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Field service in the medical industry is complex and challenging. Having recently attended the two key events -  Field Service Medical and Field Service Medical Europe - we look at some of the key challenges service directors working in this vertical face...

It is an often quoted maxim that when it comes to field service highly disparate companies from completely separate verticals can face many of the same pain points. Within the niche of the medical industry these challenges remain but there are also additional hurdles that can make service delivery even harder.

Fortunately for those working within medical field service, global conference producers WBR sit right at the heart of the industry hosting two key events, one each side of the Atlantic to help foster knowledge sharing within the community.

The first of these Field Service Medical was held in San Diego in February and in the Californian sunshine the debate was lively with a highly senior audience coming together and putting commercial rivalries aside to address some of the key challenges within the sector.

Of course as with the wider field service sector, technology has a huge role to play in enhancing the levels of service companies can provide, yet a number of additional challenges such as tighter regulation, greater security fears and fragmented purchasing structures can make the implementation of technology just that little bit harder within the medical sector.

 

Thus a number of conversations centred around integration, with FieldOne’s Ted Steffner’s presentation on the topic ‘Integrate, Don’t isolate’ being a particular highlight for a number of delegates.

Another specific focus of the medical sector is that the sale of consumables within the industry is perhaps disproportionally higher here than in other verticals such as manufacturing. Largely driven by the clean room environment, this leads to an even greater pressure to ensure good inventory management and as well as a number of presentations around this topic, Stacey Blakely, Service Sales Director, Hill-Rom led an excellent interactive round table that provided plenty of food for thought and helped drive the conversation.

Indeed, the sale of consumables is viewed very much as a key part of service revenue still within the medical sector and in some respects the thought processes of many within the vertical is still focused on the traditional break-fix approach to field service.

This was apparent when Professor Tim Baines, Aston University, gave a presentation on the topic of Servitization at Field Service Medical Europe in Berlin a month later.

 

Whilst in many other verticals the topic of servitization and phrases such as through-life-cycle service, advanced services and outcome based solutions are becoming familiar concepts, for many within the medical industry it remains a new concept which faces the dual barriers of both a relenting and strong traditional approach to revenue through consumables, as well as the additional challenges of fully implementing IoT solutions due to the aforementioned fears around security fuelled by the need to protect patient data.

However, whilst in some areas the medical industry maybe a touch behind the broader field service sector, it is also home to some truly innovative thinkers and service leaders.

One such person is Alec Pinto, Associate Director of Qiagen who gave a fantastic presentation on maximising utilisation. Pinto and his colleagues have done some exceptional work on developing mathematical modelling to truly define their available resources in terms of man hours, and then redistributing their workforce accordingly to improve customer satisfaction levels, efficiency levels and engineer engagement.

In summary, the field service industry within the medical sector has a number of unique challenges that are perhaps not felt within other verticals yet the market still continues to see innovation and development on both sides of the Atlantic.

 

“There is an overall theme of companies being more proactive and less reactive across the sector at the moment,” commented Greg Ashton, Conference Producer for WBR at the end of Field Service Medical Europe.

“People have been thinking about it for a long time but now the technology is at a place now where there is a fusion of people and technology all arriving together at a critical point.”

“It’s really the solution providers that are driving it forward, the solutions themselves have improved a lot over the last year,” he added.

 

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Marina Stedman, ClickSoftware brings us the concluding part of her feature looking at the multi-faceted challenges field service managers and supervisors face and a key philosophy in how to best serve customers...

In my last article for Field Service News, I outlined how our philosophy centres around helping service organisations answer five questions – the five Ws of field service, in order to best serve their customers and touched on the first of these Who does what.

Now let’s take a look at the remaining four Ws and why they are important for field service organisations.

W#2: With What?

Our second “W” is all about the tools. What tools are needed to complete the required actions?

Sending out field technicians qualified to fix a specific issue still can’t help if they don’t have the tools needed.

Not all mobile systems are created equal. A scheduling system that can send out an alert to a field supervisor that a field technician has been double-booked isn’t much help if it also doesn’t provide the tools to deal with that issue.

According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis on mobile deployments, implementing the right mobile tools and approach to field operations improves productivity 20 to 30 percent.

 

It also was found to decrease the time needed for field operations between 5 and 7 percent, which translated into saving millions of dollars each year.

We’ve already established that a mobile tool has to provide the functionality for a field supervisor to complete back-end and field tasks - all the “What”s of the field supervisor’s job. However, to achieve the kinds of operational improvements and cost savings possible, the right mobile tool has to meet two more criteria:

• Scope and speed to provide real time data. A field supervisor can only complete managerial and paperwork tasks remotely if they have reliable, up-to-the-minute data.The opposite is also true. They can only control field operations from the office if they can see what’s happening in the field.Accurate, real time information gives the field supervisor visibility into what’s happening on the ground. They can see that a field technician isn’t where the schedule says he should be and they can contact that field technician immediately. There are no more blind spots.
• Easy to learn; easy to use. One of the biggest reasons new software rollouts fail is lack of adoption by the end users. Much has been written about the consumerisation of B2B applications, and with good reason.Both field supervisors and technicians need their mobile apps to just work, or they won’t use them. Or at least, won’t use them well enough for the company to realise the expected benefits of having a mobile system.

