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Mark Homer, Managing Partner, Field Service Associates, interviewed Mr Robert Smith MBA, Psychotherapist and Specialist in Clinical Psychology within Organisations on how we can look after service engineers and technicians' wellbeing during these challenging times.

In the somewhat crazy times that we are all living in, did you know that losing your sense of humour could well be an early sign of stress!

There are hundreds of thousands of service engineers and technicians supported by their colleagues, management and supply chain who continue to maintain, support the fabric of the critical infrastructure in our world. Behind every laboratory, hospital and utility are our dependable service hero’s. Yet are we doing enough preventive maintenance support to look after these professional’s wellbeing? Mental health problems, in particular stress, are affecting many service leaders. For some leaders, it becomes a critical illness. Field Service News investigates this topic.

My name is Mark Homer, Managing Partner, Field Service Associates. I have been asked by Field Service News to talk to Mr Robert Smith MBA, Psychotherapist and Specialist in Clinical Psychology within Organisations. I have known Robert Smith for several years. It was thirty plus years ago we first met at a communications training event, “Meet the Press”. Robert was my coach and mentor, I owe him for teaching me the art of communication, influencing and persuasion. What follows is our conversation on a topic that I think is impacting many service leaders today.

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Mark Homer: Mr Robert Smith, can I ask you to introduce yourself to our readers?

Robert Smith: Hello from snowy Scotland, and I'm Robert Smith. As Mark has already said, I've been in the people development business for most of my career. I started off working with professionals and then developing managers and leaders, but it's always been about people. I was kind of taken as being an organisation psychologist meaning everybody thought I knew about clinical psychology, which I do now. A regular scenario for me, was people coming up to me on courses and saying, “Robert, you know about people. Can I have a private word with you I need some advice.” If I could use a professional expression, I was quite worried I might (suggested ‘screw people up’) somebody up in the process of answering because messing around with people's brains when you don't know anything about it can be dangerous. So, I started formal education and training, developing my career within the Mental Health spectrum. I have had a brilliant and fascinating time working in hundreds of countries mentoring thousands of professionals. Over the years I have worked with many engineers and people in the service and IT industries. Our discussion topic today is extremely relevant.

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Mark Homer: The majority of Field Service News readers are in the service sector. Many are delivering services and managing corporate service organisations with hundreds of field technicians and engineers maintaining critical equipment. In the present Covid crisis, engineers and technicians are maintaining critical equipment in hospitals and laboratories. They have all got the normal working day pressures plus the new additional and extra complications that COVID has introduced. The topic of our conversation today is corporate mental health. I'm keen to understand from your perspective if you have seen an upturn in referrals and to ask what your advice would be to field service leaders at present?

Robert Smith:  My interest has been over the last few years to focus on Corporate Mental Health because it is becoming critical for every organisation. A report produced by Deloitte and Mind (the mental health charity) that was commissioned by the UK Government studies mental health and the corporate world. It was published in 2019 and covered the period between 2016 and 2019. The loss to the corporate world, because of poor mental health, not serious mental health, increased by 16%. It was recognised as a real problem before COVID came in. The amount of money they estimate that was lost to corporations in 2019 was forty-five billion pounds. This is an astonishing figure. It varies in the different industries on how much is lost, but typically due to poor mental health, in the services sector it is probably the equivalent to two thousand pounds (£2,000) per person. You can do the math yourself to work out how much that would cost your organisation. The amount of money that has been measured as lost is huge. Now that was in 2019. This is 2021. I can't imagine what the numbers are going to be for last year. There's another number I need to tell you about. The World Health Organisation predicted in 2019 that the leading disease burden globally in 2030 will be depression. This is frightening. If you look at the numbers of suicides in the UK, in the last three months this has gone up by 25%. There is enormous pressure on people, but people tend to sweep it under the carpet and ignore mental health problems. I saw on the news the other night that National Health were saying that they don’t have the mental health facilities to support their staff. I think that the onus has got to come onto organisations to look after their staff. Now what we're after is improving mental well-being and mental resilience, so that people can do their job, be successful and keep the company's operations running smoothly and growing.

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Mark Homer: Service leaders are very much used to running a deskless workforce; lots of engineers and technicians are on the road. In the current crisis, many back-office and supporting allied functions that were traditionally office-based are now working from home. Numerous organisations are running 24x7 operations. We are hearing of increasing break-fix work and Preventative Maintenance backlog of work because a lot of routine work in the early stages of the Covid crisis was deferred. A traditionally difficult job now also has the added mix of this deferment work. Add the new Brexit paperwork, which is in some cases complicating or delaying some supply chains. Then the added pressure of people falling ill, isolating or safeguarding. What signs should a service leader, service manager and colleagues who are supporting each other lookout for? What are the typical symptoms you should be aware of and what would your advice be?

Robert Smith: Let me just pick up what you're saying there. What's happened to the engineering world has happened in the mental health world as well. Because what has happened is that people have spent a lot of time fixing things, but not maintaining them. You need to maintain things to be able to make sure that you don't have to get into the serious end of things. I've spoken to many engineers about what the pressures are and one of the great pressures, and one of the reasons that their levels of stress have gone up, is that they're not doing the job that they've signed up to do but they're doing Red Alert work. Red Alert work included emergency and stand-by work and critical cover. It's causing a lot of problems for people because if you're on Red Alert all the time you are ready to fight the good fight at any time, and that drains your energy level dead.

The whole process is very similar to an engine of sorts. The human condition (our engine), it is about making sure that you maintain things because if you don't maintain things, then what happens is, things go wrong. You need to do something to keep it at the positive end of mental health.

