Despite the hype that has surrounded wearable computing we’ve yet to see widespread adoption in either the consumer or business world. Yet there is plenty of potential for wearable technology in field service. However, we need to change the way we see think about them argues Kris Oldland...

As far as recent technology trends go few have failed to live up to the hyperbole quite as much as wearable technology has done so far.

In 2013 Forbes magazine brashly claimed 2014 would be the year of the wearables. Then when 2014 came and went specialist mobile computing analysts CSS stated actually 2015 would be the year of the wearables.

Yet while the technology has evolved the fact remains that I’m still pretty much one of the only people I know to actually own a wearable device.

Even the ultimate technology-as-a-fashion statement brand Apple haven’t had anything close to the impact they were expected to have had.

Yet this is the consumer world, what about in the realm of industry? It’s no secret that Glass 2.0 is being geared towards the enterprise and in field service the application of such a device, which offers a completely hands free means of communication with the added bonus of the on-site engineer being able to provide a ‘see-what-i-see’ experience to a remote colleague, could potentially be truly ground-breaking.

Indeed Google shouldn’t wait too long to release a second iteration of Glass as there are plenty of other smart glasses manufacturers working with specialist developers such as Pristine IO who are already heavily engaged with the field service industry.

The fact is that smart glasses offer the opportunity for highly efficient remote assistance and often one of the biggest costs for a field service company is getting an experienced engineer half way across a continent to make that critically urgent fix for that key customer.

 

The cost of travelling, accommodation not to mention dead-time whilst the engineer is in transit could be wiped off the P&L if companies are able to get that engineer to ‘dial-in’ rather than fly-in. R.o.I could be hit within a matter of weeks and at the same time service levels are being improved as the customer is getting his assets up and running a gain far quicker.

 

The use case for smart glasses in our industry is clear. The same cannot be said for smart watches however.

Whilst some FSM solution providers have created smart watch apps, for me the benefits are minimal. An engineer still needs to turn his hands to read an incoming notification, so the solution isn’t really hands free.

Also whilst some smart watches like the Samsung Gear2 are capable of voice calls many aren’t so again hands free communication is a bit of a stretch for most smart watches.

 

And trying to manage inputting any amount of data or notes on a smart watch is a cumbersome task simply due to the limited screen real estate. Add to this the fact that these are companion devices (so the engineers need a phone anyway) and the cost/benefit equation doesn’t really stack up.

 

And this is why we to change our thinking around wearables and stop lumping smart watches and smart glasses together under the one blanket umbrella. The use cases for both are very different. One clearly has potential in field service, the other not so much.

And of course wearables aren’t just limited to glasses and watches either. Certain smart clothing could certainly play a big role in lone worker protection. Heart monitoring vests or wearable cameras certainly would have potential in this area for example.

Indeed personally I’m a big believer in the use of wearable technology within our industry. However, we absolutely need to stop thinking about wearables as a broad technology and focus on the use cases for specific devices and how they could be a useful addition to our technicians tool-kit. Once companies start doing that, then I am sure we will see more use of wearable computing within the field service industry.

 

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As the last remaining vestiges of tinsel are tidied away from the corners here at Field Service News Towers, our Editor-in- Chief Kris Oldland dusts off his crystal ball and begins a new series looking at what is going to be the key trends for field service companies this coming year...

As the Editor of a trade magazine, you know you're always going to be asked to put some kind of list together come the start of the year predicting the big trends in the market, and you know invariably some of them you’ll get right and some of them you’ll get wrong.

Last year was no exception, I suggested that the Internet of Things would start to become an integral part of field service operations, which in some ways it did (there are certainly more case studies of field service IoT implementations now than there were a year ago), the Cloud would finally come of age as a platform for field service management systems (which our own research showed to be partially true, there is a growing move to the Cloud but it remains a gradual shift) and that 2015 would be the year that 3D printing would make a true breakthrough (woefully optimistic as despite huge potential I’ve yet to see a genuine application for 3D printing in a field service environment.)

Yet as I look through this year’s list I find that the trends I’ve highlighted are, in the main not so much about brand new emerging technologies or concepts, but more their evolution from fledgling ideas to real-life applications now soaring in full flight.

 

Therefore for once I’m feeling more confident that most of this list will come good by the end of the year.

Indeed, I would go as far as to say that if the last few years have been all about exciting innovation, as twenty first century technologies drive us into a Gene Roddenbury inspired brave new world, then 2016 may well be the start of a period of maturation, and fulfilment.

Is 2016 the year we finally stop talking about how things are going to be in the not so distant future and start realising that this is how we are going to be doing things in the here and now?

Only time will tell, but for what it’s worth, here’s how I see the year panning out...

Servitization will become a common way of doing business

On the outset a radical shift in business thinking, driven largely from the UK with an American English spelling, servitization has a number of different monikers including ‘outcome based solutions’, ‘through life-cycle services’ and ‘advanced services’.

