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IDC’s Aly Pinder explores one of the most crucial conundrums facing field service organisations today - how to ensure knowledge transfer is seamless across the organisation...

At some point we will finally reach the moment when all the seasoned field service engineers retire. I know, we have been foretelling this for years and in my case more than a decade. Despite this seemingly ever-present anxiety around replacing a retiring field workforce, many manufacturers and service organizations still list knowledge loss as a top challenge yet to be successfully addressed.

IDC Manufacturing Insights’ 2019 Product and Service Innovation Survey highlighted one of the top drivers for manufacturer’s service lifecycle management efforts is a need to capture and make accessible service knowledge and best practices. Building a culture of shared intelligence and accessibility of service knowledge, nearly half of organizations (42.7%) sampled in this study plan to leverage mobile devices for the purpose of increased collaboration amongst technicians.

These investments and prioritization demonstrate how much risk is inherent with having an entire workforce which often goes out on its own for an extended period of time, rarely coming back into a centralized location, and is one of the closest resources interacting directly with customers. The scary part is the value technicians to the customer experience is becoming more not less critical for manufacturers and service organizations.

In advance of losing field workers, I recommend you consider a few things:

• Identify your workforce that is planning to retire in the near future. Do you survey your technicians, at least annually, to ask them when they plan to retire? Assuming your technicians will retire at the retirement age of your respective country is quite risky. Reaching out to your technicians to identify when they plan to retire allows the organization to identify the level and urgency of the risk, plan for the loss, and even proactively strategize to either retain or hire more aggressively in advance of the loss.
• Get creative with technician retention. Organizations should establish a program that enables technicians to be able to work as a centralized expert. This is where gamification and incentives can be used to create a bench of technicians that are willing to stay with the company, accelerate the rate of capturing best practices, and recognize the value of the decades of experience which is held in the brains of the technician. Organizations would be wise to establish a role which based on identify qualifications or attainment of a certain expertise level can extend the viability of a seasoned technician staying on the team.
• Show your newer workforce a career path which is rewarding and valued. Many organizations struggle with creating tangible and exciting career paths for the workforce. Career paths are difficult to detail as there  are so many variables, both for the employee and the organization. This is an even bigger challenge with a largely remote workforce at many service organizations. However, the ability to communicate a future for the field technician is a critical step in addressing the workforce skills gap which should go hand in hand with trying to retain more seasoned technicians. This practice will help create a culture that values the service technician experience and show the workforce where they will fit in the broader strategy of the organization.

Talking about the retiring field force mustn’t be the end of the story that we tell each other, organizations must act now. Technology is one of the ways to capture and make accessible service knowledge, but manufacturers and service organizations need to identify their respective risk and build a strategy around addressing the loss of critical service knowledge.

Collaboration and shared purpose will enable organizations to get in front of this pending wave of retiring workers.

Laraine Geddes from Kirona, experts in dynamic resource scheduling, mobile and field service technology contributes an exclusive guide to successfully managing your organisation’s field based workforce...

1. Eradicate paper based systems

Expecting field workers to use paper based records is fraught with potential disaster and inefficiency. Paper based systems often required duplication of work, with data having to be re-entered into back office systems.

KIRONA’S TIPS:

• Deploy mobile applications in the field so that employees only have to record information once while in the field. This improves accuracy of data and frees up more time to carry out more jobs per day. Mobile communication can also reduce inefficient back office administration tasks, or be used to record the information needed for audits.
• Use a workflow driven series of checklists and fields on the mobile device to make sure individual workers follow a standard process. This will ensure continuity of good practice across a region.
• Mobile devices are far more secure than paper. If they are lost data can be locked down through encryption, or Mobile Device Management systems.

2. Dynamic scheduling

Efficiently appointing who visits which site is simplified using dynamic scheduling rather than manual scheduling. Staff availability vs skills vs customer/site availability is difficult enough to balance, add to that factors like service levels, job location, cancellations, even traffic on the road and efficient scheduling is almost impossible.

KIRONA’S TIPS:

• Deploy dynamic scheduling software that can, in real-time, optimise the utilisation of workers in the field - the right person goes to the right location at the right time. This way they spend more time on site and less time waiting for the next job or, for instance, driving unnecessarily long distances to the next job
• Scheduling software can be tuned to deploy personnel based upon pre-set ‘rules’. Work with your technology vendor to utilise this feature so that services can be optimised; like prioritising workers that have visited the site or customer before, or restricting distances to be travelled by employees, or scheduling according to customer needs.
• Consider that most mobile working visits will usually need a follow up visit or another appointment made with a different worker – your scheduling software can allocate new appointments and visits – there and then3. Integrate Systems

Busy staff are often overwhelmed with the amount of departments or agencies they have to collaborate with and the number of systems that they have to provide information to.