Now, what do you need to look for. As I am sure you already know, engineers have got a good sense of humour. One of the quickest ways to identify that engineers are under stress is that their sense of humour has gone out of the window. I think this is true of most people, but service engineers usually have a very good wry sense of humour. Being able to notice that this is going or is lost in an engineer is a big sign that they are struggling.

 

"80% of the workforce turn up with their arms and their legs. 15% turn up with their arms and their legs and their brain. Only 5% turned up with their legs, arms, brain and heart..."

 

For a service manager, one of the first things to recognise is start with self.

Self-First, because there is a new thing that seems to come up, which is a bit of a strange thing which is called imposter syndrome. It's like you're under a great deal of pressure because you don't think you've got the skills or the capabilities that everybody else thinks you have. You are under personal stress because you feel as though you're inadequate. Yet you have to keep up a brave front and one of the quickest ways you know about there being a potential issue is that as a manager and a leader, you get disturbed sleep. That you wake up in the middle of the night, and you haven't left work, it's still going on.

The other thing that you could recognise maybe in yourself, and in staff as well, is called presenteeism, which is about being at work and working longer hours, but not actually being productive. The London Business School did a survey on it. They stated that about 80% of the workforce turn up with their arms and their legs. 15% turn up with their arms and their legs and their brain. Only 5% turned up with their legs, arms, brain and heart. What does that mean well? Imagine being in a warehouse and there's a box in the middle of a warehouse. 80% of the staff would just walk around the box. 15% would actually probably pick the box up and do something with it. However, only 5% would probably think “Why is this box here? What is going on?” and solve the mystery of the box being in the middle of the warehouse. So, what is happening is that people are turning up to work but not really being present. They are there in body but not necessarily in mind and spirit. This a growing problem in the workforce. One good way of identifying that someone is under a lot of stress is if they are spending too long at work. Does that make sense?

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Mark Homer: Yes, because if someone is not present in mind it will take them longer to complete a task and be efficient at work. The result of this will be someone having to increase the workday to complete their daily tasks. I know a lot of people articulate that they're worried about something, for example you can sometimes spot people repeating themselves in the context of worrying. I like the point you're making about waking up early in the morning. How can we help worriers? How can we recognise people that are under stress?

Robert Smith: It is a vicious circle. So, you're spending longer at work. You're going home but you are worried or thinking about work, meaning you're not actually leaving work. Plus, you are not sleeping well because you are stressed. Therefore, what happens is you come in tired. The next day you are not being effective and efficient meaning you worry causing the cycle to repeat.

We need to do something to train people to be able to sharpen their focus and their concentration so that they can get things done. Interestingly enough there's been some fabulous discoveries in neuroscience in recent years, the way that the nerves work for the fight and flight process, you can train people to use that. There are methods that you can use. That's part of what we do in our training is we teach people how to adapt your nervous system, in a way to be positive rather than negative because 95% of our behaviour is driven unconsciously, we don't think about it. Consider the way we breathe we do not think about it. For example, your heartbeats you don’t think about making sure your heart is beating or controlling the beats. If I raise my arm. I don't have to think about it, it just does it. If I had to do it consciously, that would be one large task having to think about all the muscles in the arm to make the arm raise. I have no idea how many muscles are even in an arm! It is important to recognise that most of our behaviour is driven by the unconscious, which most of the time is great because we don't have to think about it. When you are stressed, then your body automatically reacts in a certain way. The unconscious mind is making your body believed that a Sabre-toothed tiger is chasing you. However, there isn’t but that’s what your body thinks. How do you then calm that down, so that you can be running the bus rather than the bus running you? How can we control our bodies reaction? We've got to kick into action the 5% of the conscious mind that we can use to control the unconscious mind, which is running the rest of the body and telling you it's stressful. It all very interesting.

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Mark Homer: Would you say that there's typically not a huge amount of leadership management training in this area. For example, a lack of training on active listening skills, or the ability to develop techniques to ask good questions to discover the state of an employee’s mental health?

Robert Smith: Brilliant question. Let’s consider the communication. So, in rough figures about 55% of communication is the visual part. We've gone into doing more zoom meetings these days, which of course, doesn't actually give you visual because we only see head and shoulders. 38% is the qualities of the voice. Finally, you've got the words that people are using. When somebody video phones in to talk to you, you're missing half of the communication. So, the manager has to listen for what is different. For many years, whenever I phoned this one person I coached and I said, “how are you today?” he would always reply saying he was fine. I would say, sometimes “No you're not”. He asked me how I knew that he wasn’t fine. I said well just listening to your tone of voice I can tell you are not okay. It doesn't take a great deal of training to be able to understand the difference in people's voice tone. Now that starts another conversation, which comes back to answering your question. For managers, when they listen to somebody and say ‘how has it been today or this week’ they need to pick up the tone of the employee. If the engineer’s tone is low or down, then the manager can say “You're saying that you are fine and, is that true? What's really going on?”. The fact that you've taken the trouble to notice that they're not their normal chirpy self, then they will react to this. They might share their problems or stresses or worries with you. You are not just walking through the process of saying hello, how are you because we do that all the time - don’t we? it's just the social norm, but to take that further and listen with care and ask, genuinely what's going on because “you don't sound as though you're fine”. Now you'll find that people will react to that.

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Mark Homer: If I'm running a service organisation I might have potentially up to 1000 people in my organisation, is there anything as a service leader that I can start addressing now? Or can I introduce some form of training or regular check-ins?

