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Paul Whitelam, VP Product Marketing, ClickSoftware, outlines five key technologies he believes will soon be shaping our industry...

The field service industry continued its rapid transformation in 2016, with emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and predictive analytics increasingly changing how field service suppliers manage their workforce.

Service-centric businesses are constantly looking for new ways to meet customers’ growing demand for convenient and communicative customer service.

2017 is likely to bring continued change and innovation, with new technologies reshaping service operations and delivery. It’s a great time to examine what’s in store for the industry this year, and what field service leaders might want to have on their radar. Here are five technologies set to improve the field service industry in 2017:

1) Machine learning and AI

Machine learning (when algorithms evolve and improve over time) and artificial intelligence (AI) also drove new changes in 2016.

With the ability to better process, interpret, and learn from data, more services suppliers can be predictive instead of reactive, and will be able to automate the tasks that don’t need human input. Increasingly sophisticated forecasting driven by machine learning will drive efficiency increases and cost savings.

2) Reaping the rewards of new realities

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) were a major force last year. Even though virtual and augmented reality are predominantly used in games such as Pokémon Go and The Lab, both are being adopted more widely in a workplace context to enhance employee productivity and customer experiences.

In 2017, an increasing number of field service engineers will start to see VR and AR initiatives being introduced to support their training and day-to-day work.

 

As experienced engineers age out of the workforce and businesses try to maximise existing resources, VR and AR will increasingly play a role in enabling training, remote coaching, and viewing more information on each task via wearables.

3) Connected customers

As our recent research showed, customer expectations are growing rapidly around the world. The demand for fast, friendly and high quality service that also fits with customers’ busy and varying schedules is becoming the norm. And, aware of the mobile-led technologies that now exist to support a higher level of service delivery, field service customers are voicing demand for engineer location tracking and up-to-the-minute communications.

This communication between the customers and engineers will give customers the ability to share photos, preferences and job information with technicians before their visit, sharing important information that will expedite the service delivery. Customers will also be able to share their customer experience with their provider after the visit, offering feedback that can inform future service decisions.

Field service suppliers that do not start to think seriously about modernizing their operations in 2017 in this way will see an impact on their ability to compete.

4) A smarter field service

A device is labelled ‘smart’ if it can connect to other devices through the Internet of Things.

This year, smart will become smarter and advancements in machine learning will create new opportunities for the field service industry.

There will be improved inter-connectivity of smart devices, which will enable field service engineers to use their smart devices to contact more experienced engineers when they need guidance.

 

This will improve engineers’ knowledge and skills, and also deliver better customer experiences through increased ‘first-time-fix’ resolutions.

Smart technology will also accelerate preventative maintenance, alerting the customer and technician when there is an issue with a piece of equipment before the customer needs to make the call.

Usage patterns and failures are therefore easier to recognise and plan for, minimising interruptions and failures when a device is connected through smart technology.

5) Autonomous vehicles will drive innovation

Autonomous vehicles are already being trialled in some parts of the world, but 2017 will be the year when the business masses start to investigate their potential in the context of business gain.

This goes a step beyond assisted driving, which is already allowing field service engineers to predict traffic and avoid routes that will slow down their journey. Autonomous vehicles can also reduce the number of multiple visits from engineers by delivering the necessary tools to the engineer onsite, or providing the required tools to the customer if the machine can be self-fixed.

 

In short, self-driving cars or drones could present a field service industry game changer and as autonomous vehicle technology improves—and in-country legislation relating to their use is put in place —discussions around the benefits these offer to industry suppliers will gather pace amidst the race to innovate.

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Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief talks exclusively to Tom De Vroy, Senior Product Evangelist, Field Service Management with IFS at the Field Service Medical conference to find out why they were involved within the Field Service Medical sector, what unique challenges he saw for field service management in the healthcare and medical sector and what key points he took away from the three day conference held in San Diego a few weeks ago.

at Field Service Medical held at Rancho Bernardo Inn, San Diego.

We also take a sneak peak at what to expect at this year's Field Service USA event being held in Palm Springs this April

 

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Thinking of attending Field Service USA this year? Field Service News subscribers are entitled to a 25% discount! 

Field service professionals can subscribe now for free here and then simply email the subscriber benefits team on subscriber.benefits@fieldservicenews.com to get your discount code!

 

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Marne Martin, CEO, ServicePower discusses the growing shift towards outcome based services and explains why it is key for field service organisations...

Mobile workforce management software is today a “must have”, not a “nice to have”, part of a company’s technology stack.

Organisations managing mobile or remote workers must ensure a consistent customer experience and grow revenue while still maximising the productivity of staff. They must do this while also managing supply and fluctuating demand, meeting SLAs, controlling costs, and ensuring consistent well branded service delivery. Technology is the best tool to use to achieve those objectives.

So if we know what the company needs, what does the customer expect? We know that customers expect better ‘outcomes’ for the monies they spend on service delivery. It’s not about just appearing on time and repairing the product or equipment any more.

What are outcome based services?

Outcome-based services acknowledge customers in a much different way than traditional break fix services. Customers have wants and needs, surely, but they also now require that more tailored or improved outcomes be driven by those wants and needs. They are no longer looking at just the specific qualities of a product or service, but at the ways in which each can use your services to meet their own goals.