The concept itself, which in reality can be dated back easily to the 1960’s and less tangibly so even earlier, involves the shift in thinking away from the traditional transactional nature of manufacturing a product to sell, and then providing services to ensure the upkeep of that product, towards an approach whereby a product is manufactured with the view of delivering a long-term service.

The (perhaps overly used and certainly overly simplistic) often cited example is ‘Don’t sell drills, sell holes’ something that many switched on sales people will be fully aware of as solutions based selling has been a staple of the consultative sell in the twilight of the last century and the early dawn of this one.

 

And at it’s heart that’s what Servitization is really all about.

However, it is doing so on a company wide scale, taking a neat, piffy one liner and reinventing the whole company structure around the premise.

The all time most cited example of servitization has to be Rolls Royce who in the sixties working with American Airlines adopted a servitized approach, coining it ‘power-by-the-hour’ and in doing so re-wrote the rules for the aviation industry.

Other big name examples of servitization also come from companies as diverse as Pearson, Caterpillar and MAN Trucks (UK) but for some time the examples of truly servitized businesses beyond these headline hogging few were in short supply.

However, in part due to the ongoing work from academia by the likes of Tim Baines (Aston), Andy Neely (Cambridge) and Howard Lightfoot (Cranfield) but also driven heavily by the emergence of the Internet of Things, Enterprise Mobility and Machine to Machine communications, we are finallystarting to see servitization beginning to really come to the fore.

At last year’s Spring Servitization Conference hosted by Baines and his colleagues at Aston University we saw academia and industry on the same page and companies ranging from global PLCs such as Air France KLM and recycling and mining giant Metso through to family owned transit packaging firm Nicklin all taking the steps towards building a servitized business operation.

 

With servitization bringing the promise of both greater long term profits as well as a better service for the clients (leading to longer-term contracts – which of course provides stability for a business,) it is little wonder that companies such as Sony are beginning to adopt the model and there is a definite feel that the concept is now gaining momentum.

For us in field service this is perhaps a double edged sword.

On the one hand it means that service now sits proudly at the top table as an absolutely critical part of a business strategy.

On the other however, it means that we need to be 100% on top of our game, as a fundamental factor in a servitized business model is that unless the client has uptime, the service provider isn’t getting paid.

However, the simple fact is that servitization is coming to an industry near you and it will perhaps be those companies that neglect to pay attention to the phenomenon that may come under threat.

 

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Look out for the second part of this feature where we look at the impact the Internet of Things and Augmented Reality may have on field service in 2016

 

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Service management software specialist ServiceMax has launched  Connected Field Service,  a complete Internet of Things (IoT) solution for the field service industry. Connected Field Service (CFS) is said to be the first product to seamlessly integrate IoT machine data with a field service delivery system, providing service professionals and technicians with real-time proactive information about field assets, delivered via the cloud to their mobile devices.

As manufacturers and service providers continue to emphasize the need for proactivity in field service, the solution will be the essential framework for delivering more intelligent and agile service, transforming how technicians operate in the field while improving the quality of service they’re able to provide.

Connected Field Service leverages the PTC ThingWorx IoT platform, enables smart machines to initiate service requests, introduces new tools for remote service, and displays real-time machine data to service professionals and, when combined with additional PTC Service Lifecycle Management solutions, provides technicians with connected diagnostics and contextual repair procedures via mobile devices.

As part of the offering, ServiceMax is also announcing the availability of ProductIQ, a new feature in the ServiceMax Mobile suite for iPad and Laptops.  This provides users with a simple and clear mobile window into smart device details and records in-field activities. By transforming service delivery with real-time machine data and intelligent service tools, manufacturers can better guarantee asset performance and uptime, allowing them to sell services, and not products, in-line with the outcome-based model.

“We wanted to leverage the power of IoT to strengthen our platform for delivering flawless field service to our customers,” said Dave Yarnold, CEO of ServiceMax, “Connected Field Service lets you know immediately when something has failed or is about to fail, and automatically dispatches the necessary technician with the right knowledge and the right parts to repair the machine and eliminate unplanned downtime. The real-time window gives our customers the opportunity to drive higher customer satisfaction, opens up new opportunities for outcome-based service offerings, and ultimately drives profitable service.”

“Together, PTC and ServiceMax are enabling manufacturers and service organizations to create new value for their customers through enhanced service offerings and the sale of outcomes,” said Jim Heppelmann, President and CEO of PTC. “Connected Field Service leverages our complementary technology offerings and a shared vision for the transformation of service made possible by the Internet of Things, bringing an array of new capabilities to technicians in the field and powering increased efficiency and profitability at multiple stages of the service lifecycle.”

Connected Field Service recognizes that the trajectory of the field service industry needs to match that of the manufacturing industry. As manufacturers are more inclined to sell outcomes not products, the technicians delivering these outcomes need to move from a reactive servicing to a proactive and predictive model. The CFS solution offers service professionals and technicians predictive insights into the products they are servicing, underscoring ServiceMax’s ongoing commitment to deliver the most advanced capabilities to its customers.

