Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News is joined on the Field Service News Digital Symposium by Christian Kowalkowski, Professor of Industrial Marketing at the Institute of Technology at Linköping University and he is affiliated with CERS, at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki.

Professor Kowalkowski rapidly established himself as a leading authority in the field of B2B service strategy research and he focuses on service growth strategies, service innovation, and the interplay between digitization and servitization.

During the conversation, the two discuss a wide range of topics related to the growing trend towards servitization and how the pandemic has changed the approach to digital transformation among field service organisations.

In this exceprt from that conversation, the two discuss whether the conversation around servitization has become more mainstream over the last few years and the many different approaches that companies can take towards servitization as we start rebuilding from the pandemic.

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Want to know more?

FSN Premium subscribers and FSN Elite members can access the full-length interview plus many, many more in the Field Service New Digital Symposium.  If you have an FSN Premium account you can access the video on the button below. If you are currently on our FSN Standard subscription tier you can upgrade your subscription by clicking the link below. 

If you are yet to subscribe you can join 30,0000 of your field service management peers by subscribing to FSN Standard for free to gain access to a monthly selection of premium content or select either FSN Premium or FSN Elite for even more resources. Click the button above to visit our subscription page to find out more. 

 

Further Reading:

• Read more about Servitization & Advanced Services @ www.fieldservicenews.com/servitization
• Read more about the imapct of COVID-19 iin the field service sector @ www.fieldservicenews.com/COVIID-19
• Read exclusive articles by Christian Kowalkowski on FSN @ www.fieldservicenews.com/christian-kowalkowski
• Connect with Christian Kowalkowski on LinkedIn @ www.linkedin.com/kowalkowski/

Professor Tim Baines’ name is synonymous with all things servitization and advanced services. Today, he is talking to Field Service News about Servitization Live, the business event solely dedicated to Servitization and advanced services, taking place 4-6 October.

Servitization: where, what, how? Internationally, the appetite for servitization is growing and the idea that services can be key to business growth is gaining ever more traction. Not only that, but a focus on delivering outcomes is increasingly seen as a valuable ambition for those business executives looking to make their company stand out from the crowd. And more and more are recognising that through such services, businesses can grow, become greener, more productive, make better use of digital and improve their resilience to economic disruption.

Yet with this growing enthusiasm come challenges and uncertainty.

Servitization Live is the event where we set the record straight! It is a business event exclusively exploring servitization and advanced services and this year, we will turn the spotlight on how servitization is turning the way we use and consume products and services on its head. Over three days, Servitization Live will showcase how the as-a-service trend affects us all on a daily basis, and how services business models present the solutions to some of the biggest challenges our planet has faced such as climate change, a growing and ageing population and health crises.

With themes that we can all relate to in our everyday lives, Servitization Live challenges you to imagine how the learning from our consumer lives can be taken into your own industries and how you can innovate the services-led business models of the future.

The keynote line up will feature experts in fields such as health, the built environment and food production, who will set the scene regarding the global challenges we face and how technology and services are beginning to address these issues in innovative ways. Speakers from manufacturers and technology businesses, will then showcase their services offerings, how they deliver additional value both to the customer and the manufacturer, and how they help to address some of the challenges facing the planet.

These speakers include Ben Wilson, Marketing and Offer Manager at Schneider Electric who will speak about how Schneider went from conceptualisation to launch and delivery of its Secure Power-as-a-Service offering in little over a year. Schneider’s offering supports the likes of hospitals and care homes to both minimise capital expenditure and energy costs, and focus on their core business of looking after people’s health and wellbeing- their strapline being ‘ Dedicate your time, expertise and capital to your core business – let us take care of the rest!’

Oliver Moffat, Segment Manager for Multi-Occupancy, Heat Networks & Heat-as-a-Service at the domestic boiler manufacturer Baxi Heating, will speak about how the company is exploring the technologies and services business models that will support a whole new way of heating our homes. They are working on ideas to enable a move away from buying gas-powered boilers and towards newer, cleaner technologies and, potentially, payment models for customers based around buying heat rather than a physical product.

Day three of the event will be dedicated to a celebration of regional SMEs and their innovation in services. We will showcase the very best of SMEs who have transformed their business models though servitization. You will hear how these business leaders changed their approach, capitalising on their expertise and getting closer to their customers, all through the adoption of services based strategies and ultimately resulting in increased revenue.