Business outcomes are increasingly becoming a real selling point that differentiate one company from another. Focusing your service offerings more on business outcomes edge out the competition, build customer loyalty and longevity, and improve the lifetime value of each and every customer.

Outcome based service is not a new concept. Why is it top of mind now?

The simple answer is technology. Technology facilitates offering outcome based services in a way manual processes never could. Technologies like that enable hybrid workforces, optimise by customer priority, IoT, M2M and even a truly mobile workforce management software facilitate outcome based services like no other technology which have emerged in the last few decades.

 

These can be used by field service organisations to deliver proactive services, based on data and information which improves the overall experience for the customer by helping them use the products better, or more efficiently.

Solid commercials can also be built around the offering, including providing customers more opportunity to purchase complementary things they might need.

Outcomes based service delivery takes that proactive service model, facilitated by IoT/M2M and MWFM and layers on additional services to make that customer more sticky, long term, and it can even increase revenue or profits along the way.

How does a mobile workforce organisation transition to an “outcomes-based” approach to field services delivery? 

Offering outcome based services is the next generation revenue model in field service. The field service industry has long been a hot bed of technology and process innovation, especially as metrics have shifted to a customer centric model. In that customer centric model, customer satisfaction, retention, and / or additional in-brand purchases are the outcome desired.

Even more attention is being focused on relating payment structures to outcomes and paying based on up-time, not just meeting a maintenance schedule or a break-fix SLA.

Use technology to make the shift in a cohesive way. Software can be used to identify a product which requires maintenance to prevent a future failure, or to indicate, often before the customer is aware, when a product like a boiler in a manufacturing facility is about to fail.

Field managers can plan labour capacity based on failure data and maintenance requirements more accurately to reduce time to repair, meeting or exceeding contracted response times.

 

Since service organisations can predict future failures, and schedule and optimise teams into future schedules, remote workers can be proactively, intelligently deployed for repairs, reducing schedule costs while preventing total operational standstills that impact the customer’s productivity. Imagine the benefit of preventing a total line shut down at a plant because your team was deployed prior to a total seizure of a machine.

Maintenance schedules can be also created which improve equipment ‘up time’ and even proactively address upgrade opportunities which offer additional revenue.

Mobile workers deployed with devices outfitted with real time, integrated mobile dispatching software can access information to address the immediate needs, but also to tap into additional information, such as training and product usage guides, ‘how to’ guides, that add additional benefits, providing that new outcome for each customer, resulting in not only reducing the field service organisation’s own costs, but ultimately in improved customer satisfaction, increased sales of future service and maintenance contracts, accessories or replacement products at end of life.

Outcome based services facilitated by technologies like mobile workforce management software which provide analytics, capacity planning, mobile dispatch, and optimised routing to plan staff, create maintenance plans, mobile on site process, facilitate on site collaboration and provide customers with information and data, help field based organisations reduce the complexity of operating products like industrial boilers or elevators, and help customers reduce the operational complexity of product operation, while maximise usage of the products.

Why are outcomes-based approach so important for field based organisations?

The most important benefits of offering outcomes based services are loyalty and improved future revenues, as well as reduced operating costs. Think ‘customer for life’.

Outcome based services reduce the complexity of operating products, while providing value added services for your customers which increase the usage of products. That proactive approach improves the customer experience which leads to increased customer revenue in the future.

Outcome based approaches teach the customer organisation, as well as the field service teams, to value ‘up-time’ rather than focusing on ‘downtime’ which requires repair, minimising the time an asset is down or a customer is inconvenienced.

 

The technology exists right now to move to a proactive, outcome based service model. The most successful companies are the early adopters that use their mobile workforce management solutions to deliver the technology which supports this evolution. Don’t delay -- make the leap sooner, rather than later, before your loyal customers become loyal to another organisation

 

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Kris Oldland, talks to the ever effervescent Carsten Groth, Technology Solutions Professional with Microsoft Field Service, to discuss what field service will look like in the not so distant future...

There are some people who have a such a clear passion for what they do it is palpably infectious, you can literally see the effect they have on those around them.

I find such people are usually a joy to talk to and so when I caught up with Carsten Groth, a Technology Solution Professional working with Microsoft, for the first time in a year or so (at the industry conference Field Service Europe) it was a true joy to see that there was an almost childlike excitement in his eyes.

He had just given a presentation discussing how and what Microsoft are terming connected field service and it is clear that it is a topic that seems to truly capture Groth’s natural passion for technology and harness it into something resembling true exhilaration.

It’s what makes him such a great ambassador for his company and such an engaging speaker. However, with Microsoft’s own field service focussed offering rapidly evolving and spreading it’s technological wings he seems to have cranked the passion all the way up to 11.

“There are complicated processes that need to be rethought, it’s like working in a big think tank around where is field service heading in 2020?” Is his first response when I ask him what developments are being focussed on in Microsoft’s Field Service team.

However, Groth is quite right to be excited by the new IoT enabled world we will all soon be occupying.

We often talk about revolutions in business but truly have we truly seen a revolution in field service on a par with what the near future promises to deliver.