Robert Smith: Okay, so the quick answer is you get us to come in and we'll spend time with you, and we'll design something because we don't do stuff that is off the shelf or the same for everybody because different organisations have different requirements. But there are things that you can do that are relatively simple and will help people. There needs to be a campaign of being able ‘self-maintenance’. The truth is you have got to take ownership of your mental health, that needs to be modelled from the top, that people have seen that they're doing things. So, there may become a need to have some sort of dialogue from the top through an organisation of what things can you do, I mean, simple things like having a walk somewhere during the day. If you have a brisk walk for 20 minutes, three times a week, enough to make your heart go a little bit faster not too fast, that has a profound positive effect on your mental health, because that stimulates the mirror neurons in the brain. One of the most effective, if not the most effective, way of changing your emotional state is breathing. When you're stressed, your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure goes up, you get clammy hands, and you can start getting a bit shaky. Your breathing changes and becomes quicker. Now what you need to do is deliberately use your conscious ability to change your breathing. By changing your breathing, you can control the nervous system and calm it down. The mind and body, which are interlinked, can be forced to calm down. Would you like to know how to do that?

Mark Homer: Yes, this sounds like an amazing technique.

Robert Smith: This technique does need discipline but it's something that can be done. If you think about it. For example, I've just got out of an irritating service customer (client) and I've got back in my van and I'm feeling frustrated. However, I cannot be frustrated or aggravated because I have got the drive off for next appointment. Yet, all you need to do is just two minutes and you can calm down.

 

"Meditation is another very good technique and the science on this is magnificent. Now meditation it can be done, relatively simply without travelling to the top of a faraway mountain..."

 

So, you'll breathe in one long breath in, for just hold it and then two more. Now let it out slowly while counting to six, but let it go out. Let it all the way out of the body. It is important to make sure you really empty your diaphragm . Now if you do that breathing exercise for two minutes that will bring down your stress levels. Now there are lots of techniques like this that you can master to make sure you are constantly maintaining your mental well-being. You can't get anybody else to do it.

Beginning with breathing exercise is a good way to start. Meditation is another very good technique and the science on this is magnificent. Now meditation it can be done, relatively simply without travelling to the top of a faraway mountain. We teach techniques from QiGong which of course is for the martial arts and is what you do before the battle. This is 3000 years old – this technique has got a very good track record! Before you go to battle you need to have a clear mind. It takes about 10 minutes to do, but you have guided meditations now. I would be very happy to share one of those with you and your readers. If your readers would like to send it in their email, we'll send it to them. They can share it amongst the staff, and it is a profoundly powerful way of becoming centred and back in your self again.

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Mark Homer: How would a corporate programme work?

Robert Smith: There are relatively short workshops that are spread over a few months. There are exercises both physical and mental because, you know, we're working as the mind and body. As I said that you know the process the neuro process that makes you stress can be reversed to make you relax, and we can teach you how to do that. We can teach how to control impulse mobile telephone activity. We each spend four hours according to Google, four hours a day on social media and email communications. Therefore, we teach you to control and have better control of your impulse, and how to use selective attention so you can deliberately have selective attention on things and lengthen the overall period of attention.

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Mark Homer: These workshops sound like a great way for service engineers to manage their stress. Robert, how would people get in touch with you?

Robert Smith: The best place to go is our web site [details are below for both contact and to obtain a meditation relaxation audio]

Mark Homer: Robert Smith, thank you very much been an absolute pleasure. The full interview has been recorded including links to other resources and can be found on the Field Service News Portal. I for one will be practising my breathing techniques and downloading the relaxation audio. I found the statistics that Robert shared quite shocking. I know for many; Mental Health is something we may take for granted but as I get older the more I come across friends and colleagues who talk about the impact mental health is having on their lives or family. I would recommend adding mental health in the context of health and welfare as a discussion item on your next service team meeting and actively listen to all the responses. Please do also try the beathing exercise before you turn the page.

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Robert Smith – Personal bio & contact details:

Corporate Mental Health Consultant

Robert has had an extraordinary career having received an MBA he went on to become a UKCP registered Psychotherapist adding Post Graduate Certificates in CBT and SFT and a Clinical Psychology Diploma. He is also a Master Trainer of NLP and Coaching. This powerful mix of business acumen and depth of psychology knowledge enabled him to design and deliver some of the most innovative Talent Development Programs in the world. So far, he has worked with people from 100+ countries, many different organisations and multi cultures. In some of those cultures Mental Resilience was necessary not only for work life but to stay alive. Robert and his team will stretch you, open your mind and transform you. All done in a no-nonsense practical way with even a dash of fun. But Robert will for sure, if you’re ready, prepare you for a new world.

Contact: info@lesleymackayassociates.com

Robert Smith LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-smith-6b94359/

• UKCP United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy
• CBT Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
• SFT Solution Focused Therapy
• NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming

Or contact:

Mark Homer, Managing Partner, Field Service Associates Limited, www.fsal.co.uk

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Further Reading:

• Read more about Managing the Mobile Workforce @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/managing-the-mobile-workforce
• Read more about Leadership and Strategy @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/leadership-and-strategy
• Read more about Staff Wellbeing @ www.fieldservicenews.com/staff-wellbeing
• Learn more about Field Service Associates Limited @ www.fsal.co.uk
• Read more articled by Mark Homer on Field Service News  @ www.fieldservicenews.com/mark+homer
• Connect with Mark Homer on LinkedIn @ www.linkedin.com/mark-homer/
• Connect with Robert Smith on LinkedIn @ www.linkedin.com/robert-smith/

The not-for-profit knowledge sharing group the Service Community, has announced their next event will hosted by GE Power at their new Stafford Location on the 16th October 2018...

The event will run from 11.00 – 16.00 and include a light lunch.

