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Servitization has been talked about for many years but all of a sudden it seems to be a key topic on the agenda of many manufacturing companies and also amongst may service based organisations as well. For those companies that tread the path being dubbed the fourth paradigm it will mean a complete rethinking of how they view field service. 

At the recent AfterMarket conference in Amsterdam Field Service News Editor, Kris Oldland hosted a panel debate with three speakers key to servitization; Professor Tim Baines, Aston University a leading proponent of the movement, Brendan Viggers, Product and Sales Support for IFS Aerospace & Defence division who has worked closely with a number of companies such as Emirates on moving towards a servitization model and Koen D’Haeyer, Global Manager Service Development & Technical Services Lely who had been through the journey himself with Dutch Farm Technology company.

Kris Oldland: The case studies we hear around servitization to date all seem to involve large organisations with quite complex or evolved business models already. Is it the case that servitization only applies to companies that have the size to make it work?

Tim Baines: I’ve worked with quite a few smaller companies which has been quite interesting first of all to break away from the myth that servitization is just about large companies. By this time next year we will have got around 70 companies within our region of the UK the west midlands engaged in servitization.

One company which helps us breakaway from this idea that it is all about delivering complex products is a company that actually delivering pallets, regular wooden pallets and these pallets are used in the automotive industry to move windscreens and cars and things like this. There business model before we got involved was they would make a pallet, sell the pallets.

 

But what they are doing now is slowly but surely getting into the space where they are making the pallets, they are designing the pallets for the application, they are working with the customer to make sure the pallets are well suited, they are actually putting the pallet in the system, they’re tracking the pallets, they are taking care of stock control and slowly and surely they are moving to a position where they are becoming the business process outsourcing partner for the customers own material handling system.

Whilst this may not be a perfectly clinical example of servitization by some definitions, but nevertheless it is a good example of a small company that has adopted the principles of servitization and then put them into practice.

Koen Dyaeyer: I couldn’t agree me that smaller companies companies servitization can work. I have a history in smaller to medium sized companies, and we went drastically through servitization aspects even by a make and buy proposition through to quality assurance etc so it’s applicable for sure in all industries.

What I would say is that technology there is an extra opportunity as in complexity it is very much possible to create the value of your expertise which is also holds true of course.

Audience Question: Whenever we decide to do any transformation a big chunk of it is behavioural change, besides the software and the hardware how to you trigger the behavioural change within a company?

Brendan Viggers: For us its understanding the processes, being able to model those processes and work as a team to fully understand what the different functions and responsibilities you have within that team. But its also being able to drive down to having a piece of data that will ultimately help you deliver that new change.

Koen Dyaeyer: My experience is set directions clearly for each individual so people understand what is needed from them to achieve the goal. Also motivate people, there is a study that says people only get a message when it is [quote float="right"]There is a study that says people only get a message when it is repeated twenty three times. That’s often a slogan that I use, just repeat it and to be honest sometimes it may need to be repeated forty six times

repeated twenty three times. That’s often a slogan that I use, just repeat it and to be honest sometimes it may need to be repeated forty six times but energise it, make it engaging.

 

Tim Baines: The companies that I studied when we wrote made to serve, were all companies that were pulled into the delivery of advanced service by their customers. In some instances companies they were pulled into this space kicking and screaming, they were product based companies and they were given no option.

What’s interesting to me now is this second wave of organisations where in some instances you are not being pulled into this space by your customers, rather your looking at the benefits that organisations such as Rolls Royce and Caterpillar have got from servitization and you want a piece of that action. But you have a different set of challenges. Some of the challenges remain the same but some are very different.

For example you have to educate your customers, about the opportunity, this is the theory here, an innovation theory showing us the difference between market pull and technology push. You’ve now got to educate your customers. You’ve got to get the buy in of the whole organisation to the servitization approach. Some of the processes and tools that are out there are great once you’ve started down the path but really to start to get the traction in the first instance, to really get people at board level to buy-in to the idea is one of the biggest issues.

 

How to inspire the senior management, how to get the messaging about what it is that servitization is about both internally and externally, how to frame servitization so they know what you are talking about. Going to customers and stimulating a customer demand which then pulls everything together.

