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The UK Service Community is a group of professionals who are passionate about service and believe in sharing ideas and experiences in order to improve. It is a community in the true sense of the word in that there is no legal entity, no sponsors, no sales pitch, no exchange of money.

Yes, it is free and no-one gets paid! Members give their time, their expertise or facilities so that we have the opportunity to talk, share and learn from our peers who operate in a whole range of industry sectors.

The Service Community generally has two half-day meetings per year which are generally attended by between 30-50 professionals. Recently we have been at GE Power in Stafford, the Institute of Manufacturing at Cambridge University and at Konica Minolta’s London HQ. We have had speakers from small SME’s, to the largest and best of UK industrial businesses, including buyers of Advanced Services such as the Ministry of Defence.

Generally we run the meetings from 11-4pm, including lunch, with an opportunity to listen and discuss 4-5 topics plus lots of opportunities for informal discussions with your peers. The discussions range across 5 broad areas, so there is always something of interest:

 

• Service Sales & Customer Success
• Operational Improvement
• Achieving Transformation & Change
• Leveraging Technology to achieve growth
• Leadership in Service

 

With this informality, yet access to the very best industrial thinking, the discussions run deeper and more intimate than one usually might find at networking events. To get an idea of the topics we cover and the speakers, have a look at the Service Community website on www.service-community.uk

First started in 2012 the community has grown to over 240 members, despite losing the founder of the community Steve Downton to cancer. His philosophy has been taken forward by a loose collection of service professional, including a number of senior leaders from Pitney Bowes, Elekta and Fujitsu, as well as ourselves. The membership is extremely varied across a wide range of industries and includes practitioners, consultants and solution providers.

At our next event at Renishaw new HQ near Gloucestershire, we are taking the community to a new part of the country with an agenda that will be to promote discussion through smaller groups of people to discuss common problems in the industry.

As with any community, the energy comes from its membership, so we are always interested in new ideas, or people who want to get involved.

If you believe that talking with peers is one of the best ways to improve your performance, then you can register for our next event at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/uk-service-community-at-renishaw-tickets-52993610315

Or if you are interested in talking or even getting involved, please contact us at info@service-community.uk

 

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Places for the upcoming Service Community event which is being hosted by GE Power, are now becoming very limited...

The event will be hosted at Ge's state-of-the-art facility at Stafford on the 16th October from 11.00 to 16.00.

As one of the most sophisticated Buyers of Advanced services, Keith Rushton from the MOD will give unprecedented insight in how performance related services are purchased, and why the MOD has been so influential in developing the new BSI standard for Services. We have one of the best presentations on Selling Service Value  I have seen from Leon Sijbers of GE Power and Ross Townsend from Ishida will be sharing their Service Transformation story. Phil Newton from BT will share his experience of rolling out an Augmented Reality Solution to one of the largest Field Service Organisations in the UK. And finally, Mark Homer from GE Digital will share some research on the importance of Service Data in industrial businesses.

The Service Community creates discussions and insights that are far deeper than most conferences, due to the informal and intimate nature of our events.  This is because we are a community in the true sense of the word, run by volunteers, with no sponsors, no exchange of money, no legal entity no hidden agenda's, just real people talking about real things motivated by a desire to learn.

Please feel free to forward this information to colleagues who you think would be interested.  We look forward to seeing you in October and remember to register by sending an email to info@service-community.uk . We will then contact you to confirm registration and will send out the joining instructions nearer to the event.

 

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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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UK based non-profit knowledge sharing group the Service Community which Field Service News is proud to partner with has recently announced one of the most diverse events they have organised in the last couple of years.

The next Service Community event will be hosted by the Cambridge Service Alliance at the Institute for Manufacturing (a division of the University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering) on the 19th April 2018.

Being at one of the world’s leading service research organisations means that we hope to mix the very best in thought leadership, with practical hands-on experiences of transforming service businesses. Each discussion will be approximately 40 mins enabling you to discuss real issues with real people.  We are also very lucky to have a The Digital Manufacturing Tour, where you will have a chance to hear about the research initiatives that the IfM are undertaking on digitalisation in manufacturing.

