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The Field Service Management software industry is fiercely competitive and one that in the last few years has been in almost constant flux as new technologies continue to push the boundaries of what is possible.

Yet, across the last decade there has been one company that has risen from a humble start-up to globally recognised industry leader. That company is ServiceMax, and the man that has led that incredible rise to prominence is CEO Dave Yarnold. Kris Oldland, FSN Editor-in-Chief, spoke exclusively with him as he stopped by the ServiceMax London HQ on whistle-stop tour of Europe...

The ServiceMax story really is an incredibly compelling one - while stories of start-ups that become market leaders are not completely unique, they are few and far between and in the competitive world of field service management systems, their rapid rise to prominence within the last decade is out their on it’s own in terms of success.

Indeed, there are some really great service management providers out there that have a built solid businesses serving their small corner of what is in reality a huge market. Companies that are happy to feed off the crumbs (and make a very profitable living in doing so) that fall down from the big table where the traditionally established players such as ClickSoftware or Astea fight for elbow room with software heavyweights such as Microsoft and Oracle.

But this was never going to be the path that Dave Yarnold, CEO and co-founder of ServiceMax was going to choose.

Even back in the inception days in what Yarnold affectionately refers back to as the ‘beige palace’, a nondescript office tucked away in Silicon Valley, there was a distinct vision - and perhaps a key reason for their success was that, that vision wasn’t just to be another software provider trying to serve the field service sector but instead to form a company that intrinsically understood what good service was and then build tools to help engender that within their clients.

“We looked at what everybody was doing around service and we thought everyone was missing the point in two respects,” Yarnold begins “One was that everybody was focussed on consumer call centres and basically reducing the amount of touch that companies were going to have with their customers, so all the technology was geared towards efficiency and reducing interaction.”

 

“We also felt that all the technology was geared to taking cost out and what we stumbled on early on was an interesting trend that anybody who was building products were experiencing much faster growth in the services side of the business than the product side.”

“The global economy has slowed down - especially since the last great recession, so that means you’re not selling as much product but there is certainly enough opportunities to get value out of the infrastructure, customer base and install base that you have. So we focussed on helping companies to grow their service business as opposed to squeeze their technicians for more productivity - which is still where most of the technology in our space is focussed.” He adds.

It is a valid point that Yarnold makes, as the economy crashed on a global scale, suddenly service became fore and centre as very simply there were no more margins left to cut. Competing on price in many industries was just no longer an option.

However, with the economy on (slightly) more stable footing these days, the shift to service centric businesses is less about a necessary differentiator and more about building more profitable and sustainable, longer term relationships. A case in point being Sony’s Professional Service’s division, who have developed a servitized business model, using ServiceMax as their FSM system. But was this shift to services something that Yarnold had always envisaged?

“A great analogue to answer that question is to look at the software industry.” He replies. “I remember back in the year 2000 when Salesforce emerged and the idea of Cloud computing and Software as a Service as a business model was nowhere to be seen. The reason why it became the primary mode of delivering software was because it was what customers wanted. They wanted a balanced relationship , a long relationship, a relationship where they felt like they weren’t entering into an agreement knowing the supplier was getting all of the profit up front on day one.

Think about the imbalance in that type of relationship and of course outcome based services makes a ton of sense to customers. It’s far more balanced, it’s what customers want. The fact that the software industry has gone through this complete disruption, and all the leaders in the sector have now embraced this model - that’s not lost on manufacturing companies. Most heads of manufacturing businesses today will be looking at what software businesses have become, they look at the multiples that recurring revenue streams produce and they want that to.”

 

“You look at the long-term, recession proof benefits of that business model and the lock in that that brings, it’s a really attractive proposition.”

Of course mention of Salesforce, brings us to the elephant in the room.

While Yarnold and his co-founders vision was certainly a driving force for the success of ServiceMax, it is undeniable that they also rode the slipstream of Salesforce’s own phenomenal growth. Now with Salesforce entering the market themselves with Field Service Lightning, does this represent a significant threat to ServiceMax’s continued growth?

“It’s not like it was a surprise to us, it took them a while but they realised that this [field service] is a pretty big market,” Yarnold begins bullishly.

“For us, it’s interesting being the only guys in the market that believe in the business model of servitization and where this is all going. I see even in the direction of their [Salesforce’s] product that it’s the old cost reduction approach. It’s a scheduling centric app that is leveraging technology that ClickSoftware built on their platform - which is all around schedule optimisation.”

“Yes, it’s part of our suite also, but our product is built around assets and contracts and relationships and the business processes that drive a service business. It’s not just geared towards squeezing an extra few percentage out of the engineers. That’s part of the overall RoI of running a service business, but it’s only part of it. Basically, I think it’s interesting what they [Salesforce] are doing, but it is also old school in my opinion, it’s still cost based, which is kind of boring to people who run service businesses.”

 

One for is for certain though, if an original vision and harnessing the growing momentum of Salesforce were the initial keys to success, the ‘special sauce’ that has allowed ServiceMax to truly flourish has been there intelligent acquisition of talent in key roles that truly understand the industry. Yet, it’s clear that the passion for service stems from the very top.

“At the core of it, if you go back to the three of us when we started, we just care about this. We think it’s vital. From a standpoint of what we as consumers expect from a service relationship. When we really start to dig into it, it’s not just software, it’s an important part of business, an important part of the relationship that we all expect and take for granted, and there’s this army of people making it all happen.”

“So the follow on from that is if we are going to try and enable all this, then we’ve got to try and find people who’ve experienced it - people like Dave Hart (a former Service Director and customer now working in a global customer transformation role with ServiceMax) who live eat and breath this stuff and have built there career around it.”

Having spent an hour in Yarnold’s company the one thing that is clear is that ServiceMax isn’t just a software company. They are a company which already deeply understands field service, yet is continuously learning more about the sector each day and that I would venture is the true key to their success.

