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Field service organisations must adapt in a rapidly changing world, says Tom Bowe, Industry Director, Enterprise Service Management, IFS.

Agility and adaptability were the overarching themes at the recent IFS customer conference in Boston.  More than 250 service-focused attendees came to hear user case studies about implementing and using IFS’s service software, watch industry experts apply new trends to real life, and to learn about what IFS is doing to take their service solutions to the next level.

Why? Because the world is changing, rapidly. According to Erik Qualman of Socialnomics fame, 40% of the Fortune 500 will be gone within 10 years. As PJ Jakovljevic of Technology Evaluation tweeted; “You have to be prepared to destroy your own business model before a kid in a dorm room does it for you.”
[quote float="left"]Monolithic legacy systems can no longer keep up with the changing market and customer demand.

So how do you future-proof yourself as a service organisation as the world changes, new technology evolves, and customer demands shift and increase? Addressing customer service vigilantly is vital to a service organisation’s success. Let your consumers drive the trends you adopt to ensure better return on investment. Flexibility and usability matter, especially in a consistently changing environment. Monolithic legacy systems can no longer keep up with the changing market and customer demand. Those organisations that don’t adapt will be replaced.

 

We have developed a sort of nine step program to help service organisations achieve service excellence and help them adapt to an ever-changing environment. Here are some of the things you should keep in mind when you are looking to make your service organisation more adaptable, and more successful:[ordered_list style="decimal"]

1. Know your business
   This may seem a bit obvious, and redundant, but in order to help your organisation streamline processes, maximise service margins, and increase customer satisfaction, you need to have a full understanding of your company’s goals, their future plans, their mission, and the vision. This will allow you to focus your efforts, systems, and processes on the right objectives
2. Excellence through insight
   The power of BI is never-ending. Use your collected data to drive more informed decisions, hone processes and affect change throughout your organisation. This should never be a static, one way function, BI should directly affect your future operations.
3. Accelerate service achievement
   A holistic view of not only your service organisation but your service value chain will accelerate service achievement. Bringing suppliers and other parties you collaborate with into the value chain adds value to them, you and ultimately your customers.
4. “Uberise” your service
   From the minute you order a car on Uber to when you arrive at your destination, Uber provides transparency from identifying the driver and license plate, to showing you on your route, to providing easy, secure payment options. Service businesses can use optimised, automated field service solutions (like IFS Field Service Management) to offer trust, security and reliability to their customers in a similar manner.
5. Delivery that delights you and your customers
   In the past, delivering superior customer service often meant accepting a reduced service margin. Now with powerful technology like M2M sensors, mobility solutions and automated processes, it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Let your customers drive your initiatives and reap the benefit at the same time. Better organised internal processes often automatically improve external delivery.
6. Open up to new things
   New trends and technology in the service space can often be overwhelming, but don’t be closed off to what’s new and great in your space. Actively watch the market and evaluate which trends will affect your industry and your business the most. Sometimes this is customer driven. If a new trend can help meet a consumer demand, it is probably more than worthwhile to pursue.
7. Optimise your world
   Today, more people own a mobile device than a toothbrush (Socialnomics, 2014) and over one-third (36%) of consumers prefer using a company website or email to contact a business (2014 American Express Customer Service Barometer). Gone are the days when an excel spreadsheet, white board, or patched together legacy systems can handle customer demands and a mobile workforce effectively. Optimisation and automation allows for a seamless process from call intake to billing, reducing overhead costs, deviations, and errors.
8. Manage your future
   The future doesn’t have to be as unpredictable as it seems. Market research, watching trends, and utilising your business intelligence (and managing your big data effectively) will help give you a crystal ball into what’s coming and allow you to adapt faster, giving you a competitive edge.
9. Agile, ready for change
   If the past decade has shown the business world anything, it is that the most successful organisations are those that are two steps ahead of the game. The best way to future-proof yourself is to function as an agile, flexible operation. With the right systems and vision in place, the changing world will have nothing on you.

IFS Enterprise Service Management is continually investing in our solutions to support our goal of providing service organisations with dynamic scalability, mobile solutions, ease of deployment, and cloud and wearables flexibility.
We are future-proofing ourselves by helping you succeed at what you do best; delivering unrivaled service.

 

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So far in our exclusive interview with Paul Massey, Managing Director of IFS, we’ve taken a look at where Applications 9 sits against previous milestones in both Massey and the Swedish ERP provider's history in part one and then in part two we looked at whether the field service world is finally ready for the Cloud and IoT.

Now in the final part of this interview the conversation turns to the impact of consumerisation on enterprise software and why being an ERP provider can be a double edged sword for IFS when it comes to working with Field Service companies….

Given the trend towards consumerisation in enterprise software across recent years it is evident that this is something that is ingrained within the IFS development mentality.

“It is getting bigger and bigger,” admits Massey. “I’ve been around a few years and it just wasn’t as relevant before because for example the first graphical interface in work someone used was probably much more up to date than the software they used in their personal life. Now its completely the other way around. Our challenge is sometimes our applications may look really old and dated compared to what they use on their tablet or what they use on their PC at home.”