Following on from last year’s World Servitization Convention where over 360 attendees joined online to explore exhibits from the likes of Goodyear, Legrand and Omron and heard keynotes from Tetra Pak, Rolls-Royce and Thales, the event is hosted by the Advanced Services Group at Aston Business School who are at the forefront of thought leadership in this field. Servitization Live is delivered as part of our mission to educate and inform those business leaders shaping industrial practice.

Servitization Live will take place 4-6 October 2021 online. Centred on an exhibition of business models from mainstream manufacturers that are leading in way in servitization, the event features a packed programme of industrial keynotes, workshops and panel discussions from leading industry experts. Visit https://www.servitizationlive.com/ for more information and to register.

The three-day event is sponsored by IFS, Xait CPQ, DLL, and Servitly and supported by Field Service News.

 

Who is the Advanced Services Group at Aston Business School?

ASG is a centre of excellence in servitization research and practice at Aston Business School. We provide education, training, research and a community of likeminded practitioners around advanced services and servitization, helping global manufacturers and technology innovators to develop services-led strategies.
The Group is led by Professor Tim Baines, the world's leading scholar on servitization.
Tim is the author of over 200 publications on manufacturing strategy, including Made to Serve, the leading textbook on transforming a technology based business to compete through services.

 

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Further Reading:

• Read more articles by Professor Tim Baines on Field Service News @ www.fieldservicenews.com/tim-baines
• Learn more about The Advanced Services Group @ www.advancedservicesgroup.co.uk/
• Read more about Servitization and Advanced Services @ fieldservicenews.com/servitization-and-advanced-services
• Get in touch with The Advanced Services Group @ www.advancedservicesgroup.co.uk/contact

Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News is joined on the Field Service News Digital Symposium by Hilbrand Rustema, Managing Director and Founder of Noventum to discuss the findings of Noventum's Remote Service Delivery Benchmarking study.

During the discussion, Rustema outlines the key data trends that emerged within their study as well as offering his deep-level insight into the meta-trends of field service and how these have shifted dramatically in recent times.

In this excerpt from that discussion, the two explore how the dual innovations of remote service delivery and outcome-based services are beginning to dovetail within the emerging new-normal of field service.

Find out more about this study and the work Noventum undertake @ www.noventum.eu

 

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Want to know more?

FSN Premium subscribers and FSN Elite members can access the full-length interview plus many, many more in the Field Service New Digital Symposium.  If you have an FSN Premium account you can access the video on the button below. If you are currently on our FSN Standard subscription tier you can upgrade your subscription by clicking the link below. 

If you are yet to subscribe you can join 30,0000 of your field service management peers by subscribing to FSN Standard for free to gain access to a monthly selection of premium content or select either FSN Premium or FSN Elite for even more resources. Click the button above to visit our subscription page to find out more. 

We would also point you to the excellent Service Centricity Playbook that is available over at Noventum Service Management's site which you can access on @ https://www.noventum.eu/the-service-centricity-playbook

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Further Reading:

• Read more exclusive Field Service News content from Hilbrand and the team at Noventum @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/hs-search-results?term=Noventum
• Read more about Digital Transformation @https://www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/digital-transformation
• Follow Noventum Service Management on Twitter @ https://twitter.com/ByNoventum
• Read more research-based content dedicated to the field service sector @ https://research.fieldservicenews.com/
• Connect with Hilbrand Rustem on LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/hilbrandrustema/

Cyber security provider F-Secure launched F-Secure Elements: a new cloud-based platform that streamlines how organizations provision cyber security services.

Available from F-Secure’s service partners with fixed-term license subscriptions, or usage-based billing for greater flexibility, F-Secure Elements empowers organizations to pick cyber security services on terms that accommodate their needs.

Many organizations operate in complex environments dominated by a range of dynamic risks and opportunities. Keeping these complexities in mind, as well as the rising costs of security and the lack of experienced security professionals, it’s no surprise that an overwhelming number of organizations want to simplify how they source cyber security capabilities.

F-SECURE ELEMENTS IS THE FIRST CLOUD-BASED PLATFORM CREATED TO EMPOWER ORGANIZATIONS WITH FAST, FLEXIBLE, AND EASY ACCESS TO CYBER SECURITY SERVICES.

