Adapting to rapidly changing technology is key to keeping up with – or even outrunning – competition. But sometimes internal staff don’t have the time or skills to manage complex IT infrastructure of office technology, making it necessary to seek out a supplement to your business’ IT department.  Matt Kingswood, Head of IT Specialists UK (ITS) explains more..

The good news is there are a number of vendors that are keen to take the pressure off your internal IT staff by offering field service, where the vendor handles key parts of your on-site IT needs, such as hardware repairs or desktop and server support.  Called managed service providers (MSPs), these vendors specialise in managing key pieces of their clients’ IT infrastructure. The challenge is knowing what to look for when working with an MSP to build an effective field service strategy. As head of nationwide managed service provider IT Specialists (ITS), I’ve found the following five tips to be the most helpful. 

1. Find a provider with high service levels.

In today’s on-demand culture, your customers expect immediate service and don’t tolerate downtime. If broken hardware would prevent you from providing an expected level of service, you need to

make sure the MSP underpinning your field service strategy is able to get you up and running sooner rather than later. The last thing you want is to have to wait for the field engineer to order spare parts before they can repair the equipment. One of the most common ways field service organisations demonstrate their success is by their first-time fix rate. For reference, Aberdeen Group says best-in-class field service organisations achieve a first-time fix rate of 88 per cent or more.

 

Of course, one of the best ways to gauge the MSP’s commitment to quality service is to ask to see the provider’s service level agreement (SLA). The SLA states that the vendor will provide services measured by predefined, quantifiable metrics. If the vendor can’t fulfil these obligations, the SLA gives you recourse.

2, Decide on the need for preventative services.

Even better than achieving a first-time fix is preventing a system malfunction in the first place. This is particularly important if your business has recovery time objectives to meet for business continuity and disaster recovery purposes. How will the MSP you’re considering prevent system errors?

At ITS, for example, we use N-able to manage printers for Howden’s Joinery, a UK-based manufacturer and supplier of kitchens and joinery products. Previously, Howden’s printers were not networked, consumables were unmonitored, supplies replenishment was not automated, and paper use was not cost-effective. Having implemented monitoring software (after networking the printers), we are now able to address any issues with the printers and manage the supply of consumables.

3. Select a partner that adapts to technology changes.

“Innovate or die” is a mantra technology companies love to repeat, but it applies to virtually any business. In the next 20 years, says futurist Ray Kurzweil, technology will change so drastically that it will pale in comparison to the previous 20 years.

If your business is going to keep up, you need to work with a forward-thinking MSP that keeps pace with technology and is able to meet your growing business’s needs. It’s also important that field engineers are familiar with all the products and services the MSP provides. Using this knowledge, the engineer can recommend other solutions that can solve your organisation’s unique business challenges.

 

For an example of how an MSP can identify and respond to a client’s needs, consider our client Baxter Freight. Baxter wanted us to not only provide new hardware and build a network but also brainstorm ways to future-proof their business. The plans had to benefit both ITS and Baxter, with products that were cost-effective for both businesses. Working together, the ITS team created a strategy for improving Baxter’s business resilience. The strategy included plans to adopt larger products, such as a managed cloud-based disaster recovery as a service platform, as the business became more established.

4. Make regulatory compliance a priority.

Regulatory compliance is a pressing concern across multiple industries. If your organisation is in a regulated industry, you need to work with an MSP that can help you adhere to the appropriate regulations – especially if engineers will be working on hardware containing confidential data.

Ask if the MSP has adopted a business continuity standard or undergone a third-party accreditation process to achieve a certification. Examples of these certifications include ISO 9001 (for quality management systems) and ISO 27001 (for information security management systems).

5. Ensure you don’t void your hardware warranties.

If an unqualified engineer works on your hardware, you risk voiding your hardware warranties. Keep your warranties intact by verifying your MSP’s field engineers are fully qualified to repair equipment from an array of manufacturers. Because technology is changing, it’s also a good idea to ask whether the MSP invests in ongoing training and additional certifications for its engineers.