If we are honest our industry that hasn’t massively changed even with the rise of mobile computing. Yet, what we are now seeing is true evolution, field service 2.0.

Mobile just made field service better, faster, and more efficient. But what we are seeing now is a maelstrom of technologies coming together which will deliver genuine, industry defining transformation change. And that is a concept that Groth is fully on-board with.

 

“The way we see it and the way Microsoft has started to think of field service, is in terms of what are the new field service enablers,” he begins.

“To begin there are the classical elements, things like the dispatching and scheduling elements and then there are also some influential parts coming from the mobile side of that, turning the mobile experience into more task oriented, check list oriented and more efficient UI oriented functionalities.”

“But now we have augmented and virtual reality in the mix as well as cloud services and of course IoT and these are all enablers to all these field services as well.”

And it is these enablers that are changing every part of both service providers and their customers thinking around field service. Although the introduction of new technologies, which lead to new processes, will also bring with them new challenges as well.

“When you think about an on-site service for a washing machine, in the past it may have taken 60 minutes and as a customer I would be billed for 60 minutes worth of work,” Groth explains.

“But now I see that the field service engineer has far more capabilities enabled by technology so am I still willing to be charged for 60 minutes when he is now doing the same job within 15 in minutes. Obviously I am not”

“If I then see a field service engineer struggling with that same task which I have just looked up online, a task I now know should take less than 15 minutes. Am I going to think it is fair for his company to be charging me an hours work when he should only be spending a quarter of an hour working?”

“By having all these influential cards we see that the customer has more influence and more impact than they have ever had in the past,” Groth adds.

It is a very valid point and it is absolutely vital that field service organisations understand that whilst technology will undoubtedly revolutionise our industry for the better in the coming years, it will also create new challenges that we must be prepared to face.

So how does this not so distant future look to Groth and his colleagues at Microsoft?

“We are driving forward from the term connected field service because we are talking about connected things that have an influence on field service. We are talking about IoT but not only that - also for example, sentiments coming from omni-channels.”

“For example, in my generation if I got stuck in an elevator then the first thing I would do would be to push the assistance button. But the generation following mine may be more inclined to pull out their phone and tell the world they are stuck in an elevator made by x,y or z. They’ll probably do this even before they think of pressing the emergency button to get rescued!”

“OK, so it may be a somewhat extreme example but it is also a perfect example of negative sentiment that we can also assimilate and utilise as a tool to improve service delivery,” Groth adds.

 

Of course this type of thinking wouldn’t be at all possible without Cloud computing and the all encompassing, pervasive connectivity that it can deliver. Is this why we suddenly see Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, stepping heavily into the field service sector, once more? Is the future a world of integrated platforms with FSM systems being an integral part of a much wider operational ecosystem?

“I do think we’ll see a movement where we will see the niche players who are offering very specialised FSM software, who are focussed on specific productivity sets, having to step out of their niche,” Groth replies.

“I think they will need to move towards a broader set of thinking as they will only be able to enable the use case scenario if they take into account more things. It’s a bit like building a house.”

“If you’re designing a house as an architect you need to be way more efficient than just designing the shell of the house. You need to have all these different parameters around how are we building the house.”

“I think this is where we see the movement inside field service. It’s not only about thinking ‘I want to enable my field service engineer to do things more efficiently and more productively’. We now must think ‘I want to enable all the kind of things for on-site service as well as customer satisfaction.’”

Of course, it is impossible to discuss the future of the field service sector without touching upon the topic of servitization.

 

Does Groth see the current focus on servitization as being driven by the technology available or is the opposite true - and it is in fact a desire to servitize our businesses that is leading us to seek out technology solutions more aggressively?

“The shift to servitization is one driver for technology but I think there are a lot of other influential parts enabled by technology. It is also based in part on a generational thing. The younger generation playing around with all sorts of technologies and asking why they can’t use these in their day to day business?”

“For instance, we’ve had customers requesting to use WhatsApp for their chat mechanism for field service. We asked why do you specifically want to use WhatsApp? We do offer a solution that offers the same capabilities but it was a generational step up with this product line. They knew how to use it and were familiar with it, they didn’t need training and could just get on with it.”

Regardless of the drivers which as Groth points out are in fact numerous, the fact is that technology is playing an ever increasing role in field service management, and now more than ever before it is beginning to shape how we work and importantly also how we interact with our customers.

“As I said, there is this enablement where we get more knowledge on the side of the customer,’ he reflects.

“We need to think how does connected field service, how do vendors like Microsoft, help our customers empower their own customers.”

“This is actually what Microsoft does with our entire partner ecosystem. It’s the way we are thinking. How do we empower users, not businesses to do more and be more productive.”

“We are thinking how do we step out of the box of FSM only and we need to think about IoT from the consumer side and business side. Changing the way companies think about doing business with field service operational software.”

 

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The Internet of Things has been positioned as the key technology that will lead to a true evolution of field service delivery. Bill Pollock, President of Strategies for GrowthSM looks at the challenges revealed in his latest benchmarking research and explains how IoT will help field service organisations meet these...

The Convergence of the IoT and Field Service Management (FSM)

The Internet of Things (IoT) is not a new concept.