“That’s becoming more and more relevant to people looking at our applications and valuing them against other applications. If the users don’t like the application, then it is much harder to get them to use it irrespective of the business benefits and everything else. That’s really sometimes an intangible but very significant hurdle to get across.”

 

“So since 7.5 with the .net release the UK has been a big focus of what we are trying to do because if you don’t get their hearts you wont get their minds. That’s the challenge: you can have as much complex detailed functionality as you like but if the end user can’t use it in a relatively intuitive way then it’s wasted.”

As the conversation drills down to more specific field service side of their offering I was keen to see if Massey, felt that being an ERP provider was a help or a hindrance to them in terms of how they approach field service. Particularly given that they essentially have to separate offerings in the space.

“I think being primarily known as an ERP provider is a bit of a double edged sword as far as field service is concerned,” Massey begins. “We do have customers that use the original IFS service management functionality which is very much best suited to being at the back end of something where you’ve manufactured it, you commissioned it and then you maintain it. So your following the whole asset lifecycle and its probably a more complex asset maintenance scenario where there is a field service element but its part of something wider and in that story the whole integrated ERP approach is really powerful. All the data moves from one phase of the lifecycle to the next, seamlessly.”

“Whereas you’ve got another set of people who are looking purely at field service for who having an ERP is almost an anathema because they want a very light footprint: field service with probably mobility and scheduling so the advantage to them of integrated finance, HR, inventory and a complex infrastructure is much less evident and almost in some cases even a negative.”

 

“So it’s about understanding the audience, understanding what a particular customer wants and that’s why we have the two offerings that we have in field service -  the FSM product as well as the embedded service management product as well. Plus then they’ve obviously got mobility which can talk to both of those things.”

“Sometimes it’s a challenge when we talk to a prospect to understand which sort of flavour of service do they want. There are some obvious things like the number of resources your scheduling, the geographical coverage or whether they have some specific end functionality which can tend to push you in one way or another but ultimately it is about understanding what the customer wants at the end of the day. It’s a fairly glib cliché but its true.”

“If we are into highly integrated service management solution space then we think we can absolutely compete with everyone and that’s why we are strong in Defence and areas like that because it is a more complex typical service solution.”

“On the simpler field service side we believe some of the things that we have done in scheduling, in mobility and with the latest release of the field service product we believe we can compete as a standalone with anybody as well.”

“I think particularly our close integration with our scheduling application gives us some real benefits,” Massey continues. You’ve always got the question of which version of mobility do you want you’ve got Android, IoS Windows and all those things but we certainly believe with the two offerings we can cover all the bases.”

“That’s why we’ve invested so heavily in service over the last few years with the acquisitions made and the functionality we’ve added in these releases. We see it as a big area of growth for IFS going forward. It’s a massive area and in most geographies that sector is still growing very strongly. Service continues to be a major focus for us and hopefully our investment decisions will pay off.”

 

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In the first part of this exclusive interview with Paul Massey, IFS, Managing Director we looked at where he felt the recent announcement of IFS Applications 9 sat against previous milestones within the Scandinavian company’s history.

Now in the second part of this interview we look at Massey’s thoughts on the Cloud and IoT, plus whether he was ready for the reception to the most talked about new tool in Applications 9 – the lobby function…

Head in the Cloud

One of the big announcements at the recent IFS World Conference was the launch of a fully managed cloud. However, many of IFS’s existing clients have already invested significantly within the infrastructure to run previous iterations of the ERP solution so is this a platform that is geared towards winning new business I asked Massey.

“From a marketing perspective of course the managed cloud is going to be aimed at winning new business. It’s a good coherent and deliverable Cloud story.” He began

“But in terms of the uptake I think it’s going to be out to our customer base quicker. Obviously there is a big customer base to shoot at and we only bring in so many customers each quarter.”

“So whilst an increasing proportion of those will be on cloud the bigger potential market for us is obviously the existing customer base. As part of an upgrade proposal we can try to convince them to go to the managed cloud and I think actually some of the benefits and return on investments are actually more tangible for the existing customer base than they are for new customers because they understand whats involved in running IFS, deploying new releases, managing the application, managing the database. They already know the importance of resilience and uptime so potentially it’s a very easy sell for us.”

“So I think in terms of the uptake the momentum will be generated from the existing customer base. But that in itself will obviously provide us with more references for the business.”

The managed Cloud solution is a direct result of the IFS’s close partnership with Microsoft. Which of course leads to questions around yet another disruptive technology on the horizon namely The Internet of Things. Whilst there has been a lot of discussion around IoT and Field Service it’s not really been as embraced as fully as some may have thought by now. Perhaps partnerships such as IFS and Microsoft could be the next stone to that wider spread adoption?