F-Secure Executive Vice President of Business Security Juha Kivikoski says these demands are driving a shift toward providing cyber security as services rather than products.

“Even with updates, products are static and can’t adapt fast enough to keep up with threats, or businesses, as they evolve. Services help businesses stay agile and are more cost-effective when delivered right, which is why the future of our industry is in delivering everything as a service,” he explained. “Having a platform designed for the servitization of cyber security can help organizations get better protection, which is why simplicity and flexibility are F-Secure Elements’ core design principles.”

F-Secure Elements is a modular platform that combines endpoint protection, endpoint detection and response, vulnerability management, and collaboration protection for cloud services (such as Microsoft Office 365).

F-Secure Elements’ key capabilities and benefits include:

• Comprehensive situational awareness and meaningful visibility across assets, configurations, vulnerabilities, threats, and events.
• Streamlined and autonomous operations to ensure efficient workflows and faster responses to real threats.
• Real-time, connected data flow between elements to enable faster detection of threats.
• Intelligent, extended detection and response capabilities for data-informed decisions.
• On-demand option to elevate difficult cases to F-Secure experts.

Usage-based pricing simplifies path to growth

A recent Forrester report emphasized the increasing importance for flexibility and usage-based pricing*: "During the pandemic, many clients became frustrated when vendors wouldn't lower license usage below baselines, even though the organization's usage had dropped off because of staff furloughs. Examine contracts and ask for flexibility to alter the licensing baseline under certain conditions and for the ability to carry forward unused license entitlements into the next year without additional charge."

With the transparency on usage provided via F-Secure Elements’ detailed invoicing for usage-based billing, organizations can make informed decisions on how to control security investments to prevent paying for idle licenses, or services they don’t need.

“Usage-based pricing helps organizations develop and adjust their security capabilities to focus on outcomes, and move from ownership to usership,” said Kivikoski.

F-Secure Elements was launched at SPECIES, F-Secure’s annual global partner conference. Video is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axLDbj1_Nb4.

More information on F-Secure Elements is available here: https://www.f-secure.com/elements.

*Source: Forrester: How To Save Money In Security Software Negotiations: Techniques For Preparing For And Conducting Security Software Negotiations To Increase Value. Paul McKay, Sean Ryan, and Mark Bartrick, October 13, 2020.

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Further Reading:

• Read more about Servitization @ www.fieldservicenews.com/servitization-and-advanced-services
• Read more about Cyber Security @ www.fieldservicenews.com/cyber-security
• Learn more about F-Secure @ www.f-secure.com
• Read more about F-Secure on Field Service News @ www.fieldservicenews.com/f-secure
• Follow F-Secure on Twitter @ twitter.com/FSecure

New research charting the servitization journey of companies shows a significant gap in progress between firms with only 3% surveyed at a stage of maturity.

The study, instigated by IFS and extrapolated by global analyst firm IDC, surveyed 420 global manufacturing companies, active across the physical value chain, who were at varying stages of their servitization strategy.

From the data, IDC developed a Servitization Maturity Framework (The IDC Servitization Barometer) comprising four levels that segments companies based on their level of adoption.

 

The Four Stages of Servitization Adoption

The ‘Splintered’ stage, and the lowest level, represented 14% of firms.Typically these companies operated in silos, running dis-jointed, manual processes and fragmented business systems producing little or no visibility in performance.

The next stage, ‘Side-Car’, was the largest representation of companies (49%). Here firms had standardised their back and front office operations but were yet to integrate the two.

‘Joined-up’ companies have integrated front and back offices in both directions and have progressed to leverage technologies such as IoT to feed core systems with real data. This segment was represented by 39% of firms surveyed.

Only 3% of canvassed firms operating at the fourth ‘Borderless’ stage (or “Servitization Nirvana,” the report says). These companies have processes that start and end outside of the organisation with operations and technology facilitating the connection between different elements of the value chain.

However, IDC said those firms at the ‘Joined-Up’ stage, who were exhibiting some, but not all elements of a servitization strategy, for example an integrated back and front office and the use of IoT, were still able to show significant financial proof-points, with service revenues - on average - one third larger than their peers’ as a proportion of total revenue.