Look out for more from this debate coming soon... 

Servitization is a key trend in that is rapidly on the rise in manufacturing realm and it's impact on Field Service could be game changing. But what exactly is servitization, how can it change the way we work and will it live up to the hype?

To find out more Field Service News Editor, Kris Oldland spoke to Professor Tim Baines one of the leading proponents of the servitization movement

 

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Near Field Communications (NFC) as a technology has been around for a fair while yet hasn’t quite got the traction that it could have. However, with Apple introducing NFC albeit in a restricted capacity into the latest iteration of the iPhone the technology could potentially come back in vogue.

This is a good thing as it has the potential to streamline workflow for field service engineers, and NFC tags are a low cost addition to field service technology toolkit.

Here are three quick ways NFC could speed up a field engineers workflow that could easily be written via an android smart device without any need for complex coding.

In the field engineers vehicle.

A tag placed into the dashboard of your field engineer’s vehicle could be written to activate a number of functions on their smart phone. For example it both log the journey start in your dedicated field service apps solution and simultaneously open a routing app.

Combining these two has a double benefit of saving time for the engineer plus by combing the start of your field engineer’s journey with a process that is required for him to make that journey (i.e. routing software), you can ensure logging in won’t be overlooked.

At your clients reception

If you have a regular maintenance contract at a specific client where you know your engineers will be making regular visits you could send that client a tag for them to place on their reception desk.

This way when your engineer arrives and is signing into your clients premises they can tap the NFC tag and automatically log their arrival on site within any dedicated field service management app you may have implemented.

On the device

When your engineer arrives at a device a well placed NFC tag could contain offer access to some key insight into the device he is there to fix.

This could be a link to the most recent maintenance notes and that devices specific history, a web page that holds manuals for the device or even opening up a parts ordering page specific to that device so the engineer can easily access the right parts for that specific device.

 

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Field Service is evolving in front of our eyes. Aly Pinder, Senior Research Analyst at Aberdeen looks at what we need to do now to embrace the future...

Many things aren’t as they were for your father or grandfather. Technology moves at such a rapid pace that even I have lost track as to what is the latest and greatest social media platform that has revolutionised the internet, or at least the lives of teenagers.

Even though it is easy to dismiss either end of the technology spectrum – should our business jump at the latest trend or will we save money and heartache by staying the course that was paved by our legacy systems back in the early 2000s?

Both strategies have their faults and may lead to hard times, but I propose there is a middle ground that is necessary for field service.

As much as we would all like to bury our heads in the sand and not accept that the world around us is changing, field service has evolved.

[quote float="left"]Customers expect better service every day, management has seen the light in regard to the value (i.e., profitability) that field service can drive, and our service teams are getting older and are deciding to move on. So why hasn’t field service adapted?

Customers expect better service every day, management has seen the light in regard to the value (i.e., profitability) that field service can drive, and our service teams are getting older and are deciding to move on. So why hasn’t field service adapted?

 

Why are we so reluctant to change as the winds around us continue to sway.

Partially it’s because changing a global network which has become accustomed to doing things a certain way is difficult. Also, no one wants to be wrong, this is our livelihood. But we can no longer sit back and let the rest of the technology world pass the field service industry by as we move in 2015 and beyond.

Not only have customers changed, but almost as importantly the field service technician within your businesses is changing and service leaders must begin to react to keep and hire the next wave of field service heroes. This isn’t easy, but below are three trends which will play a big role in the success of organisations as they move into the future of field service:

Use the tools that make your techs more productive.

As more and more millennials enter the field service workforce, organisations must begin to adapt to their preferences and strengths. In Aberdeen’s recent research report, Emerging Workforce in the Field: Tech-Savvy to Technician (December 2014), the average age of the field worker was 32 years old with approximately one fifth of the workforce under 30.

This isn’t quite a wave of millennials just yet, however a top challenge for many organisations is the ageing workforce and retirement. Why wait to adapt to the changing needs of your workforce?