“I think so” Massey replies when I put the question to him “Its certainly ticking a few more boxes that actually facilitates some of the benefits of IoT because with a hosting platform like Azure behind it that provides a lot things from the reliability and scalability, the security of data, and all those things that people are sometimes a bit frightened of when people talk about automating”

 

“Having data moving around between machines and the cloud, those are real life concerns that classical ERP and companies using ERP in that classical way are very frightened of.” He adds

“It’s not just to do with the IoT but the whole security of Cloud computing is approached the same. But just the fact that it’s Microsoft if you engage with them they’ve got a really good story about security which does take a lot of the potential concerns off the table I think it’s another facilitator effectively in terms of IoT meaning something tangible to people.”

The killer app?

As we return our focus to the Announcement of Apps 9 I reflect that the biggest buzz in the break after the initial sessions was all around a new solution called Lobby which allows individual users to have all of the data they need for their own specific roll or project in one easy place. It’s easily configurable, and a first initial look suggests it could be a powerful tool.

So what were Massey’s thoughts when he first encountered the idea, was it always a case of knowing that this would be the ‘killer app’ that would resonate so well with his customers or was he taken back by the overwhelmingly positive response?

“I think to some extent we’ve had similar technology in the past and through portal technology but because its’ now much more embedded in the application and it’s easier to set up and quickly show some real practical use of it” he explains.

 

“Yes I do think it will be the sort of headline feature that we are pitching it to be as one of the perennial challenges in selling ERP applications is presenting to the prospect the potential of all the information being at their fingertips. There is always a myriad of data in an ERP system it’s just a matter of getting at it in a useful way. So I think it’s a really graphical and hopefully relatively simple way of demonstrating that there is so much data that you can choose what data you want and how you present it .” he expands

“As a way of attracting attention to the depth of functionality beneath it in the ERP application I think it is really good and hopefully the technology in how to deploy it and customise it is straightforward enough for people to understand that it is easy to get it up and running.”

Look out for the third part of this exclusive interview as we turn our attention to the impact of consumerisation on enterprise applications…

 

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Continuing our series of interviews with industry leaders, Kris Oldland took the opportunity to sit down with IFS Managing Director, Paul Massey at the IFS World Conference in Boston last month. Against the backdrop of the launch of the swedish ERP provider’s latest product suite Applications 9, the conversation looked at both Massey and IFS’s journey across the last twenty years or so…

It’s been a busy month for IFS with a raft of new developments announced at their 2015 world conference including the launch of IFS Applications 9, key partnerships with Accenture and Microsoft, the launch of a Managed Cloud Solution plus a number of improvements to their field service offerings.

Field Service News Editor Kris Oldland spoke to Paul Massey to discuss what these announcements mean for the Scandinavian based company.

With so many big announcements coming in the first morning of this years world conference it felt like a sensible idea to try and put this into context of the near twenty year journey Massey has been on with IFS.

“Back when we became IFS back in early 1997 that was when the product was becoming graphical” Massey begins.

“There was a long history with my company Avalon and IFS who at the time were our Scandinavian distributor. Basically Avalon didn’t make the transition from character to graphical so IFS acquired most of the assets of and at the outset it was all about that new graphical user interface along with the component architecture story that IFS already had. So for us that was the first major milestone and in a way that was the first wave of internationalisation for IFS.” He continues.

Indeed IFS had been a very Scandinavian centric company before that point with one operation in Poland but little else beyond there home market.

This all began to change in the the late nineties as following on from the UK acquisition France and Germany and then a US acquisition.

As Massey explains “The first three or four years of our time with IFS was all about becoming an international company. There was a massive amount of investment in that area in sales and marketing functionality to cover other markets etc so that was a big investment period for IFS so in the early noughties there were some financial difficulties from a financing point of view because that was such a period of aggressive expansion. I wasn’t involved in the senior management then as I am now but I’m guessing they saw that was required to get a global footprint as quickly as possible.”

 

In fact this aggressive expansion plan resulted in a marked a period for IFS between 2000 and 2004 when there was negative growth. However as the world faced an economic crisis in 2008 IFS had already taken their hit and as competitors started to suffer they emerged as a healthy, profit making organisation.

“We’d finished spending our money and were set to reap the benefits of our investments” Massey admits. “We managed to more than survive that phase because it definitely impacted on others much more than it did us. We continued to grow as we moved from a negative cash flow to a really positive cash flow and we came out the other ends of that in a very healthy state.”

But what about the product how did evolve also?

“Having gone through the transition to graphical interface right at the beginning the next major milestone was enterprise explorer, the .net client in the Apps 7.5 release.” Massey explains.

 

“That was the next technology milestone from IFS’s point of view from then all of the releases i.e. 7.5 then 8 and now 9 have been more heavily focussed on broadening out the level functionality in each of the industries we target and obviously keeping the technology up to date.”

Which brings us up to Apps 9 which has brought a number of new features that had the delegates of their world conference more than impressed (see page 48)

“From a technology point of view I think the Layered architecture and some of the stuff we are doing with in-memory optimisation (which will be in an update of Apps 9 a little later in the year) is really important.” Explains Massey “You’ve got to keep the functional and technical streams running together in parallel which I think we’ve done. I think there is enough of both of those things in this release to get the customers interested in it.”