“Organisations that bundled projects with services or offered their capabilities in a consumption-mode are already enjoying competitive advantages,” Phil Carter, Chief Analyst at IDC Europe and one of the authors of the report says. “Manufacturers engaging in this transformation should demand applications that are natively connected across the full value chain, from the shop floor to customer support and service.”

IFS carried out the survey in July 2019 and the President of the firm’s Service Management Business Unit Marne Martin said IDC’s maturity framework identified the key barriers firms are facing in their quest for full servitization adoption. “The IDC Servitization Barometer lays out the key hurdles facing many manufacturing organisations,” she says, “including the lack of internal know-how and the perrenial problem of running legacy, disjointed business systems.”

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Further Reading: 

• Read the full report IDC Sertvization Barrier - Charting your Path to New Revenue Streams here.
• Read more about customer servitization in field service @ www.fieldservicenews.com/servitization
• Find out more about IFS here.
• Find out more about IDC here. 

A webinar hosted by Professor Tim Baines previewing September's World Servitization Conference will feature manufacturers exhibiting at the event and hosted on the 5th May 2020

The webinar, which takes place on Tuesday 5 March at 2pm (BST), serves as a digital preview to the forthcoming World Servitization Conference and will feature some of the manufacturers who will be exhibiting at the re-arranged event which now takes place in September - its original date in May having to be moved due to the Corona Virus pandemic.

 

The Increasing Importance of Servitization

The World Servitization Conference is in its first iteration of the a new event but already has an excellent pedigree being a natural extension of the Spring Servitization Conference which Field Service News has been a long standing media partner.

Run out of Aston University and hosted by the Advanced Services Group the global nature of this event in 2020 is testament to the increasing significance of servitization within industry - something that many are anticipating will be further increased by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

The guest line-up includes:

• Chris Dodd, Managing Director, Assisted Living & Healthcare at Legrand UK & Ireland;
• Alec Anderson, Founder and Managing Director at Koolmill Systems;
• Lee Cassidy, Chief Executive Officer,Tactile Technology and
• Tim Hughes, Managing Director at CHH Conex.

As well as looking forward to September's conference, the webinar will look at manufacturing's relationship with servitization and how it might be affected in post-pandemic world.

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You can register for the webinar here.

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The World Servitization Conference takes place from 14 to 16 September at the NEC in Birmingham, UK. For more information on the event including details on how to register click here.

 

Dr. Shaun West, of Lucerne University, explains why increasingly it seems that we have made the mistake of designing services with the machine in mind and us mere humans are developing a habit of just getting in the way...

I don’t like to be treated as a cog in a larger wheel and so why do we often design systems that treat us as if we were a cog in a complex system? This has been to me often a contradiction we see in the modern world where services are more and more standardized so that we feel we are there to service the machine.

The Importance of Service Design

My recent trip through Heathrow was very much in that vain – services (often hidden services) have been dehumanized that the experience for all actors involved is very poor.

Agency within the system at Heathrow has been lost for all actors leading you to consider that sheep might have a better experience, but at least the system is cost-effective and compliant. But service science and through service design, we don’t have to design the future world like this - we can and must do better. 

We are trying to look at things in a more human-centric approach with our Smart Twin’s project where, with ten partners, we are building digital twins for different use cases. Within a number of the cases, the interactions with the digital assistant are really important as they are supporting decision-making processes.

In other cases, we’re considering how to delegate important tasks to the digital assistant and expecting them to return for new instructions when problems start to build. This is a very different position from asking Siri to find the music I’ve been listening too (Nylon Strung by Underworld if you were interested) or to tell my heating system at home to change the set-point to 19°C from 14°C.

This returns us to the thought that “we need to remember that the human is part of the system rather than subservient to the system”. Given that many of us are in the more technical environment, it is worth looking at how we used to treat machines – we gave them care and attention, we looked after them and we listened to them.

In effect, we treated them as if they were human in many aspects. This was part of the logic that we initially used with the development of the Avatar model. (See figure 1 below). To keep the truck working for me I have to look after it and treat it with respect, if I don’t it will stop doing what I expect of it.

 

 

The model shows graphically what you need to do for it and what it will do for you – over the life-cycle you can see the whole range of services that it needs to consume to deliver for you. My coffee machine behaves just like this – if I don’t fulfil my side of the bargain it delivers me poor coffee.

When digitalization takes place we automate jobs so, therefore, people just resist the change. How true is this really? It depends… robotic or digital service assistants can be deployed.