To a growing number of services managers, the two are inseparable as they have been integrally linked together for as long as they have been heading their organisation’s services operations.

This is especially true in an environment where an influx of millennials are rapidly replacing baby boomers in virtually all aspects of the services sector; where the “marriage” between Field Service Management (FSM) and the IoT is generally seen as a “given” with respect to providing the organisation with the ability to satisfy the total needs, requirements and expectations of their respective customers.

As such, this “marriage” is somewhat analogous to the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, or taking “tried and true” favourites like chocolate and peanut butter, integrating the two together, and coming up with something “new” that the marketplace simply cannot live without. The big difference, however, is that the IoT is much more than just a tasty morsel - it is transforming the very core of field service management.

However, the IoT, in and of itself, cannot transform a poorly run Field Service Organisation (FSO) into an efficient operation; nor can it turn an unprofitable one into a cash cow.

 

However, it can clearly help to re-position an already well-run organisation for accelerated growth, heightened market position, improved effectiveness, improved customer satisfaction and increased profitability. For a growing number of FSOs, the greatest determinants of their commercial viability – and profitability – are the efficiency, functionality and effectiveness of their IoT-based Field Service Management (FSM) solution.

There’s FSM, and Then There’s the IoT-powered FSM

For most field service organisations (i.e., Gartner estimates roughly 75%) FSM solutions are no longer “new” to the services industry – they are a fact of life. What is still news, however, is how easy they now are to implement, as Cloud technology has essentially normalized the playing field so that FSOs of all types and sizes, and serving any geography, can benefit from its implementation.

The results of Strategies For GrowthSM‘s (SFGSM) 2016/17 Field Service Management Benchmark Survey report that the top opportunities, or benefits, cited by FSOs with respect to acquiring and integrating new technology (i.e., the IoT, among others) are:

• 44% Ability to run a more efficient field service operation by eliminating silos
• 39% Improve customer satisfaction
• 35% Ability to provide customers with an end-to-end engagement relationship
• 30% Establish a competitive advantage
• 26% Improve field technician utilisation and productivity
• 25% Reduce Total Cost of Operations (TCO)

The survey data also suggest that the opportunities and benefits significantly outweigh the challenges for a clear majority of FSOs – but, they still exist.

However, the IoT helps to make it all possible by allowing the new technology – in most cases – to easily integrate with existing FSM systems.

This is particularly true for FSOs whose FSM solutions are already built on a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, where the addition of field service management functionality may be as easy as simply adding a module to the existing system. This is an important factor – and it should be – for FSOs as they make their decision to acquire a specific FSM solution.

The SFGSM survey research also reveals that, for a near majority of FSOs, this decision is “impacted mostly” by:

• 50% Prefer a solution that interfaces with CRM
• 47% Prefer to work with a single provider of Field Service functionality
• 47% Prefer a solution that is intuitive and easy to train on
• 45% Integrating new technologies into existing FSM solution platform

Another 35% also prefer to invest in a solution that fosters collaboration between Sales and Service as a top decision-making factor.

What the Future Holds for the Convergence of the IoT and Field Service Management

The “future” of field service is already here!

Today’s IoT-powered FSM solutions already provide FSOs with the ability to monitor equipment remotely, and transmit data into the business’ database in real-time.

 

The greatest manifestations of this pervasive technology may be best described in the providing FSOs with the capabilities to:

1. Collect whatever data that are needed to improve a process, or improve a product, based on its measured, monitored and tracked usage
2. Switch to a lower-cost predictive model vs. the more traditional – and more expensive – preventative maintenance model
3. Determine which services to offer to customers that the organisation cannot offer today (e.g., a next-level guarantee against downtime, which can be turned into a premium service, etc.)
4. Sell, cross-sell and upsell new services, packaged as competitive differentiators
5. Create a more effective KPI program that can measure, monitor and track both the still-relevant traditional KPIs, as well as the “new” KPIs that are being created through the use of the IoT

The IoT technology is readily available; the market demand is here; and the positive impact on the bottom line of an FSM solution, powered by the IoT, is quite compelling. Just like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, the market does not really care how the chocolate and the peanut butter are engineered into the final product; they just know that it tastes good, and the two ingredients work exceptionally well together – just like the Internet of Things and Field Service Management.

 

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With a handy announcement from Gartner arriving just in time for their annual European conference Maximize Europe, ServiceMax were in buoyant mood across the two days in Amsterdam. Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News was on hand to get reaction from ServiceMax’s Dave Yarnold and Rick Gustafson...

With in excess of three hundred attendees sitting in the main hall of the Krasnopolsky Hotel in Amsterdam waiting for Dave Yarnold’s keynote speech, the mood in the ServiceMax camp was already on a high. However, what tipped the mood into one of true celebration was the announcement just a few days earlier that the San Francisco based company had just come out at the top of the pile of the much awaited Gartner Magic Quadrant Field Service report.

With a whole bunch of product innovations and customer success stories already lined up for the next two days - this recognition from Gartner really was perfectly timed - adding both a sense of gravitas and triumph to the sessions across the two days of Maximize Europe.

