ARCHIVE FOR THE ‘mark-glover’ CATEGORY

A few years back Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos declared on US National TV that he would be investing in Prime Air a delivery network that would utilise drones to deliver packages to their customers. At the time many cynically argued that it was a fanciful notion designed to gain Amazon 16 minutes of prime-time coverage and nothing more. But is the idea really so far-fetched? Could delivery drones prove to be an answer to traffic congestion when delivering spare parts in urban areas?

Mark Glover takes a look to see what’s on the horizon.

As our roads become increasingly congested, driven by several factors including the increasing urbanisation of our populations and the mega-trend of click to order replacing the bricks and mortar high street, field service engineers can face significant challenges just to get to the job on time. Is last-mile facing a cross-roads and if so, which technological route does it need to take? Mark Glover finds out more...

In the latest Field Service Podcast, Christian Kowalkowski, Professor of Industrial Marketing at Linköping University, discusses the challenges round transitioning to a servitization business model.

In this episode, Field Service News Deputy Editor Mark Glover, speaks to Christian Kowalkowski, author of Service Strategy in Action: A Practical Guide for Growing your B2B Service and Solution Business, about the challenges businesses can face when adapting to a servitization model having been used to the more traditional transactional framework.

You can connect with Christian on his LinkedIn profile here and email him at christian.kowalkowski@liu.se
Information about the book Service Strategy in Action: A Practical Guide for Growing your B2B Service and Solution Business, including how to purchase a copy, can be found here.  

The future of field service will see location based services play a dominant role as autonomous vehicles take to the road says Chris Ruff CEO at Location-based technology firm Glympse, who is the latest guest on The Field Service Podcast.

 

The future of field service will see location based services play a dominant role as autonomous vehicles take to the road...In this episode of the Field Service Podcast, fieldservicenews.com Deputy Editor Mark Glover sits down to talk with Chris Ruff, CEO at Glympse, about why he sees autonomous vehicles as playing a significant role in the future of field service delivery and how all of this needs to be underpinned by robust and efficient location based services focused technology. 

In the latest Field Service Podcast, Fujitsu's Head of Delivery Management and Service, Martin Summerhayes, suggests we should be framing the service industry in a different way to encourage young people to the sector.

In this episode, fieldservicenews.com Deputy Editor Mark Glover sits down with Martin Summerhayes, and explains why we need to approach sector in a different way to become an attractive sector for young people to enter. He also recalls his first role in service in the mid-1980s and why employee wellbeing is paramount to delivering great customer service. 
Read our profile of Martin Summerhayes here.

THE FIELD SERVICE PODCAST: Florian Kriz, Vandelande.
The digitalisation of a spare parts inventory has huge potential but comes with many challenges.

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In this episode of the Field Service Podcast, fieldservicenews.com Deputy Editor talks to Florian Kriz, Manager E-Commerce and Product Management at Vanderlande's Global Spare Parts Division, about the potential of spare parts in the service sector and shares some of the challenges involved with the digitalisation of a spare parts portfolio.

Given the many industries field service straddles, the crossover of its employees into lone working is huge. Field Service News’ Mark Glover looks into this area of health and safety and discovers how technology - and positive human engagement - can play a huge part in its successful implementation.

The last five years has seen a shift in worldwide attitudes to health and safety. Emphasis has shifted from ‘safety’ to ‘health’ with more focus placed on long-latency diseases such as asbestos-related workplace cancer and musculoskeletal conditions such as tendonitus. Employee wellbeing and mental health is attracting greater awareness and safety professionals are having a stronger role at board level, with CEOs understanding the business case for a robust health and safety system.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is an agency of the UK Government’s responsible for regulating and enforcing health and safety law. As well as providing information and guidance, they also investigate workplace incidents and accidents and bring forward prosecutions if a company has been in breach of legislation.

Having spent five years as a health and safety journalist, I have seen the profession and HSE come in for criticism for pandering to the Nanny State and stifling society with its regulation. As such, the sector gets a bad reputation, not helped by UK subeditors keen to brandish the “health and safety gone mad” headline above a piece on a children’s party or a village fete being shut down. Often though - and newspapers will fail to report this - the reason for intervention is justified as ultimately, lives were most likely at risk....