 

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Kris Oldland talks exclusively to Pål M. Rødseth, CEO Evatic as they announce the acquisition of Tesseract Service Management...

Evatic AS, a leading software vendor within Service Management, have acquired Cranbox Ltd in the UK, the owner of the Tesseract service  management software product trading under the name Tesseract.

Together Evatic and Tesseract will complement each other’s product portfolio and strengthen the product offering within the service management field in the market. Tesseract has its main office in High Wycombe just outside London and an office in Reston, Virginia in the US.

“We believe that the two organisations will complement each other both when it comes to products, industries and geographies”

“We are extremely happy to add Tesseract to our product family” says Pål M. Rødseth, CEO of Evatic. “We have known Colin and his team for years and we believe that the two organisations will complement each other both when it comes  to products, industries and geographies. The Tesseract solution with a cloud based platform will make a great addition to the Evatic software suit.”

 

“I believe that Tesseract are in the best hands going forward”, says Colin Brown, founder and CEO of Tesseract.

“With more than 150 customers in a wide range of industries, there is very little overlap with Evatic both when it comes to customer industries and geographies, and I am confident that the product and the customers will continue to thrive under the Evatic ownership”.

Evatic is a leading European service management software company with the head office in Trondheim, Norway and offices in Sweden, Germany, France, Poland and Singapore.

With a global reach and more than 300 customers in 30+ countries Evatic offers a broad product suit for companies that need to make their services profitable. Evatic is a private company owned by the founders and Viking Venture.

Speaking exclusively to Field Service News on the day of the announcement Rødseth commented “We have known Colin for a good number of years and we were actually having the same discussion about four years ago - before I joined Evatic. But somehow those discussions didn’t end in a conclusion, so we picked up the ball again about six or seven months ago and had a long and fruitful discussion that ended up in Evatic acquiring Tesseract - and we are really delighted with that.”

From an outside perspective there seems to be a lot of synergy between the two companies with each being able to fill gaps in the others markets and solutions. Something that Rødseth was keen to highlight.

“There really is a complimentary side to this, we view the UK as a really interesting market,” he began.

Currently in Evatic we are focussing our business around the copier/print industry - that’s where we have our main customers and we have a system that offers a really specialist contract management tool, which is great for advanced or complicated contracts that a lot of the copy/print guys do. So we have a great system for them.”

“However, we are not as good in the generalist service management solutions, for example repair centres and stock management solutions - that is where Tesseract fits into the picture.”

In terms of how the company focus will be split, it does indeed seem that the two different products, Tesseract and Evatic will live alongside each other as complimentary but distinctly separate entities.

 

“We now see this as one company with two different products, one being the Evatic product and one being the Tesseract product.” He added.

“I think we will continue to build the Evatic solution to tailor to industries that require really, really complex contract management solutions - and the key vertical for us there is the copy/print industry.”

Rødseth explained “However, we do have some customers outside of this sector and we are already actively looking at if we can move them over to the Tesseract solution.”

“A lot of the smaller customers that we have would benefit from running a Cloud solution with Tesseract so we hope to have some customer synergies from that. However, the primary reason for the acquisition was geographical expansion into the UK and the US.”

“Where we have our customers today is mainly in the Nordics and we also have offices in Norway, Sweden, Germany, France and Singapore but for whatever reason we have never had a strong presence in the UK. We now hope to build the Evatic brand in the UK now that we have a presence there via Tesseract and similarly we hope to be able to bring Tesseract to the European regions where Evatic is already strong.”

“So hopefully quite soon our sales guys will open their jackets and there’s not only an Evatic or Tesseract logo there but there is both.”

And it seems it will be business as normal for both companies in the short to medium term as Rødseth alluded to there being no loss of the newly acquired Tesseract band.

“The Tesseract brand has been over 30 years in the market it is a very strong brand so we will continue to keep that for the Service Centre and build on that and we will keep the Evatic brand for the document management vertical” he said.

What is clear is that there is a great deal of respect between the two parties, especially from Evatic towards not only the heritage of the Tesseract brand but also towards industry veteran Brown who will be stepping down from his role as MD but will remain working with Evatic in a consultancy role.

“Of course it is not going to be easy to filling the shoes of an industry veteran like Colin, but we will do our best to keep up innovating with Tesseract as we’ve done with Evatic as well.”

“We have 20 + people here that all have experience with the product and there is deep knowledge here within the organisation - we are hopeful towards a very positive future for both Tesseract and Evatic following this change.”

 

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When software giant Microsoft announced a raft of highly service orientated features in the latest roll out of Microsoft Dynamics it was clear they were aiming to help their customers, help their customers. But how does that translate into Field service, the dedicated FSM solution acquired by Microsoft last year? Kris Oldland spoke to Carsten Groth to find out more...

Often when a major player in the software world acquires a smaller, niche business one of two things happen.

Either the smaller company gets swallowed up never to be heard of again, or they continue with their brand but as priorities and focusses change they slowly lose a grip on what it is that made them a success in the first place.

Either way there are usually a few fairly easily found voices of discontent somewhere.

But when Microsoft acquired FieldOne (now rebranded to Field Service) in the summer of last year the move went particularly smoothly and it seems to have continued in that vein ever since.

Carsten Groth, A Technology Solution Professional within Microsoft explained that much of the seamless transition could be put down to the way in which Microsoft work with partner developers and ISVs, which is driven by a technology platform that fosters collaboration and integration across the network.

“Basically it is because under the hood of Microsoft Dynamics CRM we have something called the XRM framework which allows partners as well as ISVs to build on top of it,” he explains.

“Think of it like a Lego brick system, so Dynamics CRM is that Lego brick system, then you decide if you build a police station or a fire station.”

“The FieldOne solution came from a global ISV standpoint and what they did was build that ISV solution based on the XRM framework so they reused certain functionalities and entities coming from Dynamic’s CRM because they saw that inside field service there was a definite niche for certain types of data,”he adds.