There’s no doubt that the field service options on the market are overwhelming. However, if you follow these five tips when building your outsourced field management strategy, you can successfully develop an effective outsourced field service strategy. You’ll not only take the pressure off your internal staff but also gain the edge over your competitors.

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Bill Pollock, President and Principal Consulting Analyst with Strategies for GrowthSM explains why the key to successful service sales lies within understanding your customers and their needs...

Most people would seem to agree that a physical product, like a copier, printer, or scanner, is the easiest thing to sell. Companies can include photographs and hardware specs for these types of products in their brochures and catalogs; photographs can be included in the company’s web site descriptions; and demos can be conducted right at the customer’s site, etc.

But, in many cases, selling a product can actually be one of the most difficult things to do, especially if you have never sold anything to a particular prospect in the past, or if they are not familiar with your company’s lines of copiers, printers, or scanners, etc. This is why we are suggesting that a maintenance agreement, or professional services, for an existing business imaging system (or any other type of equipment) may actually be easier to sell than the original product itself.

Let me explain.

Chances are, some of the accounts for whom you provide copier service and support purchase dozens, if not hundreds, of individual pieces of equipment every year. For most of your smaller accounts, any single equipment purchase is, in a relative sense, a major consideration for them, both from an absolute and a financial perspective.

However, once they have made the decision to purchase a particular piece of equipment, they have already “bitten the bullet” with respect to its importance to their business operations, and they have accepted all of the financial considerations that will be tied to its acquisition and use.

 

You may have already heard the expression “total cost of ownership”, or TCO; what this means is that, in real life, there is usually more to the “total cost” of an individual piece of equipment than just the price that was paid for its acquisition.

In addition to the specific purchase price, there is also the cost of ongoing hardware and software maintenance support, replacement parts, help desk support, consumables (like paper, toner, etc.)and many, many others.

For some, the acquisition of new equipment also requires moves or changes to their physical facility to create space for a new business imaging system or copier machine, as well as additional training for the individuals who may be tasked with various internal maintenance and/or administrative responsibilities. The general rule of thumb with respect to TCO is that, over the course of several years, the “actual” cost of ownership for any particular piece of equipment may be up to twice the initial purchase price (or more).

As such, it is easy to imagine that any one of your accounts that has already planned to purchase a major piece of capital equipment such as a copier, scanner, or printer would have already examined the anticipated TCO for that unit, and would have budgeted accordingly. However, even the most sophisticated business planners may sometimes misjudge what the ultimate TCO will be for an individual piece of equipment (or not forecast it at all).

For example, they may have only anticipated requiring warranty service for one year or so following acquisition, without planning for any further post-warranty support that, if provided on a time and materials basis, would end up being quite expensive. Some may not have anticipated losing the staff that was originally trained on a particular piece of equipment, and may ultimately find themselves in a situation where new hires may need “fresh” training for an existing business imaging system. These are both classic cases where your existing accounts may already be clamouring for enhanced maintenance, or warranty agreements, or for various other types of professional services that your company may already offer (i.e., user training, train-the-trainers assistance, custom documentation, etc.).

 

Whether any of your existing accounts have either mis-planned - or didn’t plan at all - when they made their initial purchase decision, they have one thing in common: at some point, they will recognise that they need additional support over and above what they initially received when they purchased the equipment, and that this support will typically manifest itself in either the need for an enhanced maintenance agreement, specific professional services, or both.

If you have been observing and monitoring your accounts all along the way, you probably can already pick out which ones are “ripe” for selling maintenance agreements or professional services.

If you have also been keeping up-to-date with your company’s product and service support offerings, you are also ready to speak to those accounts with respect to what you believe will make their ultimate “total cost of ownership” less in the long run. Armed with this information, you will find yourself in the perfect position to make the sale of maintenance agreements and professional services as easy as possible - certainly easier than making a “cold” sales call to a new prospect.

All you really need is the understanding of what your customers require, matched against the products and services your company offers, and many of these prospective “sales” will simply be waiting there for you to “close” them.

