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Paul Adams of Solarvista looks at one of the most important, yet often mis-managed areas of field service, inventory management...

Leading edge practitioners have long recognised that effective visible inventory management and stock control are very different from simple inventory reduction. As a result of a sophisticated inventory management system, a world class cost-effective service operation can differentiate itself from the competition, lower costs and drive up customer satisfaction.

There is continued pressure for service to produce the right part in the right place at the right time and to do so at the lowest possible cost to the business. Consequently this effective inventory management has become a fundamental issue in achieving the right level of customer service and paramount to competing effectively in a fiercely competitive market.

 

As the true value of accurate and effective inventory management becomes apparent however, many companies have realised that a totally effective logistics operation is difficult to establish without the proper mechanisms in place.

The right approach.

The traditional tools and skills are struggling in some businesses to meet the service level demands of customers; with the financial imperatives faced by all businesses, more must inevitably be done with less.

One of the most important factors when considering managing your business’s inventory is to know how to achieve equilibrium between having enough inventory and yet not having too much.

Inventory is an expensive part of any business and not just accounting for the purchase cost but all other associated costs such as storage, handling and insurance. Reducing stock also reduces the risk of damage, obsolescence, theft and deterioration, which could potentially become expensive.

By ensuring that the business has a fully competent system that can order appropriate quantities required for specific jobs, it is therefore reducing these costs as well as the risks associated with carrying surplus stock.

Technology, technology…

Operational strategies supported by effective technology solutions, processes and infrastructure will allow the service organisation to deliver cost efficiently, while improving margins and increasing the resilience of the operation to face up to any potential market difficulties. Offering optimum levels of service and providing competitively priced services will position the business to take advantage of upturns in the market. The business should be able to live up to the promises made on its behalf, and deliver cost-effectively increasing customer satisfaction, retention and margins.

Normally the challenge to achieving this type of operating solution is that most service companies are working within an existing infrastructure where they are continually changing “on the run” to keep up with the shifting environment. Using a fully integrated service management solution enables a business to create an infrastructure that is designed to be able to accommodate continual refinement, and able to keep up with the shifting environment, at times even anticipating it to allow positioning ahead of the competition.

 

The improved use of communications should be seen by the business and customers as a positive move to provide better information about customer needs and requirements to both. The target is to minimise the fixed cost element of the operation keeping it variable where possible minimising overheads and creating high flexibility to deliver customer satisfaction.

Conclusion

Through systems integration the business is able to support the customer requirements by understanding customer requirements and providing support across the whole operation.

The ability to out-do competitors and sell cost effective solutions to customers requires differentiators, and these will come from an integrated systems solution enabling the business to have in-depth knowledge of customer requirements provided by top quality staff throughout an effective operation supported by a fully integrated technology solution.

There are a number of inventory management systems, although it is worth conducting some research and being sure to choose a package that is right for your business; the benefits of such a system will far outweigh the costs.

 

“Effective inventory management will give businesses in any industry a distinct competitive advantage over their competitors.” Chris Welsh, Solarvista

 

 

 

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The great BYOD debate is one that has been raging in field service for some time and it shows no sign of abating. Here Paul Adams of Solarvista takes a look at both sides of the discussion... 

The BYOD (“Bring Your Own Device”) debate is one that has received much coverage in recent months with some in the service sector as well as other industries arguing that BYOD is the only way forward for businesses looking to compete effectively and offer the most efficient customer service and increased employee satisfaction. But what is BYOD? What is the impact on the business, the workers, and the customers?

A complete move to BYOD is not going to be right for every business in every service sector, but a lot of businesses may already be partaking in some kind of BYOD scheme without even realising. For example, if employees have access to company emails on their personal mobile phone or tablet or another device then this is, in effect, BYOD. In fact research has found that globally 60% of full-time employees use BYOD to some extent. (Gabriel, 2013)

So what actually is BYOD?

Simply, “Bring Your Own Device” refers to employees having the ability to connect their own technical devices such as smart phones, laptops and tablets to the company’s network instead of using a device owned by the company. Recent years have seen an influx of workers bringing their own personal devices into their work environment and using them in their everyday jobs (Millard, 2011). In fact, 95% of employees have used their own device in work (Gens et al, 2013) and the majority already use their own personal device for a variety of work-related tasks, including communication, content creation and admin (Ellis et al, 2012).

What are the advantages and disadvantages?

There are a number of advantages to BYOD for both the user of the device and the company employing that user. However, the other side of the debate – the potential pitfalls that a company may face because of BYOD – tend to be less obvious. Below are some examples, but not an exhaustive list, both from the user and business perspective.

Advantages

• Personal choice
• Better work life balance
• Improved productivity
• No cost for equipment
• Decreased support and training costs

Disadvantages

• Financial responsibility
• “Always available”
• Loss, theft or damage
• Information and network security
• Increased support costs

[quote]58% of IT security and audit experts view employee-owned devices as a security risk to the enterprise.