You can sign up by emailing us at info@service-community.uk

 

Agenda

 

• Meet 10.30 for 11.00 Start
• Welcome & Service in GE
  • Service Challenges in GE Power
• Creating Service focus in a successful product business - Ross Townsend – Business Manager Ishida
  • Ishida is already a successful packaging equipment business. Ross will share his experience of the challenges of developing advanced services in an environment where the product is king. We will have an opportunity to discuss what is working, but also what is not, so this should be a great conversation for those driving change in product orientated businesses
• Networking Lunch
• Selling Service Value - Leon Sijbers Service Director at GE Power
  • One of the biggest challenges of selling business is to identify and quantify the pain points in your customers. Leon is an expert in identifying these pain points and then selling value to close the service deal. He will share with us his own approach which he has developed over the past 10 years in service sales.  An excellent session for anyone developing a service sales team
• Buying Advanced Services and the relevance of a new Service Standard
  • This session will provide insights from one of the most sophisticated buyers of services such as a availability contracts, as to how services are bought, and why the recently published British Standard ‘Through-life engineering services – Adding business value through a common framework – Guide’ (PAS280) is a must read for all professionals involved in servitisation of industrial businesses.
• Networking break
• Assets & Service Data Gravity - Mark Homer: GE Digital
  • Vanson Bourne recently carried out a research programme on behalf of ‘ServiceMax from GE Digital’ aimed at understanding on the importance of service data in managing assets. Mark Homer will share the results and the insights learned.
• 16.00 Meeting Close

 

Field Service News will be in attendance to report from the event and we hope to see you there also!

Find out more about the Service Community @ www.service-community.uk

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Having been widely touted as a technology that wouldn’t just improve service delivery but would completely revolutionise the way we even approach field service operations the Internet of Things has rapidly become an ever-present discussion topic amongst field service companies - but has the IoT revolution finally happened or is it still just the realm of those at the leading edge of adoption?

We ask three experts to give us their opinions on IoT in field service...

What are the core benefits of IoT for field service organizations?

Mark Homer, Vice President Global Customer Transformation at ServiceMax from GE Digital: One of the biggest challenges in field service is having advanced warning, visibility and insight into the equipment assets configuration, operational health and state, verification of location – before turning up onsite.

IoT is extremely beneficial in this regard.

It can tell you all of the above, as well as its environment, its connected to an echo system its configuration – including factory settings and as installed, localized configurations, additions, configuration changes, software and firmware settings or modifications as it’s currently operating and maintained).

IoT can also provide you with the current maintenance build, MBOM history of what parts have been changed, swap-outs, inspections, prior faults, diagnostics and lubrication, wear and tear process flow counters etc.

Using connected field service, IoT enables field service organizations to see visibility to all these and many other operational aspects of the installed asset/equipment prior to an engineering visit.Using connected field service, IoT enables field service organizations to see visibility to all these and many other operational aspects of the installed asset/equipment prior to an engineering visit.

The ability to see an asset’s health, performance, usage, RCM data, and access to a unique digital twin of this physical asset are all now possible in the field.

This empowers predictive, condition-based maintenance, as well as saving time and money, increasing first-time fix rates and customer contract renewals, and decreasing costs, overheads and streamlining supply chain issues for service call outs.

Gary Brooks, CMO Syncron: With the Internet of Things (IoT) becoming more mainstream – the market is expected to reach $267B by 2020 – companies across industries and verticals are starting to prepare for the impact this game-changing technology will have on their business.

Leading manufacturers like Caterpillar are investing heavily in connected machines to allow equipment to pass information from one to another, ultimately pro-actively repairing equipment before it fails.

This shift in thinking from a reactive, break-fix service model to one focused on maximizing product uptime is a fundamental change to how manufacturers handle service today, and IoT is at the core. Major benefits of incorporating IoT data into field service include:

• Quicker resolutions. IoT data can provide more diagnostic information, so a technician can arrive to a job site and immediately know the steps necessary to make a repair. IoT can identify what part needs to be replaced, and trigger action to either pre-emptively replace the part before it fails, or take immediate action if downtime does occur. Using IoT data effectively ensures that technicians are equipped with the correct parts, and can make a repair on their first visit.
• Happy customers. Customers are happy when their equipment is up and running, and any unnecessary downtime leads to dissatisfaction and frustration. Service parts availability is the linchpin to any successful service organization, and IoT data can help service organizations better manage their service parts inventories to ensure downtime is rare or completely eliminated.
• Increased revenue. When technicians are stocked with the appropriate parts and are able to repair issues on the first time, quickly and correctly, not only are customers content, but technicians are able to make more visits to more customers each day – ultimately resulting in more business and ROI for the manufacturer.

Mark Brewer, Global Industry Director for Service Management, IFS: The Internet of Things (IoT) and so-called “digital twin” technologies are poised to have a huge impact on the service sector; reducing costs, maximizing data analytics, and extending the lifespan of products.

IoT allows field service organizations to become proactive and predictive by identifying equipment issues and mitigating the problem before it cascades into dreaded unplanned failureIoT allows field service organizations to become proactive and predictive by identifying equipment issues and mitigating the problem before it cascades into dreaded unplanned failure that impacts business performance and safety.

When embedded into the right field service management software, service organizations can analyze and visualize real-time operational data from connected machines and devices and automatically turn the information into immediate and predictive actions. This, in turn, delivers service level improvements and drives better business intelligence and flexibility.

Another core benefit of IoT for not only service organizations, but any asset-intensive company wanting to optimize their service offering is the ability of predictive maintenance. The Predictive Maintenance report forecasts a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for predictive maintenance of 39 percent over the time frame of 2016–2022, with annual technology spending reaching £7.96 billion by 2022.

Has IoT become prevalent amongst field service organizations as yet, or are those now utilizing IoT within field service delivery still leading edge? 

Mark Homer: It’s a hot topic. We see that most CSO are aware of IoT, and many prospects and customers are activating in IoT as well as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), participating in one or two pilot or POC projects.

As an industry many service technicians have been collecting data from machines for years, typically through interface cables (e.g. RS232, Bluetooth collection of binary OT data, or early telematics).