 

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Best practices, customer insights and recommendations distilled from 20 years of experience are included in the new book written by Mike Karlskind, Stephen Smith, & Alec Berry of ClickSoftware 

 

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Want to get a signed copy? Field Service News readers can pre-order a signed copy now! Register for your copy  @ http://bit.ly/1W6u3Fb 

 

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Over the last 20 years, ClickSoftware’s customers have managed billions of successful service engagements, and have seen firsthand just how hard service delivery can be.

Our new book Service is Hard: Turning Common Field Service Challenges into Customer Engagement Opportunities, contains insights, best practices and recommendations from experts, thought leaders, and analysts, representing hundreds of person-years of experience.

This book addresses eight of the toughest challenges in achieving consistently exceptional service, from best practices for customer experience to managing spare part consumption in the field.

The book’s chapters collect insights from leading service companies, implementers, industry experts, and software developers and provide recommendations on steps to take to successfully address each challenge.

They are:

1. Holding the customer’s hand – why customers expect superior service
2. Aligning conflicting stakeholder interests
3. Metrics for measuring field service management
4. Integrating field service management and legacy systems
5. Managing in-day schedule disruptions
6. Integrating parts into field service management
7. Achieving mobile application adoption
8. Turning the Internet of Things vision into value

 

The Customer Service Imperative

Global economic growth over the past century, driven by the manufacturing and selling of products, has created two groups of unsung heroes whose work is mainly out in the field: technical professionals who install, maintain and repair products; and service-based people who provide services such as home-based health care.

Both groups have typically been viewed as operational cost centres to be contained and optimised. The more recent realisation is that these service heroes are the driving force for effective customer engagement, the brand ambassadors who present the employer’s face to the customer.

 

These companies—from the smallest service contractor to the largest global enterprise—see superior service as a primary competitive differentiator and growth engine.

This shift in thinking recognises important truths about business today.

Customers want (and can mainly get) what they want, when they want it.

You no longer compete only against others who do what you do, or sell what you sell. You compete with every experience that your customer has with every company that provides your customer any type of service.

A Business and Technology Perspective

The nature of assets, equipment, tools, and knowledge used by service-led businesses addressing different vertical markets is unique.

Regulators, competitors, geography, customers and the supply of qualified service professionals are some of the varied characters of these service operations’ external influences, while internal influences include available capital, corporate history, reporting structure and executive strategy. Regardless of type of business or industry, Excel spreadsheets and legacy tools historically used for field service management (FSM) have facilitated only tactical and reactive approaches to the field service challenge.

 

While these tools allowed individual managers or dispatchers supporting a small part of a business or service to make decisions that suited a granular part of the business, achieving total operational awareness was not possible, much less efficiency and effectiveness. Today’s FSM solutions need to support an approach that can consistently deliver against the defined strategy, meet regulatory requirements and deliver the highest levels of customer satisfaction while addressing the variability of each business and industry of operation.

Embracing the challenge is only step one.

Customer service excellence is a journey rather than a destination, a cliché that is as true as ever in the context of transforming service.

As noted in our book’s title, “Service is Hard” - it is challenging to implement business changes to improve service delivery and enhance the customer experience at the same time. Our advice: keep your eyes on the prize.

Building world class operations is not easy, otherwise every business would already have done it. Focusing on the top 8 challenges with the right team, the right mindset and the right technology solutions makes excellence in field service operation possible for any organisation.

 

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Want to know more? Field Service News readers can pre-order a signed copy of this book now! Register for your copy @ http://bit.ly/1W6u3Fb

 

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Nick Frank, Founding Partner at Si2, discusses the importance of understanding the metrics you are measuring to asses both internal performance and external perceptions of your service delivery in the eyes of your customers, and how the two are closely aligned...

Despite the bigger plan, do you find that the barrage of every day problems and deliverables makes it difficult to achieve your vision?

Most of us are driven by the everyday objectives of our boss, organisation and stakeholders.

The best performing leaders are not only able to deliver tactical results, they seem to be able to rise above the daily noise of business, see the bigger picture and figure out how those small wins can be turned from haphazard steps into a coordinated journey.