“They [the FieldOne team] already knew about field service, what are the needs, what are the pain points in it and then they built on top of that XRM framework a field service solution.” “So when FieldOne was acquired by Microsoft there were no pain points as it was a hundred per cent solution fitting inside that XRM story.”

“Basically the only adjustment was the transition from having FieldOne as accompany to having Microsoft as a bigger company.”

So how is the product evolving from FieldOne to Field Service with such heavyweight backing?

“We think of field service as a broad area,” begins Groth, “we do have small specialisations like the medical industry or automotive, but I think perhaps 69% to 75% of challenges are maybe equal.”

“But processes are ever changing and what we as a concept are trying to bring out ‘is here is a change management ability inside your organisation’. Should you buy new software every-time you make changes to your processes? Of course not – and it would be even better if you could make adjustments on your own.”

“For example, feedback from one of your field service technicians saying ‘every day I’m starting my business day it is a lot of effort for me to give you a status feedback - can we simplify it? Is there a way to do that?’ This is exactly what we are able to do inside Field Service. We come up with systems with an easy, simple UI experience that allow companies to form a better connection between mobility devices and all those interactions with the back office.”

“We are trying to change the way field service companies engage both internally and with their customers, by introducing what we call Connected Field Service, which you can now do in the Cloud, with a concept that is a horizontal solution which will still totally align to your vertical business. We then have vertical instruments such as healthcare for instance, to provide a nice smooth kick-off within that system.”

Given Microsoft’s position as a top tier Cloud  services provider, and Groth’s reference to Field Service’s own Cloud functionality, this seems like a perfect time to address the ever-present elephant in the room. Namely Cloud security.

“One of the biggest benefits that Microsoft has is that we can do both the Cloud experience as well as the on-premise experience,” replies Groth.

“So if there is any reason that we cannot go with you to those Cloud services, we can still fall back to the on-premise models.”

[quote float="left"]"We do have customers struggling with firewalls, policies, or they might even have more specific laws inside certain countries, so what we are trying to do is find spots where we can introduce Cloud services and then make their lives easier..."[/quote]“We do have customers struggling with firewalls, policies, or they might even have more specific laws inside certain countries, so what we are trying to do is find spots where we can introduce Cloud services and then make their lives easier.”

“Sometimes the worries are simply because they read news stories about the unsafe Cloud and different types of compliance issues inside the Cloud. But that is changing, it’s changing a lot.”

So does Groth see a growing momentum, in terms of companies wanting to move their field service offerings to the Cloud?

“We do have customers struggling with firewalls, policies, or they might even have more specific laws inside certain countries, so what we are trying to do is find spots where we can introduce Cloud services and then make their lives easier.”

“Definitely, people are struggling with making their work easier and the Cloud and Cloud Services can definitely do that.”

“But it’s new technology and new methodology that we have to learn. It’s like if your not well trained in Outlook, you may well end up having an inbox with 2000 or more unread emails – should it be like that? Definitely not!”

“Why is it like that? It’s because you’ve not been trained in the Outlook experience. And it’s pretty much the same with the Cloud – you must be trained to use Cloud Services and what they are.”

This leads us to the question of whether the selection of a field service management software solution should fall under the remit of IT, Operations or both.

“It’s actually even more complicated because we also have the management conversation as well, bringing in processes and organisational structure elements as well” comments Groth.

“So we have the management coming in and saying this is the way we set out our internal processes are you able to actually adjust the software, or are we able to adjust the software, to continue to allow us to do these processes in this way?”

When Microsoft rolled out the latest feature set of Dynamics in the 2016 release their was a lot of focus on knowledge sharing, to empower contact centre agents by putting the right information they need in front of them as quickly and effortlessly as possible.

With knowledge sharing being a critical tool for field service companies facing a potential crisis, with the prospect of an ageing workforce set to leave on mass in the not too distant future, it would be interesting to see if this level of functionality could now be ingrained into the Field Service product suite as well.

Fortunately, it seems this is very much all part of the plan at Microsoft.

As Groth outlines “Imagine you’re a field technician, trained on a specific device, scheduled to perform maintenance on a customer site. You open up the log board and maintenance files and figure out it’s not revision A that you have been trained on but revision B that is required.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice to have the capabilities of accessing a knowledge base on the fly to see what are the differences between revision A and revision B? Maybe there are not that many changes in the revision so the field service technician could still provide the maintenance to that customer on site once he sees the difference between A and B?”

“We enabled this by offering, inside Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016, capabilities for these knowledge banks. We even go a little bit further where we are enabling the field service technicians as well as others to comment whether that specific article was useful or not.”

So it seems again the strength of the wider Microsoft platform, is adding weight to the feature set of Field Service.

Of course, other field service solutions, as Groth (who previously worked for German based scheduling and optimisation solution providers FLS) will attest, are easily able to plug into the XRM framework too, or even add further functionality to Field Service, adding ‘one more Lego block to the tower’ as Groth describes it.

But there is also a tangible shift towards field service solutions being part of a wider ecosystem with the likes of Oracle and Salesforce following in the footsteps of ERP provider IFS who made a concerted effort to embed field service within their platform with the purchase of Metric and 360 Scheduling a few years ago.

There are of course arguments both for and against the case for integrated solutions versus stand-alone, and that is consideration each individual company must take.

However, with the acquisition and integration of Field One into their platform Microsoft are now a very, very solid option once more for field service.

 

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ClickSoftware have for a long time been seen as a key leader amongst field service solution providers. But the sector has gone through rapid evolution within the last few years with technology moving forward whilst the market becomes ever more competitive.

Meanwhile, ClickSoftware have been through an evolution of their own, with new ownership and a new CEO Tom Heiser, at the helm.

And he is determined to see the optimisation specialists stay at the forefront of the industry. Kris Oldland reports...