Many Technicians are also used to reading meters and process counters, sampling lubrications and collecting photographic and thermography imaging as part of their work order completing debrief process.

IoT makes this process real time.

Gary Brooks: While many manufacturers are collecting data from sensor-equipped products in the field, few are actually using it to improve their service operations.

As the cost of sensor-equipped parts decreases and more data becomes readily available, it will become more important than ever to invest in human capital and technology that support a service model focused on maximizing product uptime.

Companies that do this in the next 12 to 24 months will be equipped to succeed.

Mark Brewer: Whilst IoT solutions are not yet prevalent in the majority of field service organizations, those utilizing IoT solutions and rolling them out at scale will be the winners over the next few years. Sensors are increasing in sophistication and are transmitting increasing amounts of data. With IoT sensors, the asset or machine becomes “smart” and is placed at the centre, sending data back to the service centre and enabling diagnostics to determine issues that may arise in a day, week or months’ time.

It’s this predictability that will enable field service organizations to deliver next-level customer satisfaction.

However, any IoT driven business requires data acquisition (communications and networking), analytics and business software to work in unison.

The problem is that very few companies have all the skills in-house to do this on their own. As such, savvy field service organizations will look to seek out IoT experts and form partnerships with them to take their business to the next level.

What steps are needed to introduce IoT processes into a field service delivery workflow?

Mark Homer: I am a great fan of using IoT education kits that are widely available and brilliant for educating technicians through practical and fun training labs - for example, the GE Predix IOT kit which you can find @ http://fs-ne.ws/1CJ730iXfcT

Mark Brewer: Firstly, companies need to be careful of integrating IoT for IoT’s sake.

By 2020, more than seven billion business devices are expected to be connected, but smart tech does not always add value. Misuse can lead to security vulnerabilities, with the network chain becoming more exposed to cyber threats. Organizations, therefore, need to first consider the business case for IoT.

A lot of IoT solutions mostly focus on a single element of IoT; for example, connecting the devices, or big data analytics - rather than providing a complete end-to-end IoT solution.Once this is understood, companies must start small - ideally by trialling a proof of concept. Before globally rolling out IoT solutions as part of their business, organizations need to check that the equipment, gateways and sensors work; that they are capturing the right data, and that they have all of the correct business applications in place to make sense of that data.

Next up is choosing a best-in-breed software application that can be easily integrated from inception with enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, or whichever management software the business has implemented. It’s important that the solution is completely mappable to the back end, closing the loop from device to business application.

A lot of IoT solutions mostly focus on a single element of IoT; for example, connecting the devices, or big data analytics - rather than providing a complete end-to-end IoT solution.

Field Service organizations need solutions that make the critical connection between analytics and transactional applications, which turn analysis into action and then into value.

Is adoption of IoT essential for a field service company to remain competitive?

Mark Homer: Yes, obtaining more accurate data from your connected assets will provide deeper understanding and insight into how your customers use and operate the equipment and assets you provide and thus enable you to derive a clearer understanding as to the value of that provision to your customer and their end customer or the upstream or downstream supply chain.

By understanding the asset performance, availability, and its RCM (condition and status), the asset true through life cost (cost of the asset throughout its whole life and its ultimate replacement) the servicing costs of inspection, maintenance, breakdown in the event of unplanned downtime is all critical as it allows for future innovation to improve future profit, performance and efficiency of the assets and the workforce maintaining it.

Connected products are also able to provide R&D with amazing data to give deep visibility into how a customer truly uses the equipment you provide.

This, in turn, is assisting the product development lifecycle in designing easier to use and maintain products.

Gary Brooks: As more products are equipped with smart sensors and complete autonomy becomes a reality, it will be more important than ever to shift from a reactive, break-fix service model to one focused on maximizing product uptime, or preemptively repairing equipment before it ever fails.

The best way to achieve this is to leverage IoT data to ensure parts are pre-emptively replaced before they fail.

Manufacturers must reinvent their service organizations, adopting sophisticated solutions and new business processes to optimize service parts inventory levels and prices while maximizing product uptime, which not only leads to improvements in revenue, gross profits and operational efficiency but also the overall customer experience.

Mark Brewer: By 2020, around 25 percent of asset-intensive companies will adopt IoT and digital twins to optimize service.

Whilst this doesn’t seem tremendously high, with the general shift towards servitization and the demand from consumers to have an all-encompassing customer service experience, more and more organizations in industries like manufacturing and construction, and logistics companies, in general, will be utilizing IoT technologies to expand their service offerings.

IoT technologies have the potential to enable companies across all industries to measure aspects in a detail and quality that has never been possible before; empowering businesses with assets’ performance indicators.

Leveraging IoT solutions can help organizations measure essential key metrics, such as availability, reliability, maintainability, supportability, cost of ownership and end-result, allowing them to operate more like service industries.This enables companies to find the most profitable models - turning service into opportunity.

Leveraging IoT solutions can help organizations measure essential key metrics, such as availability, reliability, maintainability, supportability, cost of ownership and end-result, allowing them to operate more like service industries.

For example, previously, the manufacturer’s knowledge of a product stopped once it left the factory. But now, via the feedback made possible through IoT, manufacturers can start to learn the usage, behavior and performance of these products in the real world, and can even make engineering changes to improve them over time.

Another example is construction machine manufacturer Caterpillar. The company has been able to fit its equipment with smart sensors to measure tire pressure, temperature, oil levels, and so on. It is a win-win for customer and service organization alike; minimizing equipment downtime and enhancing product development and improving service efficiency.

The approach is said to have saved Caterpillar millions of dollars already.