“In our line of work, asset uptime is crucial. The ability to create real time reports straight from the machine and deliver to our technicians is very powerful,” said Daniel Kingham, Program Director at medical equipment company Elekta. “This feature alone will differentiate us from our competitors, delivering proactive and highly productive service to our customers around the globe. Ultimately, Connected Field Service allows us to transform our business and create loyal customers.”

"With so much new technology available in IoT point solutions, one of the main challenges our members are seeing is how to make sense of it all and put it to use," said John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research, Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA). "The Connected Field Service solution from ServiceMax and PTC is the first solution we have seen that addresses this problem head-on. They have delivered the first pre-integrated suite that can provide a seamless view of real-time machine data, right in the context of where it is needed most -- the delivery of service in the field."

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What are the trends that will have the most impact on field service in 2016? John Cameron, general manager, Trimble Field Service Management,  reveals his top six.

Field service organisations have reached an unprecedented transformative stage, as an array of advanced tools continue to storm the market helping businesses to transform the way that their field service organisation operates.

Last year saw the expansion of the Internet of Things and the widespread introduction of advanced analytics tools to tackle Big Data. These trends will continue into 2016 along with the need for greater integration. Furthermore, with technology development moving so quickly and companies continually having to modernise their solutions to keep up with the competition, 2016 will see an increase in businesses entrusting one provider to deliver all the functionality and modularity they require to manage their work, workers and assets out in the field.

1. The Internet of Everything - The IoT has been on service businesses’ radar for a while, so the trend isn’t exactly new heading into 2016, but as more businesses invest in connected technology, we’ll see it become an established industry best practice. Gartner predicts that by 2020, 26-billion devices other than smartphones, tablets and computers to be connected via the Internet of Things. For field service organisations, connecting equipment with technicians’ mobile devices and the back office in real time is a necessity. Information captured in the field provides diagnostics and performance metrics that mitigate certain issues as well as tracks patterns and trends for long-range planning. The goal is to ensure an intelligent and preventive—not reactive—approach.
2. Predictive Maintenance Will Fuel Field Service Automation - With the predictive power of connected devices, the field service industry will not only take a more predictive/ proactive approach to service, they’ll begin to automate the field service process. For example, sensors in a piece of equipment could automatically trigger a service call when it needs something repaired or it’s due for regular maintenance. Connected devices take the idea of proactive service work — the service business has enough insight to let the customer know when a machine needs a repair before it fails — and automates the process.
3. Making sense of data for improved intelligence - With the majority of field service organisations deploying a vast range of different technologies out in the field, from GPS and vehicle tracking systems to fleet and work management solutions, many are challenged by the vast amount of data they’re collecting back. The ability to analyse and act on this data will continue to trend in the evolution of field services technology. [quote float="left"]Advanced analytics capabilities will allow organisations to execute on information generated from the field to become more efficient and productive.

    

   Advanced analytics capabilities will allow organisations to execute on information generated from the field to become more efficient and productive. Deploying workforce management solutions with sophisticated analytics tools will enable managers to improve operations with real-time visibility into their operations. Data gathered from smarter mobile apps and equipment sensors will provide insights on performance, tasks, service quality, and new products that will enable field service managers to not only keep up with the competition but to step ahead. Analytics will be embedded and pervasive. After all, the value of analytics is in the answers, not the data.
4. Greater Integration - As back office, telematics and workforce management solutions become more integrated with mobile devices, the opportunities to increase efficiency and productivity are growing exponentially. Field service managers can make real-time decisions remotely by accessing vehicle tracking, scheduling and routing on their mobile devices. This allows organisations to mitigate reckless driving incidents, control wear and tear on their fleet and decrease maintenance costs, all from a handheld. Mobile apps will continue to provide critical information such as daily tasks, customer histories, billing, and the locations of nearby teammates on demand for field service technicians. This access to real-time information empowers the technician to make strategic decisions, recruit help from teammates, and complete jobs on-time the first time, resulting in lower operational costs and higher customer satisfaction.
5. The Power of Mobility - The right mobile architecture can solve many of the tactical challenges field service organisations face today: latent customer needs, increased competition, unmitigated churn and worker productivity. To be successful with any mobility deployment, organisations must choose the best field service solution and adopt the implementation best suited for their operation. Gartner has made the following predictions for the state of mobile in field service by 2016:
   • 2/3rds  of the mobile workforce will own a smartphone
   • 40 per cent of the workforce will be mobile
   • Field service organisations will purchase 53 million tablets in 2016
   • Approximately 56 per cent of smartphones purchased by businesses in North America and Europe will be Android devices
   • As more and more organisations use mobile to automate the service process and eliminate duplicate data entry, those who stick with paper methods will get further and further behind
6. One solution, one provider - With technology development moving so quickly and companies continually having to modernise their solutions to keep up with the competition, 2016 will see an increase in businesses entrusting one provider to deliver all the functionality and modularity they require to manage their work, workers and assets. To achieve that, they need robust and flexible end-to-end platforms backed by a reliable provider.

 

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Global energy management firm Schneider Electric is rolling out ServiceMax's service management solution to 6,000 engineers across the globe as part of its One Schneider customer support strategy in which IoT will also play a key role. Marc Ambasna- Jones caught up with both companies at MaxLive Europe.