The ‘self-service kiosk’ service assistants can, in product dominate logic, appear to be a major step forward on the service. It becomes possible to have one “service operative” whose real job appears to tell me how I should be interacting with their new solution rather than allow redeployment of staff to improve the overall customer journey and experience.

In a case I know well, the digital assistant does this by taking away tasks that the current service desk operators are poor at performing and allowing them to focus on supporting the customer with real issues – the objective of the service desk.

Here the service desk didn’t want to go back to the old way of working. Interestingly, they are now happier in their work and doing a better job.

The common theme here is to focus on all people and machines with respect and understand their basic needs and requirements, as well as what you're expecting from them when building digital solutions.

Agency is important for people; this places us in ‘control’ and allows us to have some control and understanding of what is happening. It stops us from feeling like being a small cog in a large complex wheel. Agency also brings co-creation of value, again important as the literature confirms that lasting relationships are built on co-creation of value and joint decision making between many actors.

Such relationships also create social and emotional value during service engagements and somehow we need to learn to do this effectively with digital helpers, assistants, and advisors. 

We asked Bill Pollock to predict what he thinks 2020 will bring. Typically, he went beyond the next 12 months and horizon-scanned into the not so distant service future where failure to keep-up could mean the end of your offering.
There has been a growing shift away from manufacturing toward the Servitisation model for decades already. However, while the manufacturing model is a well-entrenched, deeply-rooted model that everybody understands; the Servitisation model is still not anywhere near being as widely understood – even within the services sector.

The transition from break/fix, to network services, to self-help, to remote diagnostics/support has been steady, and has followed a logical evolution over the years. However, the move toward Servitisation requires more of a “leap of faith” as well as a whole new mode of operating (and pricing) for which many services managers are still not familiar – or comfortable.

This trend has carried on for decades – and the services sector is just about ready to “rock and roll” with it moving forward; however, even some of the key (and more savvy) players are not yet 100% certain that they have it right with respect to re-engineering their overall service delivery structure; services support organisation; KPIs and metrics; services support policies, procedures and processes; pricing, accountability – and the list goes on. As such, this trend will positively carry on throughout 2020 – and well beyond – as each major group of services organisations (i.e., leaders, followers, “wait-and-see’ers”, skeptics, and all others) begin their respective transitions.

The evolutionary prospects for Servitisation are quite simple: the market, as a whole, will need to see some prime examples of success in their respective vertical and/or horizontal services segments before making the plunge. They’ll need to move beyond all of the “failure” and pratfall stories before feeling more confident. They’ll need to hear some success stories – and, in their own segment. Bank/financial organisations will need to see how others in their field have succeeded, and what the positive results have been. The same will go for the medical/healthcare segment, manufacturing/industrial segment, and so on.

Most organisations will also need help with how to price “power by the hour”, “airplanes in the air”, and other “new” ways for pricing their services. I suspect there will be an uptick in the number of case studies, Webcasts and conference sessions focusing on these and other related areas. Servitisation is – and will continue to be – a big deal for years to come.

"Customers no longer will be pleased simply with equipment that is working, sensors that are communicating, and devices that are operating..."

Organisations are also transitioning from providing corrective maintenance to predictive maintenance, and this trend continues to shape the industry moving forward. Corrective maintenance has worked for many years because, basically, that’s all the industry had to offer. From the break/fix, call the manufacturer’s hotline, days; through the current remote diagnostics and repair days, there has been a common thread running through our industry: Some piece of equipment fails, a call is made (i.e., either by phone, in the past; or, today, remotely from the equipment itself) and a corrective action is taken. 

However, these are examples of the soon-to-be-bygone OTR (i.e., On-Time-Response), MTBF (i.e., Mean-Time-Between-Failure), MTTR (i.e., Mean-Time-To-Repair), FTFR (i.e., First-Time-Fix-Rate) and PM (i.e., Preventive Maintenance) days. Through Predictive Diagnostics and Predictive Maintenance the need for any On-Time Response will be highly diminished, as will the need for MTBF, MTTR and FTFR KPIs/metrics, etc. Over the coming years, there will be the need for “new” metrics, such as MTBPF (i.e., Mean-Time-Between-Prevented-Failures); MTTR will be measured in minutes or seconds, rather than in hours or days; FTFRs will be normalised as everything will get fixed in a single attempt, whether it requires a single “try”, or multiple “tries”; and PMs will virtually disappear (or at least be replaced by another PM = Predictive Maintenance). 