Look out for the second part of this exclusive interview where the conversation turns to the Cloud…

 

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In this new four-part series Field Service News Editor Kris Oldland takes a look at five key tools forecast to become part of the field service engineer’s toolkit in the not so distant future.

 
As a child of the eighties with a penchant for a bit of science fiction to me the year 2015 sounds very much like the distant future we might have heard about when watching Tomorrow’s World back when we were kids. And whilst not all things that we thought would appear in the future have arrived -  for example,  we are not all walking around in  shiny silver outfits and the hover car has yet to be invented  - there is so much technology that is commonplace today which is truly remarkable and has that futuristic feel.
 
Devices like satnavs, tablets and smartphones could all have come straight from the set of Star Trek and just a decade ago it would have seemed incomprehensible that devices like these would be regular items in both our working and our personal lives. These devices are now not only widely in use, they are hitting mass saturation.
 
And it’s little wonder really when we think how big the impact first smartphones, then tablets and other forms of mobile computing have had on the way we work , how we communicate, the way we interact with each other, and how we manage tasks - all empowered by the mobile Internet. And in no other industry has the impact of improved mobile computing been felt more than in field service.[quote float="left"]In no other industry has the impact of improved mobile computing been felt more than in field service.

>However, I truly believe that the leaps forward we have made in terms of technology this decade are just the tip of the iceberg and in the next few years we will see further technologies that are now starting to emerge become as commonplace as the smartphone, satnav and tablet, and that they will have an even greater impact.  Phrases like the fourth paradigm, industry 2.0 and the new industrial revolution which were once being whispered in corners are now being used by very senior and respectable people with more and more frequency and more and more confidence.
 
Just consider this a moment – we are talking about a leap forward in technology that is comparable with the shift in society created by the industrial revolution.We are talking about massive changes in the way we work, a wholesale sea change bigger than anything we have experienced in living memory - all empowered by technologies that whilst they may seem futuristic are already out there and being used in industry today.
 
So lets take a look at some of these technologies and how they can be put to work as part of the field service engineer's tool kit.
 

 

Wearables: smart watches

 
Having spoken about smartphones in the introduction perhaps the most obvious place to start is with wearable technology such as smart watches. Last year was widely touted as the year of the wearables yet it didn’t really live up to the hyperbole.
 
In fact it was quite the opposite... research from digital research firm L2 confirmed what a lot of people in the industry would already have guessed:  that whilst 75% of consumers are aware of wearable technology, just 9% actually had any desire to purchase and a tiny 2% confirmed they actually owned a wearable device.
 
So not quite the mega-impact that many industry experts had been predicted.
 
However, whilst the consumer world might not be ready for such devices there is a definite home for them in the world of industry and particularly in field service.Lets take the smart watch to begin with. As part of the recent release of IFS Applications 9,  smart watch integration is embedded. Other companies like ClickSoftware have also built smart watch apps into their field service solutions.
 
The ability to communicate hands free, whether it be receiving messages or making a call, has obvious benefits for the field engineer whether it is when they are driving between jobs or working on site on a repair. This is the first key benefit of a smart watch. And whilst much of this functionality is available either through bluetooth headsets or through the smart-phone itself being put on speaker for example,[quote float="right"]A smart watch brings together and streamlines functionality in a much more convenient manner.

The impact that smartphones have had on field service is widely recognised - smart watches simply take the power of the mobile phone and deliver it in a more convenient device that enables the engineers to work with both hands at all times
 
And for me introducing additional convenience and improving the overall efficiency of the tasks we are trying to undertake, is a large factor in whether an emerging technology will take root and I do believe that smart watches certainly tick many of these boxes and have the potential to do so and should absolutely be considered when selecting the right hard ware for our field engineers.
 
Look out for the next feature within this feature where we look at how smart glasses and unmanned drones could also become regular tools used by our 2020 field engineers.
 

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Within field service the IFS brand is well known, having gone through an aggressive expansion drive fuelled by key acquisitions of US based Metrix and UK based 360 Scheduling the brand has secured both headlines and customers alike within our industry in recent years. However at this year’s IFS world conference held in Boston there was a real sense that the ERP software provider has truly come of age as a key global player.

Hosted in Boston the three-day event combined some inspirational keynote speakers, a slick mix of presentation formats – including a US TV Style panel show and most importantly given the profile of the delegates an impressive array of technology for the attendees to get their hands on.

At the heart of the conference was the announcement of IFS Applications 9 which having be revealed on the first morning of the conference caused a significant amount of interest and excitement. Admittedly the audience was already fairly engaged with IFS’s product suite with an initial poll showing almost half of those in attendance were already considering moving to Applications 9, however, if the general reception to the series of new functionalities and tools announced was anything to go by, by the end of the three days that figure may well have increased further.