As Manish Gupta, senior vice president of Schneider Electric took the stage in the Salon Opera in the 19th Century Le Grand Paris hotel, few of the 270 attendees at MaxLive Europe would have been aware that the company at which Gupta plies his trade is in fact older than the building in which they were sitting.

Le Grand Paris and its much celebrated Café de la Paix were opened in the 1860s and played host to local literary heavyweights Emile Zola, Victor Hugo and Maupassant. Thirty years earlier, and about 317km south in Le
Creusot, two brothers named Adolphe and Eugene Schneider acquired the local mines, forges and foundries. It was the start of what is today a $25bn business.

It is of course a very different business. Schneider Electric now defines itself as a specialist in energy management and automation.  Its client list spans the globe and covers a wide range of industries including utilities, manufacturing and distribution. This has led to rapid growth in its service teams which now numbers 20,000 tech support engineers. Understandably it has built up a complex service structure to manage its resources but not without a degree of pain.

According to Gupta, growth and acquisitions have led to the company having “lots of disparate systems from multiple vendors, including Excel spreadsheets.” Schneider Electric has, to be fair, been a very acquisitive company. It has bought and integrated 17 businesses in the last five years, including a £5 billion purchase of UK engineering firm Invensys earlier this year. This acquisition trail brings its own challenges and has been a contributor to the company’s service management conundrum.

“We had different solutions across different business units as well as different countries,” says Gupta. “As part of our global program for One Schneider,  our objective is to enable consistent and accessible visibility into our customers globally. This led us to purchasing Salesforce for CRM, and then we wanted to extend that single view of the customer to our field service. ServiceMax enables an end-to-end connected experience for our customers, techs and management and was on the Force.com platform.”

 

This fits with Gupta’s and Schneider Electric’s vision for the evolving role of the service engineer. “The installed base is key,” adds Gupta, “because we want to track how customers are using our products. We want to improve products and improve the experience.”

As well as the obvious potential for upselling, Gupta sees this ability to create a two-way conversation with customers an increasingly essential skill for service engineers. The premise is that retaining and upselling existing customers is easier than finding new customers.

Schneider Electric is currently in the process of rolling out ServiceMax for 6,000 of its service engineers and plans to review its contract when rollout is complete in 2017. Although still in mid-adoption, Gupta has identified a couple of pain points.

“Governance and training have probably been our biggest challenges,” he says. "It’s not unusual. Any large software deployment will have its sticking points and getting users up to speed quickly on new software tools is not easy. It’s time consuming and never moves as quickly as you want it to."

So what are the initial thoughts on dealing with ServiceMax?

“I like that fact that it aligns with our corporate strategy on standardisation, and the partnership we have with ServiceMax allows us to contribute to their roadmap. And ServiceMax’s functionality enables us to be more dynamic and support the business.”

What could be better?

“I’d like to see more systems integrators doing training as that will drive competitive pricing in PS resources. That will come in time as ServiceMax expands.”

It’s a fair point. It’s easy to forget that ServiceMax is still relatively new in software terms and new companies generally have a lot of energy and a willingness to go the extra mile to help customers. When Gupta was on the stage with ServiceMax CEO Dave Yarnold, it was clear from the outset that there was more to this arrangement than just a bit of back scratching.

 

So what does Schneider Electric get out of it beyond the original remit for buying software to manage its service teams? “The strength of partnership we have with them is enabling greater innovation in what we are doing with our service organisation. As a company, they think strategically about the software, which empowers us to do more strategic things with our service delivery.”

The industrial internet of things

One of the more strategic things is increased automation. Schneider Electric has been a massive advocate of the Internet of Things within its various customer industries, claiming that IoT is a driver for increased efficiency as well as increased sustainability.

Its own industrial IoT whitepaper talks about a “wrap and re-use approach” rather than a “rip and replace approach”, the idea being that this will enable greater business control through accurate machine intelligence.
This measured approach, it says, “will drive the evolution towards a smart manufacturing enterprise that is more efficient, safer, and sustainable.”

Gupta believes that IoT is a “fundamental strategy” that will significantly “change our service organisation.” In what way? “Technology is not the issue,” he says. “We can already do things quickly and efficiently. The biggest impact for us is the value we are able to give to the customer. This is where the biggest opportunity with IoT is for us – mitigating downtime, maintaining uptime and assets becoming predictive. IoT must become an operational strategy and not just be a vision. We are focused on scaling the innovation to an industrial level, not just pockets of visionaries doing isolated projects.”

As if to drive home the point, Schneider Electric also rolled out its VP of information process organisation, R&D and Innovation Efficiency. Twila Osborn, as well as having a long job title, is a mathematician. She worked on the space shuttle programme in the 1980s, using her problem solving skills on the well-publicised issues surrounding the shuttle’s heat-resistant tiles.

 

Today she works out of Boston in the US, designing processes across Schneider Electric’s data and technology platforms to ensure a lifecycle of data across the organisation. She has just finished with a proof of concept, she says, reaffirming that “R&D is relevant.”