There will be a whole “new” way of delivering service, as well as measuring the success of the organisation through an entirely “new” set of KPIs, or metrics. [By the way - I have already written many times about the need for “new” KPIs/metrics and, respectfully claim the rights to MTBPF!] 

Customers no longer will be pleased simply with equipment that is working, sensors that are communicating, and devices that are operating – they are now beginning to look more closely at how their systems, equipment, sensors and devices are working together, in their behalf to get the job done. A services organisation that merely keeps individual systems or equipment up and running (i.e., maintaining high levels of uptime), but does not ensure that they are all working together to effectively and efficiently execute the company’s business, will ultimately find themselves being replaced by other services organisations that do. The clear winners will be those organisations that “get” Servitisation, and not those that do not.

"There will need to be an industry-wide educational 'push' as to what Servitization really is..."

Again, what will move the needle in 2020, is clearly communicating to the marketplace what failures to avoid (and how to avoid them), and what successes can be had (and how to achieve them). There will need to be an industry-wide educational 'push' as to what Servitisation really is, what it can do for the organisation (and what will happen if they don’t embrace it), what the ultimate value propositions are for transitioning to this “new” model, and what some of the best success stories have been.

Further, most services organisations are not currently using their respective Field Service Management (FSM) solutions to their full capabilities. The most successful organisations may come close, but there are few that eke out all of the capabilities that may otherwise be offered to them. Some may augment their FSM solution with a home-grown Excel spreadsheet “patch”; others may be using their Sales & Marketing Management (SMM) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions for activities that their FSM could (or should) be able to support; and still others may not even be aware of the full spectrum of capabilities they may have right at their fingertips. Again, it becomes an educational process that should be driven by the FSM solution providers themselves through the offering of strengthened professional services, such as customer portals, training, train-the-trainers, etc.

As some FSM solution providers may be focusing more on developing Augmented Reality (AR), Merged Reality (MR), Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML) based applications to bolster their offerings, they may be relatively deficient in focusing on the basic, or “core”, components of their solutions and, thereby, miss the opportunity to help their customers/users get the most out of their offerings.

Services organisations will also be relying much more heavily on apps and mobile devices in support of their service delivery performance in 2020. Society, as a whole, is relying more and more on apps and mobile devices for communications; and, in many cases, the services sector is leading the way.

Most FSM solution providers are providing their customers/users with more apps and customer portals to facilitate their use of the solution, as well as for communications with their remote support providers. Every year, a higher percent of business is being conducted remotely, and the need for more functional mobile communications is increasing commensurately. The IoT stands for the Internet of Things; and in this regard, humans may also be considered as one category of “things” that the IoT helps to connect. 2020 will see the proliferation of all types of “things” connected to one another through the IoT: systems, equipment, devices – and people. In fact, the numbers of connected things will likely to continue to grow at an accelerated rate in 2020 – and beyond. The more connectivity there is, the better the delivery of service can be.

 

"The move toward AR and VR is beginning to grow even faster as more installations have been deployed, and more success stories are making the rounds..."

 

Companies will also continue to expand their use of AI-powered field service technology and tools. Basically, companies that are already using AI technology in support of their services operations are much more likely to expand its use over time – and, probably, very quickly. However, companies that do not yet employ the use of AI in their services operations typically lie on either side of the fence: either, “we need to do it now”, or “let’s wait and see how this all works out.” The pressure to embed AI in their services operations will be so intense, however, that there is likely to be a surge in usage throughout 2020 and successive years.

Primary uses of AI include the powering of a chatbot capability; the ability to identify key target markets for selling/upselling/cross-selling products and services; and the ability to make their overall services operations work much more productively and efficiently.

Just as Virtual Reality (VR) has made watching American football games (and European football games, as well) easier for the layman to understand, it is also making it much easier for field technicians to repair equipment in the field. No more bulky documents or manuals are required, and training programs can be short-cut (to a certain degree) as AR and VR, merged together into MR, can lead the technician to a “perfect” fix, first time, and every time.

