inc.  a software company delivering strategic business applications to a number of  leading enterprises have recently announced the acquisition of Atlanta, GA-based OpenSpan, Inc., a privately held software provider of robotic process automation (RPA)  and workforce analytics software.

OpenSpan uses robotic automation to ease the burden on customer service representatives  by automating routine desktop tasks, thus increasing employee productivity and job satisfaction. By providing insight into desktop activity and automating or eliminating repetitive, time-consuming tasks, OpenSpan frees agents to focus their energy on delivering exceptional customer experience while also helping to lower operational costs.  

Running on more than 200,000 desktops at leading global enterprises, OpenSpan provides advanced robotic automation and workforce analytics capabilities that complement and enhance Pegasystems’ Customer Relationship Management application suite and Business Process Management platform.

This acquisition unifies robotics and workforce analytics with case management and real-time analytics for the first time. Organisations can quickly experience the benefits of an integrated desktop and leverage their insights and cost savings to transition effectively into a fully-unified CRM solution.

“Organisations are under tremendous pressure to transform their businesses into customer service machines to meet the new demands of digital customers,” said Alan Trefler, founder and CEO, Pegasystems. “We’ve already seen the power of Pega and OpenSpan working together to help our clients with their digital transformation initiatives. We believe OpenSpan’s cutting-edge robotics, workforce analytics, and process automation capabilities, combined with Pega’s leading process and real-time analytics, supports an emerging era of intelligent automation working in concert with people to deliver a better customer experience.”

Meanwhile Eric Musser, CEO, OpenSpan commented:

“Over the past 11 years, we’ve built a highly successful organisation that has helped introduce the power of robotics and desktop intelligence to mainstream business,”

“But this is just the tip of the iceberg of what analytics and robotics can really do. By integrating with Pegasystems’ proven applications and platform, we believe we can advance robotic automation and desktop analytics in exciting new directions that will change the way businesses interact with their customers.”

 

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Swedish firm XMReality work with Bosch Rexroth to pioneer new remote service program that utilises smart glasses and augmented reality...

Augmented reality software and smart glasses from Swedish company XMReality have enabled automation and drive system manufacturer Bosch Rexroth to roll out a new service and support programme with remote assistance.

The first Rexroth solution launched for industrial hydraulics is called Hägglunds InSight Live, the support programme involves the client company’s own maintenance team in carrying out adjustments, troubleshooting and emergency work, with guidance from Bosch Rexroth’s systems specialists back at base.

Using the software from XMReality with an ordinary smartphone, tablet or laptop, along with the optional smart glasses, the local service engineer works directly with one of the in-house experts at Bosch Rexroth.

The system was initially used by Bosch Rexroth in Sweden but is now being rolled out in other selected countries. Potentially, any of Bosch Rexroth’s 375,000 (30k+ employees in Rexroth) personnel worldwide can access the system.

“Bosch Rexroth provides world-class services and we constantly strive to implement new and innovative ways to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations.”

“Using XM Reality’s platform, we are now able to offer a remote service portfolio that ensures that help, assistance and our specialist expertise are available for both planned and unplanned situations” commented Rory Moore, Service Business Development Manager - Hägglunds Products

 

“We are proud of now being classified as an Essential Supplier in Bosch global purchasing system” added XMReality´s CEO Johan Castevall. "This is a confirmation of the importance of our Remote Guidance solution in modern industrial way of work.”

The augmented reality smart glasses from XMReality enable hands-free operation during the interaction with the service experts, but the software can also be used with just an ordinary smartphone.

The service expert sees on his screen what the operator sees through the lens. The software transfers video and audio streams between the service expert and the operator with perfect synchronisation, even when the bandwidth is low.

Gestures, drawings or instructions can be overlaid by the instructor on the live image.

The XMReality software is compatible with Windows and Android operating systems. The optional smart glasses, which enable hands-free operation, can be used with prescription glasses or protective smart glasses.

Their 40° field of vision enables the instructor to see the periphery of the image – augmented reality smart glasses can often only offer 15-30° field of vision.

The smart glasses are powered by the tablet or laptop computer and battery life is usually around two hours, depending on battery size.

 

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With the recent launch of the world’s first fully connected IoT solution for field service, ServiceMax has really opened the doors to IoT adoption within our industry. Mark Homer, VP of Global Customer Transformation for ServiceMax reflects on just how big an impact IoT can have for field service companies...

We are seeing a growing interest in IoT adoption in the market today - from both customers and service providers - along with a move from reactive to proactive service. It’s certainly reflected in many of the companies I am working with that have a keen interest in this area.

But why is this?

Reactive service, as we all know, can be very expensive. In my view, it doesn’t really deliver what it should do in terms of the quality and value.

If you consider downtime and lost output, from a customer’s point of view, reactive service costs really are quite significant.

Also from a supplier’s perspective, it’s always been expensive to send engineers out with an average figure of around £180 for a B2B environment. Even in a consumer context, engineer call out costs can be expensive.

In fact, in some of the organisations that we work with - such as those maintaining gas plants or very expensive equipment such as security scanners - it can cost anything up to £1500 for an engineer to be sent on a job.

IoT offers us some potential solutions to address this issue. The recent research we undertook with Field Service News and PTC really helped solidify some of the thinking around how these benefits can play out in the real world.

In parallel, we are also seeing the shift to connected services begin to accelerate with a growing trend towards servitization.

I’ve sat on quite a few round-tables recently in this area.

Servitization has been around for a while, having come out of lean manufacturing and Six Sigma.

 

But with the on-going drive towards globalisation and digitalisation, alongside the emergence of IoT, we’re now seeing added market momentum.