A key challenge is that ‘service’ is a business in its own right.

To be successful, all elements of a business have to be coordinated and managed from sales, to operations, finance to people as well as resources.

Put this in the context of a working business, where different levels of capability and maturity will exist in the organisation, and it can be pretty hard to figure out where your priorities lie. One way is for leaders to constantly see their challenges in relation to the whole business, so that they keep a perspective on how these elements fit together.

For example one could view a service business as requiring four essential elements to be successful:

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1. Value: Do you deeply understand the experience and value outcomes you deliver to the customer within the industry value chain? Have you clearly defined your business model and how you will organise your business to deliver success?
2. Go To Market: Are you effective at creating and selling products, services and solutions that can access this value?
3. Service Delivery: Can your operations consistently and profitably deliver services to the expectations of the customer?
4. Plan / Leadership: Is there an explicit plan that is financially backed and supported by the organisations leadership?

[/ordered_list]

Although a pretty straightforward way of thinking, most managers can get caught up in the everyday activities and lose sight of the bigger picture. To illustrate this, lets look at one of today’s hot topics, ‘How to maximise the potential of the Internet of Things(IoT)?’

Many companies are still confused as to what the IoT means for them, especially as most commentators are also struggling to see how companies can move themselves forward in a practical pragmatic manner.

We see lots of ideas and case studies focused on what the potential could be, but few suggestions on how to achieve the goal.

Perhaps companies should first focus on the ‘Value’ that the IoT capability can bring to their customer’s value chain as well as their own bottom line.

This goes deeper than customer needs. It is important to understand what makes customers successful in terms of growth and profit within the industry value chain. Then it is possible to identify the expertise or data that can be generated to make a difference to the customer’s profitability.

As companies explore value, they will start to want to try ideas out, perhaps a few very low key pilot projects with customers, to open their minds up to new opportunities and potentially business models.

For a product company, this could really start to challenge their ‘Go-To’ market thinking. The fact that piloting propositions for services is an important part of their design process runs contrary to many product development processes.

The pilot process will also impact the ‘Service Delivery’ operations that must consistently and profitably deliver the value proposition.

In particular with digital technologies, having the software and analytical expertise in house to develop robust solutions is often a challenge to be overcome.

Increasingly it is necessary to work with partners or even as part of an inter-dependent ecosystem.

 

Lastly and most importantly, it is critical to have a ‘Plan’ that is backed by the leadership with a commitment to resources.

Probably the biggest frustration from managers driving change is that great ideas do not receive the resources they need due to short-term budgetary reasons.

What we see is that even in this relatively high level simplistic example, there are a complex interacting set of factors that leaders, as drivers of change, have to manage in parallel.

This complexity is a fact of life and will not go away.

This is why a factor that makes top performing managers successful, is having a perspective of how the daily grind fits into the big picture.

An even simpler way of cutting through the confusion of developing a services business can be summed up by a Steve Jobs quote:

‘You’ve got to start with Customer Experience and work back towards the technology, not the other way around'

 

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Want to know more? Nick can be contacted on nick.frank@Si2partners.com. Si2 On-Demand is a unique advisory and support service that enables top performing leaders to solve problems and get things done, as and when required

See our website at www.si2partners.com or gain insights on our blog ServiceInIndustry.com

 

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Would you like to be part of a worldwide consortium of leading technology companies and industry associations committed to delivering exceptional service and support, and at the same time enhance and innovate your service and support capabilities and performance?

Join Noventum’s new project on defining a new chapter of the Service Capability & Performance (SCP) Standards - Service Parts Management. Through your participation in this standards development project, you will work with other leading companies to identify best in class practices, processes, performance benchmarks and capabilities necessary to operate a world class Service Parts Management operation. Once established, you will be able to obtain certification against the new standard by undergoing a rigorous audit of your service parts management function.

The SCP Standards are a suite of best practice standards for managing service operations.