IFS Applications 9 revealed

After an initial opening keynote from IFS CEO Alastair Sorbie we were soon greeted with an impressive promotional video giving us a glimpse of what the next generation of IFS applications will include. Shots of a very modern, intuitive looking interface sitting across multiple devices, including interestingly a variety of smart watches ensued as the video rolled across the obligatory 100ft screen, accompanied by an upbeat dance track.

The message was very clear. IFS Applications 9 was something the Scandinavian based company were very proud about and they wanted the world to know it.

 

As Thomas Sald SVP Research and Development, IFS announced as he took to the stage as the video came to an end “It looks quite exciting doesn’t it? And it’s beautiful as well”.

Indeed this is perhaps the first initial response of IFS Applications 9. It simply looks great. It is a clean, modern, and intuitive looking user interface. The growing trend of customisation in enterprise technology is something that the development team of IFS have clearly given a lot of consideration to.

“We know that user experience is important to you as it is directly linked to your business.” Sald continued “A great user experience increases productivity, makes it easier to make the right decisions and helps in attracting and retaining talent. It also shortens the implementation time and creates enthusiasm for the new system.”

“User experience is important. Yes it’s looks good, but it is important because it supports your business and the people that run your business.”

However, there needs to be more to a new system than just a facelift. Fortunately IFS Applications 9 has introduced a number of new capabilities that also raise the bar in terms of the functionality of the software that could potentially some real benefits to those field service companies that elect to implement it.

The first of these introduced was the IFS Lobby.

IFS Lobby essentially provides a very clear and highly customisable view of a business or a specific project within a business, in relation to a specific job role or process. Being fully customisable IFS can bring the users at-a-glance information that they need for their own specific requirements and it can be tailored to each unique user.

The user is also then able to drill down into specific finer details relating to either their role or a specific project and it’s elegant UI is fully responsive making it accessible from desktop, tablet or even smart phone.

 

Such easy access to key information whilst out in the field could of course be equally as vital to enhancing and improving how a field engineer’s workflow as it could to making reporting at management level a far easier and less troubling task.

Another impressive benefit of lobby is the ability to observe and interact with other departments within the ERP structure and this leads neatly into the second big introduction of IFS Applications 9 – Streams.

Streams is basically an inbuilt notification system within IFS Applications 9. With a similar look to something akin to the lovechild of instant messenger and twitter it was a neat way to receive updates on tasks that require your action.

However, Streams doesn’t just sit in your Lobby waiting for you to spot the new notifications pop up. No Sir, with apps for both smart phones and smart watches available Streams is able to bring your attention to the task at hand as soon as it arrives.

What was soon becoming clear with the release of IFS Applications 9 was that the software is hugely customisable. From being able to quickly and effectively build your own Lobby that provides the key information you need at a glance through to tweaking the UI so that it looks more familiar and comfortable to you and your colleagues.

However, being able to make aesthetic changes and user level functionality is one thing but a true customisation, one which essentially changes elements within the base code, which are sometimes still both genuinely needed and well motivated is another entirely.

In the past a significant consideration if you have a customised version of any software, let alone something as mission critical as an ERP, is how much additional work is there to make the upgrade feasible due to the customisations in place. Often the amount of work to transition from one version to another can simply outweigh the benefits of moving to the new platform.

This is where the next major new element of IFS Applications 9 comes in. It is built on a ‘Layered Application Architecture’ which essentially removes such worries from the equation making upgrades as simple a process for customised versions of the system as those that have been run straight out of the box.

“We’ve broken the code into separate transparent layers” explained Sald “That means when we come with an update to IFS applications your customisations can remain unchanged. That’s going to save a lot of time.”

Indeed it is, and this layered architecture has been applied to all of the varying pieces of IFS Applications 9 such as the data models, the design models the business logic and the user interface which could be a potentially massive incentive for those companies looking to opt for a system which is set to grow with them.

 

The other big enhancement that could be a real game-changer for both IFS and ERP providers in general is the inclusion of an embedded CRM. As data becomes more and more important in field service both in terms of capturing it, interpreting it and most importantly removing barriers to accessing that data for those who need it is critical.

With the inclusion of Embedded CRM within IFS Applications 9 essentially users can now have an enterprise application that combines ERP and CRM into a single package so now the barrier of using a CRM as a separate application with it’s own separate database is removed.

However, whilst each of these components of the new release are important, it was undoubtedly the Lobby function that had caused the most excitement with the conversations in the coffee break clearly being centred around this new innovation, with a number of attendees clearly keen to get a hands on experience with it in the later sessions.

Playing with the Big Boys…

I mentioned at the beginning of this feature that this was the year that perhaps IFS have truly emerged as a major global player. And whilst IFS Applications 9 is truly an impressive step forward for the company, it was just element of the announcements revealed at the conference that led me to this conclusion.

Another significant factor is the announcements of a number of key strategic partnerships that signify just how far IFS have progressed in recent years and how important a player they may set to become in the various verticals they operate within.

The event itself saw a number of these partners including the likes of Oracle and Intel showcasing how they are working with IFS in the innovation and networking area.