We are seeing a large number of companies of all sizes, that view IoT as an enabling technology to allow them to move towards preventative planned maintenance within their service organisations, as well as a shift in focus for their businesses that puts the emphasis on outcome based solutions.

My personal view is that we will soon see outcome based service models becoming more and more common. The industry as a whole needs to sit back and rethink its service models.

I know that there are already a few high profile case studies, such as Cannon, providing document services rather than selling printers, for example, or one of the most famous examples of Rolls Royce providing flight hours not jet engines (coined ‘power-by-the –hour’).

But these examples are no longer examples of companies operating outside of the norm.

We often see customers looking for a guarantee that their provider is going to provide a particular service, deliver a particular outcome, and a certain pre-agreed level of performance.

And this shift in thinking is leading to a change within industry that is very much ‘we are in it together’.

Providers are becoming accountable for their customers’ success, and as a result will reap the rewards of being an integral part of their customers’ businesses - including longer-term contracts, which of course adds stability and a platform for further development and growth.

Our recent partnership with PTC has been well documented, and the reason for coming together is very much a result of this emerging need for a platform to fulfil this demand. A platform to enable field service companies to evolve in keeping with these trends and to support this new service economy.

At the core of the partnership is a desire to allow manufacturers and service partners to connect products - a key building block in maximising IoT within an outcome based solutions strategy.

 

And whilst I know I’m biased, I must say that I’m really excited by our recent launch of Connected Field Service, which is the complete Internet of Things solution for the field service industry.

By leveraging PTC’s ThingWorx platform, ServiceMax’s Connected Field Service can let you know immediately when something is about to fail, and automatically dispatch the necessary technician with the right knowledge and the  right parts to repair the machine and eliminate unplanned downtime.

Given the potential we discussed above for IoT to change the way field service companies focus their businesses, and its role as an enabler for companies moving towards a servitized model, I genuinely believe that Connected Field Service is a first glimpse of the future of things to come in our industry.

Exciting times indeed.

 

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James Smith, Research Director for Field Service conference producer for The Field Service Summit, organised by Copperburg explains how the IoT is set to change everything...

 

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Field Service Summit 2016 takes place at St Hugh's College, Oxford, UK on 12 April. Not registered yet? Click here  and quote FSN25 for your 25% discount.

 

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I’ve been using the internet for 20 years, and in that time it’s changed how people connect with one another.

When I started there were 77 million online users.

Now there’s 3.2 billion.

But the Internet of Things (IoT), also known as the industrial internet, has much further to go - and is set to change how everything connects with everything.

From connecting 3.2 billion people, the IoT will connect 41 billion devices, and that’s just in the next 5 years.

An order of magnitude bigger than today’s consumer internet, the industrial internet will transform industries. It’s only a matter of time before it transforms yours: cheap bandwidth, cheap sensors, clever analytics and pervasive smartphones and wearables – in truth the IoT era is already here.

During research for this April’s Field Service Summit in Oxford, I caught up with some of our speakers to take a closer look at how IoT will change field service operations.

The ‘Service Web’

“Field Service is undergoing a revolution. New sensors and sources of data mean that firms are able to offer ever greater and more sophisticated services and solutions to their customers,” explains Professor Andy Neely, Head of Cambridge University’s Institute for Manufacturing & Founding Director of the Cambridge Service Alliance.

“Original equipment manufacturers in all sectors seem to be waking up to the challenges and opportunities of field service not just for their products, but also for their competitors. This, coupled with developments in big data analytics, make field service a fascinating place to work today.”

When everything is connected, it will be those service companies that best understand their customers who capture the most value.

“IoT is not just a technology transformation, it’s an industry transformation that requires competing industry players to work collaboratively to realise the true benefits on offer,” says Stephen

Jeffs-Watts, Senior Advisor – Enterprise Service Management, Service, Projects & Asset, with enterprise service management company IFS.

 

Competitive advantage will not come from responsiveness or cost; it will come from becoming a strategic partner to your customers - and the field service team will be the elastic cord that binds together vendors and customers.

“It is also important is to rethink both the back office and customer interaction – the large call centre will disappear, to be replaced by control centres, staffed by more highly skilled people able to interact with equipment remotely,” he adds.

“Sending a service technician will become a last resort; only happening when physical intervention with equipment is necessary, but how does the service organisation ensure that they don’t become commoditised as well and move up the value chain to become trusted advisors with strong customer relationships?”

“The biggest challenge facing most service organisations is how to increase their service profitability and increase revenue,” observes Mikko Keto, Senior Vice President, Performance Services, Metso Corporation.

“Focusing just on spare parts maximises profitability but tends to limit service growth. Too much field service work and profitability can become too low. Finding the optimum mix is the holy grail of services.”

 

“The real power of IoT lies in the data that is produced,” says Marc Tonen, EMEA Product Management, Astea International.

“Field service management solutions take the data collected from machine-to-machine monitoring and turn it into actions – actions that mean faster repair times, less time wasted on travel and reduced asset downtime.”

“Leading service organisations have moved from a purely reactive service delivery model to a proactive or preventative model and are already reaping the rewards.”

If it’s clear to see where the initial value will be created - the real prize will be won by field service organisations able to retool their teams to move into the role of strategic advocacy.

“There is a need to enhance the customer experience through field service interactions,” says Aly Pinder, Senior Research Analyst, Aberdeen Group.

“Technicians not only find themselves responsible for fixing downed equipment, they also have to have the tools, skills, knowledge, and expertise to deliver value to customers as the brand advocates for the business.”

 

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St Hugh's College Oxford, UK, is the venue for Field Service Summit 2016 on 12 April.  Not registered yet?  Click here and quote FSN25 to receive a 25% discount

 

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