Despite the (negative) buzz, millennials aren’t that different from previous generations. But they have grown up in an age which they have always had access to the internet and a connected device. They expect to have this capability at work too. Organisations that provide these workers with the latest technology, much of which is moving towards a more consumer look and feel, will have a better chance of hiring the best of the next crop of technicians.

BYOD is not dead in field service.

The wave of excitement for BYOD (bring your own device) has waned a bit since the thoughts of this strategy revolutionising IT. Concerns around security, device proliferation and management, and a decrease in productivity led some organisations to turn away from BYOD.

However, as seen in Aberdeen’s BYOD: A Flood of Devices in the Field report (December 2014), nearly two-thirds of top performing companies currently leverage some level of BYOD within their field service operation.

These top performers found that this strategy had no negative impact on key metrics such as SLA compliance and service margin, while slightly improving employee satisfaction. And as we all know, happy employees make happy customers.

Create the right incentives to drive the right behaviours in field service delivery.

As customer expectations as to what great service is continues to change, the field service team also needs to evolve. No longer is it good enough to just show up within a four or two hour window, resolution is the name of the game for many customers. Furthermore, the way organisations are differentiating in this 21st century economy is through service, and the quality of service being provided.

[quote float="right"]This may seem like marketing or consumer jargon, but even in B2B environments customers have begun to expect a heightened experience and more value-add services.

With this shift scheduling technologies must ensure that the right technician with the right skills and the right service attitude shows up to work with the right customer. This may seem like marketing or consumer jargon, but even in B2B environments customers have begun to expect a heightened experience and more value-add services.

 

This is both a threat, but also an opportunity for the savvy service organisations that adapt to this changing environment and ensures that technicians aren’t only showing up to turn a wrench, but are equipped to solve customer needs.

The field service environment is not stagnant. However, too often organisations work under the mindset that customers will not leave, profitability will continue to grow, and technicians will always do the right thing. The challenge many organisations are facing as we enter 2015 is that the status quo will not be acceptable, and the field service organisation will need to evolve in order to excel.

The opportunity is still great, but the leaders will do well by adapting to the needs of their customers and technicians.

 

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To read Aly Pinder's latest white paper sponsored by Trimble Field Service Management which looks at why Generation Y is a good fit for field service click here

 

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The internet of things (IoT) is fast becoming a field service priority as the revelation that IoT can drastically increase customer satisfaction while reducing costs comes to fruition. IoT has the potential to eliminate unplanned downtime, more accurately meet SLAs, inform product development, and improve business decisions and forecasts when it comes to field service processes. IFS's Tom Bowe takes a look at the challenges being faced by companies looking to embrace this brave new world... 

Adopting IoT technology can change the dynamic of how your service organisation is run and provide vision into future possibilities and opportunities.  None of this is disputed; clearly the benefits of IoT are huge.  But field service organisations still face a myriad of challenges, particularly when it comes to meeting growing customer expectations with new market technology that disrupts internal processes, transfer of knowledge, and more.  How can field service organisations take the challenges of adopting IoT head-on, and achieve an infallible competitive edge?  Here are some suggestions.

Challenge: Lack of a Shared Infrastructure and Common Standards

IoT is actually a complex combination of hardware and software that constitutes a platform for developers and organisations, and the vertical nature of this platform contributes to the fragmentation of its infrastructure (Rachel Kalmar, Forbes 2014). With limited open source platforms, IoT devices are currently installed in their own platforms and ecosystems, which can run up costs and make IoT projects more technically complicated. Additionally the industry has yet to be standardised, including communication protocols and methods.  This makes integrations challenging and can hinder scalability as well.

Solution:

Implement technology that has developed IoT functionality but preferably has not tied itself to a specific platform or IoT vendor.  Solutions with open APIs will allow easy integration with sensors, etc. and will allow you to grow as the industry changes and develops.

Challenge: Data Control and Data Sharing

Large scale adoption of IOT technology is hindered by issues with data control. Decisions around who can access data, especially private data, must be made.  This can be a slippery slope which has yet to be addressed effectively.  With remote sensors and monitoring, there is a need for heightened sensitivity to data control.  This goes for data sharing as well. Since there are currently little to no compliance frameworks to address IoT’s unique issues, partner vetting needs to be even more critical and details about use of transmitted data will need to be clearly laid out.