W#3 and #4: When and Where?

These questions are the golden eggs of mobile because the right answers are “Whenever” and “Wherever.” Information or decisions needed in any given moment can be accessed or made in that moment. A speedy, full-function mobile app releases the field supervisor’s bottleneck in two ways:

1. The distinction between “field” and “office” tasks becomes obliterated. Location no longer restricts what the field supervisor can do
2. Because location no longer constricts the field supervisor, the field supervisor is no longer the bottleneck preventing other people from completing their tasks efficiently.

That holiday request? Once approved by the field supervisor on their mobile device, the system is updated in real time so the schedulers back at the office are aware of the change in capacity for that day.

An emergency service request comes into the office. The mobile field supervisor sees it, and can assign it to an available technician already nearby.

Now the customer gets same day service, and your company gets maximum utilisation out of a field technician who is kept fully scheduled during the day.

W#5: for Whom?

There are numerous stakeholders relying on field supervisors being able to stay on top of all their tasks and demands but for a service organisation, the most important “Who” is always the customer.

And who is the lynchpin between the field supervisor and the customer – the field technician.

By erasing the boundary between office and field tasks, the field supervisor gains time to spend on the most critical task: mentoring the field technicians. Whether it’s more time side by side with a field technician on a call, or being available to answer questions via text, chat or video camera, a field supervisor can better serve technicians once freed from the desk.

 

When the field supervisor has more time to train and mentor the field technicians, you get happier, more qualified people. As their skills grow, they can complete more complex tasks and finish simple tasks faster, so you’re increasing your field utilisation potential without major increases in labour costs or staffing. Best of all, your field supervisors can spend more time mentoring field technicians without falling behind on the operational and managerial tasks the back-end stakeholders rely on.

Fast pace and high pressure make mobile the release valve

Applying the Five Ws of customer service for field supervisors means using mobile to empower them to carry out all their responsibilities regardless of location.

They need the ability to monitor and act in real time. When field supervisors don’t have to choose between sitting at a desk or being in the field, they can more efficiently carry out their roles by allocating their time and energy where it provides the highest return: mentoring and assisting field technicians to deliver enterprise -quality customer service.

 

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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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There's still time to register for next week's "Creating Value from Field Service" event, being held at the prestigious Williams F1 Conference Centre, in Wantage, Oxfordshire, on  Thursday 28th April.

There's no charge to attend the action-packed event, which is hosted by  mobile workforce optimisation solutions specialist Leadent and attracts senior figures from the UK field service sector.

 

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To register and see the full agenda click here

 

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The interactive agenda will allow delegates to explore the theme of "Creating Value from Field Service".  How do you maximise the value delivered by and through a dispersed  field force? The conference will bring together industry experts and practitioners who have been there and done it.  Field service organisations such as Anglian Water, NATs, Serco and Arqiva will share their real-life experiences.

The event attracts senior delegates from some of the country’s largest organisations. The day is structured with presentations, case studies, and panel events,  and there is plenty of opportunity for discussion with fellow peers and for delegates to network, converse and share ideas.  Represented organisations will include utilities, telcos, facilities management, government agencies and more.

The range of topics includes Tactical Resource Planning, Analytics, Change and Transformation Management, the End-to-End Customer Journey, as well as IoT and the latest technologies.

A  complimentary tour of the Williams F1 Collection is included.

 

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To view full agenda and register,  click here

 

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The move towards servitization for many manufacturers offers a new way of thinking in business, with long term contracts and profitability the carrot on the stick. Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief of Field Service News talks to Harman Lanser of Air France-KLM, about making the move to an outcome based approach within the aviation sector following on from his key note speech at last year's Aston Spring Servitization Conference.

To find out more about servitization register to attend this years Aston Spring Servitization Conference here

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Attendees to this year’s Protection and Management Series (P&M), which includes five separate exhibitions including the Service Management Expo will be able to see keynote speeches from three highly inspirational speakers this June.

Across June 21st, 22nd and 23rd P&M takes over the entirety of London’s flagship exhibition and conference centre venue the Exel in the South of London close to the iconic O2 arena and Canary Wharf.

The event which as well as Service Management Expo also includes The Facilities Show, The Health and Safety Expo, Firex and IFSEC will attract over 45,000 visitors who will be able to see key note speeches from Tim Collins OBE, Kate Adie OBE and James Cracknell OBE.

As well as the keynote sessions in the main theatre there will also be dedicated solution theatres across the whole of P&M including a field service focused theatre.