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Digital Twins have a big role to play in field service management and will be essential for creating business intelligence writes Mark Homer at ServiceMax, a GE Digital Company

We often hear the phrase, ‘you cannot account for human error’ but that seems illogical in today’s connected world. We have the technology to not just account for human error but to eradicate it.

The Internet of Things with the proliferation of affordable and reliable sensors is changing the way in which we can view, manage, service and support technology, processes and any physical object. By mirroring a process, product or service into a virtual world, we can create environments in which machines can automatically analyse performance, warn of impending issues, identify existing or potential errors and even suggest part upgrades or changes to procedures to make them more efficient.

This is the digital twin idea. As a concept, it’s been around for a while (NASA used it on early space missions) but the emergence of IoT has made it a commercial reality. Digital twin eliminates guesswork from determining the best course of action to service critical physical assets, from engines to power turbines.

 

Easy access to this combination of deep knowledge and intelligence about your assets paves the road to wider optimisation and business transformation.

Digital twin technology spans across all industries where the value is in assets and more generally complex systems. Its ability to deliver early warnings, predictions, and optimisation is fairly universal. In time, I think we’ll see the concept of a digital twin to be applied to human beings as well, playing a significant role in healthcare.

However just mirroring is not enough. If the aim is to achieve zero downtime or at the very least, overall insight into on-going product and process performance, the digital twin has to be analysed and that analysis has to feed other functions.

What the digital twin produces, when bundling data with intelligence, is a view of each asset’s history and its potential future performance.

This continuum of information leads to early warnings, predictions, ideas for optimisation, and most importantly a plan of action to keep assets in service longer will, sending commands to machines in response to those forecasts.

In other words, if you close the loop, with data and predictions, you can act directly on the asset itself. That’s where Asset Performance Management and Field Service Management are changing the way service operations run.

 

By combining APM with FSM tools, the digital twin idea is transformed into an intelligent agent. Businesses have, for the first time, a complete suite of intelligence at their fingertips, to understand potential equipment issues, and pre-empt them or act upon them quickly and efficiently with the correct tools and parts, should machinery need fixing.

This means field service is managed more efficiently, reducing costs and ensuring minimum downtime as engineers attend jobs with a full understanding of the problem, the right parts to hand and a complete knowledge of how to fix it.

This is the shift from an often blind and reactive approach to fixing broken products and services to a predictive model that should eliminate waste, reduce costs, downtime and importantly human error.

The digital twin idea has additional benefits too, as it can use historical data and current data to provide a complete picture of a particular asset, its past performance, what it should be achieving now and its likely end of life date, when it would be predicted to be less efficient.

 

This sort of knowledge is gold dust for product designers and manufacturers as it can feed back accurately, which parts work well and where machines would need improving or upgrading.

Combined with the knowledge of field service professionals this makes for a powerful tool for upselling products and services to customers. Any new ideas or enhancements can be fully supported with data analysis and perhaps even simulations to illustrate how new parts and functions would improve performance.

It offers justification and also accountability and should cut through irrelevant or unsuitable product or service ideas.

It’s transforming service at the edge by bringing together all the facets that make businesses and machines tick - and goes a long way to creating a world of zero unplanned downtime.

 

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A new study from Vanson Bourne, sponsored by ServiceMax, from GE Digital, the leading provider of field service management solutions, has found that 75% of IT decision makers believe that machines will receive better, preventative healthcare than human beings by 2020.

Leaders surveyed believe advancements in machines having the ability to predict failure, take preventative measures or self-healing actions are widely viewed as beneficial to a company’s bottom line.

For example:

• 46% of respondents say machines requesting help themselves will help their company better manage their equipment assets.
• 39% of respondents say predictive maintenance would help better manage asset equipment.
• 44% of respondents say digital twin with predictive maintenance and artificial intelligence would help prevent major failures.
• 69% of IT leaders surveyed say they would like their own personal digital twin to help themselves and medical professionals regulate their health in non-invasive ways by taking early action and preventative measures.[/unordered_list]

The new study, “After The Fall: Cost, Causes and Consequences of Unplanned Downtime,”  surveyed 450 field service and IT decision makers in the UK, US, France and Germany across the manufacturing, medical, oil and gas, energy and utilities, telecoms, distribution, logistics and transport sectors, among others.

According to Gartner, by 2020, 10% of emergency field service work will be both triggered and scheduled by artificial intelligence. The new study highlights the impact of new technology like artificial intelligence, analytics, and use of a digital twin on how we monitor industrial machines to predict when a piece of equipment will fail and what preventative service maintenance is required.

“In the same way that organisations want zero unplanned downtime with their equipment assets to avoid expensive loss of production or service, we want to mitigate our own human ‘outages’,” said Mark Homer, Vice President Global Customer Transformation for ServiceMax, from GE Digital. “This holistic view of how something is operating – whether it’s a person, an equipment plant or an individual component in a machine – has historically been disjointed and only visible when something goes wrong.

 

Today, organisations are now acutely aware of the value of a real-time view on the health and performance of their critical assets, as well as predictive analytics on when preventative maintenance or intervention is required, and access to time series data, service history and optimisation demands. The research found that more than half of companies are planning to invest in a digital twin in the next three years.

The value of these digital insights in an industrial context is starting to generate interest in preventative maintenance in a human context.”

A copy of the Vanson Bourne Whitepaper and Executive Summary, can be downloaded here

 

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In the Big Discussion we take one topic, bring together three leading experts on that topic and put four key questions to them across four weeks to help us better understand its potential impact on the field service sector...

This time around we turn to a brand new topic which is the Internet of Things and our experts are Paul Whitelam, ClickSoftware, Mark Homer, ServiceMax from GE Digital and Mark Brewer, IFS...