 

Legislation and lone working

In the UK alone, it is estimated there are six million lone workers in the UK, and approximately 23 million in the US. Workers sent to fix a coffee machine, lorry or an offshore wind turbine classifies them as a lone worker; the spectrum of lone vocations is a vast one and those in field service will often come under the lone worker category.

 

"Employers are required to provide a duty of care to their workers and to do all that is ‘reasonably practicable’ to protect them..."

 

In the UK, health and safety legislation is underpinned by the Health and Safety at Work Act. Employers are required to provide a duty of care to their workers and to do all that is ‘reasonably practicable’ to protect them. In the sphere of lone working, there is no specific legislation as such. Speaking at a a recent lone worker safety conference in London, Sean Elson, a specialist Health and Safety Lawyer at Pinsent Masons said: “Most of the issues that I see around lone working are seen through the prism of the general duties of the Health and Safety at Work Act.”

And while the law, according to Elson “remains stable”, what is expected as ‘reasonably practicable’ is changing. “It does not stay the same. It is constantly moving,” he said at the same conference. “What is it we have to do to satisfy our duties?” The introduction of British Standard 8484:2016, the country’s Standard for Lone Worker safety devices, has further ring-fenced the effectiveness of lone worker solutions in the UK. Companies offering technology-based solutions have to adhere to the standard, a key requirement of which, is that an alarm, once activated supersedes the 999 level of emergency response, and be directed immediately to the relevant control unit, guaranteeing an appropriate police response.

 

Technology

Craig Swallow is Managing Director of SoloProtect, a company providing lone worker technology solutions in the UK and US. Clients include Sky, Domino’s Pizza and department store John Lewis. Typically, the end-users are working alone; sent to fix satellite boxes, deliver pizza and furniture. Soloprotect’s suite of solutions include personal ID tags that incorporate video technology and small fob alarms, which can also be discreetly triggered if an incident occurs.

Other products include an alarm watch system and a lone worker app, that can integrate with mobile workforce management. The firm also provide analytics software that covers usage, training and alarm elements and produces graphically-friendly reports to showcase progress to the CEO or department heads, an important element of a health and safety Manager’s modern role. “Our main point of contact is a company’s Health and Safety Manager,” Craig tells me over the phone.

 

"Alarms when I first started were very much stand-alone and weren’t really connected to anything, they were literally press a button and hope someone hears it..."

 

“They have always had the desire of providing their management team with the benefits of using the technology, and now they can provide a clear dashboard that justifies the ROI.” I ask Craig how open clients are to adopting new technology? “You’ve got the whole spectrum. Some are scared, some are really progressive. I was with a client yesterday,” he says, “and I was showing them what benefits they would get as a set of managers would be and they immediately got it.” So how much of an evolution has there been in the lone worker technology “It’s been massive,” says Nicole Vazquez (pictured), an expert in Lone Worker behaviour.

“Alarms when I first started were very much stand-alone and weren’t really connected to anything, they were literally press a button and hope someone hears it. Then it got a bit smarter and pressing that button would make sure somebody hears it. Now it’s connected to GPS and some companies will link it into their tracking and their productivity.”

 

Disingenuous

Nicole, who runs Worthwhile Training, a training and consultancy firm specialising in lone working and security, however has seen a down-side to the employee tracking features. “If you’re giving somebody a device for safety but they also know that you are using it to monitor productivity too, then it can feel a little bit disingenuous from the end-user’s point of view,” she suggests.

Convincing workers that the technology is a compliment rather than a hindrance is an ongoing challenge in the lone worker arena and Vazquez tells me of a client, a kitchen appliance manufacturer, who gave engineers tablets to register their arrival and departure at a job and to take pictures before and after to prove no damage occurred after completion. Ultimately the technology was there to protect workers, but it wasn’t perceived that way.

 

"Rather than it being a spy, it would be their witness. The difference between those two words is huge..."

 

“When we talked to the engineers about it, they said they felt uncomfortable,” Nicole remembers. “We took the angle that this was about protecting them.” However, after the workers said their safety wasn’t an issue, Nicole took another approach: “We asked them if they had been accused of, for example, causing damage when they hadn’t, and suddenly everybody wanted to have a conversation about it.” She continues: “Rather than it being a spy, it would be their witness. The difference between those two words is huge. It’s not somebody keeping an eye on them, it’s somebody keeping an eye out for them.”