By failing to integrate these systems, workers spend many more hours than need be, rekeying data into multiple back-office systems – duplicating effort and creating the potential for mistakes and errors.

KIRONA’S TIPS:

• Choose a mobile solution that can integrate and ‘communicate’ with any system. If implemented correctly this will mean that staff will only need to enter information into their mobile devices once, whereby the data then populates all relevant back-office systems automatically.
• Integrating mobile applications with scheduling systems is particularly powerful. The mobile software can updates the schedule with the emerging day information; allowing visits to be automatically redistributed between staff where visits over-run, customers are unavailable, appointments are cancelled etc.

4. Visibility of front line services

By failing to have visibility of operations in the field, organisations fail to respond to challenges as they happen and lose the opportunity to resolve them at minimum cost and disruption to the customer.

KIRONA’S TIPS:

• Providing mobile devices enables you to track all the factors which impact field performance like: routing of employees, time spent onsite, incomplete jobs, missed appointments, lateness etc. This data can be used to analyse operations, fine tune the scheduling engine or to demonstrate ongoing improvements in efficiency.

5.Having customer information to hand

Arriving at the customer’s location without complete historical notes puts the service provider at a disadvantage when providing its services and is disappointing for customers who expect their service provider to have comprehensive knowledge of their relationship.

KIRONA’S TIPS:

• By using mobile technology the appropriate notes can be delivered to the workers’ mobile devices when they are needed. This means a professional can provide a service with the continuity the customer would expect. It also reduces the risk of them not being able to deliver that service on their first visit.
• Organisations can allow historical records to be sent to field workers for that customer, allowing them to see full details of historic work completed with any certificates, photos, contracts that are relevant. They can also see future planned work future work. This minimises the risk of duplicating work that has already been done or will be done during the course of a contract.

 

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Welcome to the final part of this series on the key trends to have an impact on field service organisations in 2016

 In previous features in this series we’ve touched on servitization in part one, IoT and AR in part two Smart Glasses and Rugged Computing in part three…, and optimised scheduling and connected vehicles in part four

Now as we bring this series to a close we look at to key tools field service managers should be implementing this year. Knowledge sharing platforms and easy reporting solutions…

Knowledge sharing projects will become high priority...

Another year gone and another year closer to an impending ageing workforce crisis for an awful lot of field service companies.

With the number of field service engineers in their mid forties and fifties there is a distinct danger that companies are facing a huge problem not just in the sheer numbers of field service engineers that will need replacing but also in the very real possibility that when these engineers leave, not only will their experience leave with them but also so will their knowledge.

And the incoming Generation Y or Millennials and the outgoing Baby Boomers have many distinct , contrasting characteristics that add further challenges to this.

 

The Baby Boomers for example are hoarders of knowledge, having worked long and hard to gain their experience they were it like a badge of honour and may not necessarily feel comfortable giving that experience away for free.

Millennials on the other hand are ‘Google Natives’, born into a world of social sharing and online collaboration, for them the first thing to do when faced with a challenge to which they don’t know the answer is not to research the topic in a book but to ask their social circle.

The challenge that many field service companies is getting their existing workforce to participate in knowledge sharing platforms, and ensuring that the platform they are building has a familiarity and strong UI that will engage the next generation of field service engineers as they come through.

Fortunately tools like AR can help overcome both challenges by recording remote engineers calls and strong them digitally.

However, regardless of how companies approach the implementation of developing a knowledge bank, it will be a high priority for the majority of field service organisations and those that don’t do so soon could be in a lot of hot water the longer they wait.

Easy reporting will become a key priority for field service companies

Finally we can’t have a top ten about business trends, without mentioning Big Data somewhere can we?

I often say that problem with Big Data for so many people is that it is very often a completely intangible concept.

However, the emergence of dashboards as a business tool in field service is essentially what Big Data is all about.

We can talk about the four V’s (veracity, volume, velocity and variety) or about things like Hadoop or MapR for ever but only a handful of folks really get it and in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter.

 

All most of us want to know about Big Data is can it help me see ‘insert relevant business challenge of the day here’. And that’s exactly what many FSM software providers are now promising.

And in today’s world where service is a key differentiator, and where service excellence sits alongside productivity as the two leading KPIs for many field service companies, then the old adage of ‘you can’t manage what you can measure’ holds as much weight as ever.

So as with scheduling, those companies looking at a new FSM solution in 2016 should ensure that the tool they opt for has all the reporting capabilities they could possibly need as instant reporting and easy access to data becomes standard.

 

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

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

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

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

Expanding on this further Gilday explained

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Linking the knowledge directly to support

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

Especially in rapidly growing markets like China and Brazil.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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