They are developed by Service Strategies Corp together with their European partner, Noventum Service Management, and they are designed to improve the quality and effectiveness of technology service operations. Currently, over two hundred service organisations around the world use the SCP Standards to improve their business operations and deliver top-quality service and support.

Industry leading companies that have already adopted the internationally recognised SCP Standards include Schneider Electric, Advent Software, Fresenius-Kabi, Fuji Xerox, McKesson Corporation, Bobst Group, Teradata Corporation and many others.

With approximately 200 participating organisations and over 1500 certification audits performed worldwide, the SCP Standards represent the most widely adopted service quality program available today.

Click here to request more information about the project of defining the SCP Standards for Service Parts Management and learn how you can be part of it.

 

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Nick Frank, Founding Partner at Si2 Partners, discusses the importance of understanding the metrics you are measuring to asses both internal performance and external perceptions of your service delivery in the eyes of your customers, and how the two are closely aligned...

As a Field Service manager, imagine having one Key Performance Indicator in your business that could predict how your customers will experience your equipment. One simple measure that your teams could use as a focus for their primary mission; to ensure customers remain satisfied, loyal and profitable. The limitations of most measures of customer satisfaction and loyalty are that they look in the rear view mirror, in that they ask questions after the fact. Far better to create a leading indicator, but how?

To get a better feel for customer satisfaction, many managers spend time in the field talking to customers and their teams.

Some will create rafts of measures to monitor and improve their operations. Their logic being a great performing team is more likely to have loyal customers. However there is a temptation to measure everything, which can start to confuse teams.

To overcome this managers bring focus through introducing key performance indicator’s (KPI’s) and dashboards to make it easier to see the issues and take action. More sophisticated businesses look towards the Balanced Score Card methodology in which a more holistic view is taken of the operation. They not only examine financial and processes efficiency, but also consider organisational capacity and customers in relation to their strategic goals.

 

This balanced approach is pretty sensible, but a can be too ‘management speak’ for the people at the sharp end of the business.

The key challenge is to create measures that drive the right behaviours and culture, and not ones where people start to find ways of working around. So it is not quite as simple as many make out. From my own experiences of managing a european service operation, I always felt it would be extremely beneficial to develop a simple measure that was:

1. Easily understood by everyone.
2. That gave us a forward view that a particular piece of equipment was potentially going to lead to severe customer irritation and dissatisfaction.

Our business was injection molding systems, and we knew that something was going wrong in the customer when the spare parts spend of the machine increased, fault reporting was high and the same problem re-occurred over a 12 month period. We created a ratio of these 3 indicators and found that at a machine level, we could start to rank problem systems and identify those that were likely to turn into an irate customer.

Our thinking was that not only could this be used by the local teams to bring focus to a specific customer issue, it also gave an indications of how well teams were managing their installed base. Unfortunately for a number of reasons we were unable to operationalize this strategy and I often wondered how effective it would have been.

Recently I heard Mark Noble, Customer Support Director at Inca speak at a Service Community meeting in the UK. Inca design and manufacture digital printers and gave themselves the goal to improve the equipment productivity and hence satisfaction of their customer base. For their technology, it is the performance of the print head that controls up to 256 ink delivery nozzles, which is critical to uptime.

By combining 3 key performance parameters of the machine, alarms, nozzle deviations and productivity, Inca could rank their equipment in terms of the likelihood to cause customer dissatisfaction. They created simple dashboards that clearly identified the priority machines to be working on.

This allowed them to identify faults before they became critical therefore reducing costs, enabling their customer support centre to identify issues more effectively, maintaining better print quality and improving the planning of engineer visits around customers production runs.

 

A second example of this approach is at Peak-Service, part of the Qiagen corporation, a €1Bn technical services supplier for medical, analytical and industrial equipment. As part of their transformation journey, they created a customer experience indicator which aggregated measures of machine utilisation, revisits, call response time and call completion time.

They used this to help focus their teams and people on the drivers of customer experience as they moved through a transformation programme. This gave them one measure, which was easy to action and could be used to demonstrate results.