Solution:

Don’t wait for standards to be fully defined and approved.  Develop your own “standard-inspired” approach by working with your technology vendors on a flexible, OS agnostic pattern and protocol that meets your most important (rev 1) requirements.  Make sure that data auditing is part of your software functionality, and align your IoT with existing company security and privacy demands.  Consider using the AllJoyn framework which is a developing open-source device agnostic IoT standard with the strongest community and downloadable SDK’s. And keep a watchful eye on the top IoT standard competitors including OIC, IIC, Thread (Google) and IEEE (P2413) for ideas, patterns and best practices.

Challenge: Security

The more devices that IoT connects, the greater the risk of malware and breaches.  Devices and sensors are also at risk of being physically comprised.  The latest debate of cloud security also applies here.

Solution:

Work with software vendors that have addressed IoT and cloud security.  Prepare your IT department to keep up with safety and security measures and explore your platform options before implementing.

Challenge: Implementation and Training

Another challenge that field service organisations potentially face in adopting IoT is in the implementation of sensors or other IoT technology.  Will this be a responsibility of your field technicians, or a third party?  Either way, re-education and new training will likely be needed.  This may lead to more upfront costs and internal adoption challenges.

Solution:

Use forecasting and planning software to predict the change in service demand before, during, and after the roll-out of an IoT initiative.  Explore what-if scenarios to see if your current field force can manage an IoT implementation effectively.

According to GE’s Global Innovation Barometer report, 67% of organisations agree that agility and speed in adapting and implementing emerging technologies into their organisation is essential to innovation (Ray Wang, 2014).  Being an early adopter of IoT, especially in field service, opens a world of opportunity in regards to new value creation, business models, and revenue streams.  It will allow your organisation to create new value for customers, bringing the concept of delighting them to a whole other level.

Face newcomer challenges head on, work with vendors that take an open and scalable approach to new technology, and work to make your field service technology nimble.  By doing this, and avoiding a rip and replace mindset, your organisation will be able to reap the intrinsic value of this new technology.

 

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In the first part of this feature we looked at why medical device manufacturer Elekta felt it was necessary to establish a global knowledge sharing platform, now in this the concluding part of this feature we look at how they managed the task...

In terms of logistics, Elekta took a broad approach initially with a couple of duplicated platforms to ensure that everyone had access to the knowledge. The main plan was to integrate the knowledge base within the deployment of their new CRM system, which would provide automated access to relevant articles dynamically, based on customer, service desk or field engineer requirements.

However, they also placed the articles from the knowledge base onto a searchable database as a secondary system whilst the CRM was being rolled out, leaving no stone unturned and meaning full global access to the program was achieved from the start.

The content itself was then tailored dependent on its use, with the knowledge base comprising of a mix of mediums including text, images and videos with links to e-learning snippets also embedded within many knowledge article.

Expanding on this further Gilday explained

“If the article was talking about a particular part of the machine, and one of the procedures was something that often caused a difficulty for the engineer, we would just embed a link into an e-learning module that was only a few minutes long that would demonstrate to the engineer how to do a particular procedure.”

 

“For our engineers in China or Japan or many of the other evolving countries these were really valuable because it didn’t require any translation or any language issues, they could simply look at what was done.”

Of course the global scope of this project was one of it’s key drivers in the first place and whilst gaining adoption of the program on a global basis sounds like a huge task, in reality, for Elekta at least it actually wasn’t that big a hurdle.

“The adoption around the world wasn’t particularly difficult because there was a pull from the field service engineers in the first place.” Gilday states.

“There really is quite a bit of internal competition in that the engineer that has provided the most knowledge articles or the engineer that has provided the article that is used by the most engineers round the rest of the world holds an awful lot of kudos.”

Indeed it is perhaps a phenomena of the connected world we live in where public ranking has become ingrained within our thinking.

 

As Gilday elaborated “There is a lot of pride of being a very competent technician and being able to share your knowledge. I think many years ago the approach was knowledge is power and people were less inclined to share it but today its the other way around and people are keen to be seen as experts in their area.”