If you ask any seasoned field service professional to name check three field service software providers you can almost guarantee that ClickSoftware will be one of those they mention.

For many years ClickSoftware has been viewed as the gold standard in terms of field service optimisation. However, the market is going through rapid change and is now more fiercely competitive than ever before. In such an environment, relying on past reputations is a dangerous game to play - even when your reputation is one as strong as that which ClickSoftware can boast.

However, across the last year, ClickSoftware have gone through rapid changes of their own. After long running and widespread rumours of SAP acquiring the company proved to ultimately be unfounded, the company was purchased by Californian based private equity firm Fransicso Partners.

This was followed by the appointment of Tom Heiser, formerly of EMC as a new CEO, and whilst many of the Israeli talent that pushed ClickSoftware to the forefront of the sector remain on board, Heiser’s arrival heralds a new era for ClickSoftware, with both their approach to technology and culture having a delicate shift of focus to help them hold on to their position as an industry leader.

When we meet for the first time Heiser himself comes across initially as very much something of a people person, a firm handshake is balanced by a warm ‘Hollywood’ smile and he carries that air of informality and confidence that seems to be becoming commonplace amongst senior executives working for US tech firms these days.

When we meet we are also joined by Mike Karlskind, a man with a career spanning some twenty years plus with ClickSoftware.

Given the recent restructure of ClickSoftware, one could be forgiven for thinking this was the old guard introducing the new. However, as conversation unravels across the next hour or so, it seems more that Heiser understands and values the talent and history embedded within the company, and intends to utilise it.

 

His aim it seems, is not so much a complete re-imagining and reinvention of ClickSoftware, more gentle refinement, to ensure that the company remains ahead both in terms of technology and of course market-share.

Part of that process is ensuring that the company retain a focus on R&D but also that they make sure the market is aware of that focus.

“Before I flew over here I spent sat down with some senior industry analysts in Israel “ says Heiser, “and they were saying to me, the technology behind ClickSoftware is right at the top, but you guys really need to start banging the drum some more.”

Indeed, in their midsts ClickSoftware have some fantastic success stories, including European automobile glass replacement giant Belron, who operate in the UK as Autoglass.

“Mike and I have been speaking to a number of our clients’ COOs, Presidents etc recently and having strategic conversations around how to best leverage our solution and one of the best examples is Autoglass based over here [in the UK].”

 

“They have a net promoter customer satisfaction score which is like crazy high and they’re using  ClickSoftware as a tool to completely differentiate themselves from their competition, and I’m really proud to see that.”

But what about the shift in focus in terms of technology? What can we expect from ClickSoftware moving forwards?

Well it is clear from speaking with Heiser that he sees very much the future of both ClickSoftware and enterprise computing in general, as being based in the Cloud. However, he also understands that the shift from the still prevalent traditional on-premise model to a Cloud based world is not solely about the development of the technology.

“The thing is, shifting and changing the culture is actually harder than getting the technology right,” he begins.

“With the technology, you just get the right people, you invest in it, and you’re going to ultimately do it. The second area is the business model, which as a small public company, which is what we were, makes it super hard to go to the Cloud.”

 

“Now we have with a board of six people in Moshe [former CEO and founder] myself and four guys from Francisco Partners, who are all super smart guys that have done this before. So I feel with the six of us we can do it, but how do we do this with the new business models?”

“How do we go from an on-premise model with cash flow up front to a subscription model which is where we feel we need to be. Everybody wants to be on the other side, nobody wants to go through that process. But we’re set to get there.”

As he speaks, Heiser conveys a sense of the magnitude of the task not only faced by him and his team in terms of moving with the ever growing traction driving software solutions towards the Cloud, but also faced by the industry in general.

However, there is also an underlying confidence that he and his team are more than up to the challenge, that he cannot contain.

[quote float="right']I look at culture as the biggest challenge, but then there are some people here that are so energised by what we’re doing it’s like, ‘let’s go faster’

“Culture is the third element we need to mention. I look at culture as the biggest challenge, but then there are some people here that are so energised by what we’re doing it’s like, ‘let’s go faster’ I feel like I’m holding you back! - It’s really invigorating, but we need to rein it in every now and then and make sure we’re all on the same track.”

 

Having spent an hour with Heiser, it is clear his enthusiasm could genuinely be infectious, yet it is also clear that he is grounded enough to see the woods as well as the trees. He is also smart enough to not only keep key members of his team such as Karlskind close by, but also to admit when it is time to turn to them for support.

There may have been a number of changes for ClickSoftware in the last year or so, but with Heiser at the helm there is a good chance that their position as one of the leading brands in the market will remain firmly intact.

 

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In Part One of this Industry Leader interview, Dave Yarnold, CEO of ServiceMax, spoke about the company's rapid growth and the technology underpinning that rise to prominence. In Part Two, he talks to Marc Ambasna-Jones about the the changing world of field service and  the 4Ps he considers essential to success.

Service is not just considered a cost centre any longer, Yarnold points out. "Service people are getting involved in growth discussions. So you will have to know what is going with your customers and all these products will have to be calibrated and serviced and this means a field service tech is needed to go do it.

More of service will be on manufacturers now and they will want it because it’s an opportunity to evolve selling product into a service business model. Instead of just selling licenses and products up front, you now have powerful long term relationships because you offer upgrades and so on. There is more tie-in. It also gives manufacturers longer, recession-proof, financial models and you will see more field techs as a result.

The reality of course is that no one knows for sure how service will develop. All you can do is support the service teams with a set of tools that make them more central to the ongoing success of a business."

People, Products, Processes and Promise

FSN: While this sounds great, surely there are gaps in the ServiceMax arsenal?

DY: “All this stuff is deep. When you dive into the four Ps - People, Products, Processes and Promise - (ServiceMax’s key message), there’s just an incredible amount of depth that you can add into the platform. We built it with the 4 Ps in mind, so we can expand. I don’t see any huge gaps but the more we get into it, the more we peel back the onion and discover more about our customers’ needs, the more we can develop new features and pump out capabilities.”