However, there were two top tier partnerships that really caught the eye. The first of these was a co-operation agreement wit Accenture that was announced the day before the conference, which will see the two companies, strengthen there existing partnership with training and certification of over 100 consultants through the IFS Academy.

With IFS and Accenture jointly pursuing sales and delivery opportunities the core of the agreement will focus on growing IFS’s licence sales together with Accenture’s implementation and application management services. Such an approach could be key in opening up a path to top tier, blue chip organisations for IFS who have traditionally be more focussed on the mid-level sector.

Whilst this five year partnership may well prove significant for IFS, it was the other ‘diamond level’ partnership that was announced that is of likely interest to their customers both past and present.

That partnership was with Microsoft.

As a result of this high level collaboration IFS announced during the conference the global availability of IFS Applications as a fully managed service on Microsoft Azure, which could provide a much more flexible and cost effective way to take advantage of the IFS suite of solutions.

 

Optimised for IFS Applications versions 8 and 9, IFS Managed Cloud is a security-enhanced single-tenant cloud within the world-class Azure environment. Customers can decide how and when changes are made to IFS Applications, specify maintenance and upgrades to suit their business needs.

“Not everybody wants to go about the cloud in the same way” began Dan Matthews, Chief Technology Officer IFS as he made the announcement. “Some of you may see it as a virtual data centre, others may be working with a partner who are moving multiple assets to the cloud. Some of you may want the vendor to take care of everything for you”

It is to those in the last categories that IFS Managed Cloud is aimed at.

“IFS Managed Cloud marks a major milestone in our company’s history as it offers our customers a new set of options for deploying, running, and using our solutions,” Matthews commented in the accompanying press statement to the launch.

“We have designed IFS Managed Cloud to provide flexibility, improved security, and reliability at a level that would be very expensive to achieve in any on-premise installation. Coupled with the layered application architecture of IFS Applications 9 and the ability to utilize Azure’s global network of data centres, we are offering a truly future-proof cloud solution that reduces complexity, risk, and cost.”

So what about Field Service?

Of course whilst understanding the bigger picture is important, for those with field service operations the burning question is what have you improved for my team and me. In fact there were a number of major updates that were announced during the conference that related specifically to their IFS Enterprise Service Management (ESM)suite of products, which comprise of IFS Service Management, IFS Field Service Management and IFS Mobile Workforce Management.

In fact Cindy Jaudon, North American President for IFS went as far as defining IFS ESM as the most “comprehensive suite of service management solutions available.”

So what has been added?

For a start the latest iteration of IFS Field Service Management (version 5.6.2) includes a number of enhancements including running natively on Microsoft Azure which as well as being a robust and proven platform of allows customers to dynamically scale system resources based on actual usage.

There has also been a large focus on added mobility tools with some really nice enhancements including an automatic calculation of ETA using GPS data and the long awaited ability to record videos with the system. However, here it is perhaps the under the hood tweaks that were most impressive with initial tests showing that the new update is delivering 92% decrease in sync times and a 500% increase in maximum file sizes.

 

Notifications have had an overhaul too with the Android version now support the Android notification bar (a key missing feature for many Android users) and alongside the ability to accept or reject a job assignment directly from notifications just makes the user experience that much more streamlined than before. We also see the notifications system having a wearable option for the first time as well with integration with Samsung and other Android watches.

There is also the introduction of what promises to be an excellent automated knowledge management solution, which will make recommendations of which solutions are appropriate for a job as information is being entered by customer service staff or customers.

The system considers user rankings and actual usage. Additionally, solutions include attachments (FAQs, product manuals, etc.), service notes and sync with the mobile devices; efficiently extending knowledge management from call centre to field service.

In both IFS Field Service Management and IFS Mobile Management there is a focus on scheduling and IFS Mobile Workforce now features support for a number of increasingly complex scheduling problems including being able to now even cater for jobs that have different start and finish areas.

Alongside this there is increased support for dispatchers including simplified visualisation of the schedule, and manual, semi automated and dynamic scheduling options.

For management there is then the excellent inclusion of target-based scheduling which gives them the ability to set business-goals and KPIs within the system that automatically impact on the way the scheduling system allocates work whilst at the same time it can consistently monitor actual performance versus business targets such as SLAs and first time fix rates etc.

IFS Mobile Workforce Management also now incorporates an Advanced Resource Planning tool, which supports the manning requirements of more challenging and complex operations such as Oil Rigs, Ships, high-tech machinery and so forth.

Finally IFS Service Management boasts the same love and attention to it’s UI that has been seen across the whole of IFS Applications 9, plus improved remote warehouse capabilities, and again a focus on both scheduling and mobile.

Milestones

As I mentioned in the beginning, the IFS World Conference from the very start had a sense of celebration and pride about it all underscored with a deep lying confidence.

The technology showcased across the three days was undoubtedly impressive and at the forefront of the various industries it is designed for. And as we’ve touched on here through some strong strategic partnerships IFS may well soon find themselves playing in a bigger pond and attracting even bigger fish.