Indeed Elekta play on this mentality by publishing internal league tables with 1,000 users generating on average 60 new knowledge features a month the approach is certainly working at present. It was simply a case of getting the ball rolling.

To do so they made good use of the knowledge that they had locked up in siloes across the organisation and harvested close to 4,000 articles which were put into the knowledge base initially.

They also created some video material captured at a global summit and established a training and awareness program through targeted webinars across the team.

“We did a lot of training and awareness around the whole program to say that this is everybody’s collective responsibility once it started its actually fairly self perpetuating, you just need to clean up every now and then, to focus on the areas that get a lot of attention, take out the articles that are never used.” Confirmed Gilday

“Everybody has responsibility for it and the constant peer review means you can improve the quality of the content as you go.”

Linking the knowledge directly to support

The other advantage Elekta were able to utilise by aligning the knowledge base to their new CRM system was that they could now connect this into their service desk function.

Previously Elekta had been a very product driven company, which had largely grown as a result of continuous product innovation. In such an environment often service is a secondary consideration and so it was for Elekta in the past. However, by Gilday’s own admission that is rapidly changing.

So the benefit of setting up a service desk environment where upon receiving a call from a customer and as the service desk agent is typing up a problem, a keyword search on the knowledge base which pulls up the articles that are most related to this problem, is even more widely felt.

 

By clever design the system is also continuously refining itself making it ever more efficient.

“We implemented a scoring system so as the engineers close the service call they are encouraged to identify whether a knowledge article helped them and to link it to the particular problem” Gilday illustrated “So the system essentially self learns. This further qualifies that list of knowledge articles to be able to present it in a very dynamic form at the help desk.”

So with Elekta having established what from the outside seems a very slick and effective means of sharing knowledge across their global network the ultimate question is has it had any impact on the levels of service they are delivering?

It is of course impossible to establish a true value contribution of a new service initiative unless you undertake them really do them one at a time. And to do so severely limits the speed at which potential progress that can be made. In this instance the implementation of Elekta’s knowledge base program has coincided with them up-skilling their service desk staff and also driving forward with remote support connectivity.

However, across these three initiatives Elekta have seen more than a 20% visit avoidance, which will result in quite a dramatic effect on their efficiency on service to the customer.

Looking specifically at the Knowledge Base they are getting over 2000 knowledge articles views each day, nearly half of the articles are used with service cases attached.

 

There are also over five and a half thousand knowledge articles published now. And whilst they started with a large amount of features, they are undertaking more and more clean ups, removing any articles not being used regularly or related to old products.

There is also a lot of potential value in the product base for those customers who maintain their own equipment. Generally Elekta will offer a second level support to customers in those situations, and the value of the knowledge base could potentially be leverage further amongst these clients, either as a value added proposition or even on a transactional basis.

Finally there is the benefit that bringing the knowledge to the fore can have on future product refinement, which is a real benefit for the team working in R&D.

As Gilday outlined “A lot of this knowledge goes straight back into product updates. This product intelligence form the field says if we can eliminate this particular problem this will have an x percent benefit.”

So whilst the initial project may have seemed daunting, it appears that knowledge really is power, and by bringing it to the fore, we can truly harness it a number of different ways to push our organisation forwards to ever greater heights.

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Establishing a knowledge base is a strategy that can yield numerous benefits for a field service organisation and once the initial pain of setting it up is accomplished it can become self-perpetuating. One company that have adopted this approach is medical device manufacturers Elekta...

The devices Elekta manufacture deliver radio therapy treatment for cancer care and are one of the leaders in the niche field of image guided radiotherapy. Devices such as a linear accelerator that delivers extremely accurate radiation used in sterotactic treatment for tumours are a core part of their product line. These devices capable of delivering are very high precision, sub millimetre accuracy radiation.

As you can imagine these are highly complicated devices with many modalities  and while they have many computer systems and software applications controlling the treatment planning systems and oncology information system, there are obviously a lot of electronics mechanics and pneumatics within the device as well as a vacuum system and of course a way of generating radioactivity in a very controlled way.