In addition to a speaker from the CSA, we have leaders from MARS, Oracle and Fujifilm joining us to discuss and share experiences on how they have tackled some of their key service business challenges.

How to register

You can reserve your place by sending an email to info@service-community.uk. We will then contact you to confirm registration and will send out the joining instructions nearer to the event.

Please feel free to forward this information to colleagues who you think would be interested. We look forward to seeing you in April

Agenda for the 19th April 2018

12.00 - 13.00: Meet at the Institute of Manufacturing at Cambridge University
13.00: Nick Frank: Welcome

The Impact of Big Data and Machine Learning technologies on developing Customer Experience in manufacturing companies Dr Mohamed Zaki: Deputy Director of the Cambridge Service Alliance will introduce the work the Cambridge Service Alliance does and share recent research he has undertaken into Customer Experience development

Leading Service to a Trusted Advisor Culture:  Ashley Weller: UK Service Director at Mars drinks will share his own journey in driving sustainable cultural change

The Digital Manufacturing Tour

Coffee & Networking break

Real World Challenges of implementing Augmented Reality in Field Service Adil Kabel: Technical Support Manager, at Fuji Film responsible for EMEA 2nd line support for Wide Format Digital Printers will share his experiences of running two pilot projects in the Field Service organisation looking at 'glasses' and handheld augmented reality apps

Benefits and Challenges of Self Service models - Stephen Darkes Snr Process Analyst: Global Systems Remote Support at Oracle: Steve will give us some insights into the different Self-Service support models that Oracle have introduced to enhance customer satisfaction and make their business more cost-effective.  He will cover a range of models, from the use of community forums for Diagnosis and Resolution to the development of Customer Replaceable Units for hardware.  He will share his experiences of the range of benefits that self-service brings, as well as the challenges of implementation.  Many businesses can make their customer support more effective through self-service business models.

17.00 Networking Drinks

Reserve your place by sending an email to info@service-community.uk. We will then contact you to confirm registration and will send out the joining instructions nearer to the event.

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The next Service Community event will be held at Oracle's Reading Offices on the 24th May 2017.

To register please email info@service-community.uk and their team will register you and send out logistics details nearer the date.

As usual this will be a very informal discussion focused programme aimed to allow you to share ideas over a range of service topics.  And a date for your diary! Our autumn event will be held on the 3rd October at a venue to be determined.

The Service Community is run by service professionals for service professionals, there are no commercial sponsors and literally if you are working in a professional capacity in the service sector then this is your community -  so if you would like to host a future event or want to suggest some discussion topics, then also contact the team on the above email.

The Agenda for the 24th May event is as follows:

•  12.00 - 13.00: Meet at Oracle Reading Offices for light buffet lunch
• 13.00 Welcome and Introduction - Steve Elsham: Oracle
• 13.15 Shift to the Left: Mark King  Service Director UK & Ireland, Pitney Bowes - Mark will share his experiences of how when faced with falling margins, through incorporating a self service model he has been able to increase profitability without reducing customer loyalty
• 14.00 Outsourcing service to 3rd parties - Dave Gibson  Veteran  Service Director with SUN / Oracle - Dave will share the challenge he faced first at SUN Microsystems and then later at Oracle, in outsourcing Customer Support to 3rd party service providers, while still maintaining excellent service on mission critical activities
• 14.45 Coffee & Networking break
• 15.15  Cloud Adoption in Field Service Management Solutions: Kris Oldland  Editor Field Service News - Kris will be reviewing the adoption of Cloud technology by both Suppliers and Clients of Field Service management Solutions, based on a 3 year research programme he recently concluded
• 16.00 Leading Change in After-Sales Support: Ian Cockett Ex Service Director Bosch UK & Cygnet-Texkimp - Shifting from a capital equipment focused business, to one that leads with service support and customer outcomes. The challenges faced and the approaches taken in achieving change.
• 16.45  Open forum & discussion based on the day
• 17.00 Close

We hope to see you there and please spread the word to any of your colleagues who may also find this event of interest - as a non-profit organisation word-of-mouth is incredibly powerful friend for us!