Ground control

Her proof of concept is essentially about using automation to create a standard data flow across the organisation, “designing serviceability and scalability into the marketing attributes we need in the products from the very beginning,” she says.

“We can now look at the products and get metrics so we can develop competitive models now, looking at how we compare with rivals and plan accordingly. We can close the loop with our service team, so the engineer in the field can capture the data and look for upsell opportunities. It’s about service engineers getting the right product and parts while on site or maybe even like the Tesla, refresh the software without interrupting the user?”

She talks about value creation, not a standard phrase for a mathematician, and applies to the idea that the service technician has this increasingly important role in helping the company define its future.  “They are going to be critical in the chain,” she adds. “The speed of reaction will be huge and can alleviate customer problems quickly through the data telling you what is wrong – intelligence is becoming critical.”

So does she see service engineers selling or just good sources of raw ideas for R&D? “The automation will enable us to close the loop again with the service engineer who can see gaps in the market or problems and feed them back instantly to the product design people, so products will change based on real experiences in the field. So yes, the role of the service engineer will keep changing.” And selling?

 

ServiceMax’s Dave Hart, VP of global customer transformation steps in here. “It’s a fine line between serving and selling,” he says. “You don’t really want them to sell because they break the trusted adviser status. Empowering field service engineers to make more informed decisions thought, that’s different. A lot of companies don’t have direct sales forces anymore, so in many respects filed service is the touchpoint with the customer but not really a salesperson.”

Hart adds that if you speak to most field service leaders they will probably tell you that one of their biggest issues is data. They know it’s in there, they just can’t get it out the system in any meaningful way. “It’s usually in a bunch of disparate systems that don’t talk to each other,” he says.

And that is the problem Schneider Electric is trying to solve. It has a plan to coordinate the whole organisation; not a small task but if Osborn’s proof of concept flies you get the feeling it will be on that road relatively quickly.  She understands that you need meaningful data to glue a modern business together. It’s finding ways to make this data easily accessible and that makes Schneider, not for the first time, one to watch.

 

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Marne Martin CEO of ServicePower explores how new challenges in field service are resulting in a delicate balance between digital innovation and industry pressures.

The field service industry is teetering on the edge of a precipice.

On one side are emerging technologies like mobile workforce management software, route optimisation, wearables, enterprise mobility software, operational analytics, IoT/M2M connected devices, and social collaboration. On the other is the shifting environment, including the changing workforce, the emergence of the millennials, legislative challenges and increasing competitive pressures.

Where the Age of Enlightenment that occurred from the 1600 to 1700’s was about cultural and intellectual change in Western Europe, based on new ideas around reasoning, analysis, and individualism, the ‘Age of Digital Enlightenment’ is very different.

It has created a digital effect on field service which requires that each organisation utilises technology, analysis and information together to enable new, better ways of delivering service, while meeting its business goals.

Emerging technologies, digital technologies, in particular can be transformational to field service. However, field service organisations must balance new technologies to meet compliance and productivity goals, and ultimately achieve the highest levels of customer satisfaction and profit for the business.

Field Service Challenges

Field service organisations are continually challenged, by not only increasing competition, declining margin and changing customer expectations, but also a myriad of other issues, including:

• Evolving business strategy - Business strategy must be continuously adapted to address changes in the competitive environment, changes in customer’s communication preferences and changes in labor supply.
•   Legislation - Legislative changes absolutely impact how field service organisations operate. Legislation must be identified and business process designed or changed to accommodate them.
•   Emerging technologies - Social, mobile, analytics, cloud, wearables, and IoT/M2M are transformational and absolutely should be evaluated for impact to the business.
• Emerging millennial workforce - The workforce is aging. The millennials are increasing backfilling the ranks. They grew up with mobile and social technology. They are motivated differently than their more experienced peers.
• Competitive pressure - The competitive environment changes every day, with new entrants and early technology adopters, like Uber.

Impact on the sector

Field service doesn’t stand still. Established organisations continue to be threatened by new market players.

Meanwhile, the field service industry is reinventing itself, eliminating manual processes and schedules which are costly and inefficient. Field service recognises now the value of field based resources. People are our greatest opportunity and highest costs. We must fight for talent, especially as the labour pool shifts towards millennials.

There is confusion over which technologies to implement, in terms of legislation and productivity. In Europe, for instance, traveling to work is now considered part of reimbursable hours for employees. What workforce management software is best capable of handling accounting for this legislative change, and the new schedule complexity, while improving productivity and efficiency at the same time?

 

These challenges, these impacts on the industry, are the biggest threats to field service; they are also our biggest opportunity.

Navigating the Future of Field Service

All challenges that face field service organisations today can be addressed with emerging technology that transforms operations.

• Real time optimisation improves productivity and efficiency, while also reducing costs.
• Mobilised on-site processes improve first time fix rates and the customer experience.
• Operational and business analytics improve oversight and operational performance.
• IoT/M2M connected devices facilitate the evolution from reactive repair based models to proactive, less costly and more customer friendly models.
•  Social collaboration leverages the comfort of millennials workers to improve first time fix rates and reduce field based overhead.