 

So Elekta’s field engineers tend to be extremely smart folks. Many of them are actually physicists, or bio-science graduates with PHDs and it takes a long time to train an engineer, from a relatively high level of knowledge in the first place, through to becoming competent engineers who can resolve all of the problems that might occur on such a sophisticated type of devices.

 

This of course means that training engineers can be a long and challenging process. This is becoming a particular challenge in the developing markets of Asia Pacific and Latin America, where unfortunately due to the prevalence of Cancer there is an on-going struggle to keep up with developing enough engineers in order to be able to support the growth of product sales.

Especially in rapidly growing markets like China and Brazil.

Of course for a company in such a situation the efficient training support of the engineers, becomes extremely important.

“An important challenge for Elekta has been around the tackling the questions ‘how do we share knowledge around the whole service organisation?’” revealed Elekta Senior Vice President of Service, Martin Gilday during a recent presentation at a meeting hosted by UK non-profit group the Service Community.

It was clear that this issue had to be addressed and having recently implemented a new service management application, Gilday and the team at Elekta took the opportunity to establish an automated knowledge management solution.

“Prior to deploying that system we did have a number of ways of sharing knowledge which the engineers basically developed themselves but it wasn’t truly shared. It may have been shared amongst smaller groups of engineers but it certainly wasn’t a solution that worked on a global basis.” Gilday admitted.

With the complex nature of some of the problems Elekta’s engineers face there is of course a huge amount of value in being able to share some of that analytical and corrective maintenance activity across the organisation. Fortunately for them, this was acknowledge amongst their engineers also and they were a big part in Elekta’s drive to share knowledge across the group on a more efficient and systematic level.

 

As Gilday explained “There was a real clear message from the field that the engineers wanted the opportunity to share information with their peers and to learn from other parts of the organisation, helping each other develop.”

 

This pull from the field engineers was a real plus for putting an effective means of sharing knowledge across what was not only a global workforce but also one with differing knowledge requirements.

Elekta’s service organisation’s maturity growth is closely aligned to that of the healthcare sector as a whole. The most mature area of the world being the United States, where devices tend to be top end machines, with maturity essentially declining somewhat as you go east.

In countries such as China, Malaysia, and India while they have a big need, the devices most commonly installed tend to at the lower end of the spectrum in terms of sophistication. This is partly because healthcare clients in these areas are often developing the skills for their own clinical teams.

So the aim for Elekta was to share the knowledge they could extract from those who were really experienced in seeing the more sophisticated problems and then be able to share that with other parts of the world.

“When we started looking at it there were many, many sources, which were all manual sources of knowledge across a different systems and not really achieving what we wanted.” Gilday explained

“So the objective was really to enable all of the Elekta service engineers to be able to access service knowledge for any particular product, at any time.”

No mean task, and one that was further compounded by the nature of the market they operate in.

 

Unlike many industries where there is a pull from the customer side for global consistency, i.e. international customers expect the same customer experience in the UK as they get in the US as they get in the Nordics. In healthcare this typically doesn’t happen.

 

Healthcare solutions are usually country based and a direct result of this was that Elekta  had three independent business units. So there first action needed to pull these together to form a global perspective.

“The first thing was to establish an overall project leader who was going to pull together a common way of doing things.” Gilday outlined

This involved establishing standard knowledge processes and also importantly the format of the knowledge articles themselves, essentially a one-page document that could be viewed electronically which really described what the problem was, and any advice that the knowledge provided. With this structure in place things could begin to move forward.

However, getting this right from the outset was a key ingredient in mitigating future issues according to Gilday.

“The format itself was pretty simple” he said “ What is the problem the knowledge articles are addressing, what is the solution or advise that is being given and what product is the article about. Pretty simple stuff you might think, but it is so important to get that right in order to share it with as many people as possible. “

“Bearing in mind we are dealing with engineers from all over the globe, we were really trying to take the knowledge available and put it into a standard format, a relatively simple format that could be used in all countries. Knowledge is only any good if people really see the benefit and want to pull that out and can use it easily. “ He added.

