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Switching from paper to digital mobile forms can  transform field service maintenance operations, says Mark Scott, Vice President Marketing, ProntoForms.

Mobile technologies have taken over our personal lives, enabling us to be more productive and efficient as we shop, consume and communicate daily. When it comes to operations and maintenance in field services, however, mobile technology has been slow to permeate our workforce. Operations and maintenance are critical to ensuring safety, compliance and productivity in field services. Yet, many  maintenance practices today are still relying on paper-based processes that are error-prone, vulnerable to audits, and overall, highly inefficient.

Manual maintenance procedures hinder productivity and add unnecessary steps to operation practices hurting your company’s bottom line. For many businesses, ineffective internal practices also don’t guarantee that safety compliances are being enforced.

Mobile forms technology offers an end-to-end solution for a company’s maintenance programme, by enabling users to accurately collect and store field data, then easily share it in real time with key stakeholders.

Mobile forms bring many benefits to any field services operation. Here are five examples of how a mobile solution can make your business operate more efficiently and ensure your customers take notice:[ordered_list style="decimal"]

1. Embed rich media in your reports
   Sometimes words alone cannot accurately capture a problem or issue in field work, but a picture can tell a thousand words. Mobile forms allow maintenance inspectors to sketch and annotate directly on photos from the job site to highlight specific concerns. In addition to taking pictures on site, images like equipment diagrams can also be pre-loaded onto a form for field workers to reference. Mobile form providers are also offering barcode scanning and audio functions within forms as well so users can include richer field data.
2. Informed decision-making and a logical workflow
   Data gathered in the field is meant to ensure that operational standards are reached and exceeded, but it’s important that the data is communicated in a timely manner and shared with the right people. Mobile forms can be configured to automatically send completed maintenance forms to specific supervisors and decision-makers within a company, based on the data entered. If an inspection pinpoints a safety concern, that form can be configured to automatically send a report to a safety compliance manager. What’s more, maintenance forms can also be scored by the severity of the issue, and if a major maintenance breach is revealed, key stakeholders can be alerted through SMS messages and social media.
3. Business intelligence with analytics
   Analytics can provide a wealth of information, as maintenance trends can be compared over time. This means that a company can leverage its previous response to a maintenance issue and also determine whether this issue had arisen in the past. With mobile forms, in-depth analytics reports can also be scheduled for regular delivery to key supervisors and decision makers. Since field service data can be logged as it happens through mobile devices, these decision makers can analyse performance and spot hidden business trends in real time to predict potential issues or mitigate risks.
4. Dispatching inspections
   Field service workers need to provide accurate and in-depth maintenance inspections, however, they are also pressed for time and need to move on to the next job. Across all departments, improving productivity and automating mundane and repetitive tasks is essential, but this is especially critical for your maintenance programme. By using mobile forms technology, maintenance jobs can be dispatched to specific field workers, which saves valuable time. This means that field workers can avoid unnecessary trips to the head office to receive their next assignment, which gives them more time to spend in the field and conduct detailed inspections.
5. Calendar invites for follow-ups
   Irrespective of the size or efficiency of your field workers, it’s imperative to prioritise tasks and optimize workflows. High-risk maintenance concerns need to be addressed immediately, while less critical issues can wait. However, these low-risk concerns still require a response. As soon as non-critical issues are discovered, field workers can use mobile forms technology to schedule a maintenance technician and send calendar invites while they’re on the go at other appointments

 Now more than ever, it’s critical to take maintenance procedures to the next level by adopting the right type of technology. Businesses utilising mobile technology will see increased productivity and reduced costs, while quality of service is improved and risks are mitigated. When it comes to operations and maintenance don’t let your company fall behind the rest of the industry.

 

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Aberdeen’s Aly Pinder asks are we smarter than we were in the past, or do we just have better access to data?

When was the last time you asked someone for directions, or used a phone book, or waited for the day’s forecast on the morning news?

Well, that last one is probably something you still do out of habit, but the others are things which have left our consciousness as we can just “Google it” from our smart phones. The emergence of technology and the IoT has flooded the service leader with more data than ever before. Machines talk to machines, technicians collaborate with each other via mobile devices while in the field, and customers interact with the service team in real-time owning their experience.

But with all this access to information and data comes a few challenges. How much is too much data? How can we turn this data into actionable insights? Who needs to know what and when?

These are all questions that the Best-in-Class service leader is tackling right now. As seen in Aberdeen Group’s recent State of Service Management in 2016: Empower the Data-Driven CSO (March 2016) research, one of the top goals for service leadership was improving the quality and relevance of data for the service team. This is a top 3 goal, only trailing the need to improve customer retention and drive service profitability.

Happy customers, profits, and then data quality in that order shows how the impact of data is rising on the agenda of the senior service leader today. But how do we get to a place where data is useful?