This thinking shows that by using operational data that already exists in most businesses, it is possible to create leading measures that drive action. The analytical techniques are in fact relatively simple, it is more having the right mind-set to try a different approach which is the challenge.

As products become connected through the IoT, so the opportunities to gain greater insight into customer experience and satisfaction will expand. Some might call this predictive and others a big data opportunity, but the name is not important. The critical insight we gain from these examples is that these companies are applying their deep know-how of their equipment and customers business, to identify problems before they happen.

Fore-armed is fore-warned!

If you would like to enter into a deeper discussion on this topic and others, why not join other industry professionals at the Service In Industry blog.

 

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Bill Pollock, President and Principal Consulting Analyst with Strategies for GrowthSM explains the importance of understanding your customers. How they differ from each other, how they are the same and most importantly how they use your products, in order to understand how best to serve them...

Every day you deal with a multitude of customers that may vary by type, size, installed base, usage, personality and everything else that ultimately differentiates one customer from another.

However, one thing always remains constant – their business systems and equipment are extremely important to their day-to-day operations.

Even if the equipment you support is not necessarily the most important piece of equipment in their facility, it will generally always be of significant importance to your primary customer contact, as it will typically be their direct responsibility to “manage” the internal availability and operation of the equipment to all of the users at their facility.

 

In many cases, your customer contact is the primary individual through whom all other users at the facility must obtain permission to use the equipment (i.e., via employee passwords, or ID/key cards, or the like).

They may also be integrally involved in the monitoring of machine usage on a daily, weekly, and other periodic basis – either from manual observation, or through the availability of remotely-generated reports.

They are typically the “gatekeepers” for access to the equipment, and it is generally their responsibility to manage, monitor and control its usage over time.

Accordingly, they are very important within their own organisations – and you are very important to them.

However, despite this common thread that runs through virtually all of the customers whose equipment you support, it is also important to remember that each customer account may also be different in terms of:

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• The various types, brands, models, and numbers of equipment they have installed at their respective facilities;
• The ages of the individual devices that are covered under warranty, service contracts, extended warranties, or on a time-and materials basis;
• The usage patterns of the equipment at each of their individual locations (i.e., continuous vs. intermittent use; single vs. multiple shifts; simple vs. complex applications; etc.);
• The volume or throughput they regularly execute; and
• Any other unique and/or specific differentiators that may distinguish one customer from another.

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However, at the end of the day, the one common denominator among all of the customers you support is the fact that they all depend on the continuous availability, operation, and usage of the business systems and equipment they have installed at their facility – and your primary customer contact is generally the one that shoulders most – if not all – of the internal responsibility to ensure that it is always running, and that there are no significant occurrences (or even worse, recurrences) of equipment downtime.

The single most effective means for gaining a full appreciation of your customers’ reliance on their business systems and equipment is to first understand how they use it.

For some, the equipment is an integral component of what they do on a day-to-day basis. Customers in the manufacturing, financial, medical, aerospace, legal, government (and many other) segments will tell you that their business systems and equipment are “essential” to their business operations – that when the system is down, their production is severely impacted, leading to serious financial, safety and personnel consequences.

Although some of the customers in these segments may have multiple and/or redundant machines in operation, when even one goes down, they feel it – and they want it back up and running as soon as possible.

For example, a retail establishment’s Point-of-Sale (POS) system may be the only means they have for providing their respective customers with a receipt, order confirmation, coupons or other important transaction-generated documents.

 

When their system is down, they may be unable to serve their own customers and, as a result, may find themselves temporarily “out of business” (i.e., think when the POS system goes down in a boutique clothing shop, or a McDonalds, etc.)

For these, the reliance on the equipment you support may be perceived as being even more critical (at least on a relative basis).

However, regardless of the specific industry segment or type of customer you support, there will always be a basic – and corresponding – level of reliance on the business systems and equipment they have installed at their facility.

As such, it will always be in your – and their – best interests to fully understand the extent to which they rely on the equipment you support so you will always be prepared to work from a stronger base of understanding with respect to exactly what your customers are dealing with, when they’re dealing with an equipment failure.

