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The field service landscape is evolving and it is important to ensure your field service engineers are equipped for the challenges ahead. Here, Sarah Nicastro, Field Service Evangelist with IFS outlines three core opportunities to do just that...

In the world of automation this and artificial intelligence that, the role of the field technician is often questioned. Will technology eliminate the need for technicians altogether? I think not. But the role and responsibilities are undoubtedly changing and will continue to do so.

The good news, for your technicians and for you, is that this world of automation and intelligence frees them up from manual, preventable tasks to do more value-added work.

The challenge is, this often isn’t a shift that comes naturally. In addition to the proliferation of technology, the entire field service ecosystem is changing. Customers have new and more sophisticated demands, companies are competing less on product and more on service, and data is now our most valuable resource.

With all these changes at play, it is time for you to consider the ways in which you need to upskill or reskill your technicians as their time is freed up in a way that will offer you competitive advantage or impact your bottom line.

As you incorporate tools like IoT, AI, and ML that reduce the drain of manual tasks on your workforce, consider these three areas in which it might make sense to upskill or reskill your talented technicians:

1: Hone Their People Skills
As customer focus becomes prioritised in every field service operation, one of the biggest challenges I hear tell of is the need for more soft skills.  Technicians that are highly skilled and knowledgeable in repairing a certain product may not have historically needed to be all that people friendly. Those times have changed.

Today, service is the frontline of your brand – it is the impression that will matter most in how you are viewed in the eyes of your customers. It is a, if not the, major differentiator for organisations today. Therefore, you need to focus on improving the people skills for all your frontline workers.

These skills include communication, empathy, problem-solving, empowerment, engagement, and confidence – as well as a solid understanding of how to be respectful of someone’s time and property.

Going beyond those basics (which, believe me, many need to work on) you will want to consider how to equip your technicians with the skills and ability to be consultative, to suggestively sell/ cross-sell, and to become an expert at providing real-time insights.

2: Harness Their Knowledge to Train and Educate
When you find yourself successfully leveraging technology to the point you’ve reduced your demand for field visits, and you will, you’ll want to think about how you can re-deploy some of your most skilled technicians in an impactful way. One avenue is to mould your technicians to be master trainers and educators.

There are several applications for this – you could use expert technicians to train new field talent, you can enlist their customer-facing knowledge to educate product and sales teams, and you can even look to use skilled technicians to train and educate your customer base.

3: Develop Their Data Analytics Abilities
Data is the foundation that the future of field service is being built on. Service organisations that are embracing Servitization and outcomes-based service are determining not only how data can be utilised internally to provide more predictive service, but how data can be used to create new offerings and revenue streams with customers.

If you are collecting data from assets, you are undoubtedly sitting on a wealth of insights that your customers would likely be willing to pay you for. The hard part is finding out exactly what those offerings are, how to deliver on them, and how to monetise and market them.

This is where businesses are really evolving, and this evolution necessitates more masters of data. Depending on your industry and their skills, your technicians may be able to be leveraged in analysing and creating intelligence from data or in aspects such as determining what insights your customers would be willing to pay for, how those insights could or should be delivered, how best to market and sell these new offerings.

Sarah Nicastro is Director of Service Management Business Development at IFS

IFS to optimize maintenance scheduling, service and product development through simplified access to Rolls-Royce Trent engine data.

Rolls-Royce has chosen IFS Maintenix™ for exchanging engine data with airlines operating Rolls-Royce Trent engines, including the Trent 1000, Trent XWB and Trent 7000. With a long list of world-leading airlines operating with its engines, the IFS Maintenix solution will help Rolls-Royce and its customers share data.

The IFS Maintenix Aviation Analytics capability enables the automated provision of field data, which ensures that Rolls-Royce receives timely and accurate information. IFS Maintenix then acts as a gateway to automatically push maintenance program changes from Rolls-Royce back to the airline operator. As a result, life-limited engine part maintenance deadlines can be updated based on actual operating conditions and life consumed by each engine in use.