FSN: Is Product IQ is an example of that?

DY: Yes, Product IQ enables companies to uncover, track and interact with their installed base and make it come alive.

How many companies have a handle on their installed base and their system of record for all their customer assets? Very few. It’s a big gap – all these companies growing through acquisitions with all these different sets of data in different systems. It’s not one of the first things that gets harmonised so we are hoping we can help.[quote float="left"]How many companies have a handle on their installed base and their system of record for all their customer assets? Very few.

 

Selling on Salesforce

FSN: Looking back, how important has Salesforce been to ServiceMax and what is the relationship now? They must look at you and think, ‘I wish we’d done that?’

“Well, yes, they have the platform on which to build but we have spent a lot of money and time to build ServiceMax. It’s taken years to understand the needs of a market, which is one of the reasons why it’s not been disrupted previously. From a system perspective it has all the complexities of an ERP system, multiple functions having to work together, multiple data sources, a lot of integration points.

Plus it has all the complexities of a CRM system in that you have to deliver a customer-facing app to enable customer-facing folks to do their jobs. So, it’s got to be simple, easy to use, easy to interact with and on top of that it has to be disconnected and mobile.

That of course means solving the problem of data synchronisation – you are talking about one of the most complex enterprise application domains ever – so it’s not trivial to go and build one of these.

“In terms of Salesforce, it has been an awesome enabling technology because we go into service organisations that are tasked with taking care of massive customer bases and they are not going to put that at risk. It’s reputation and a significant revenue stream, so organisations must be super conservative.

We are riding in on one of the best, well established cloud platforms and in many cases already tried and tested and used for sales and marketing, so building on the Salesforce platform has given us a tremendous head start. It’s allowed us to get over a lot of hurdles that we would have otherwise had to face in a very conservative target market.”[quote float="right"]Service people are in front of customers every day. They are generating revenue and performing this incredibly vital function. Why does nobody think about those guys?

 

FSN: ServiceMax growth has been impressive. Does it reflect the growing importance of the service industry?

“When we were a 40-50 person company I was having meetings with CIOs of $25bn Fortune 500 companies.
There were times when I was looking around thinking this is unbelievable. When we started the company we looked at the competitive landscape and realised nothing has really happened since the late 90s. No one had really cared about this market and that surprised me. Considering how much revenue comes out of service operations, it’s shocking.

I won’t share the logo but, when I spoke to the CIO and head of service one of the biggest companies in the world, I asked ‘why is it the case that when a new mobile device comes out everyone says, your sales people need these?’
Service people are in front of customers every day. They are generating revenue and performing this incredibly vital function. Why does nobody think about those guys? He shook his head and said, “I’m not sure.”

FSN: Do you see yourself as championing their cause? Is that what drives you and the business?

“It’s one of the drivers. Certainly for a long time service has been an afterthought. It goes back to the business model. If you generate a sale and from that sale, everything after cuts into that profit, so businesses want to minimise costs. Service has traditionally been viewed as a cost but times are changing fast and we believe we are a big part of that change.”

Yarnold talks a great game. He has enthusiasm and determination in abundance and that can only be applauded.
He has come a long way since his days with Clarify and there is a sense that he really does want to fly the flag for field service but it is the company’s land grab that is intriguing and also telling.

Offices in Europe and the Far East have been added to the roster. Although Salesforce may not be jockeying for position, the giants of Oracle and SAP are players yet to fully wake to the potential of the market. By the time they do ServiceMax could be an attractive acquisition target anyway. Certainly ServiceMax is not short on investors.

“There are a lot of service companies out there, millions of field technicians around the world who are trying to do their job but still don’t have great tools. They have clipboards, old Lotus Notes, applications that are simple and do not do a great job in terms of helping them do their job. There is a huge opportunity for us here. And as a place to invest technology dollars, that sentiment is starting to build.”

 

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Miss Part One of this interview? Find it here

 

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 In our continuing series on field service industry leaders, Dave Yarnold, CEO ServiceMax talks to Mark Ambasna Jones about the company's journey so far and the future of field service. 

When Dave Yarnold, ServiceMax CEO,  first ventured into Europe in search of business, ServiceMax were nothing more than a start up. Today it is one of the most successful field service management providers in the world. 

Still a relatively new kid on the block in software terms, ServiceMax is only eight years old. You get the feeling it’s still punching above its weight and Yarnold encapsulates the energy and excitement of the company that believes it is onto something.

ServiceMax has witnessed phenomenal growth (300% year on year with 150 new customers in 12 months, according to the company). Its inaugural ServiceMaxLive Europe customer event in Paris last year showed it has certainly arrived.

Yarnold was fresh back from Japan when we met. Was it easier to set-up in Japan than in Europe, I asked?

“Western Europe in particular and North America were clearly the top targets for us when we first started but then the next one in line terms of the number of manufacturers and the premium on service and quality was Japan. It’s always hard going into a new territory, a new country. No one wants to be the first to break a market but fortunately we have a number of companies that have done global roll outs and that has helped us and continues to do so.”

Did the company feel established in Europe now, I wondered, particularly in terms of business development and not just software sales?

 

“In our early days in Europe we were a small company with just a few use cases. To have people like Manish Gupta from Schneider Electric and John Cooper from Sony at ServiceMax Live was great and I think that says a lot about how far we have come. I have personally been working with Manish for five years, before we even had a team here, I was flying to Paris working on the details, looking at the installed base and helping find a solution. Schneider has over 20,000 field technicians.”

I asked why Yarnold had seemed particularly enamoured with Inspecta when its CCO Timo Okkonen spoke at the event.