 

Conclusion

BYOD represents the tipping point from corporate-led IT to consumer-driven IT; corporate IT now significantly lags behind the consumer market (Millard, 2011) and this has had a dramatic effect on the desire of employees to use their own devices at work. It is a trend that is set to continue throughout 2014 and beyond.

Over the last couple of years, these devices have become integrated into everyday life for most people as result of the ‘always on’ nature of social media and the 24/7 online world. With the lightning speed at which technology is progressing it is maybe neither cost-effective nor practical for businesses to update their employees’ technological devices as often as both the company and the employee might wish. Therefore, BYOD has become the natural solution to this problem.

However, there are a number of key considerations when implementing any kind of BYOD scheme in the workplace. Most notably these are around security; of your company’s data and networks, of access to your systems and around confidentiality. The use of industrial-strength security approaches, such as Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory, is important to deliver this with confidence.

[quote]One size increasingly doesn’t fit all in terms of tools and technologies for work. The challenge is for the IT department to ensure their business is secure.

 

Also, there are a number of functionality and cost implications worth noting. If you need particular functionality from your devices that is only available on expensive corporate hardware, then BYOD may not even be applicable at the moment. Here at Solarvista, our new line of cross-device mobile apps offers a good feature set but it will be mid-2015 before the sheer volume of functionality is available on all platforms. There are big challenges ahead in ensuring the business remains secure whilst also adopting working methods that are becoming ever more prevalent and popular. It is important to know that BYOD, according to the experts, isn’t going anywhere. Therefore there should be no rush to implement it without giving proper consideration to all the ways it will affect your business, your employees and ultimately your customers.

Paul Adams, Marketing and development manager at Solarvista looks at why no two field service companies are ever quite the same and what that means when choosing service management software...

 'At Solarvista, we have implemented hundreds of service management and workforce mobilisation systems over the years. And the biggest thing we have learned over that time is that everyone in service management does everything differently… even in the same industry sectors!

This issue became quite a big problem for us. We’d be approached by a prospective user in the same industry sector as current customers (they were often referred to us by them) and we’d think, “Great, we have a service management solution off the shelf for you”. Then, we’d find out that they did just about everything differently! Ouch.

We’d pitch modifications that required the use of developers going into the core product and making changes to meet those needs. In itself, quite a workable proposition and we’d done this successfully for many years. But as we grew, managing this code change became more costly to us, and sometimes to the customer. And it’s fair to say that developers don’t come cheap.

The ‘gaps’ that we normally address with specific modifications or code usually are categorised as:

1. Missing functionality
2. Integration to legacy systems
3. Logic or business logic modifications/additions

 

To our customers, these gaps needed to be filled to ensure a successful, efficient solution was implemented. But, deep down, it often felt risky to them… they couldn’t see what they were getting until the latter stages of the project, when maximum resource exposure occurred. It doesn’t matter how good we are as developers, it’s only natural to feel anxious about such risks.

We needed to do something that enabled us to address the (mostly) totally different needs of each customer without resorting to changing or modifying our product.

I’ve written in previous articles about our R&D effort in cloud based services and some of the answers came as a result of this research. In cloud systems, one of the key cost reduction drivers is “one version of software for all customers”. But we knew that this was contra to what service management systems need. After some deep thinking by our best developers, we managed to find a solution.

Firstly, we re-architected many parts of our software to offer, what we call, Extensibility. This means that we can add completely new client-side features, 100% integrated with the core product, without needing to modify a single line of the underlying product code. In other words, one version of software BUT with new functionality added specifically for the customer needs, which operates as if it’s part of the existing product (the user wouldn’t realise). Not only that, the feature can be added in (literally) hours or days (not weeks) and with no requirement to regression test the underlying product. This enabled us to address Missing Functionality and Business Logic Change issues.

This didn’t solve the problem of connecting to ever increasing legacy and partner systems however. Often we would need to read customer data from a corporate system, or update a third-party system of a partner company. In fact, we often built 30+ interfaces in one system! How could we do this without needing expensive development?

The answer came again from our R&D into cloud architecture. We thought about power supply adapters and how they could be “plugged” together to achieve a whole unit. From this we built something we call a Dynamic Adapter operating via our Service Bus system that allows us to connect as many systems together without needing to code a single line. Once again, one version of software, but implemented doing very (very) different things.

The results have been impressive. In fact, we have recently addressed the service management needs of a very famous coffee shop company using Extensibility and Bus/Adapter technology alone without needing any core changes to our products. Another, in the automotive sector, that had pulled out of a service management project with a competitor, has had 35 ‘gaps’ filled with this same technology.

Service management software is often standard. But this doesn’t mean you cannot have exactly what you want.