“We didn’t know when it [the Gartner announcement] was going to hit the street so everything you saw, the whole presentation around our model, our platform, our services, and our passion was already in place. But then we were able to insert the validation of all of that as well,” comments Dave Yarnold, CEO of ServiceMax as I caught up with him a little later in the day.

“It was a beautiful thing to be able to come here present our mission and our progress and then show that validation from a really credible third party - it was really fantastic. The timing was terrific,” he adds.

 

Indeed, one of the biggest factors in why the Gartner Magic Quadrants are so widely acknowledged as key industry benchmarks is that it they are not just based on a set defined group of criterion from one organisation, but also upon feedback from each company’s own clients. This is something that makes the recognition even more important for Yarnold.

“It’s the biggest thing,” he says. “Everybody meets with these analysts and everybody presents their products but where there the rubber meets the road is the references.”

“Being able to give the analysts lots and lots of accounts with lots of companies getting results from their operations and then of course the specific comments that were made in the report about large companies expanding their global roll outs and actually getting all kinds of great financial returns - those are the things that go beyond hype,” he adds.

However, one gets the feeling that even without the Gartner announcement, the conference would have been a very upbeat affair. Field Service News has now attended the last three Maximize Europe events in a row and there are considerably more people and more buzz about the place than there was at the inaugural event held in Paris just a few years ago.

“We changed our strategy a little bit this year,” explains Yarnold when I comment on the growth of the event. “Instead of having a major event in San Francisco and two minor events in Europe and APAC, we’ve acknowledged all three regions are important to our business so rather than force our European or Japanese customers to fly to San Francisco we decided to make a concerted effort to do a great event in all three places.”

“I think what’s important when you're trying to grab the hearts and the minds of a group is you have to create an environment for the tribe to get together so they can share experiences and learn from one another,” Yarnold continues.

“Even at lunch I was introducing companies who were saying ‘oh you're a ServiceMax user that’s great, we use your parts in our products so let's talk’ and that really helps. It helps them with their business and clearly it helps us because they’re bonding around the experience that they’ve had with us.”

There was one slide in particular that really caught my eye in the morning’s opening sessions and that was the sheer number of partners within the ServiceMax ecosystem, the market place for which was only launched just over a year ago. I was keen to understand just how important that partnership ecosystem was in the continuing success and vision of ServiceMax and what role it would play in the future of the company.

“Several years ago we came to a couple of realisations,” opens Yarnold when I discuss this with him.

“One was that at the time, we were doing all of our implementations because customer satisfaction was so important to us - we wanted to make sure that every single customer was thrilled with us. However, we reached a point where continuing to do that would mean it would be really hard to scale the company. Also we were broadening our geographic presence and we needed to have partners that operated locally, using the local language.”

 

“The other thing that we were seeing, especially as we got into larger situations, was there were areas of functionality that it just didn’t make sense for us to build when some of our partners had that functionality.”

“Still we were surprised how fired up those partners were to engage with us and the last time I checked about half of our customers have actually used one of our partner’s products in conjunction with ServiceMax. It’s been really great to see that since we set up that partner market place . We can’t do it all so we’ve been thrilled with the support we’ve got from the partner community.”

In terms of the technology itself there was one definite show-stealer Field Service Connect, ServiceMax’s IoT solution, which was showcased with a number of successful case studies. Given the relative infancy of the product which launched just over a year ago, were the team at ServiceMax surprised how quickly these customers were able to show real value in using the tool?

“I was not surprised by it all,” replies Rick Gustafson, CFO, ServiceMax. “We’ve brought to market a nice bite-sized way to go about this that can deliver real business value. We’ve had the early adopter program which we’ve run half a dozen customers through it and now we have a couple of customers that are going to expand it broaden it out across the business.”

“I think the key to this is we boil it [IoT] down to a very simple value proposition and we talk about it as a way of getting started with IoT. We make it very understandable, very pragmatic, with well-defined outcomes and when we sit down with the customers we intentionally say let's focus on two or three use cases lets not try to boil the ocean,” Yarnold adds.

“The key to these hype areas is you’ve got to get some value for your early customers otherwise everybody says it was just over-hyped and it dies. Here there is real business value,” he concludes.

It would seem that both an army of satisfied customers and now Gartner themselves would agree with him too.

 

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The IFS World Conference has been held in Barcelona and Boston in recent years, A telling testament to the Swedish software company’s growing importance on the global stage. However, in 2016 it was time for a successful homecoming as the conference headed to Gothenberg.

Field Service News was there to report on the key announcements made...

At the IFS World Conference in Boston held 18 months ago the headlines were all about milestones. The company had recently hit their millionth user, Applications 9 had just been launched and key partnerships with the likes of Microsoft and Accenture had seemingly launched them into the world of enterprise level organisations as a genuine challenger to the likes of SAP and Oracle.

So looking ahead to this year’s event in Gothenberg there was an anticipation of just how the Swedish ERP provider had moved onwards from those milestones - just how much progress had been made?

However, just ahead of the conference in September 2016 it was announced that private equity firm EQT had acquired 97% of the company which added a further dynamic to the backdrop of the conference’s three day agenda - what did the acquisition mean for IFS and would it change the roadmap for better or for worse?

These questions were addressed swiftly as Alistair Sorbie, CEO IFS took the stage for the opening keynote session - and the message was clear.