Rolls-Royce helps transport thousands of air passengers and tons of cargo across the world on a daily basis, and maximizing the safety, efficiency and insights gained on each trip is paramount. With the support of IFS Maintenix and its Aviation Analytics capability, Rolls-Royce is able to offer a systematic method of exchanging and accurately updating airline engine life data to optimize the interval between engines being removed and sent for overhaul. This will provide new streams of data for Rolls-Royce to analyze the performance of fleets with Trent engines and refine the aftermarket offerings it can provide its customers, from service-based contracts to analytics insights and more.

Richard Goodhead, Rolls-Royce, SVP Marketing – Civil Aerospace, said: “Ease of data sharing is a key component in the Rolls-Royce IntelligentEngine vision, which sees a future in which our aero engines are increasingly connected, contextually aware, and even comprehending. Working with IFS Maintenix to ensure we receive accurate and timely engine life data will help us as we make further progress toward that objective by helping us deliver greater levels of reliability and efficiency to our operators.”

Scott Helmer, President, Aerospace & Defense Business Unit, IFS added: “We are thrilled to work with Rolls-Royce to deliver next-generation maintenance protocols, all based on up-to-date engine life data. This strategically important deal offers further proof that IFS Maintenix can help aviation organizations maximize the revenue potential of their assets through standard, lean, and predictable maintenance.”

What is the one key question you would advise a field service director to ask an Augmented Reality vendor when potentially seeking a solution to implement within their business?


JOHN BISHOP, PRESIDENT, LIBRESTREAM
There will be many questions the field service director will be asked by colleagues, customers, or supply chain partners. Addressing the questions upfront is very important and the AR vendors should all be able to answer them. For example, you need the answer to questions like ‘how do you handle privacy issues’? Or, more basic than that, ‘when I move beyond the pilot phase, will IT let me deploy?’

We felt it was important to identify the common challenges we’ve experienced with customers during deployment. We worked with customers and analysts to develop the Remote Expert Industry Guide. 

Our longevity in the AR space has made it clear that sharing video or capturing data digitally can be a touchy subject, especially when end customers are involved. Field service directors and their colleagues need reassurance that the vendor they choose can provide the solution.

STEPHEN JEFFS-WATTS, PRODUCT MANAGER, SERVICE MANAGEMENT, IFS
“What areas of my service delivery organisation will be affected by deploying AR technology and how do I manage change effectively to ensure successful adoption of your product?”

At the Field Service USA conference in Palm Springs, California this year, digital transformation continued to dominate discussions. Marne Martin of IFS and our own Kris Oldland were both on the speaking roster so they caught up over a coffee to compare notes…

As someone who attends many field service conferences across the globe, there are some speakers within our industry whom I know will give a presentation that always gives me a spark of an idea for a new article or feature and as such, I always make a beeline for their sessions when my schedule allows.

One such speaker is Marne Martin, President of Service Management for IFS and CEO of Work Wave. Martin has an uncanny knack of talking about subjects that are right on the pulse of the audience. She always manages to address the concerns and present solutions that resonate with the room, but is also able to bring a light sense of levity and fun to her sessions as well – and she usually has at least one brilliantly memorable line that gets stuck in your mind for a long time.

This time around it was the fantastic throw away one liner: “You don’t want to bring a Volkswagen to a Formula 1 race.”
It was a pithy reminder that the stakes in field service have been raised in recent times. The competition is greater than ever as industry after industry adapts to the disruptive influences of innovative companies like Uber, Deliveroo and AirBnB who are not just revolutionising their sectors but those far beyond their remits by raising expectations of what seamless customer experience looks like in the age of the app.

Martin’s discussion weaved through both the digital transformation and also the cultural transformation that many field service organisations are going through, with the majority of those yet to do so now seeing such change looming on their horizons also. She touched on crucial issues being widely felt, such as talent shortages and how service organisations can get value from the technology that the pressure of increasing customer demand insists they implement.