 

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As we enter the final few working days days of 2015 it's a good time to reflect on what we did well this year and of course what we can do better next year...

However whilst the world is certainly a better place financially than it was a few years ago we still live in an age of austerity. More and more companies have quite rightly moved their service departments to their own P&L as the shift from cost centre to profit centre becomes more common for a service division.

However, whether your field service operation is a necessary cost or a profitable division of your business, the ability to achieve more next year than you did this year with the same level of resource is one that can push your organisation to a better market share, greater profits and of courser internally will do your career as a field service management professional no harm at all either!

Fortunately many of the arguments for adopting certain technologies within field service industries are based on a robust return on investment (R.o.I) basis that will ultimately pay for itself and deliver ongoing savings in efficiency - often within a 12 month timeframe.

Driver behaviour apps offer reduced maintenance costs of your fleet vehicles for example, rugged devices are regularly bought because whilst they may be more expensive in the short term over the course of their lifetime the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is in fact much lower than that of alternative consumer devices.

 

Then of course there is optimised scheduling where not only will you see reduced fuel costs but also achieve higher job completion across a day so potentially not only reducing costs but simulataneously improving customer service also.

However, as with many things in life which sound a bit too good to be true, such claims of operational improvements and cost savings can sometimes be met with cynicism. Indeed, optimised scheduling may not deliver huge benefits for all companies, those with a relatively simple work process or a small team for example may not see the same benefits as those with larger workforces or a more complex set of jobs being allocated.

The simple truth is there is no simple answer as to the type of company that will get the best gains from optimised scheduling.

However, what is well documented is that most companies will see some performance gains and many of those who implement optimised scheduling will see highly significant gains such as PHS who saved £2M in a year in fuel savings alone. 

So in order to help our readers identify whether optimised scheduling would benefit their organisation, Field Service News has teamed up with specialist service management provider IFS to offer a free, no obligation Field Service Healthcheck that will identify exactly what efficiencies your business could make through adopting an optimised scheduler.

Simply click the link below to access the registration page.

Once there complete the brief form and instructions will be sent to you on how to undertake your free field service health-check and a scheduling expert from IFS will analyse your current workload and identify exactly how and where you could make improvements within three days of receiving your completed form.

So why sit in the dark about how much optimised scheduling could benefit your company. Find out for free right now...

 

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Click here to access the free field service healthcheck now... 

 

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Effectively managing the peaks and valleys in field service demand is one of the greatest challenges facing managers and executives across a broad array of market segments says Michael Blumberg, President & CEO of Blumberg Advisory Group, Inc.  Here, we publish the first part of extracts from his White Paper, "The Variable Workforce Model",  on how the momentum for freelance service technicians is building and potential solutions for managing them.

The Field Service Dilemma

Typically, temporary or contingent labour was utilised to support periods of peak demand: when there was a spike in new product sales or when brought about by seasonal issues. For example, a surge in installations or refreshes resulting from new product purchases required that the service organisation employ additional field service engineers (FSEs) to complete the installations in a timely manner.

However, relying on a temporary workforce to handle emergency maintenance was historically viewed as anathema to service executives within companies that sell equipment. This was because the FSEs were typically viewed as an extension of the sales team and thus vital to keeping the equipment operating and the customer happy. The conventional wisdom was that if equipment failed to operate properly then the customer would become irate, blame the manufacturer or reseller, and stop buying their products.

FSEs were considered to uniquely possess the specialised knowledge and skills required to resolve emergency issues. These skills took years to acquire and were difficult to replicate. How could emergency service be trusted to temporary employees with limited knowledge or experience with the product?  As a result, peaks in demand for emergency service were typically handled by asking FSEs to work overtime hours.

Setting the groundwork for the variable workforce

In the mid-1980s a number of service networks were created among like-minded service providers (e.g.  resellers, OEMs, etc.) to provide FSE coverage in geographic areas where their partners lacked specific skills sets: the beginning of the managed service provider concept.  Another driving force behind the decision to use contingent labour was the fact that the economics of hiring full-time personnel were not favourable. With margins declining, it was difficult for service providers to justify hiring additional personnel. Turning toward a network of vendors, subcontractors, and service companies to fill peaks in demand became a viable solution for many service providers.