Is the answer to our data problem more technology?

Top performers recognise that ensuring the service team has actionable data is a journey and not something that can be solved with one-off investments. It takes a strategy, leadership, and resolve. Connecting the field team to insights helped these organisations resolve issues faster, deliver more value to the customer conversation, and make the field team better at their jobs!

 

All these are great, and the Best-in-Class have some lessons for the rest of us:

Empower the service team with the data they need to make decisions, more isn’t always better.

Top performers ensure the field team has customized data views which provide only the pertinent information for technician for the specific task they are working on. Having the data necessary to solve complex issues at the time of service is integral to ensuring resolution can occur on a first visit, technicians are efficient, and the customer can be back up and running with minimal downtime.

Give the field team the mobile tools to have access to insights.

The field workforce is rapidly changing. We have been fearing the aging workforce for some time now, and it is finally here. But the Best-in-Class ensure that as technicians leave the business, their knowledge does not. They are able to capture best practices and expertise, and store these insights in an accessible location which can be tapped into via mobility in the field.

Leverage machine, customer, and technician data to identify the future of service excellence.

The IoT means different things to different people and industries. But the value isn’t just in the fact that we more devices are connected. The value of the IoT is in connecting the service chain to resolution, value creation, and collaboration. Smart machines and products open up a whole new world of possibilities as savvy organisations can take this data and better understand how to optimise assets performance, build better machines, deliver more targeted services to customers, and ensure technicians know the answer to the problem before they even get on site in front of the machine.

The proliferation of data in this era of the empowered customer can be a challenge for many organisations. Too much data leads to delayed action or inaction altogether. Top performing organisations have invested in technology and their internal processes to ensure they can turn all of the valuable data being captured every minute into actionable insights which drive value.

Top performers were able to take improved data capabilities and turn that into outperformance in key metrics such as customer retention, SLA compliance, and worker productivity.

Don’t be left behind looking at a phone book or reading a map. Tap into real-time data to make the decisions which will lead you into the future of service excellence.

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As the worlds of academia and industry came together once more at the annual Aston Spring Servitization Conference the message was clear. Servitization has moved from concept to reality and now it is time to start moving the conversation beyond the theory and into real world applications...

The concept of servitization, whilst still fresh to many is not actually particularly new.

Indeed, many of the often cited examples of servitization such as Caterpillar, MAN UK and Xerox have been providing advanced services and outcome based solutions business models to their clients for many, many years.

Rolls Royce, the much celebrated poster boys of the servitization movement have been delivering ‘power-by-the-hour’, their own brand of servitization, ever since the late sixties when they were given an ultimatum by American Airlines to offer a new business model or lose their business.

From an academic standpoint, the first reference to Servitization as a concept is widely accredited to a paper published by Vandermerwe & Rada entitled “Servitization of Business: Adding Value by Adding Services” which appeared in the European Management Journal in 1988.

Yet here we are some 28 years later and still the terminology is foreign to many, outside specific circles of industry and academia.

 

But at the same time, we are seeing a growing number of examples of servitization by significant companies.

Last year in Field Service News, we reported how John Cooper at Sony Professional Services had moved their business towards what was essentially a servitized business model in their broadcast services division by equipping Tele-Madrid with an entire new TV suite on a cost per usage basis, an agreement that puts the full onus on Sony to ensure they delivered 100% uptime.

Yet at no point in our conversation did the word servitization come up.

Then there is Air France KNB.

When Field Service News interviewed him at last year’s Aston Spring Servitization Conference, Harman Lanser of AirFrance KNB admitted that he hadn’t come across the concept until he saw Prof. Tim Baines give a presentation at the Aftermarket Conference in Amsterdam, whereby he immediately identified with the concept as exactly the process he was trying to take the MRO unit of the world’s 2nd largest airline through.

So is there this disconnect between the theoretical world of academia and the world of industry, especially when the evidence would seem to point out that they are indeed both heading in a similar direction?

 

What hasn’t helped is that academics in the past have used a number of interchangeable phrases like ‘life-cycle through services’, ‘advanced services’, ‘outcome based solutions’ and ‘servitization’ when discussing the topic - which has weakened the focus somewhat. Add to this that the research community has tended to focus very much around isolated individual companies in many instances, and the type of benchmarking that makes industry sit up and listen more attentively has been somewhat lacking as a result.

This sentiment sat very much at the heart of the opening keynote presentation of this year’s conference given by Prof. Rogelio Oliva, of Mays Business School, Texas A&M University.

“We’ve basically got stuck in a research mode,”began Oliva

“We like to go out and work with companies, do a case study, write it up and then we’re very happy with it.”

“The problem with doing that is that it is very difficult to aggregate and come up with a theory  that is realisable across several industries or even across several companies.”