“Timo has such a great story to tell. Inspecta is an interesting company and what it’s trying to do using ServiceMax is so interesting. It now has 1,600 users of  ServiceMax but it’s using the software for company transformation. The thing I love about his story is that it’s not just about service it’s a tool for collaboration, for employees to talk, to share important information. It’s really cool to see what different folks are doing with the platform.”

Service as a software

Transformation is a recurring theme. Yarnold’s suggestion that software as a service is becoming service as a software seems to fit with the Inspecta case study.  He believes ServiceMax has found itself at the heart of this changing landscape, partly by design but also partly as a result of being in the right place at the right time.

So does he see the company as a disruptor, ripping up the rule book?

“Ah yeah, certainly in making service a focal point in a technology world. No one else is doing that. Also catalysing this move towards a service model, we have a platform that allows companies to put these ideas and plans into place. We can take these grand ideas around IoT and make them usable, creating understandable user cases for IoT.”

 

What would that be, I asked?

“Quite simply it’s a machine talking to a machine, and when the machine says something is wrong, you take that data, dispatch a technician and fix the machine before the customer even knows there is a problem, eliminating unplanned downtime. We can help here and play a very disruptive role. We have the right tools to do that.” Banking on IoT makes sense and for service it’s an obvious fit.

ServiceMax had even rolled out Kevin Ashton, the guy credited for coining the term the Internet of Things to talk at the event and drive home the point. But isn’t everyone thinking along these lines?  And what makes ServiceMax so different?

“We’ve been looking at IoT for several years now, going back to when it was referred to as M2M – seemed like a good idea then but now it’s a better idea because it’s called IoT right? So we were always clear that we didn’t want to solve the data problem – all that data coming off of sensors, we didn’t want to get involved with sorting out the big data. We figured others would do that. We wanted to distil the data into something useful for service organisations. Our platform is geared to ultimately be agnostic, taking smart distilled data and to use in a service environment. This is where service becomes more strategic.”

ServiceMax has partnered with PTC to deliver the IoT bit, leaving it to focus on the service angle. Yarnold admits it’s still early days but you get the sense that this is a pivotal moment for the company and the industry as a whole.

Does Yarnold see a shifting role for field service technicians?

"There are two objectives here. One is to elevate the head of service so that service decisions are more strategic. We think that the Chief Service Officer  should be a C level position. The second objective is to determine the future role of the field service team.

 

We had 30 plus CSOs in a room and the liveliest discussion was on this – do your service people sell or serve and how best to generate revenues? Do you provide incentives to sell and potentially break the trust they have with customers?
Customers do trust their service techs. I’ve been in meeting s where customers have turned to the field service tech and asked, “should I buy this product?” There is a lot of power and trust here so you have to be careful.”

Are any companies doing this now?

“A lot of companies have armed the service teams with soft skills; they don’t call them sales skills. I think that some of the more forward thinking ServiceMax users have put some tools in place to coach field service people in what to look for, how to look for competitive equipment, for example, to identify a potential upsell opportunity and putting lead generation buttons in the system. It’s a delicate balance.”

Too delicate? Will it last?

“Service people are wary of pushing field teams towards selling too hard but they also seem excited by the fact they are relevant and generating revenue. Now service is not just considered a cost centre. Service people are getting involved in growth discussions.”

 

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Look out for part two of this Industry Leader article when Yarnold talks about the 4 Ps he considers essential to service success.

 

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Best practices for knowledge sharing in field service are understood but too few companies are allocating the necessary resources, warns John Ragsdale, vice president of technology and social research at the US's Technical Services Industry Association

Ragsdale was revealing the findings in the  TSIA's  annual research: The State of Knowledge Management: 2015.  “It is frustrating when  best practices for knowledge management, such as knowledge-centred support are understood, but companies refuse to allocate the necessary resources. I continue to hear companies struggling with problems we know how to solve, but there isn’t support from executives to provide the funding, staffing and cultural support required to be successful."

But there’s hope as some companies are building modern knowledge-sharing platforms to help techs access the best information available, from any device. Here, Ragsdale explains to Derek Korte, editor of Field Service Digital, how to build a next-gen knowledge base that techs will actually use.

Whose job is it to build a digital, “virtual” knowledge base?
Ragsdale: That may depend on who has the “intelligent search religion” in your company. Some very large companies are hiring a new position —knowledge czar — who reports to the CIO and ensures each department captures and shares knowledge amount peers.

But full-time resources are rare within support and field service companies, so multiple employees dedicate time to nurture the knowledge program. The starting point is to identify all of the content sources across your enterprise — and across the Web — with valuable content to include in the search indexing, then prioritise each source for inclusion.[quote float="left"]The starting point is to identify all of the content sources across your enterprise — and across the Web.

 

Isn’t that complex?
Ragsdale: A simple way to do this is to ask service techs which content sources they find valuable. Field service leaders will likely be surprised at the variety of sources employees use. Look at the search platform analytics to identify content and to find articles that need to be updated or removed. Then, use relevancy analysis to understand the most-used content. Some search products may be able to index everything at once, while others may require some custom filters or integrations to access every repository.

What companies have successfully put this plan into action?
Ragsdale: During my recent Technology Services World presentation, I highlighted three TSIA member companies that have embraced this concept with great results: Tricentis,which sells software testing tools; Broadsoft, a provider of unified communications and collaboration software and services; and Informatica, which delivers enterprise data integration and management software powering analytics for big data and cloud services.

Each company offers an elegant user interface with a single search field that retrieves content from multiple sources. They also offer filtering options to help employees find exactly what they need. It’s a much better option that scrolling through pages of results. In general, once the virtual knowledge base approach is implemented, users will respond. Employees will conduct more searches, access and download more documents, and spend more time overall on the site. That not only helps employees become more productive, but it also streamlines customer self-service, which has huge cost savings implications.