It was still business as usual and field service remained a significant priority for the company.

This sentiment was echoed when we spoke to Paul Massey, Managing Director, IFS Europe West, about the take over.

“They’re very hands off, have been positive in terms of their messaging and are supportive of the existing management” Massey commented.

In terms of the field service sector Massey also further outlined why it remains such a key priority on the IFS roadmap.

 

“It’s a growing market that we have got some really good stories in which we haven’t exploited as well as we might, so with EQT coming in and us taking an initial view of where we might target some early investment field service is an obvious candidate because we weren’t maximising the benefit we’ve got from having that product.” he added.

So with field service still very firmly on the agenda and the private equity acquisition looking - upon initial observations at least, to be something that is good for both IFS and their existing users the tone of the conference was able to gain sharper focus - and that tone was very much all about innovation in the technology. The headline stealing announcement being the introduction of IFS IoT Business Connector...

With IoT still very much the key technology on everyone’s buzz list it was an anticipated launch and potentially an essential one, as competitors in the FSM space at least, race to deliver similar tools.

What is interesting about the IFS solution is that as you may guess from the name it is a tool that connects other systems potentially shortening the time from ‘ideas to tangible benefits’ for IFS customers’ by providing an end-to-end architecture.

Designed to de-risk and accelerate IoT initiatives in areas such as predictive maintenance, service management, asset management, and manufacturing, it provides the ability to harness data gathered from products, assets and equipment to identify actionable observations that trigger either user-defined, automated or semi-automated workflows in the wider IFS software suite.

Another important benefit is that it also comes with plug-and-play connectivity to the Microsoft Azure IoT Suite (but also has open APIs to connect other IoT platforms also.)

Essentially the IFS IoT Business Connector is designed to bridge the gap between analysis of IoT data and using the output to then execute maintenance and service more efficiently.

A number of earlier adopter case studies were rolled out during the announcement including Songa Offshore, an international mid-water drilling contractor, ATS, a leading provider of factory maintenance and IT services based in the U.S., Anticimex, an international pest control company, and Hecla Mining, the North American precious metals mining company.

“We decided to join the early adopter program because we understood the enormous impact that IoT technology can have on our business,”

 

ATS Automation Director of IT Christopher Lebeau said. “By connecting our field service value chain we are able to automate our processes in a new way and use the insights to make smarter business decisions.”

IFS CTO Dan Matthews added, “By working with our customers and partners we are able to connect the dots so that investments in IoT not only yield piles of data and pretty charts, but result in real actions that are co-planned and executed in an optimal way together with everything else that is going on in a business. For our customers it means an easier way to get started with IoT, lower risks, and faster time to realised value.”

Another key technology announcement from the conference that will be of interest to IFS’ field service clients was the introduction of an new and enhanced version of IFS Mobile Workforce Management (MWM).

 

Major feature updates include automated resource planning, rostering and shift scheduling as well as extended deployment options in the cloud. Commenting on the updated solution IFS product director for service, asset, and project based solutions Jørgen Rogde commented,“The new version of our dynamic work scheduling solution represents a major product investment aimed at helping our clients streamline and automate their scheduling processes while maintaining and enhancing the flexibility of the solution through new options for cloud deployment and big data management.”

“It will help our customers use their resources more effectively, ultimately saving them time and money.”

Another important announcement made at the conference was the unveiling of a new version of IFS Enterprise Operational Intelligence (EOI).

Included within the new version - the first major release since the solution was acquired through the acquisition of VisionWaves in July 2015 were a number of new features such as capabilities for adding custom visualizations,

plug-and-play integration with IFS Applications, and of course integration with the IFS IoT Business Connector.

A number of elements of EOI are particularly suited including of course the scheduling element, which is powered by the IFS dynamic scheduling engine that users will be familiar with.

This tool used in combination with the ability to customise maps by incorporating drawings, illustrations or performance data onto a map could be a fantastic tool for prescriptive analytics and potentially modelling different schedule scenarios. In combination with the in-memory database technology demonstrated in Boston last year could theoretically mean that running simulations to find optimum workforce division could be done in minutes as opposed to weeks or even months that such a task using manual tools.

However, whilst the developments of both EOI and MWM and their integration to the wider suite of IFS Applications were not only impressive but also have easily identifiable use-cases within field service operations, it was the glimpse into the not too distant future from IFS Labs that was the show stopper from a field service perspective.

At the innovation centre sat proudly at the heart of the exhibition hall the IFS labs team demonstrated drone technology integrated with IFS Applications with a live real-time demo.

 

The drone proof-of-concept featured live integration between a drone and IFS Applications for automatic generation of work orders whilst inspecting assets on a scaled model demonstration.

Using computer image analysis, a drone flown by a member of the IFS labs team was able to recognise a break in a power line within the model and automatically generated an observation that is registered in IFS Applications via the IFS IoT Business Connector.

The end user can analyse and process the drone observations via the IFS Lobby interface, in which additional information such as geolocation and customer feedback is cross-referenced to help the user action appropriate maintenance and repair.

Although still not available, the proof-of-concept demonstration certainly opened up a number of eyes as to the power of technology to help in the delivery of field service within the not too distant future.