Bridging the Divide

Bridging that precipice, between the digital effect and the industry challenges, requires quick and decisive action.

• Act strategically – Look at what technology delivers the greatest return on investment and prioritise your investment where it matters most.
• Recognise that field service (people, process, IT, parts, etc.) usually crosses multiple aspects of the organisation.
•  Be sure to gain alignment and recognise that every function has a vested interest in success.
• Don’t forget to build a business case and agree the metrics for success.
• Employ creative thinking to challenge the status quo and rethink how that strategy can be delivered.
•  Work with technology vendors that understand innovation and what’s possible.

Field Service is a critical part of most businesses today. Field based resources are often the only touch point with your customer post sale.

Take advantage of new technologies to build a platform for success which improves visibility and increases flexibility across the service value chain. Adapt faster and more efficiently to external change and new company strategies.

Productivity drives profits in your business!  Your competitors, and even businesses you don’t know about yet, are heading that way so Cross that bridge now before it is too late.

 IoT will change field service from reactive to proactive: one of three key take-aways from the Servicemax's inaugural MaxLive Europe event in Paris. Marc Ambasna-Jones reports.

Customer events are always a mixed bag given the nature of the crowd. You can never please everyone but they are also a good indicator of how well a company is actually doing beyond its sheen of marketing.

Pacing the specially erected stage in the Salon Opera ballroom at Le Grand Paris hotel, ServiceMax CEO Dave Yarnold told the 270 people gathered about his dream.  When he first came to Europe to pursue a few leads in the early days of the company, he hoped that one day ServiceMax would host an event just like this in a grand setting and full of customers.

Dream achieved, the company now has another goal, to turn the service software industry into a billion dollar global market with ServiceMax at its head. Ambitious? Yes of course. Achievable?

Perhaps. The numbers came thick and fast – the third largest Salesforce.com ISV, 150 new customers in the last 12 months, 300 per cent year on year growth, 90 plus parent consultants and so on. In its own words, ServiceMax is “evolving from a reactive, to a proactive, to a predictive business.”

In a nutshell, this sums up the demands of the rapidly changing service profession.  New technologies are forcing change again but this time at unprecedented levels.

 

This event was about showcasing that change. It was an attempt to lay out a plan, to identify the future and reinforce the idea that the changes will be for the better.

We took three things from the event:

The Internet of Things is more than just a buzzword

Kevin Ashton is often credited with being the father of  the term "Internet of Things"  term after writing it on a presentation in 1999 while working at Procter and Gamble.  He had this idea that the company should put RFID tags onto its products to improve product tracking and create real time stock management.

However, Ashton does not claim to be the ‘father of IoT’. Rather, the term ‘IoT’, he says, was created by someone on Twitter, who had shortened the internet of things into an easily manageable hashtag.

His views on the future clearly captured the imagination and raised a few eyebrows too. His suggesting that by the next century more than half the world will be vegetarian prompted muttering in the audience but he wasn’t here to talk about food...

What did he think of IoT and its impact on the service industry?

“Well the irony in the service sector is that the best service person is the one you never need to see,” says Ashton.
“Fewer resources wasted on needless service and less downtime for someone using a piece of equipment because service can be done pro- actively,” he adds, suggesting that this is what ServiceMax is enabling by adopting an IoT approach to service.

Ashton predicts that in the age of IoT, software as a service will shift to ‘service as software’, with service becoming increasingly interrelated with software in new ways. According to Ashton, this phenomenon will generate both predictive and self-diagnosing service.

 

So what does ServiceMax CEO Dave Yarnold think?

“Field service is now the first industry to benefit from the disruption of IoT,” he says confidently, “transforming from under-funded afterthought to under pinning new business models, revenue creation, and influencing product design.”

New global research from Field Service News, commissioned by ServiceMax and IoT partner PTC, found that forty-five per cent of field service management professionals believe the IoT will likely have the biggest impact on field service by 2020 -- more than big data, smart glasses, augmented reality or any other technology.

More than half of field service professionals surveyed say they are already implementing or planning to implement an IoT-based strategy, and seventy-four per cent do not think the size of a company matters when implementing IoT field service strategies in their organisations.

The service model is being flipped on its head

“Moving forward, we will begin to see service outcomes designed into products at the R&D level, as well as the ability for equipment and devices to become capable of recommending companion products to customers for cross sell and upsell opportunities,” says Yarnold.

One of the customer examples Yarnold was most excited about was the one from Timo Okkonen of inspection, testing, certification consultancy services firm Inspecta.

Okkonen spoke brightly about “influencing everything for our kids.” The company’s vision, he says “is to save the planet through improved maintenance and service.”

It’s this idea that excites Yarnold because this customer is using his software to not just manage service engineers but actually helping to re-shape the company’s entire approach to business.

It’s a view shared by Jerome Piche, global customer service VP at medial diagnostics company bioMerieux in France. “How can we be more efficient to increase the first time fix?” He asked. “We are organised in silos but this is a way in which we can break the silos and have a more end-to-end view.”