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The agenda for the 12th May is no exception:

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

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

ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS & TOPICS

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

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

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

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

 

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Held at Fujitsu Stevenage, this event brought together 35 service professionals from around the country who listened to and discussed four excellent presentations covering various aspects of Outcome Based Services.

The excellent speaker this time around were:

• Veronica Martinez a globally eminent researcher in the area of Servitisation, presented an overview of the research she has been doing with the Cambridge Service Alliance. She told us how some of the worlds leading brands have approached developing Outcome Based Services, giving an exceedingly deep insight into the change process. Brilliant for any manager working on service transformation!
• Alex Bill gave his perspective of developing Outcome Based Service at the coal face. As a service professional in a major Power Generation OEM, he gave us insights into how the business model to make money is not as simple as just selling a service.
• Des Evans, the Ex CEO of MAN UK gave us the business perspective on servitisation, with insights from his 23 year journey to grow the business from £55M to £550M. It was a must ‘hear’ for anyone selling service concepts to their board.
• Chris Farnath Director International at Allocate Software, shared his own personal journey in leading business change toward outcome based services in the IT/Software world. Again incredibly useful to understand how he is approaching the ‘messy’ challenge of service transformation.

Thanks to all the participants for a great networking and discussion event

For a personal perspective on the event, read Martin Summerhayes’ account below which is also published in his personal blog.

 

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Service Community Conference - Outcome Based Services

[quote]“The purpose of a business is to get and keep a customer. Without customers, no amount of engineering wizardry, clever financing, or operations expertise can keep a company going.” ― Theodore Levitt

 

The first Service Community event for 2015 was held this week. There are two Service Community conferences that are held every year. They were first started by a wonderful consultant and friend, Steve Downton, many years ago and have continued to be popular and thought provoking events. Unfortunately, Steve lost his battle with cancer last year and a number of the core members of the community [including myself] decided to keep the event going - as much in Steve’s memory - as well as it gives a fantastic, open forum to share ideas, the latest thinking and case studies from the world of Services.

One of the key differentiators to other events, is that it brings together service practitioners to discuss and share ideas, changes in markets, share best practices and case studies. It is not an event where people come to try to sell products, services or companies - this is not what the Service Community is about.

So what do we mean by Services? We mean Services in the broadest sense possible. There were delegates from the widest spectrums of industries, including: Cambridge Service Alliance, Power Generation, Aston Business School, Construction, Cancer technology treatment, Sports Goods Technology, Logistics, Digital Photography, Soft Drinks manufacturer and then the traditional IT software and IT Services businesses.

 

What brought us together for this conference? The theme was “Outcome Based Services (OBS)”.

A number of points struck me during the series of four presentations and follow up discussions during the event. Obviously, the first point to mention, is what on earth are Outcome Based Services? The following points highlight the key elements of Outcome Based Services:

1. Predetermined results and predictable costs defined in agreement with the customer and are a reflection of the customers business: 

One example quoted related to the transport industry. The traditional approach is to pay separately for the truck, servicing, tyres, risk certification and then the fuel and driver. The customer then has to try to find the best deals for each of these elements. In addition, something I did not know is that a truck is only productive 25% of the time i.e. actually on the road delivering products and goods and hence making money. The OBS approach is to provide the vehicle and charge the customer on “price per kilometre”.

2. Protection of the client’s investments: 

One of the concepts discussed was leasing the product and having all of the associated services wrapped around it in a single charge. For example, the Rolls Royce model used to lease aero-engines which was shared at a previous event.

3. Short, medium and long-term savings adapted to changing client needs: 

One example was based on the savings from the production of electricity for the national grid using gas turbines. The customer could pay for either short term availability [how quickly you can turn on/off a turbine], medium term savings from the use of fuel, or even longer term savings from the ability to have upgrades build into the outcome based charging model which means the product stays in useful 2-5 years longer.