 

In the 1990s outsourcing of non-core activities became popular with a number of prominent original equipment manufacturers such as Cisco, NetApp, IBM, and HP who outsourced non-strategic field service functions to Third Party Maintenance companies.

The recessions of 2001 and 2008 led to layoffs and hiring freezes across a wide array of industries. Service providers could not risk having situations where field service engineers were not available to support customers’ requests. Rather than keep non-essential workers on the payroll, companies realised they could reduce operating expenses and lower overhead costs by hiring field service engineers on a per call basis; as consultants or freelancers.

The freelance model has now become main stream within the field service industry. It gives service providers the ability to manage field service delivery through a variable workforce model. Maintaining a field service workforce on a full-time basis represents a short-term, fixed cost for service providers. With field service experiencing its own peaks and valleys in demand, a service provider can now convert a short-term fixed cost into a variable expense.

Options for building a variable workforce
[quote float="right"]Field service companies have a number of options available to them for obtaining variable field service labour.

Today, companies who support or maintain large sets of geographically dispersed technology and environments such as ATM machines in retail locations, Wi-Fi access points in coffee shops, or Internet of Things enabled technologies, have a number of options available to them for obtaining variable field service labour. These include: [ordered_list style="decimal"]

 

1. Implement Master Service Agreement (MSA) with one or more companies. This usually requires the OEM hand-off all on-site service requests to the Field Service Organisation who is responsible for managing their own workforce. While this is one of the simplest ways to obtain access to a contingent labour force, it is often the most expensive; particularly if the FSO is using its own workforce to perform the on-site request. This is because the FSO’s price per service call usually takes into account direct labour costs, plus parts, overhead, risk and profit.
   Furthermore, the FSO may not be able to provide their client with full visibility, accountability and control into the service delivery process. Basically, the client is alerted to when a call is dispatched and when it is completed, not to what occurs in between.
2. Manage subcontractors on their own. Another option is for a company to build its own variable workforce through a “Direct-To-Tech” approach. This requires that a company hire independent contractors either directly or through a staffing company, or they can reclassify existing full time FSEs as independents. Reclassification could create problems from a legal and financial perspective.[quote float="left"]The Direct-To-Tech model can be very successful but only if the nature of the work is truly independent contracting, not a second class worker.

    

   More importantly, setting up and managing a variable workforce labour pool requires an investment in mobile communication and collaboration technology, as well as new processes, procedures, and training for both management and dispatch staff.
   Companies who don’t approach this challenge strategically often end up with ad hoc systems and processes that are cumbersome and unscalable. All too often, companies end up blaming the subcontracted or freelance workforce when the real root cause of the issue is a lack of robust and scalable systems that lead to mismanagement.
3. Adopt a “Sharing Economy” model. Companies who are willing and able to manage teams of individual workers can turn to a sharing economy model. In this scenario, a company would use an Internet platform, provided by a 3rd party technology vendor, to recruit, on-board, train, dispatch, manage, and pay individual contractors. There are substantial cost savings to a company who is willing to pursue this course of action. Improvements in service quality and productivity are also possible .Freelance contractors are typically more engaged and motivated since their income is directly proportional to the quality of work performed and number of assignments they accept. More importantly, it avoids the risk of misclassifying workers. Freelancers who make themselves available through this type of labour model have made the decision to become a small business. In their work as independent contractors they have the ability to decide how many companies they contract with and which types of jobs they select, how and when they go about performing their work and how to best use their own tools and equipment.
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All things being equal, we believe the sharing economy model offers the optimal solution for obtaining access to a variable workforce. This is provided the company using this model is prepared to engage in the necessary leg work required to manage teams of independent contractors through a Freelance Management System (FMS) platform.

 

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Watch out for Part 2 of this White Paper. Download the version here

 

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