Is a smart knowledge management strategy the best lever at a manager’s disposal to fight against the looming talent gap?
Ragsdale: I think service managers have a few levers to pull (scheduling automation, mobile devices, remote access, among others), but knowledge is definitely a critical element. We continue to hear that large numbers of senior techs are retiring in the next two to three years, so now is the time to proactively begin capturing their hard-earned knowledge any way possible.

Nearly half of field service respondents said a 20-30 percent improvement would be possible, while more than a quarter pegged improvement at 30 percent or more. The results from our latest research, The State of Knowledge Management: 2015, make clear that employees and managers understand the potential value of knowledge.

Why isn’t that potential realised?
Ragsdale: In my report, I talk about the key obstacles to realising this potential, including insufficient resources, broken or outdated processes, and the lack of a sharing culture. I also talk about how to incorporate some key knowledge metrics into executive operational reviews, to at least introduce the subject and hopefully place it on the exec’s radar.

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This feature first appeared on the US Field Service Digital  website and is republished here with kind permission

In the first part of this exclusive interview with Marne Martin, CEO of ServicePower we looked at the development of their product suite with the recent launch of NEXUS FS^TM giving them a great platform to drive forward with Martin admitting that there will be a big focus on sales execution in the coming year as they see to capitalise on the considerable investment and resources they have put into developing and refining their product.

So in this the concluding part of this interview we ask just what what sector are they looking to conquer?

Well one of the advantages Martin sees ServicePower having over their competitors is that they are ideally placed to work across a broad spectrum of field service organisations.

“If you think of where we are now I like to describe us as in the middle of the triangle.” Martin begins.

“So you have ClickSoftware at the top and then ServiceMax and Service Bench in the two bottom corners. We sit in the inside of the triangle competing in all those areas. Each corner has slightly different focus but we are able to start looking at the markets and verticals of all three of those.”

 

“It gives us a very broad spectrum if we can compete directly where Click compete, where ServiceMax competes, where Service Bench competes that gives us a lot of business to go after and that is why sales execution is going to be very interesting as we go after that business.” Explains Martin.

It’s a bold strategy, that will see the UK based company, whose US offices are in Virginia taking on all comers, even ServiceMax who they also work with as a partner on occasion and whilst Martin clearly has respect for her Californian

based rivals, she also believes ServicePower are well placed to compete with them for business.

“I think ServiceMax validated that in the field service sector you really can go after the SMBs and the enterprise” she comments before adding “but the issue a little bit with ServiceMax of course is the cost, as a SaaS only solution it is quite an expensive solution and does has both the pros and the cons of being built right on the Salesforce ecosystem.”

“So we worked with NEXUS FS^TM to have a technology that is actually very scalable at a lower cost point. That will enable us to go in at a good and attractive price point and demonstrate real ROI to a lot of the SMB segment as well be able to scale that with functionality to the enterprise market as it’s very versatile and modular.”

However, as mentioned above, whilst the ServicePower team are gearing up for an eventful few years in the short term, Martin has an eye on the long term as well.

 

ServicePower now have a number of patents currently being filed having worked with KPP and Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK – an area Martin believes is a hotbed for emerging technology focussed talent.

“I’m a little bit of a technology nerd in the sense that I have always been involved with companies that have a lot of technology patents and interest in patents” confesses Martin “I firmly believe there is a ton of excellent technology developed there (in the UK) because there are still a lot of people studying maths and sciences in the UK and the quality of the technology is great there.”

And the area of this investment in technology is all focussed on developing the next-generation of algorithms to drive field service management scheduling forwards.

As Martin explained “Our simulated annealing algorithms is excellent, its very versatile and it works across a broad variety of verticals. But when you think about the future you want to get algorithms that use less meta-data and work faster and more efficiently.”

“You need to start thinking about not just optimising the work-flow and technicians but how do we start bringing in predictive analytics, more integration touch points and all these Big Data elements. To do that you really need to go to the next level.” She adds.

 

“That’s where we started doing the investment with some people in Manchester Metropolitan University looking at Quantum Annealing.”

“What’s interesting with the ServiceScheduling product, and this is one of the reasons it has always performed so well, is it never allows a bad schedule. When it optimises in the process it runs through various optimisation scenarios and then only writes that change if it is definitely better.”

“What quantum will do is do this in a more efficient way and faster. If simulated annealing takes an one-minute of optimisation to get to a result, we want something that will take 15 seconds to get to a result.”

“It also will enable us to migrate the product into the next generation.” Martin comments before explaining further

“Rather than a boring discussion on how do you keep re-writing the existing product, when we look forward five years we want to have a new back-end engine based on quantum annealing, so ideally we would have that in two to three years and that will fit in with a lot of the predictive capabilities that are in demand especially by the larger enterprises to day.”

Such vision and desire to innovate whilst also building the business in the current is impressive, however for Martin it really is a simple case of wanting to build a product that will become a significant player within the field service industries for many years to come.

It is also the biggest differentiator she can build between her companies and her competitors who she feels are not pushing the boundaries as much as they perhaps should be.

“Even if you look at SAP and Oracle and other big players, there really is very limited true technology innovation.” Martin states.

“ServiceMax doesn’t use any algorithms, the TOA algorithm is older, ClickSoftware uses so many algorithms that it makes its very complicated when training, or at least it makes it very labour intensive.”

 

“We want to keep driving superior results for the field service organisations but do it with technology that makes their life easy not complicated.”

Indeed whilst Martin is eloquent and laid back during our interview, she also clearly has plenty of belief in her product line which shines through our conversation.

“I’m very passionate about our product suite; I’ll put our products up against everybody, especially as we continue finishing off the road map of where we are going.” She states boldly.

“It’s coming together slowly but surely and steadily and us being able to do this across the next 12, 24, 36 months it’s going to be phenomenal.”

“We want to make sure that we are setting up a company that can continue growing in the immediate future but we also want to set up one that can keep growing for twenty years as an exciting field service player.”