Another announcement made at the conference is that IFS have now got 1 million users on board.

 

It’s a big milestone but one that is all the more impressive if look back at their history and see that it took, 21 years to reach the 500,00 mark. A further 8 years to grow that figure to 750,000 and just a further 2 years to grow there user base by a quarter of a million users to hit the big seven figure milestone.

One thing is sure; IFS’s growth is now gaining some serious traction. They’ve got a product that can deliver and are rubbing shoulders with some very powerful friends.

Now wonder they’re feeling confident. The question is now just how big can they become? How long before we are talking about the next milestone? And just what will that Milestone be?

 

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IFS's Tom Bowe takes a look at the feeling we've all had before where the day is spinning out of control and helps identify how we can stop it with field service technologies... 

You know what I mean. It’s 8 a.m. Two field techs have called in sick, three started late and four more are in training, your dispatchers are already biting their nails, and the schedule is looking more like scrambled eggs and less like the beautifully organised chart that 30 minutes ago was going to hit 100% of your SLAs.

Perhaps you have a legacy system that just can’t keep up with demand. Perhaps you use a ‘temporary’ Band-Aid application, or a hodge-podge of Excel and other manual systems. Whatever your predicament, there is a better way.

You’ve heard it before - the right technician, at the right place and right time, with the right tools. Right? This marketing buzz only means so much. What does an optimised schedule truly mean for your business?

For one, it means the situation I described above can be addressed without daily fire-fighting and crisis management. A schedule that continually and automatically re-optimises in real-time based on changes (expected and unexpected) that happen throughout the day, eliminates human error, frazzled dispatchers, missed SLA’s and so much more. Let’s take a deeper look.

 

The end game is to deliver the best service possible balanced between lowest cost and highest profit. Pretty simple, right? No, actually that is kind of hard. There is a cost and usually a revenue side of every factor that drives your service business. If you had unlimited resources you could probably keep all your customers happy all the time, right?

If you had engineers within a few minutes’ drive of all of your customers and they all had every part that could ever be used to service the equipment they repair, you could literally achieve the ultimate goal of 100% satisfaction because these techs would be there when equipment fails, and they would always have the right part. But that’s fantasyland, not to mention super-expensive.

What you need is an intelligent system to consider all the dimensions and constraints of your service operations and evaluate them in real-time to make sure you are making the best decision to achieve target service levels.

In other words achieving a level of customer satisfaction where customers return for additional product and service purchases, while you deliver that service at the highest profit and lowest cost possible. So what kinds of dimensions and constraints are we referring to?

The dimensions of field service scheduling usually include geography, capacity, traffic, work to be performed, rules about the work to be performed, parts, people and time. These constraints, and many more, each have an impact on your operating margin.   Let’s look at some examples.

Capacity is the number of resources available to handle the workload. This can include employees, contractors or service partners and needs to address emergency jobs, appointments, installations, repairs and PM work. Capacity costs money so shift rosters are carefully planned to provide adequate coverage. But parts come into play because they need to match up with the assigned resource. And so does travel times, traffic and proficiency.

 

The work itself is defined when the job is created. It could be an urgent job that requires immediate attention, or a lower priority PM service inserted into the schedule at the last possible moment given their proximity and availability.

Maybe a technician arrived on site and could not get access to the equipment, or the repair took half the time expected. Why not recognise that you now have additional capacity and dynamically adjust the schedule to increase productivity? Perhaps you can do one more job today or you can arrive 10 minutes early to the next one, but maybe there is a penalty clause. These are all factors in making the best decision.

Rules usually define who can do a given job. Do they have the skills, certifications or even travel visas. Are they qualified, available and how much do they cost? Are they close enough, can they get the parts needed, or is someone else closer and equally qualified?

All of these decisions are balanced against time. For instance, knowing where each resource is currently located, who is on time vs. running late, how far do they have to travel to their next job, and if that made sense at 8am in the morning, does the same set of circumstances apply at 9:05am? The same can be said about the value of each service call to your business.

The customer’s happiness is not static. There is a time period within which your response is adequate and after that satisfaction dwindles or costs rise depending on the SLA. And 1 hour appointment windows are better than 2, 3 or 4 hours. Even better if you tell the customer the tech’s estimated time of arrival (ETA).

Today, the best enterprise service management software solutions take all of these factors, and more, into consideration when providing an optimised end-to-end service delivery schedule. Optimised scheduling, as part of an intelligent mobile workforce management solution, means complete field visibility, on-time every time, anywhere.

It means less human error and better efficiency. It gives you back the control you might think you’ve lost…so you can get that cup of coffee at 8:15am instead of having to manage another blow-up crisis.

 

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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.

In the first part of this feature we looked at whether servitization was limited to just large size companies and how to manage the change involved in moving to such a radical new approach. Here in the final part of this feature the debate continues....