The first question of this topic was "Just how big is the potential impact of IoT on Field Service?"  whilst the second answered was "Is IoT now making the shift from early adoption to mass adoption amongst field service companies?" and last week the questions was "What are the challenges of implementing an IoT strategy within field service operation?

And now the final question on this topic

 

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Question Four: Are field service companies who are not adopting IoT at risk of becoming non- competitive?

The urgency around IoT adoption varies from one vertical industry to the next, but the cost of service delivery and need for greater visibility are universal concerns. The old business adage “you manage what you measure” certainly applies.

If your competitors have a level of insight that enables them to increase the number of jobs per technician per day or reduce critical failures by 90% thanks to preventative measure, the business benefits are powerful and quantifiable.

Increased efficiency and productivity, and slashing the cost of missed SLA penalties, that has direct impact on customer satisfaction and profitability. IoT can deliver exactly these types of insights and business outcomes, and only service organisations that invest in IoT capabilities will reap these rewards.

 

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In a word, yes. This is much more than just a ‘nice to have’ scenario. In most industries, margins are too thin and competition is too fierce to simply guesstimate how much capacity a piece of equipment can cope with, and it seems positively archaic to run a reactive break/fix service mentality in today’s connected age.

Industrial downtime is no joke. Unplanned downtime in just about every industry has a significant impact.

The Aberdeen Group last year reported that the cost of downtime across industries went up to $260,000 per hour on average between 2014 and 2016. That’s a huge jump with a considerable hit on any business.

On top of that, most companies don’t know how best to optimise uptime availability in different conditions, such as managing volatility, meeting peak demand or managing performance in extreme conditions. If your competitors are addressing this problem and you’re not, you’re surrendering market share. Digital disruption is set to wipe out 40% of the Fortune 500 companies in the next 10 years and the Industrial Internet will play a big part in that disruption, as well as the survival and success of companies.

The question isn’t why would you, but rather why wouldn’t you?

 

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Definitely!

The potential gains in cost efficiency and improved service offerings are tremendous. IoT has the potential to disrupt entire industries. Organisations that aren’t educating themselves on the potential, road mapping an IoT strategy, or structuring their organisation to be IoT-ready may not see the risk now but they will definitely be laggards in 5-10 years.

IDC predicts that the installed base of IoT endpoints will grow to more than 30 billion by the end of the decade from just less than 13 billion units in 2015.

As a consequence, machine-generated data will comprise an increasing share of stored data: by 2020, 10 percent of the 44 zettabyte digital universe will originate from IoT devices.

In five years, there will be seven times more IoT data than there is today.

 

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Look out of the next topic in our Big Discussion series coming soon... 

 

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In the Big Discussion we take one topic, bring together three leading experts on that topic and put four key questions to them across four weeks to help us better understand its potential impact on the field service sector...

This time around we turn to a brand new topic which is the Internet of Things and our experts are Paul Whitelam, ClickSoftware, Mark Homer, ServiceMax from GE Digital and Mark Brewer, IFS...

The first question of this topic was "Just how big is the potential impact of IoT on Field Service?"  whilst the second answered was "Is IoT now making the shift from early adoption to mass adoption amongst field service companies?"

So let's move onto the third question of the topic...

 

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Question Three: What are the challenges of implementing an IoT strategy within field service operation?

One of the biggest challenges of marrying IoT and field service is developing the technological infrastructure to capture, process, and respond to the data collected by IoT-enabled assets. Turning voluminous data into business intelligence will require service organisations to completely rethink their operations.

If a machine can tell you an uncomplicated part needs replacement, will you be able to dispatch a junior (and therefore less expensive) resource to provide maintenance; or simply deliver the part to the customer by drone? Will you be able to do so without human intervention? Will you be able to use IoT data to optimise scheduling preventive maintenance while reserving capacity for emergency work?

In order to fully realise the benefits of IoT, field service organisations will need to incorporate artificial intelligence driven service automation solutions that integrate with their other systems. IT support will be increasingly important, as well as expertise in data science.

 

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There are still some hurdles to overcome in the wider context, such as security, data storage, infrastructure demands, and the knock-on effects across a company’s wider IT systems. But many of the data protection issues and cyber threats have been addressed by the development of more sophisticated edge computing devices and edge to Cloud technologies, as well as putting some of intelligence and logic (AI) power and computing next to the critical asset. Very few companies have the expertise in-house required to protect industrial data, so you should engage data science cyber security specialists where it makes sense.

There’s also the question of who in a company can best lead the digital charge. Companies need a person or team that can bridge the gap between IT, service and operations so that all competing priorities are met. It’s an easier issue for larger companies to address as they have a greater breadth of talent pool and a wider range of skills.

I also think mindset can be an inhibitor or an accelerator. Most people can think big, but the potential of the Industrial Internet means you can think bigger. You’ve got to sit down and look of the art of the possible and then map a digital strategy to it. There’s lots of help available in this area, such as dedicated foundries, maturity assessments et al, but people don’t know they exist.

 

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Like many things, it depends:

If equipment is high-value and expected to have a long life, you need to retrofit them with sensors.

Those sensors may be 3rd-party.

Many facilities, even today, have limited bandwidth available to them. This can make transmitting data from many sources challenging.

For third-party service providers there’s the question of data ownership. Who owns information collected about how equipment is being used and is performing? The service provider? The OEM? The customer?

Fundamentally, the biggest challenge with adopting and implementing IoT is having the right structure and systems in place to maximise its value. It doesn’t serves an organisation to have the ability to collect data from assets if that data is not processed and actioned in real-time.

Organisations need business process intelligence, optimised field service management, and real-time visibility to truly maximise the potential of IoT.

 

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Next weeks the final question of this topic: Are field service companies who are not adopting IoT at risk of becoming non- competitive?