“At IFS Labs, we look beyond the current needs of businesses to anticipate what solutions will be required in the future,” IFS Labs director Bas de Vos said.

And perhaps this is the key takeaway from the three day conference, for those asking how the EQT acquisition will affect the IFS, the message was it’s business as usual - and on the evidence on show in Gothenberg this year, the usual is innovation.

 

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Marina Stedman, Director Global Field Marketing, ClickSoftware, takes a look at the technology shaping the next phase of field service evolution...

The term Internet of Things (IoT), describes the inter-networking of physical and smart devices, items such as vehicles and buildings and even technology services. Connected interoperability across many devices, applications and infrastructure presents an opportunity for the field service industry to raise the bar on two key areas of field service: operational costs and customer satisfaction.

Operational Costs:

Increased connectivity within a field service operation fosters a predictive model for addressing possible equipment, infrastructure, machine or device failures. The ability to diagnose and address issues and undertake preventive maintenance is essential to saving time (and money) on service calls, cutting the number of service requests made and improving the first-time-fix rate.

Take a building’s HVAC system for example. With today’s increasingly unpredictable weather, warm one day and freezing the next, IoT sensors can monitor temperatures and simultaneously use historical service and on-line data to predict maintenance requirements, failure rates and climate trends. This data can be used to manage service and operational tasks, for example making sure a system is serviced before parts fail and before the first freeze occurs, cutting the risk of breakdown and reducing the need for field service intervention.

Customer Satisfaction

Cost, asset management and effective communication are key components to achieving the ultimate goal: ensuring customer satisfaction.

Customers are unhappy when they have to wait a long time for a service visit, wait in all day for an engineer to arrive or make multiple calls to find out the status of their job. If multiple service visits are needed before a problem can be fixed because the information required for a first time fix is not available, both customer satisfaction and business profitability are impacted.

IoT sensors in devices or infrastructure, linked to real-time scheduling and dispatch solutions can detect potential service outages and make sure that issues are fixed before they become critical. For instance, IoT sensors in a food vendor’s freezers could identify a potential fault and notify the manufacturer that it’s due for a service before the freezer breaks and the food spoils. The manufacturer can quickly schedule an engineer to visit and rectify the issue before the freezer breaks down, saving time and money for everyone.

The IoT technology that we envisaged only five years ago bears no resemblance to what can be done today and it won’t be long before machines will automate decisions and launch actions without human intervention.

3D Printing

3D printers use Computer Aided Design plans to mould thin layers of melted plastic, aluminium, and powders together to form shapes. They started off making simple things like models and toys, but today’s devices have the sophistication and capability to form replacement parts. Why is it then, that few, if any field service organisations currently fulfil field-based replacement part requirements with 3D printed spares?

Maybe they don’t feel that the technology is safe and reliable enough at the moment? This won’t always be the case - here are two things to think about for the future:

Speeding Spare Parts Fulfilment

Apart from people costs, spare parts management is one of the biggest areas of cost for a field service organisation. Anticipating parts demand is challenging, even with the most sophisticated field service software solutions and the rarer the part, the less likely a field service engineer will have it available on-site when needed. 3D printing will make it as cheap to produce single items as it is to produce thousands and introduces the possibility of directly manufacturing finished components on site - reducing inventory costs and speeding up job completion.

Improving First-time Fix Rate

Not having their problem resolved in one visit is a constant source of irritation to field service customers and research has found a direct correlation between first-time fix rates and customer satisfaction. (*Aberdeen Group Fixing First Time Fix) .

As lack of parts to fix the problem is the main reason field technicians visit a customer site twice, field-based 3D printing facilities could enable parts to be printed on-demand, improving first-time fix rate and positively impacting customer satisfaction ratings.

Imagine the Future

IoT sensors in devices send messages to fulfilment and dispatch when a part is at risk of failing.

A 3D printer creates the part and the job is automatically scheduled. The service engineer fixes the problem before the customer is aware of the issue and without any disruption to business or personal life. Sounds like science fiction, it won’t be a few years from now.

Looking for more tips, trends, and future field service technology advice? Check out the Technology section of Field Service Matters.

 

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Field Service News Editor-in-Chief, Kris Oldland talks exclusively to Graeme Coyne of Siemens about why an attitude of exploring continuous improvement is ingrained in the company’s DNA...

The Aston Spring Servitization Conference is a unique event in that it brings together both industry practitioners and academics to discuss the evolving trends in servitization – a key shift in business thinking that puts field service at the heart of a businesses success.

The presentations come thick and fast, and as would be expected by a conference hosted by a leading industry focussed university, there is reasonably heavy bias towards the academics when it comes to speakers.

And whilst the rapid fire format (around 50 presentations in two days) can foster a great deal of discussion and cover a wide and varied number of research areas across the spectrum of servitization, there is always a danger of death by power point when trying to cover so much ground in such a short period.

Therefore, when Siemen’s Graeme Coyne took to the stage armed with a presentation that featured just three simple slides, it was not only a bold approach but a welcome one.

 

Coyne, has two key qualities that are essential in a senior field service exec.

He is both genuinely approachable and easy to talk to, whilst having a deep rooted desire to continuously look for improvement.