Kris Oldland: There is a point there that you touch on briefly about not just getting the buy in from the internal teams but also from the customer. Data can play a significant part in servitization and that presents a challenge in it’s own right, as data is very precious currently. How can we overcome that and encourage our customers to let us access their data?

Koen Dyaeyer: To start I’ll mention one thing, there is an aspect on this benchmarking data with your customers which is of course, that you are obliged to do this anonymously that is clear. You can tell the a customer ‘look this is your data this is the rest of the market and this is the variation’  but you cannot be open to all extents.

But the value is not in knowing exactly who is doing what, the value is in comparing yourself with others and knowing what to learn, and how to then improve.

On the other hand it is also true that you have to select your targets when your developing these value propositions. This approach may not fit every type of customer immediately. I would say twenty to thirty percent may adopt really quickly, really embrace it and are immeditely fond of the concept, another twenty to thirty percent will be lagging – it is not in their mindset and then the part in the middle is where you have to push. And when you have pushed and achieved the 80% mark then you can approach the laggards.  That is more or less how we approached it so we didn’t lose to much time and energy in developing it.

 

Brendan Viggers:  Certainly in the defence market the classic contracting model is performance based logistics where the OEM is providing a platform and then the through life support of the platform as well, so all the servicing that goes with it and they will then offer a SLA or guarantee the fleet availability for 80% of that time.

What we are finding is there is a need for partnership between the OEM and the customer. Because the OEM needs to know how the customer is driving that vehicle. If he is taking that tank and forcing it across a plain over the bounds of normal operational use then it’s going to cost that OEM more to service it. So can be a win-win but if you want that platform you need to be prepared to operate within acceptable bounds.

Koen Dyaeyer: To add to Brendan’s point there I would add that in our case we are looking for the win-win-win because we are in between but if we focusses on the win-win-wins we can really drive forward.

Tim Baines: This debate about ownership of data has been going on for over 10 years. To my mind its the use of the data that is important. I’ve seen it in Xerox’s case where they will turn around and say OK the contract price is this for an advanced services contract on print management but if you let us share that data and use that data it’ll come down to this.

Audience Question: What would you say are your most important KPIs to actually monitor and drive your service business today?

Koen Dyaeyer: The most important group of KPIs are the service profitability KPI’s we have data on overall revenues and data on cost indicators. We cannot always be exact with th eservice cost indicators to the penny but we know what it is likely to be. So the service profitability is a major KPI.

Then there is customer satisfaction. The first question we ask in every technical assessment is what type of customer do you think this is and also is he satisfied? So we link that data to understand the relationship of data to customer satisfaction.

 

Then for the operations we also have the performance KPIs of the product so mean time between failure, mean time between breakdown, some performance indicators specific to our industry so number of failed milkings for example that help us see if the farm management is running smoothly. So performance, customer satisfaction  and service profitability – these are the three main KPI group we use.

Kris Oldland: Have these KPIs evolved as you have moved through this process of servitization? Have they evolved as you gather more data and therefore Insight into your customers?

Koen Dyaeyer: Actually we started with maybe 8 or 10 basic KPIs and what we started to get excited about was the analysis we could do with them. We were able to look at the years of technical experience and see how that aligned to customer experience and service profitability. We learned a lot out of that initial process and then some new KPIs grew out of it .

Tim Baines: I may have seen something slightly different in some of the companies that I have looked at. A quote that comes to mind is by Henry Ford who said profit is a result of service. Therefore when I look at people like Alstom the number one KPI is around customer experience.

That means the customer experience, which in their instance would be the amount of time a customer is waiting because a train has failed to show up, that customer experience is the number one KPI.

For Alstom that’s key because it relates directly to the customers key core business process, which is about moving people. Then there are KPIs around the customer experience when somebody is onboard the train and so on. It’s the manufacturer that then translates those to mean time to failure etc.

What is very interesting to me coming from a world of production, where the main KPIs were cost, quality and  delivery and everything was around that then moving to the service world where KPIs are centred around the business processes of the customer, and because those customers differ so must those KPIs differ.

 

Audience Question: I am understanding this correctly that the fourth industrial revolution is about re using our IP and industrial assets to serve customers better?

Tim Baines: I think that we are looking at a very special form of organisation. What is particular about the technology innovators you see here is that if they have the internal procedures in place to capture how the product is performing in the field and then feedback to the design process so the product becomes better suited for application, then that innovation loop is what is distinctive about the manufacturing companies and is different to technology innovators.

Ultimately it means language like through life support  are actually a characteristic of the old product mentality, we’re talking about a capability being delivered. Indeed even the notion of After-sales service is a product based concept because we are thinking of the notion of  producing something selling it transactionally and then after sales.

Another point to make is that we talk about servitization from the point of view of a manufacturing company, a company that’s got technology innovation capabilities delivering advanced services. But we also have the phenomena of companies which are service companies, technology integrators, developing their ability to technology innovate.

So there are two ways that servitization can arise. Predominantly we talk about a move from manufacturers to manufacturers that deliver service but we can also talk about service providers developing their abilities to redesign products.

 

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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...