Although they may not be ploughing that path alone, as Martin alluded to a soon to be announced partnership with Thingworx to add to their IoT partners, with the potential for other partnerships along the way.

“I am very much a partner person and one of the things that I have always cared about is not thinking business is an environment where I win by someone else losing. Instead we have to find ways with our partners and with our customers where we all win.” She states

“I think there is enough opportunities that even through a partner ecosystem, both should be generating profit whilst still delivering ROI to our customers.”

 

And this is at the core of Martin’s thinking when it comes to partnerships, delivering customer ROI must remain at the very hear of any conversation.

“My approach is I will partner with whomever is going to be a good partner as long as we can deliver real return on investment for our customers.” Adds Martin.

“Those partnerships that are all about window dressing and marketing, that the customers don’t get value from, well they may be nice but in the end its all about customer value.”

With a steady growth trajectory, a desire to innovate continuously and a firm grasp of the most important factor of all - delivering customer value, ServicePower under Martin’s guidance are certainly on the right track.

With an active sales approach being the adopted in 2016 there is a fair chance you’ll be speaking to someone in the ServicePower sales team at some point next year. Given the vision and direction of ServicePower , I’d say that when the call does come, you may well want to listen.

 

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Our Industry Leaders interviews series continues  with an exclusive interview by Field Service NEws Editor-in-Chief, Kris Oldland with ServicePower CEO Marne Martin. In Part 1  they talk about the thinking behind the development of  the new NEXUS FS^TM  software, and the importance of user-friendly interfaces and deep functionality...

It’s been a busy time for the team at ServicePower, a company heavily focused on the constant evolution of their own suite of products, with a clear strategy of exploring and harnessing the latest emerging technologies and implementing them within their own solutions aimed solely at the field service management sector.

The recent release of NEXUS FS^TM  an enterprise-class, cloud-based field service management solution designed to be suitable for any sized service business is the latest addition to the Service Power line. It incorporates comprehensive mobile dispatch functionality that sits well with the dynamic scheduling engine that ServicePower is perhaps best known for.

In Marne Martin,  ServicePower have a focused and savvy CEO, with a strong background in highly senior roles, with both a passion for innovation and an understanding of what it takes to drive business forward. It is clear that Martin has a clear vision of the road map ServicePower needs to be taking both in the short to medium term as well and way beyond.

“We’ve really taken what we have -  a twenty year deep and rich experience in field service - and have accelerated it into new product development and innovation of our existing applications, to find new ways of approaching the pain points and needs of the field service industry,” Martin begins as we discuss where exactly ServicePower are in their development right now.

“Especially, the last twelve to eighteen months we’ve really accelerated,” she continues.  “We acquired the source code for mobility in January 2013 and we’ve actually built out a leading mobility product, so we’ve been able to leapfrog our competition in many regards.”

Our conversation is taking place just after the announcement of NEXUS FS^TM  which has a definitively fresh and modern feel with a lot of focus on the user experience. This is something that will sit across the suite of ServicePower products in the not too distant future and is clearly a consideration for the development of their product line.

The importance of the User Interface

“With the existing applications we’re about half way through migrating the User Interfaces to the really great new look and feel of NEXUS FS^TM . We’re using angular JS and Bootstrap but we’re looking at new technologies all the time and it’s a really beautiful UI,” Martin comments.  “Even when you think about what Salesforce and some of the really big players are doing, I feel we are really at the cutting edge now.”

UI has become an integral element of what makes a successful business application in today’s modern environment and this is something Martin is acutely aware of.

“You can’t underestimate how radically Apple has changed everything. With what they put out with the iPhone and how it looks and feels. You certainly have leaders in software that really care about user experience and UI like Salesforce, but I think Apple with the penetration they had really took it to the next level”

So how does this Martin filter this approach into her own organisation?

“The key is taking what we’ve done with some of the new technology, and then making sure we have integrated a great user experience throughout the other applications, modernising the UI, but not losing all the functionality that we have built over the last twenty years. It’s a really exciting time”

“I think ten years ago there were certainly some competitors that were more proactive in terms of UI than ServicePower were but we’ve actually worked to leapfrog them and even go beyond Salesforce is at the moment using them and Apple as a benchmark”

“Even if you look back at TOA at the time, they had a great UI and ClickSoftware were doing some UI development maybe ten years ago but I think we’ve actually moved beyond that.”

“At this point we are benchmarking off ourselves in a way; we have a great team led by Steve Higgins who joined with us in late January, and then he has integrated with all the various product teams with the existing applications. The product guys were just at Dreamforce the other week and they walked away saying wow we are actually ahead in certain areas now. I’m really proud of that.”

However, Martin is also keenly aware that mission critical software, especially at enterprise level, cannot be all style and no substance.

“When we look at SMB solutions on the Internet you know they want to see a UI like that but when ultimately when it comes to the enterprise deals, when you get to a certain scale it is still all about the functionality,” she explains.

 

“The UI is nice but in the end what enterprise level field service organisations care about is things like our ability to do real-time optimisation, heavy duty management of third party contractors, the warranty claims,  analytics -  all these things.”

“A great UI is necessary now, but it’s not enough - you’ve got to have depth of functionality because that’s what gives a barrier to entry,” Martin states before adding, “With a hundred grand I might be able to spin up a little UI and an app, but I’m never going to be able to get a robust solution that will satisfy the leading enterprises as well as having the depth of functionality.”

And with a product development road map starting to come to fruition, the next stage for ServicePower is an aggressive growth period as they seek to capitalise on the attention a raft of awards and recognition their technology has gathered as they’ve continually sought to improve their own suite of solutions.

Martin admits the next phase of their strategy is to really focus on sales execution now. “I think we have a very good position now in terms of growing our brand awareness, recognition of the technology in the product suite that now we can really start scaling on sales execution. That’ll be the big push the year forward.”

Look out for the second part of this exclusive interview coming next week....

 

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