The move toward AR and VR is beginning to grow even faster as more installations have been deployed, and more success stories are making the rounds (at trade shows and Webinars, etc.). In fact, the merging of AR and VR has sent out a signal to the “Wait and see’ers” that they may be missing the boat on AR as it is already merging with VR – all while many of their competitors are beginning to implement AI and Machine Learning platforms in support of their services operations. The time to move is now – before it’s too late in terms of having your competitors ending up being better equipped to support (and market to) their targeted customer base.With the rise of IoT-connected devices and smart homes, many new challenges lie ahead for the field service industry. The rise of IoT-connected devices and smart homes provides a major value proposition to customers, as well as to the FSM solution providers. However, what also comes along with the benefits are a number of potentially serious consequences.

For example, once virtually everything is connected, smart systems will likely become more susceptible to power outages, hacking and various types of breaches in security. The analogy is: before watches, people used sundials to tell time. Then watches could help them tell time – until they either wound down, or the batteries went dead. Today, if the global satellite network goes down (e.g., as a result of space debris, solar flares, etc.), many things we all take for granted will stop working, including a partial/temporary halt to our ability to tell time, make change, or communicate to one another via our mobile devices.

As an example, as I have been writing this article for Field Service News, I have used a pink post-it note to cover the camera on my iMac. At the same time, Alexa is probably listening to anything I say without me even thinking about it. Further, somewhere across the globe, there is probably someone standing outside the front window of a home and yelling at Alexa, Googol or Siri to “remind me what my password is for the front door security code.” What the "expert” hackers can do to outsmart smart homes or businesses will only get more invasive – and potentially dangerous – over time (i.e., the invasions of privacy tend to happen first, with the “patch” or “fix” coming later). As such, the need to provide continual connectivity PLUS protect the privacy of the customer/user will be paramount as more and more smart implementations go into play.

Making projections for 2020 in the services industry is relatively easy. Basically, everything you have gotten used to is going to change. Here's my summary:

• The “good guys” will make everything better; and the “bad guys” will try to make everything worse
• Every time you make a mistake, the whole world will find out about it virtually instantly
• Service fixes will be completed faster – but you won’t always be aware that there was a fix
• Service pricing may or may not be more expensive – but it will certainly be different
• New start-ups will enter the market; but some old standbys will be forced to depart
• Most of the KPIs/metrics you’ve used for decades will be replaced
• The most successful services organisations will follow the lead of technology – not the competition
• You think that today’s Merged Reality applications are too futuristic or too soon? Wait ‘til tomorrow, when everything is merged (i.e., connected)

 

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Read more from Bill at Pollockonservice.com 

 

 

Industry and academia combine for new servitization event.

Rolls-Royce, Goodyear and Alstom will share with share their experience of growing business through services at the inaugural World Servitization Conference in Birmingham in May.

The World Servitization Convention, organised by The Advanced Services Group, part of Aston Business School, will see industry experts join academics to demonstrate the way that servitization can be used to transform the future of manufacturing through keynote speeches, developmental workshops and live demonstrations.

Some of the keynote speakers attending the event include Andy Harrison, Engineering Associate Fellow for Life Cycle Engineering at Rolls-Royce, Marc Preedy, Managing Director of Truck Replacement Sales in Europe at Goodyear, Mike Hulme, Managing Director of Trains and Modernisation at Alstom and Antony Bourne, President of IFS Industries.

Professor Tim Baines, Director of The Advanced Services Group and regular Field Service News’ contributor said: “What will set the World Servitization Convention apart from other conferences is the exhibition – or as I like to think of it, ‘Servitization Live’ – with demonstrations from businesses at the forefront of the business model.

“We will bring servitization alive with exhibits and demonstrations of advanced services and the technologies that enable them.”

Keynote speaker Andy Harrison, from Rolls-Royce, said: “The World Servitization Convention provides an excellent opportunity for businesses to network and learn about the benefits of advanced services from those already offering them.Servitization is quite prolific in the business world, but relatively few people recognise what it is. This event will be a great way to address that and encourage more companies to adopt the model.”

The three day event, sponsored by IFS, Blueprint AMS, DLL, Servitly and Field Service News, will take place on 5, 6 and 7 May at the International Convention Centre (ICC) in Birmingham, UK.

 

As official media partner of the event, Field Service News are able to offer our manufacturing audience complimentary admission by quoting code WSC20-FSN during the registration process which you can find here.