Look out for the second part of this feature where we look in detail at the logistics of how Elekta approached this task...

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The internet of things has massive potential to change the way companies operate and remote diagnostics can change the way field service organisations operate - benefits of cost reduction and improved customer service are the key promises of the technology but what about the security issues.

To find out more Kris Oldland, Editor of Field Service News caught up with John Pritchard, Managing Director at M.A.C Solutions a company specialising in the area, at a recent Service Community event.

 

Across December and January we asked our readers to nominate candidates for the inaugural #FSN20, a list of the twenty most influential people in field service. We received nominations from across the globe through social media, email and even a phone call or two directly into the news-desk.

Armed with a list of candidates, a Field Service News panel selected the final list of twenty based on the number of nominations, their impact on the industry (past, present and future) and their sphere of influence in both the physical and digital world.

After much long deliberation, heartful debate (read arguing) and enormous amounts of coffee we managed to whittle our list down to a final twenty which we pleased to present to you here the inaugural edition of the #FSN20. You may not agree with our selection and if you don’t tell us, tell your friends, tell your colleagues, hell tell the world – because at the heart of it that’s what this list is all about, getting people talking about excellence in field service and raising the profile of those leading us to a better future.

We are now announcing who made the list in alphabetical order in four sections across four days. So without further ado we are pleased to bring you the final five of the #FSN20

Aly Pinder, Senior Research Analyst, Aberdeen

One of the most prolific authors in the industry and also one of the nicest guys in Field Service to boot. Pinder had more nominations for this list than any other candidate, which speaks volumes.

Having written or co-authored over 50 research reports, and benchmarked more than 4,000 service executives across 5 years with Aberdeen, he writes and speaks with authority and understanding and is widely respected across the market.

Follow Aly @Pinderjr

 

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Bill Pollock, President and Principal Consulting Analyst, Strategies For Growth

Pollock is one of the industry’s most respected authors and commentators with a long and distinguished career focused on field service.

Having worked for Gartner, Aberdeen and been a founding partner of The Service Council, his analysis is highly sought after and he has authored some of the most detailed research available in the industry. His white papers, blogs and posts are widely read across the globe.

Follow Bill @SFGOnService

 

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Hilbrand Rustema, Managing Director, Noventum Service Management

Co-author of seminal service book, “Service Economics” and managing director of one of Europe’s most prominent Service Management consultancies, Noventum Service Management, Rustema has been at the heart of evolving service thinking across the continent for many years and remains at the forefront of the sector today.

Follow Hilbrand @bynoventum

 

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Steve Street, IT Security & Infrastructure Architect, IBM

Steve Street, IT Security/Infrastructure Architect, IBM – In a long industrious career with computing giants IBM Steve has been an excellent servant to service science. He has worked with many of the key leaders and thinkers in this area including Professors Irene Ng, Scott Sampson and fellow Cambridge University Alumni Andy Neely on a wide range of initiatives to unite academia, government and industry in the development and promotion of service science as a discipline.

He remains a key figure in the evolution of the area and his work is shaping the way leading organisations are seeking to deliver services.

Follow Steve @SteveDStreet

 

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Martin Summerhayes, Head of Strategy and Business Development, Fujitsu

One of a few on the list that started their a career as a service engineer, Summerhayes’ career has been quite remarkable.

He was the man who devised HP’s service strategy which became a billion dollar proposition, he has advised London’s Metropolitan police force working with local and national government, paramilitary and commercial companies, before taking on his current role as Head of Strategy for Fujitsu. And he still finds time to take a proactive role in promoting service excellence in the UK nonprofit group, The Service Community.

Follow Martin @martinsummerhay

 

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Special Mention - Steve Downton, Downton Consulting

Whilst Downton sadly passed away in 2013 his long-standing legacy remains both in the approach he developed to service as outlined in the book, ”Service Economics”, which he co-authored with Hilbrand Rustema and Jan Van Veen, as well as in the non-profit organisation he created, ”The Service Community”, which continues to operate as a significant organisation dedicated to sharing best practices amongst service companies operating the UK.

Steve’s impact on the field service industries will be long felt.

 

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See the rest of the list here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three

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