In the States, employees are perhaps more cautious about being spied upon while working. Swallow suggests the role of Unions has made workers more aware of such technology. “In lone working,” he says, “you still have the same challenges – the same in field service - of workers wary of being tracked. I would offer that it’s a greater concern in the US because the Unions are very powerful.

The engagement, therefore, between both parties is often a greater consideration in America.”

 

The Potential

But what about the advantages of linking lone worker and field service technology? Efficiency and compliance can surely compliment a health and safety solution? Swallow, suggests the engineer’s tablet or rugged laptop aren’t quite suited to the lone worker discreet hardware just yet. “It’s not an ideal terminal to use from a health and safety or alarm perspective,” he says, “but if you could create relationships between our system and the field service system, whether that’s sharing information about known-location or risk, for example then there could be advantages.”

 

"The potential of IoT and machine learning on lone working technology is an exciting one..."

 

Expanding further, Craig recalls a client, a large rail operator, who require confirmation that track-side maintenance is being carried out by an engineer with the correct training and credentials but they also want to know when the job is being carried out. “They want to use our device,” Craig explains, “because those individuals are lone workers so there’s a health and safety angle too.” “It’s also about audit. They [the client] are managing a complex chain of sub-contractors and sub/sub-contractors. Ultimately, it’s about making sure they’ve got a full audit trail and the task in hand is being done by the right guy with the right credentials.”

The potential of IoT and machine learning on lone working technology is an exciting one, and Craig, who used to work at PSION, the British company who pioneered the Personal Digital Assistant in the early 80s, is convinced the industry is headed in that direction. “Traditionally, our devices use circuit switch voice and SMS,” he explains.

“We have a data product, where the voice; audio or video call, or whatever data is being sent will come through a middleware platform. The theory is, as long as you’ve got an Application Processing Interface (API), that data can interface with that middleware platform, with as many other platforms as you like.” Nicole is also encouraged by the “joined-up thinking” between safety and efficiency. However – and this is a big question in field service at the moment – she remains cautious about the cross-over between the asset and the engineers.

“It’s about making sure the productivity or efficiency tracking does not blur the boundaries of staff, she says. “People are your assets.” Lone working technology is a part of health and safety which exists so that, after a day’s work, workers go home unharmed. Indeed, as Nicole says, people are your biggest assets and they deserve to be protected to the highest possible standard.

A year into his tenure heading-up ServiceMax Scott Berg is in a positive mood. Field Service News’ Deputy Editor Mark Glover went to meet the CEO to discuss life after GE’s acquisition, Brexit and why IoT still has more to offer...

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Note: This interview was held prior to the announcement of Silver Lake's acquisition of a majority stake within ServiceMax which sees GE to continue as a minority investor. Find out more about the acquisition here 

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Ahead of my interview with Scott I go online to read a handful of the firm’s customer case-studies. I browse with the intention of spotting a pattern, a pool of similar companies that can give me handle on the ServiceMax success story. Of course, the firm have always operated in diverse sectors: aviation; food production and pharmaceuticals to name a few.

As I delve further the specialism of the companies narrow into impressive and exciting-sounding niches: centrifugal pumps manufacturers; architectural coating companies; bio-analytical measurement system providers all extolling the values of ServiceMax’s solutions. With this in mind, I start by asking Scott how he keeps a handle on this array of industries, a forest of complex verticals. “You’re talking about large workforces that have scheduling needs at a real primitive level who have a real despatch and scheduling element,” Scott tells me in a meeting room at GE’s London offices.

“I think that unifies all those vertical industries for us. At the bottom of that, for the most part, there is either a complex piece of equipment and it’s really that machine or that piece of equipment that we that’s at the centre of what we do. “We tend to provide solutions for those with complex asset types of services which could be a wind turbine or a power plant, a centrifuge, or a brain-surgery machine in a hospital. When you look at it that way, there’s a lot of similarity across them.”

It will be a year this January since Scott took up the post as CEO of ServiceMax coinciding with GE’s acquisition of the firm. Despite being part of a multi-national conglomerate, a company who this ranked 18 in this Fortune 500, has the technician-focused ethos remained “This is a company that cares quite a bit about assets and equipment and machinery and engineers,” Scott says.