4. Use of methodologies, tools and processes to deliver outcome commitments and continual productivity improvements: 

The presentation from the University of Cambridge Service Alliance included a Service Strategy model - with examples where different customers had started the journey to “OBS”, In addition, the presenter talked about you might have to segment your customers as only some would be interested in OBS; that Risk Management and how you would deliver exactly what was required [the example given was the tonnage of rock removed by an explosives company] was critical and even giving away low margin services for “free” to be able to maintain a “sticky” relationship with your customers.

5. Operational excellence through the use of best practices, regularly reviewed to ensure their long-term applicability: 

The final example was a software company that realised that the current, traditional approach of implementing software solutions was not meeting the needs of their customers and has started on a journey to change the complete services landscape across their organisation to focus on “Adoption”. They had attended and worked with the leading industry experts, learnt the best practices and were implementing them in their organisation. The key to their success, though, was that the entire Operations Board of the company was behind the move.

My overall definition of Outcome Based Services based on the presentations and examples given would be:

Outcome Based Services are where you as the Service Provider, COMMIT to providing high-quality; customer defined and reflective of THEIR business; services; aligned with predetermined service levels and fixed prices, where there is a Shared Risk and Reward strategy in place for both supplier and customer.

 

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The next event put together by non-profit knowledge sharing organisation The  Service Community is to be held on the 16th April at the Fujitsu's Stevenage office located at:

• 14 Cavendish Road,
• Stevenage,
• Hertfordshire,
• SG1 2DY

Continuing on from the excellent sessions that have been held at previous events the agenda is once again packed with key figures from industry and academia sharing their insights into what makes great service.

The days agenda is as follows:

• 12:00 Arrival, Coffees
• 12.30 Welcome and Introduction: Martin Summerhayes, Fujitsu
• 13:00 Presentation 1:  Dr. Veronica Martinez, Cambridge Service Alliance. "Outcome  Based Service"
• 13:45 Presentation 2: Alex Bill, "Advanced Services in the Power Generation Industry: competing through advanced services" 
• 14:30 Networking break
• 15:15 Presentation 3: Des Evans, Honorary Professor Aston Business School and Former CEO MAN Trucks. "Acheiving 'disruptive' growth in the UK Commercial Vehicle market with outcome based services"
• Presentation 4: Chris Farnarth, Allocate Software. "Customer success and outcome based software services" 

Attendance is free of charge and these events have proved to be highly engaging and thought provoking sessions in the past so attendance is highly recommended. To arrange your attendance email The Service Community on this link.

 

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In the first part of this feature we looked at why medical device manufacturer Elekta felt it was necessary to establish a global knowledge sharing platform, now in this the concluding part of this feature we look at how they managed the task...

In terms of logistics, Elekta took a broad approach initially with a couple of duplicated platforms to ensure that everyone had access to the knowledge. The main plan was to integrate the knowledge base within the deployment of their new CRM system, which would provide automated access to relevant articles dynamically, based on customer, service desk or field engineer requirements.

However, they also placed the articles from the knowledge base onto a searchable database as a secondary system whilst the CRM was being rolled out, leaving no stone unturned and meaning full global access to the program was achieved from the start.

The content itself was then tailored dependent on its use, with the knowledge base comprising of a mix of mediums including text, images and videos with links to e-learning snippets also embedded within many knowledge article.

Expanding on this further Gilday explained

“If the article was talking about a particular part of the machine, and one of the procedures was something that often caused a difficulty for the engineer, we would just embed a link into an e-learning module that was only a few minutes long that would demonstrate to the engineer how to do a particular procedure.”

 

“For our engineers in China or Japan or many of the other evolving countries these were really valuable because it didn’t require any translation or any language issues, they could simply look at what was done.”