Piche was referring to the idea that the mobilisation of the software and the ability to manage and analyse service data more efficiently is changing the game.

ServiceMax describes this as a transformation, where service is now starting to influence decision making and opening up new opportunities for businesses to increase efficiencies.

In fact the company believes in it so much it wrote an e-book called Diamonds in the Rough: Unleashing the Power of Field Service Transformation. Not your average bedtime tome but certainly something to get those transformational juices flowing.

People and skills are changing fast

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US, there will be 800,000 additional service workers in the US by 2022.

It seems that despite technology, the service industry is growing and we will need more techs than ever before.
But is this right? Is the industry really going to support a huge growth in personnel at a time when automation technology is starting to have such an impact on service efficiency?

If anything the role of the service professional is going to change more rapidly. The pressures to change will only increase with technology advancements.

 

“How do we stop the technicians talking in ‘techlish’ and ensure service permeates through a business? How do we make it sexy to them because I think it’s the sexiest business in the world,” says  ServiceMax CTO Hari Subramanian.

John Cooper, head of service for Sony Professional Solutions Europe supported the idea that attitudes towards service professionals have changed and professionals themselves need to evolve to meet the new demands and expectations of customers.

“We were seen as a necessary evil in the service department,” says Cooper.

“We just took care of things. There was a lack of visibility but now with ServiceMax we can have visibility and prove we add value.” It is this justification of the role that fits with the general theme of the event – transformation through technology and using the data to increase an understanding of customer service requirements while reducing waste So should service people evolve into a sales role also? Should they really upsell the customer?

There was a certain degree of egg shell treading but the consensus is that service techs do have to evolve and embrace the idea of soft selling.

While Dave Hart, ServiceMax’s VP of global customer transformation urges caution for, quite rightly, concerns around undermining the service tech’s credibility and trusted status, he does concede that perhaps there needs to be a change, an evolution in roles as field sales team numbers dwindle across industries.

“In this new economy service is the difference,” said the introductory video, highlighting the change that is coming.
Technology and in particular IoT and data analytics are impacting all industries and you have hundreds if not thousands of businesses jumping on the train to try and capitalise, to forge niches, conquer markets.

ServiceMax is no different although in Field Service they have a head start on some of their peers. The industry, though, is surely in for a rollercoaster ride.

 

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In the above video you'll find the Q&A session from our most recent webinar run in partnership with service management software specialists IFS where Field Service News Editor-in-Chief, Kris Oldland spoke with scheduling expert Daryl Dudey of IFS.

 

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Do Millennials and Augmented Reality hold the key to the future of field service?   Field Service News Editor-in-Chief speaks exclusively with Professor Howard Lightfoot of  Cranfield University School of Management to find out why field service organisations should ditch the chalkboard approach and embrace augmented reality

Augmented Reality (AR) is starting to make some serious waves in Field Service.

AR has made its way from being one of a number of potential technologies that we could see impacting in our market to perhaps the biggest conversation in field service circles, matched only by the emergence of a number of case studies of how Internet of Things.

One man who has been talking up the importance of AR within a field service environment for some time is Professor Howard Lightfoot.  Indeed, it was his forward-looking work at Cranfield University in embracing AR and it’s potential use amongst manufacturers and service organisations alike that garnered him a coveted place in this year’s FSN20 – a list of the most influential people within the field service industry globally.

However, whilst the potential for AR as a field service tool is vast, Lightfoot’s work has been in applying it in another area that will likely have just as big an impact on the field service industries globally: using AR as a training tool to bring in the next generation of field service engineers.

I took the opportunity to catch up with him after his presentation at this year’s Aftermarket Business Platform conference to find out more about the work he and his colleagues were doing and to ask the $64 billion question – is there a sufficient skill-set and talent pool amongst the millennials to ease our fears of an approaching ageing workforce crisis?

“What we’ve set up at Cranfield is a learning laboratory,” Lightfoot begins. It’s not a design laboratory laboratory or an engineering laboratory; it’s a learning laboratory and we are using virtual and augmented reality tools as part of training and teaching processes.”

Lightfoot, who is perhaps arguably more well known for some of his pioneering work in the field of Servitization, is part of a team at Cranfield who are very much ensconced in the world of manufacturing both at home in the UK and abroad.

“We are looking at how companies maintain products throughout their useful life and that can be ten, twenty, thirty year but also doing that at the right cost. So a lot of our research is on doing that,” he explains.

“So, how things work, degradation mechanisms, self-healing technology. The area I’m working in and the reason I’m interested in the aftermarket business and field service is in the application of augmented reality in training people and also getting data out into the field readily and easily.”

The application of AR in field service operations is potentially an absolutely massive game changer, he believes.

“It could de-skill the field service activity - and there will be parts of the world where you can’t get the right people. With augmented reality you can link them to a skilled technician back at base who can take them through the process, not with a manual, not on the phone but he can actually see what they are doing and he can overlay information for them, digitally point at things ‘that’s the nut, this is the one you turn. Don’t torque that one anymore than this, torque that one to this level or undo that cabinet first and make sure you disconnect this before you do that.”