 

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In the Big Discussion we take one topic, bring together three leading experts on that topic and put four key questions to them across four weeks to help us better understand its potential impact on the field service sector...

This time around we turn to a brand new topic which is the Internet of Things and our experts are Paul Whitelam, ClickSoftware, Mark Homer, ServiceMax from GE Digital and Mark Brewer, IFS...

The first question of this topic was "Just how big is the potential impact of IoT on Field Service?" 

And onto this week's question...

 

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Question Two: Is IoT now making the shift from early adoption to mass adoption amongst field service companies?

Although IoT in field service is still relatively new, early adopters like manufacturers of capital equipment are approaching greater maturity. They’re leapfrogging other industries in terms of first-time fix rates and overall operational efficiency.

Other industries are beginning to recognise the potential benefits, and we’re seeing conversations around IoT shift from wide-eyed wonder to practical next steps. Utility and telecommunications providers are well positioned to benefit by making the infrastructure they maintain smarter and better connected. Consumer-facing organisations can better empower customers to participate in diagnosing and repairing problems.

The Smart Meter initiative in the UK is a perfect example where mass adoption by consumers will force manufacturers to advance. A couple years ago IoT in service was largely seen as tomorrow’s problem.

Today service providers are eager to take the next step.

 

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IoT hasn’t reached mass adoption in any market just yet, but certainly field service is seen as the ‘killer app’ for businesses. And it’s making fast progress.

Senior management are realising that service is the hidden gem within their organisations, largely due to the untapped potential of the Industrial Internet, and it’s something we’re seeing in our own global customer base.

Fuelled by the shift to outcome-based service models, shrinking product margins, and globalisation, and the Industrial Internet, industry watchers have been predicting that service revenue will eventually eclipse product revenue. Smart, connected, optimised equipment assets are accelerating that shift.

As companies begin to properly monetise service with sensors at the edge, they have the opportunity to increase service revenues and margins further, providing an effective hedge in a downturn economy.

That’s why we’re seeing greater adoption and acceleration in this space.

 

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Yes. The concept of IoT and IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) isn’t a new one.

It has been around for more than 20 years. But now, thanks to advances in technology and digital transformation, it is at the forefront of business opportunity. There are many field service sectors that have already been working with sensors and IoT technology for a few years now, such as the medical industry (like the IFS customer Sysmex).

Over the next five years we will no doubt see the number of IoT implementations rise among field service organisations as the industry becomes regulated and more best-practice cases are publicised.

 

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Next weeks question: What are the challenges of implementing an IoT strategy within field service operation?

 

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In the Big Discussion we take one topic, bring together three leading experts on that topic and put four key questions to them across four weeks to help us better understand its potential impact on the field service sector...

This time around we turn to a brand new topic which is the Internet of Things and our experts are Paul Whitelam, ClickSoftware, Mark Homer, ServiceMax from GE Digital and Mark Brewer, IFS...

And so onto the first question on the topic...

 

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Question One: Just how big is the potential impact of IoT on Field Service?

The Internet of Things is already transforming field service. Service has traditionally been a reactive practice. Something breaks, a technician is dispatched to fix it, and sometimes the repair is successful the first time. IoT enabled devices provide ongoing visibility into the status of a piece of equipment, as well as a richer view of the severity and source of any issues, and the ability to make predictions based on this information.

The service organisation no longer waits for a panicked phone call from a customer. They can proactively maintain equipment, replace components before they break, and use an understanding of asset lifecycle and usage patterns to inform future product design.

Customers increasingly expect to pay for uptime instead of equipment, and define SLAs based on their business targets. Eventually, all service organisations will have to live up the expectation of seamless  service and minimised  disruptions.

 

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The potential of IoT – and more importantly IIoT (the Industrial Internet of Things) – is immense. So much so, that it’s making service a game changer, fundamentally changing how we optimise equipment and capital assets, and predict their maintenance and service requirements.

By harvesting and applying intelligence that previously would have been impossible to obtain, companies are seeing a major step change this area - that’s why more forward thinking companies are combining IoT-enabled field service management with asset performance management.

This is emerging as the real disruptor because for the first time, customers have meaningful performance and service intelligence at their fingertips to understand potential equipment issues, and pre-empt them or act upon them quickly and efficiently with the correct tools and parts.

It’s important to remember that prescription is equally as valuable as prediction - prescription to make adjustments or refine parameters to improve productivity or throughout, or keep something running to the next planned service outage. That’s one of the things that makes the Industrial Internet so powerful – you can do load balancing, and share the flow and volume across multiple appliances or machines using condition-based monitoring to switch machines in high volume usage areas when required.

 

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IoT has huge potential to transform field service organisations. The concept and technologies allows organisations to take data collected from remote sites and equipment to:

Gain better insights into the usage of equipment.

This will help determine when to perform optimal service. Rather than send technicians to sites on a schedule, you can send them only when you need to. For example, say you service a solar park. One of the main things that can lead to damage solar modules is wind. By remotely tracking the wind speeds, you can better estimate when to perform service.

Run a leaner service organisation.

One challenge service organisations encounter is that they’re reactive in nature. They respond to equipment failing. And without real-time information of equipment, when the equipment fails is unpredictable. This requires the organisations to maintain a fair amount of slack. Both within the inventory they manage, and the people that they’re made up of. Knowing when equipment will likely need service or when it will reach its end of life allows you to better plan.

Improve the competitiveness of your service offerings.

IoT, combined with machine learning, allows you to address problems before they occur. This results in higher availability of your equipment and lower service costs. You can pass this to your customers by improving your service terms and conditions. Higher SLA targets and compliance delivered at lower cost is a win-win all around.

 

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Next weeks question: Is IoT now making the shift from early adoption to mass adoption amongst field service companies?

 

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