The keynote presentations will be as follows:

Colonel Tim Collins OBE

21 June, 11.30 – 12.30

Colonel Tim Collins attracted attention on both sides of the Atlantic for his rousing speech to the troops before going into battle in Iraq. His autobiography, Rules of Engagement, subsequently went straight into the best-seller lists and he is now CEO of a security company.

Tim is a naturally inspiring speaker, combining extensive experience of active service with broad knowledge of military and political history. An authority on teamwork, leadership and motivation, his speeches show a clear parallel between military problem solving and the challenges faced by leaders in any walk of life.

Kate Adie OBE

22 June, 11.30 – 12.30

It used to be said that if you found yourself in the same place as Kate, you should leave straight away.  She became a household name as BBC Chief News Reporter, covering the Gulf War, the demise of the Soviet Union, the protests in Beijing’s Tienanmen Square and NATO’s campaign in Kosovo.

Aside from her autobiography, The Kindness of Strangers, Kate has published Corsets to Camouflage and Nobody’s Child. She has won the Royal Television Society Journalism Award and the Monte Carlo International Golden Nymph.

James Cracknell OBE

23 June, 11.30 – 12.30

James Cracknell is one of Britain’s greatest ever oarsmen. After victory alongside Redgrave and Pinsent in the coxless four in Sydney, he went on to achieve another Olympic gold in Athens.

James will talk about his adventures, the build-up to both Olympics and how they were nowhere near as straightforward as the public seemed to think. He reveals the highs and lows of his training regime, the different characters that make a successful team and what drives him to seek out new challenges.

 

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The next event by UK non-profit organisation the Service Community has been announced...

Field Service professionals can reserve their place for free at this next Service Community event to be hosted by the Centre for Through-Life-Engineering Services (TES) at Cranfield University by emailing TheServiceCommunity@gmail.com.

The event will be the afternoon of the 12th May from 13.00 – 17.00. Before the session begins, there is also a great opportunity to visit the Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality lab at the OpEx institute, where you can dip into what these technologies might bring to the future of service delivery. Space is limited for this tour, so please state in your email if you want to attend the VR/AR visit.

Cranfield University  is one of the worlds leading global research establishments into TES and is working closely with industry leaders such as Rolls Royce, Bombardier, Babcock, Siemens and BAE, to establish within UK government a National Policy for Services in Manufacturing & Technology.

This event is the first of our Insights Series, where we aim to provide service leaders with practical hands on insights into one of 5 themes that will stretch across many industries including software, technology as well as manufacturing:

• Moving to the Cloud
• New Service Revenues
• Art of Transformation and change
• Workflow management : soft skills, processes and scheduling
• From Reactive to Proactive business: Customer Success, Consumption Gap

The agenda for the 12th May is no exception:

• 12.00: Virtual reality / Augmented Reality lab visit
• 12.30: Pre-Meeting coffee, biscuits,  networking
• 13.00: Welcome and introduction from Mathew Caffrey (Mngr Op Ex institute Cranfield)
• 13.15: Impact of VR/AR on Services & the Servitization Business model – Professor Howard Lightfoot (Cranfield)
• 14.00: The Challenge of scaling and expanding a service operation to support a rapidly expanding technology business – Ian Cockett (Services Director Cygnet Texkimp)
• 14.40: Networking Break
• 15.20: Creating a Customer Success Culture – Chris Farnath (Director Customer Success at Allocate Software)
• 16.00: Moving from a Opex to Capex, cloud based business model – Colin Brown (Managing Director Tesseract)
• 16.40: General Discussion & Wrap up
• 17.00: Meeting Closed

To sign up for the event and the tour, please email TheServiceCommunity@gmail.com. Event logistics will be sent out nearer the date.

ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS & TOPICS

Howard Lightfoot: A leading expert on Servitization having co-written the book ‘Made to Serve’ with Professor Tim Baines

Ian Cockett: Service Director at Cygnet-Texkimp Ltd, a specialist manufacturer of equipment for the global fibre and fabric, plastic, foil and film processing markets. Previously Ian was Director of Service Operations at Bosch UK’s heating division running a service team of over 300 engineers.

Chris Farnath: An experienced Services Director working mainly in the Software and Technology arena, Chris’s current challenge is creating a Customer Success culture and will be sharing & discussing the challenges he faces in his current role. Chris is also a member of the Service Community leadership team.

Colin Brown: Colin is MD/Founder of Tesseract, a leading Service Management solution provider. In this presentation he is going to concentrate on the business challenge of moving from a transactional business model to a pay as you go model through a Cloud based technology platform. In particular how this has changed the business model of his company.

 

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CEM has been identified as a  key driver of customer loyalty and profitable growth, is a trending topic in the manufacturing industry. But for many manufacturers this is still a greenfield operation. So where do you stand and how do you get started?

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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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