Of course the global scope of this project was one of it’s key drivers in the first place and whilst gaining adoption of the program on a global basis sounds like a huge task, in reality, for Elekta at least it actually wasn’t that big a hurdle.

“The adoption around the world wasn’t particularly difficult because there was a pull from the field service engineers in the first place.” Gilday states.

“There really is quite a bit of internal competition in that the engineer that has provided the most knowledge articles or the engineer that has provided the article that is used by the most engineers round the rest of the world holds an awful lot of kudos.”

Indeed it is perhaps a phenomena of the connected world we live in where public ranking has become ingrained within our thinking.

 

As Gilday elaborated “There is a lot of pride of being a very competent technician and being able to share your knowledge. I think many years ago the approach was knowledge is power and people were less inclined to share it but today its the other way around and people are keen to be seen as experts in their area.”

Indeed Elekta play on this mentality by publishing internal league tables with 1,000 users generating on average 60 new knowledge features a month the approach is certainly working at present. It was simply a case of getting the ball rolling.

To do so they made good use of the knowledge that they had locked up in siloes across the organisation and harvested close to 4,000 articles which were put into the knowledge base initially.

They also created some video material captured at a global summit and established a training and awareness program through targeted webinars across the team.

“We did a lot of training and awareness around the whole program to say that this is everybody’s collective responsibility once it started its actually fairly self perpetuating, you just need to clean up every now and then, to focus on the areas that get a lot of attention, take out the articles that are never used.” Confirmed Gilday

“Everybody has responsibility for it and the constant peer review means you can improve the quality of the content as you go.”

Linking the knowledge directly to support

The other advantage Elekta were able to utilise by aligning the knowledge base to their new CRM system was that they could now connect this into their service desk function.

Previously Elekta had been a very product driven company, which had largely grown as a result of continuous product innovation. In such an environment often service is a secondary consideration and so it was for Elekta in the past. However, by Gilday’s own admission that is rapidly changing.

So the benefit of setting up a service desk environment where upon receiving a call from a customer and as the service desk agent is typing up a problem, a keyword search on the knowledge base which pulls up the articles that are most related to this problem, is even more widely felt.

 

By clever design the system is also continuously refining itself making it ever more efficient.

“We implemented a scoring system so as the engineers close the service call they are encouraged to identify whether a knowledge article helped them and to link it to the particular problem” Gilday illustrated “So the system essentially self learns. This further qualifies that list of knowledge articles to be able to present it in a very dynamic form at the help desk.”

So with Elekta having established what from the outside seems a very slick and effective means of sharing knowledge across their global network the ultimate question is has it had any impact on the levels of service they are delivering?

It is of course impossible to establish a true value contribution of a new service initiative unless you undertake them really do them one at a time. And to do so severely limits the speed at which potential progress that can be made. In this instance the implementation of Elekta’s knowledge base program has coincided with them up-skilling their service desk staff and also driving forward with remote support connectivity.

However, across these three initiatives Elekta have seen more than a 20% visit avoidance, which will result in quite a dramatic effect on their efficiency on service to the customer.

Looking specifically at the Knowledge Base they are getting over 2000 knowledge articles views each day, nearly half of the articles are used with service cases attached.

 

There are also over five and a half thousand knowledge articles published now. And whilst they started with a large amount of features, they are undertaking more and more clean ups, removing any articles not being used regularly or related to old products.

There is also a lot of potential value in the product base for those customers who maintain their own equipment. Generally Elekta will offer a second level support to customers in those situations, and the value of the knowledge base could potentially be leverage further amongst these clients, either as a value added proposition or even on a transactional basis.

Finally there is the benefit that bringing the knowledge to the fore can have on future product refinement, which is a real benefit for the team working in R&D.

As Gilday outlined “A lot of this knowledge goes straight back into product updates. This product intelligence form the field says if we can eliminate this particular problem this will have an x percent benefit.”

So whilst the initial project may have seemed daunting, it appears that knowledge really is power, and by bringing it to the fore, we can truly harness it a number of different ways to push our organisation forwards to ever greater heights.

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