“What you end up with is a whole bunch of anecdotes. ‘Company A did this and Company B did that and it’s very difficult to make progress under theoretical developments.”

“I think we as academics, have fallen short of delivering a set of theories, a set of concepts and a set of principals that managers could actually use.”

 

“Of course they [the theories and concepts] are going to need to be modified to a particular  situation, but overall there ought to be some overarching principals to navigate this and we have failed to do that.”

A similar sentiment was also offered by Prof. Tim Baines, Aston Centre for Servitization, Aston University when he gave us his reflections at the end of what was a busy two days.

“I think what we have to accept that the lens that we are using to look at the different adoptions of services throughout the world is imperfect,” admitted Baines.

“It’s useful to reflect on services gaining traction, but as yet we haven’t got the techniques to say with certainty economy A is competing more on the basis of servitization whilst economy B is competing more on the basis of productization.”

However, that is not to say that the move to servitization is floundering, in fact the opposite is very much true. It is now in a stage of evolution where it is beginning to move from the fringe slowly towards the mainstream.

That said, there is still a long way to go towards more widespread understanding. Currently there is a very specific type of company that is suited to servitization, especially when it comes to doing so hand in hand with the academics.

“There are three types of companies,” explains Baines.

 

“Firstly there are those companies that are doing incredibly well selling products and they don’t want to talk about servitization at all. Then there are the companies that are struggling financially and they are prepared to look at servitization because they are prepared to look at anything that can help them get out of the mess that they‘re in and then there is the third set, which are companies that are competing but are getting some kind of feeling that the world that they operate in is changing.”

“It is the companies that are seeing new business models emerge, those who’ve still got stability but who know they’ve got to evolve the way in which they capture value, these are the businesses that we want to work with because if we can help those, we can learn an awful lot about this transformation process and we can position these companies to compete better in future years.”

However, Baines believes that there is definitely a synergy growing between academia and industry.

“This is the fifth time we’ve done this conference” he begins.

“The first year we did the conference we created an event where we had practitioners and we had academics and actually there was a huge gulf between them which was really quite hard to reconcile. We didn’t have a language to describe what was actually going on.”

“I think what has happened is that the academics have accelerated in that they now have a better understanding of industrial practice so they can talk more coherently with practitioners and conversely the practitioners are starting to understand the language of servitization.”

“Through conversations around base, intermediate and advanced services they are beginning to be able to converse with the academics. There are still differences and there always will be - we’ve got different sets of priorities when we are both doing our jobs, but there is a definite sense of it coming together.”

 

“We have now established the language of servitization the notion of these base, intermediary and advanced services is becoming well established, most of the presenters are using those terms and those languages now. We really don’t want any other papers coming along offering different frameworks for this topic because we have moved beyond it,” he continues.

So how can the academics move forward to support their counterparts in industry?

“I would say the first thing we need to do to move forward is to leverage what we have done,” Oliva explains.

“We have been out there writing case studies, interacting with firms, learning from them. Let’s step back and spend a bit more time with those cases, do the hard work of thinking about what it means as opposed to just documenting the story.”

“Then we need to look at the phenomena that we are researching. “We are looking at servitization, which is a transformation that is hard for companies and there is a very long tradition in research that says if you as an academic get involved in the change journey, you can learn from this process - this is something that we call ‘actual research’.”

“So the next strategy is engaging in that process, the research will take longer because we are going to walk with that company, but that is what it takes to get the work done.”

“The final strategy I propose is a push for being relevant,” Oliva continues.

“If we put relevance at the front of our research goals: how we design research questions, how we design research hypothesis, how we design and develop research implications, if we do that with a manager at hand and thinking about the manager and about being relevant, I think that will also help us shape our own work.”

One thing is certainly clear after the two days of exhaustive presentations and debate, servitization has begun to move forward both as an industrial movement and as a topic for academic research.

The key questions are moving from what and why to how. As Baines commented in summing up the conference in the final session:

“Really, now the conversation needs to be about how do we get traction within an organisation, how do we advance this concept.”

“That’s where the real challenges are.”

 

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Si2 Partners consultancy is launched to help industrial companies leverage services and take advantage of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) or Industry 4.0 to beat the competition and win in their markets. Founding Partner Nick Frank tells us more 

Si2 On-Demand is a new way for managers and their teams to get advice and the support they need to get things done – as they need it, when they need it and as much as they need!  Managers engage with Si2 to solve problems, get new ideas or validate their thinking.  If they have capacity constraints, they use Si2 specialists as an extended workbench to complete their tasks -virtually, rapidly and cost effectively, wherever they are in the world. An innovative smart platform enables access to expert practitioners and consultants as well as a growing Insights Library, 

Leading industrial manufacturers have long seen the installed base as a business opportunity and as a way to moderate economic cycles. Faced with intensifying competition and limits to growth from product sales in developed markets, after-sales services provides ways to drive new revenue streams, improve margins and ward off competitors.