However, the critical point she touched on was the importance of understanding and clearly defining service strategy. It is a point that I have made both in recent presentations of my own as well as in these pages. Without a properly defined service strategy, without knowing ‘who’ your organisation ‘wants’ to be, any such programs that seek to implement digital transformation will be at best ill formed and at worst an expensive failure that could really set a service organisation back.

I’ve expressed the opinion that digital transformation, has to be an ongoing process, not a one-off project. A journey, not a destination. As such, a clearly defined service strategy needs to be in place if you want to stay on the right path.

So when I sat down with Marne to grab a quick coffee away from the melee of what was a jam-packed conference, with hundreds of delegates and vendors buzzing around – this was the first area I wanted to touch base on and swap notes about.

“Think about how you empower the field, the mobile workflow enhancements, how you enable the technician to cross-sell, upsell, to close out tickets, all of these items that drive higher customer satisfaction. These are all fundamental to what makes service matter.

They all drive profitability for the service organisation, growth in revenue and customer satisfaction,” she mused as I outlined my thinking to her. “It is just that today we have more tools with which we’re able to achieve this and that allows us to achieve it at a faster more efficient pace - which is, of course, what customers want. I think it all fits together in a way that we, as a sector, are able to bring these fundamentals into the new digital era.

“It only becomes a problem when companies begin thinking about digitalisation as something disconnected from these fundamentals.” This line of thought echoes my thinking on the topic as well. However, there is an additional layer of complexity to the discussion that I have also been considering of late.

Perhaps the biggest of all shifts in the field service sector over the last decade has been the move firstly from cost centre to profit centre and now what many see as a natural extension of that into a world of servitization. In one sense, it feels as though the field service sector has never witnessed such a significant paradigm shift as we are seeing today as companies move away from the traditional break-fix approach to one of outcome-based services.


         "Digital transformation, has to be an ongoing process, not a one-off project..."


In that sense, we’re going through a complete revolution across the sector. However, I’m also of a firm belief (and have spoken to many service directors around the world who agree) that the essential thing in terms of delivering service excellence is not to lose sight of the core tenets of what good service looks and feels like, and at the heart of that remains some long-established foundational positions around ensuring an ‘Outside-In’ perspective on the service business.

Making sure you understand the customer and how they want to interact with your organisation, and then making sure processes are designed around that understanding is not a particularly radical position, but rather a well established best-practice.

The result is a dichotomy in service strategy between embracing the new while holding on to the historical precedents that underpin service excellence. It is not an impossible equation to balance, but it is one that should be considered deeply when approaching the current mega-trend of digital transformation.

This balance between yesterday’s, today’s and tomorrow’s worlds was another area that Martin touched upon in her presentation where she used the phrase ‘Challenge the Present, Lead the Future’ and it was something I wanted to dig deeper into when we spoke. “By challenge the present I mean that field service organisations need to assess where their basics are weak, flawed or broken, and to assess how these can be improved to drive a future in which they are not,” she explained.

“If you look at all the key technology trends that are out there, we’re bringing every single one into service. Of course, some are coming faster than others as you would expect, but they all have applicability in service. However, on the other hand, the building blocks of what great service is, whom you deliver service to, and what you deliver service with remain the same.

“It’s the interplay of the fundamentals of service, the brand, the asset, the technician, and so on and how we drive the efficiencies and delivery of these forwards, with these new technology trends, into a new paradigm.

“To get to servitization or outcome based service, you still need to understand maintenance and break-fix and up times and asset performance. It’s not as if our understanding of all these core things goes away; it just has to be heightened and put together into an outcomes-based proposition. But rather than just deciding what is going to be our approach to reducing technician travel time or what is going to be our overtime strategy, companies are now looking at everything holistically to be able to asses the outcome they are delivering to the customer, how they are pricing that outcome and what is the margin on that outcome.”