After his presentation I caught up with him to talk through some of the key points that he raised during his 30 minute key note, which was well received by both the academics and the practitioners in attendance.

One of the first things that I wanted to pick up with Coyne was how the culture of Siemens as an organisation mirrored his own attitude towards adopting an approach that is all about continuous improvement, and how that translates across both product development and service delivery.

“We do it [focus on continuous improvement] across the company in every process we do – so it could be service coordination, how we deal with spare parts, and how we manage our service engineers. But we always look at it from the point of view of how can we do it better?” Coyne replied

“We use ‘plan, do, check, act.’ or GEMBA. We have two meetings every week within our department to ask ‘how can we do the service coordination part better?’ Somebody comes up with an idea, it’s discussed in an open forum, and if we think it is worth investigating we ask them to go out and develop the idea further.”

“We’ve had this philosophy for many years. It’s all about what exactly is the problem - can you define it? What’s the root cause and what are the options?”

 

“The main thing is to launch it, monitor it and then evaluate it. You have to keep going round in this loop and it is embedded in our culture.”

One area of Coyne’s presentation that particularly caught my attention, was when he spoke out quite strongly against the productisation of services.

Given Coyne’s experience this was an area that I was interested to dig a little deeper into.

What was it that drove his thinking on this?

“We are centrally controlled and have products that are developed from our headquarters and this can lead a view on services that begins with the product and then looks at what services can we develop for them. You then end up with product people devising a lead service and saying sell that service,” Coyne begins.

“My view is different. I’m in a region, and dealing with end customers."

"Essentially we know what someone like Unilever, Coca-Cola or Ford Motor Company want and come at it from a the reverse point of view and it’s very difficult to slot a productised service into the customer’s needs. It may not fit; it may not be what they want.”

 

Pushing a bit further on this I was keen to see if Coyne felt that this was an issue felt more keenly by multi-nationals, who all too often are further removed from their customers than smaller, more localised competitors.

In fact whilst Coyne does admit there is a danger for larger organisations to become disengaged from their client base, he also believes that if multinationals approach cooperation between different regions correctly there can be huge benefits in terms of knowledge sharing.

“What I’ve seen is people from the regions bringing in new perspectives and ideas. For example, twenty years ago I was based in Germany and I brought in a perspective from the UK, other colleagues brought in opinions from other countries like Finland and Italy.

“More recently we have begun to have regular meetings using video conferencing for up to an hour at a time, where we do best practice sharing."

"Basically we pinch with pride!” He says with a wry grin.

“For example, we’ve just found out our team in Belgium have an approach for a particular customer type and product type and we realised they’ve been doing what we want to do now in the UK for the last 17 years.”

“They already know what works, how much it costs and what the benefits have been. So we can take best practice sharing and use it and implement it in our country to suit our customers needs.”

Given the setting of our conversation, I was also keen to understand just how far along the path Siemens is towards advanced services and servitization.

“In terms of the move from SLAs to performance based contracts we’ve done it from certain places, in the world,” he begins.

“Very often where the customer themselves doesn’t have the wherewithal to do it [manage the service chain] they may rely on us. They rely on our management skills to be able to deliver something where we can have KPIs based on the quality of product they’re producing, the volume of product and improving productivity.”

“For many years in Siemens now we’ve had an approach to customers that says we focus on four things. Firstly can we improve their turn over? If they can make more things they could possibly sell more! We don’t control their market in the service world but we can give them the ability to do that.”

“We also look at how we can reduce their cost base, their utilisation of people, spare parts management; there are many things you can look at in reducing costs.”

“The third part is asset availability and using new technology like real time condition monitoring services to predict when assets need to be serviced and maintained. In that way we reduce downtime and become proactive rather than reactive.”

“The final part is to do with sustainability. Let’s look at the water industry for example - a regulated business that has to guarantee the quality of the water that they give to their consumers, if we can do something like putting in instrumentation products and calibrate them so that they don’t get penalised by their regulator, it further adds strength to our role in supporting their business and gives us greater customer loyalty.”

 

Of course whilst the shift towards delivering advanced services is heavily reliant upon changing the culture both within your own organisation but also amongst your customers also, technology – particularly the IoT is playing a critical role in enabling companies to be able to deliver such solutions.

But how big a challenge is it for a company like Siemens, with well over 100,000 assets out in the field globally (and some of these assets are 30 even 40 years old) moving to IoT?

“It can be hard but a lot of the equipment that is thirty or forty years old tends to be power related. Its drives, motors and other individual items that were never networked in any way shape or form” explains Coyne.

“Industry 4.0 is allowing everything to communicate. We have a lifecycle information service we offer where we will take the installed base from the customer, analyse it, and point out where they might be at risk.”

“We get situations such as a ship turning up in port with a bow thruster that needs a service - it might be thirty years old and they still expect us to do it.

There is no way that, that is connected in the internet and in future we will be much better at supporting our products as they will be fitted with Industry 4.0 compatible connectivity”

“But that is the dilemma we have in terms of looking after legacy products, and then looking to the future and saying if you specify this in these systems we are going to be able to support you way, way better. Rather than an adhoc approach you can plan it and manage it better.”

 

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