Today, services are an anchor business for many companies and have evolved from pure product support to encompass sophisticated offerings to help customers better manage or outsource industrial processes, including asset management, maintenance or parts of production and logistics. Nevertheless, even more companies have either not taken part in this evolution or failed to realise its benefits due to a flawed strategic approach or implementation. The well documented “service paradox” phenomenon, where profits decline even as volumes increase, is something that managements must learn to overcome.

 

Forward-looking companies have gone on to drive competitive advantage by bundling products and services into integrated solutions, delivering outcomes to customers demanding functionality and performance.

When outcome displaces the product from the centre of focus, transactional relationships with customers become more co-operative and longer term, as both sides work together to co-create value and share risks.

With customers locked-in and competitors locked-out, price pressures are moderated through value- based pricing. Currently, outcome-based services or performance contracting are viewed as a way to bend cost curves to improve performance in many industries, including healthcare, infrastructure, technical services, aerospace, defence as well as large machinery. Nevertheless, while customers have benefited from these business models, the same cannot always be said for suppliers.

Companies contemplating outcome-based services must overcome a number of hurdles, including assessing and managing risks as well as understanding how to measure value. Their challenge is to blend their value chain into customer operations, integrating ecosystems of suppliers and partners into value networks. They must invest to scale their business, but ensure that demand is sufficient and customers are open enough to try new approaches.

 

With technologies such as the Industrial Internet of Things enabling more productive service operations, there is now increasing evidence that digitization, is also sparking a ‘revolution’ in thinking, driving servitization and new business models. By enabling companies to collect and analyse data on an unprecedented scale and granularity, new services are being designed to improve products, process performance and customer experience.

Data is becoming a key new asset class, perhaps even more valuable than the underlying physical assets and processes. It is crucial for competitive advantage, and necessary for OEMs to avoid commoditisation of their products. Those with real vision are investing in new digital service platforms (“Anything-as-a-Service”),  to drive disruptive growth and new customer demand while dramatically reducing costs.

Si2 Partners reflects this new age of disruption. With the ambition to help industrial companies leverage services in increasingly digital environments, Si2 Partners offers On-Demand Advisory and Support, delivered through collaboration technology by people who know how to make things happen, Si2 helps companies not only shape their servitization transition, but focus on all the critical issues affecting their service businesses, including strategy, business models, organisational development, sales, marketing and operations as well as technology.

 

Operating across many industries and all geographies, Si2 Partners is uniquely placed to deliver solutions to problems or work successfully on major business transformational issues, such as business building, operational improvement, change programs or new go-to-market initiatives. Si2 combines a deep understanding of service business, a unique blend of top management and consulting expertise and strong industry experience.

Each business and the context within which it operates are unique, requiring a bespoke approach. Si2 works with management teams to understand their views, requirements and objectives, while bringing industry insights, proven methodologies and services thought leadership to the table.

 

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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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New UK research shows that UK SMEs have a bullish attitude towards investment over the next 12 months. SMEs are most likely to invest in IT equipment, cars, vans and plant & machinery.

Research carried out for London-based SME asset finance and leasing specialist Norton Folgate revealed that of 400 surveyed  four in 10 (39%) of SMBs planned to invest in new IT equipment over the next 12 months, spending an average of £5,290 each.

Cars are the second most popular working asset among SMEs, 18% of business owners planning to acquire at least one over the next year, spending on average £14,496.

Plant & machinery (12%) and commercial vehicles (11%) are in third and fourth places with SMEs spending an average of £7,426 and £11,163 on these respectively

According to the findings, 10% of SMEs intend to use asset finance and alternative finance to acquire their working assets, underlining the growing popularity of this sector.  Indeed, more than half (53%) expect demand for alternative finance – including asset finance - to increase over the next two years.

Norton Folgate, part of the Amicus Group since 2015, reports seeing a significant increase in the number of enquiries among SMEs. Robert Keep, Founder and Principal, said: “Most SMEs understand the critical importance of up to date IT systems and this is reflected in their willingness to invest in new equipment over the next 12 months.

“We’re finding that many small business owners increasingly see the value of using asset finance to acquire these rather than tying up working capital or turning to bank overdrafts and expensive credit cards. Being part of Amicus has put us in a very strong position to further enhance our asset leasing and finance capabilities.”

John Jenkins, CEO of Amicus commented: “It’s encouraging to see such significant numbers of SMEs are committed to investing in their working assets and the growing importance of asset finance.  Norton Folgate has built a very strong reputation in this field and is playing an integral role in our strategy of offering a diversified range of specialist lending services.”

 

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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:

[ordered_list style="decimal"]

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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