Again I agree with Martin’s take on things here. The phrase that comes to mind is evolution, not revolution. I feel this is an apt mantra for many service organisations to adopt in these times of rapid technological and societal change. While talk of impending industry revolution may grab headlines, the truth is effective change is always iterative – and that very much holds true for field service organisations today.

Whether your organisation is on a journey to digitalisation or to servitization, remember it remains a journey, not a destination. Please drive carefully.

Do you think AR will become a mainstream/commonplace part of field service operations within the near future?

JOHN BISHOP, PRESIDENT, LIBRESTREAM
This question is an interesting one. AR is a large bucket. If you look at proven capabilities such as remote expert guidance and digital work instructions, AR is already a mainstream capability for market leaders.

Other AR capabilities such as 3D modeling and cognitive services, while important parts of the digital transformation journey, are further out in maturity. For these proven AR tools, we’ve experienced a shift from Operations to IT led sourcing to deploy at scale across an enterprise.

At scale, these enterprises report strong operational results such as:
• 30% Productivity gain from ‘just in time’ mentoring of field techs;
• 5-10% Increase in asset up-time;
• 50% Reduction in support call duration;

• 20% Acceleration in time to resolution.

In addition to these tangible results, our customers describe how AR also provides them with competitive differentiation, worker safety, premium service offers, and worker retention opportunities.

STEPHEN JEFFS-WATTS, PRODUCT MANAGER, SERVICE MANAGEMENT, IFS
The current technology inflection point, where technologies like AR, Artificial Intelligence and machine learning will become pervasive, makes it one of the most exciting times to be working with service companies.

Many use-cases that, only a couple of years ago, seemed aspirational at best, are becoming more real and accessible every day.
We are certainly seeing more interest in this area from the industry as cost and complexity reduce – making the technology more accessible to a wider range of organisations.

The Feasibility of AR in Service report produced by the Service Council in 2017 found that 33% of respondents were already using AR, with 43% evaluating it. From what we see in the market, this upwards trajectory has continued and momentum is continuing to build.

2019 figures shows revenue guidance increase equivalent to $711 million, representing 20% year-on-year growth.

IFS has announced its financial results for the second quarter and first half of 2019 that ended June 30, boasting a 20% YOY growth and a revenue guidance increase of 6.35 billion SEK (equivalent to US $711 million).

The upturn can in part be attributed to a number of significant deals in the first half of 2019 which have been chalked up as some of the biggest in the firm's history.

IFS Chief Executive Officer, Darren Roos suggested the firm are now looking beyond these results, commenting: “IFS is the only vendor of scale in our sector that stands on a principle of choice, providing an experience free from ultimatums. Now that we see what this IFS is truly capable of, expectations for the second half of the year remain high and I am pleased to have increased our guidance for the remainder of the year to deliver 2019 revenues of $711 million, or 6.35 billion SEK, an increase that represents a 21% increase year-on-year.”  

What role can AR play in helping field service companies overcome the ageing workforce crisis they may be facing?

JOHN BISHOP, PRESIDENT, LIBRESTREAM
As the ageing workforce continues to challenge field service operations, the need to transfer and harness the knowledge of these experts is undeniable. With statistics such as 10,000 workers retiring every day in the US market for example, it is clear why this trend is a major driver for AR within field service.

STEPHEN JEFFS-WATTS, PRODUCT MANAGER, SERVICE MANAGEMENT, IFS
The key use-case in this area is the remote expert whose expertise can be leveraged across multiple field technicians to rapidly increase competency in the field.

This is critical in supporting the next wave of service technicians which the industry needs as more experienced technicians leave the workforce.

This use-case also provides a potential way to extend the career of some technicians, re-deploying field-based workers as remote experts whose specific objective is to increase competence and transfer their extensive knowledge, gained through years of in-field experience, to the next generation of technicians.