“I think there’s something close to 25,000 employed service engineers. There’s a real love and affinity which has been good and benefitted us.” Since the acquisition, ServiceMax have gained traction beyond Europe in countries where previously it had been difficult to get a footprint. Of course, investment has helped but Scott suggests GE’s global respect has also been a factor. “In the past 12 months we’ve had a number of customers in the Middle East fuelled by the positive brand and reputation of GE in that part of the world.”

 

"This is a company that cares quite a bit about assets and equipment and machinery and engineers..."

 

Europe though remains a strong area for the outfit with clients spanning the continent. On the day I meet Scott, Britain is reacting to Theresa May’s draft Brexit proposal, and my mobile buzzed and bleeped with news notifications as I made the train journey down.

The process of Britain’s extraction from the European Union has been fraught and complex with political commentators and business leaders offering various doomsday scenarios if negotiations falter. I ask Scott what effect, if any, Brexit could have on its European footprint? “I don’t want to get political and be on one side or the other and I can’t say I fully understand it,” he says wisely, “but there’s a demand out there for global operation in the world’s largest corporations and people are going to have to get through trade barriers and deal with the consumer on a worldwide basis regardless.”

We’re both happy to swerve further discussion on Brexit so I steer back to where it all began for Scott, in pharmaceuticals at Eli Lilly and Dendrite in the early 90s where he held Business Director and Senior Director roles respectively. A role at Connect offered a peak into the field service sector dealing with territory management systems, introducing large volumes of laptops into white-collar knowledge workers. “I had an early glimpse of the mobile workforce and what that was going to look like,” he recalls. At the time, California was the focal point of US software development. Fuelled by a growing interest in technology, Scott, originally from New Jersey headed to “chase the dream”. Fast forwarding then to 2009 and Scott is interviewing at ServiceMax.

As he plotted his experience, he was able to align his previous roles to the field service sector. “Even as I was about to join the company,” he says with a smile, “I was remembering all the things – even from pharmaceuticals – about remote working and parts ordering. We would deploy thousands of laptops to a sales team and none of those laptops had the means to service them, repair them, return then, ship them and prep them. Back in those days we had to run a full-on field sales operation because how else would 2,000 reps get what they needed.

“I had no idea how pertinent that would end up being first-hand experience of aftermarket or a parts operation where frankly where we trying to deliver a software solution.”

We work out that “back then” was 35 years ago and we both wince slightly at the speed of time passing. “My daughter calls me old,” Scott, 50, jokes. Still, the last four decades have seen a revolution in technology and software advances; the advent of the internet underpinning most applications. I ask Scott, given his experience, if he thinks the world wide web was a watershed moment, or perhaps something else? “I think the big change that I’ve seen for has been mobile,” he offers.

 

"The internet is not as ‘everywhere’ as people believe. It’s blocked in hospitals and airports. It’s enhanced by smart-mobile devices that have these rich capabilities but we also have to deal with the reality that they will sometimes lose connectivity..."

 

“Of course, this would be nowhere without the internet but going from luggable, yet heavy and fragile laptops to really smart affordable mobile devices; I think that’s a big deal.” And what about the internet? “ It’s been a bit of a double-edged sword,” he says. The internet is not as ‘everywhere’ as people believe. It’s blocked in hospitals and airports. It’s enhanced by smart-mobile devices that have these rich capabilities but we also have to deal with the reality that they will sometimes lose connectivity.

“We acknowledge the mobile workforce and the internet connectivity and getting data to people; we acknowledge the mobile devices and how important they’ll be but the only way to really do this properly is to think about that device and software operating in a connected and dis-connected way,” he pauses. “It’s a balance of the two. Relying on connectivity, the Internet of Things (IoT) goes beyond laptops, smartphones and tablets. Monitoring our heating and air-conditioning and even dimming our lights, its potential impact across heavy industry is huge."

In a previous interview with Field Service News’ Scott said that IoT had been an “unfulfilled promise”. Does he stick by the statement? “I think what needs to happen now, and this is where the real value will come from IoT,” he says recalling the earlier Interview.

“I think what needs to happen now, and where the real value will come from IoT, is when input from a machine can be fed into more predictive models using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning. Only then we will get truly predictive services, and only then will you get a learning model rather than an alert system.” He elaborates further: “Part of the early benefits for our customer base have been error logs and early warning systems. Now, what we offer for field service management and asset performance management can be through IoT and the predictive side; and then measure whether or not that had the impact that was wanted.”