 

Indeed as a tool for transmitting knowledge and experience from one corner of the globe to another it is a genuinely exciting technology that could really up the ante when it comes to improving productivity in the field.

AR: a fantastic training tool

However, it is the use of AR as a training tool that Lightfoot is truly passionate about.

“You can visualise things,” he begins when asked why it is such an important tool in future training techniques.
“They use it in chemistry teaching - you can visualise a molecule in virtual reality much more effectively than a two dimensional picture on a computer screen or in a book. Imagine augmented reality where you get a molecule and then start overlaying information for students on that and then it becomes much more meaningful. It becomes real.”

As mentioned above, whilst in many ways we are on the cusp of a glorious period for the advancement of field service with technologies such as AR and IoT begin to open up completely new ways of structuring field service operations, at the same time we are facing a crisis of unheralded proportions as huge swathes of our workforce edge ever closer to retirement age.

AR: recruitment appeal

I was interested to explore whether Lightfoot felt whether the use such bleeding edge technology such as AR could play a role in attracting and the brightest and best of the next generation away from the dominant careers of finance and law and towards the Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) subjects that could help field service organisations cope with the sudden loss of their baby-boomer workforce.

“There is certainly more of an interest now in manufacturing in the UK generally with brighter people,” he admits. “I think for years people wouldn’t go near something like manufacturing or even science and engineering because it was too difficult and manufacturing does seem to have a bad press. Everyone wanted to be in finance not manufacturing. Now things are starting to turn a bit. The UK government has realised you can’t build a country just based on financial services.”

 

“Luckily with some of the technology emerging, like augmented reality technologies, these millennials, the guys going to university now are born into this technology. For them it’s just second nature. They tweet they send text messages at a faster speed then I can talk and so the use of that technology for them is completely there.”

Of course it is one thing attracting millennials, educating and training them is another matter entirely and if we are to harness the dynamism of this young demographic we must understand that the way they learn is fundamentally different to how their predecessors did.

As Lightfoot comments : “In our day, Google and the Internet weren’t around. If you had a project to do it was library and some really serious heavy detective work to get some information. Now the information is instantly accessible they spend the time learning rather than finding the material to learn from.”

Knowledge sharing the Millenial way

However, the biggest difference is not so much the access to information but the way information is disseminated. For a generation born into smartphones and social media, sharing and collaboration are simply parts of life. This is something Lightfoot believes Millennials can benefit from greatly.

“They’ll share with people, they’ll text somebody a message about what they’ve found, they’ll email somebody something they’ve got or they’ll send somebody a link through social media. So the technology is there for sharing, for learning quickly and for accessing information quickly. It’s incredible.”

Of course the flip side of this is whilst a generation that has such easy access to information has phenomenal opportunity to learn rapidly, there is also a danger of them being less focused. However, Lightfoot believes that the key to keeping Millennials engages is through the adoption of technology within the teaching environment.

“This is why things like virtual reality and augmented reality are so important.” He explains, “When you start using that to train them and educate them then that’s the technology they are familiar with. They’ll buy into that far more than giving them a book or standing somebody in front of them lecturing at them.”

 

“Learning via technology and these new techniques is going to feed their desire to want to learn. I picked up a study from Columbia state university on augmented reality and training and there study showed people picked things up twice as quickly when trained through augmented reality than being trained with the hardware and with a guy in front of them. Also they said they felt it was a more intuitive way of learning.”

Digitisation of knowledge bases

Given the above, Lightfoot also is a staunch advocate of ensuring the digitalisation of knowledge bases and integrating them with training programs sooner rather than later. “I think you’ve got to capture what you’ve got and make sure you retain that tacit knowledge, the knowledge learnt over the years. I recall talking to Rolls Royce many years ago about how they saved information on engine data. The problem was they saved it in different methods in different places. Spreadsheets, software, handwritten and in their heads so you must get the infrastructure right to capture knowledge from the guy in the field.”

“For example if you’re using AR to help an engineer in the field that can now be recorded. It doesn’t just disappear anymore. You can digitize the whole thing. So every time the guy speaks to someone my take would be: for God’s sake make sure it’s recorded. Once you’ve got that digitised you can share that information easily.”

You don’t tell your new engineers to go read the manual, you send him to these recordings and the trainee is happy because that’s the technology he is used to, he adds “You need them integrated, you need to make sure the knowledge capture and the knowledge sharing work together. There is nothing like learning from someone who knows what he is talking about whichever way you do it.”

And what about that $64Billion dollar question? Can millennials replace the ageing boomer workforce? Are they suited to field service engineering roles?

“Absolutely” Lightfoot states, “I think more than any other generation now because of the technology they are used to and the way are used to acquiring information. They are used to data sources and it matches quite well with the way systems have to be put together in terms of things like field service and maintenance.”

“So I think yes they are fit for the job. What we have to do is get them interested in manufacturing and technology industries so let's drive that on.”

 

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