 

"I think the version of autonomy that applies to complex services is a smarter machine that asks for help before it needs it..."

 

So, not only pre-empting but learning from pre-empting? “Exactly,” he affirms.

“We talk a lot about the closed-loop mentality; where you’re predictive about the maintenance instruction, then you capture the service that was actually executed then feed that back and now the model gets smarter over time.”

Despite the speed in which technology is progressing Scott believes the technical role of the engineer will remain.

He’s wise and experienced enough however, to know it is changing.

The asset, assisted by IoT and Machine Learning, will come to complement the technician. He references the term autonomous, suggesting – perhaps correctly – that people only associate it with self-driving cars. “I think the version of autonomy that applies to complex services is a smarter machine that asks for help before it needs it, a smarter machine that provides realtime data to advise the technician,” he says.

While IoT is certainly changing the field service marketplace, the hype around the technology is bringing a side-effect, a bi-product that requires effort for an end-user to control: data, reams of data. Scott is sympathetic towards clients who find themselves drowning in error-codes.

He tells me about a client he met the previous day - a provider of cancer surgery equipment.

“Every morning,” he says shaking his head, “the technician woke to an email reporting 2,000 potential error codes. And it’s all on this technician to decide what’s meaningful and what’s not. Sure, it’s a good IoT application that’s come up with 2,000 codes, but which one actually matters?”

The issue of data-overload affirms Scott’s earlier point, that IoT needs to be reined in by a strong predictive model that can filter the relevant information.

“That’s where things are really advancing now,” Scott affirms.

“To go from IoT spewing data at people, to layering a predictive model on that to advise and lead a technician’s actions, delivered through a smart mobile device that can present the relevant information.”

All of this ultimately adds up to efficiency, a key factor for those organisations whose business models are asset-heavy; the wind turbine or nuclear reactor for example. The effect of down-time across an assembly line, for even a short period can have serious financial consequences.

“They can’t afford for it to be down,” Scott explains, “and you can’t just call anyone to come and fix it. This isn’t a Google or a Yelp search to get someone with credentials to climb 300ft and fix a wind turbine.”

 

"The effect of down-time across an assembly line, for even a short period can have serious financial consequences..."

 

With good timing, a week before our meeting, a GE press release lands in my in-box announcing the launch of PreDix ServiceMax Asset Service Management software aimed squarely at these heavy-asset sectors. I’m drawn to the safety and compliance element of the software where the solution creates documentation for workers to check the correct Personal Protective Equipment is fitted.

“Even a simple checklist at the start of each technician’s day that asks if you are equipped with the right boots, or hard-hat or eye wear; just the reminder can contribute to a reduction in safety incidents,” Scott says.

Importantly, signed employee safety and maintenance documentation creates evidence of compliance. Scott outlines the process: “It [the documentation) shows that every technician, that morning acknowledged that safety procedure and that instruction, the documentation can prove it occurred. Along with the maintenance documents, it shows that everything that needed to get done was done.”

Checklist management has been a focus at ServiceMax. 

The firm have produced capabilities around form-data capture, the uploading and capture of photograph as well as video; all feeding into the battle against inefficiency. To make this point Scott cites describes wind-turbine maintenance, which to take place, a technician must climb 300ft, a journey that can take several hours.

“Imagine the tremendous inefficiency if you weren’t perfectly ready with everything you needed when you got up there. “You don’t want to get all the way and not have the right bulb,” he says, only half-smiling. You have to be perfectly ready to execute because you’re about to spend four hours getting to a destination.”

I wrap up the interview by asking Scott what inspires him to do what he does?

He lists the variety of industries that they serve, clearly enjoying the different experiences this brings.

However, he finishes – unsurprisingly, as is the ServiceMax ethos – by bringing it back to the engineer.

“I think the field-service technician is an underserved, individual skill,” he says. So, perhaps serving, literally, millions of technicians is part of what drives me.”

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Scott Berg is CEO of ServiceMax

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The Field Service Podcast returns for series three with a brand new host Mark Glover who speaks to Oneserve's CEO Chris Proctor. 

in this edition of the podcast fieldservicenews.com Deputy Editor, Mark Glover talks to the ever insightful and engaging Chris Proctor, CEO with Oneserve where they discuss why robots won't be taking over field service operations (just yet) and how OK should no longer be good enough for field service companies that want to excel.

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