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Brexit fatigue’ may be sweeping across the European continent but for those of us involved in critical supply chains, now is not the time to put our heads in the sand. The network nature of international supply chains means we may all be reliant on the least-prepared organisation, as ByBox’s Simon Fahie, explains. 


There’s no escaping the fact that field service can be a lonely industry. Ask the engineer battling torrential rain to repair a wind turbine. Or the manager greeted with blank stares at dinner parties when asked to explain his job. With mobile engineering teams working in often remote locations, and a high number of lone workers, it can feel like there are limited opportunities for collaboration within field service.

But with Brexit around the corner, now is the time when field service operators must work together – not just to avoid problems, but also to get ahead. While the UK political climate remains highly uncertain, ByBox has shared practical tips with customers to help prepare for the ‘worst case scenario’ - No Deal.

A ‘Hard Brexit’ could mean that businesses which currently move parts freely within the EU, including the UK, will find themselves becoming importers and exporters between the UK and the EU.

An obvious statement perhaps, but several of the companies we have been working with will find it a shock to implement not only the existing rules, but also additional new procedures to manage No Deal.

And herein lies the real rub - under new customs rules, if one company fails to comply, it could cause delays to the stock of all businesses within the same consignment.  The smartest businesses recognise that ‘one issue affects all’ within Field Service; and that by and large they do not compete supply chain against supply chain.

 

"Advanced businesses view Brexit as an opportunity to take stock and think about how they can add value..."

By preparing for new import and export rules now they’re protecting not only their own businesses, but the resilience of the whole field service sector. Advanced businesses also view Brexit as an opportunity to take stock and think about how they can add value after Brexit and get ahead in a new trading environment.

The most common themes are:

Use of technology
An increasing number of  firms are looking to digitise processes around distribution, engineer productivity and inventory. With ever-more stringent SLAs and cost pressures, there just isn’t room for inefficiencies or delays in responding to disruptions

Increased forward stocking
In some industries where the potential consequences of delays are not acceptable, EG medical technology, we’ve seen an increase in firms using micro Forward Stock Locations (FSLs) – placing critical items in App-Lockers at the service sites where they’re needed, to protect first-time fix rates

Third party specialists
Many companies are turning to third parties to manage complexities around cross border transport and distribution. For example, our strategic partners such as Bespoke Distribution Aviation (BDA) – already have established transport channels, a customs clearance approach and brokers.

Two years on, it’s easy to experience ‘Brexit fatigue’ – but the burden can be significantly reduced if field service companies realise they’re not alone, and help each other through it.

Simon Fahie is Managing Director at ByBox.

Simon Fahie, Managing Director - Global Technologies, at ByBox reflects on a busy final quarter for the year, what the big challenges for 2019 will be and how we can overcome them...

Judging by the packed conference halls I’ve seen across the world this quarter, I think it’s fair to say that Winter 2018 is ‘events season’ for the global field service industry.

I was among the thousands of professionals who travelled to attend flagship conferences – all connected by a ‘need to know’ the latest developments within our sector.

But, as I heard tales of pioneering innovations and technologies at, for example, exhibitions in the USA, and a user group event in the UK, I was struck that the processes behind our work are just as important as the technology which supports it.

Hearing about the increasing pressures and challenges affecting the field service supply chain, and the different ways organisations are seeking to address them, triggered a train of thought in my mind around the power of lean thinking.

The principles of Lean are clear. It’s a systematic way of checking every process to find and extinguish waste. By eradicating unnecessary spend, time and resources, organisations can focus on adding value to customers.

And this one methodology is so effective, it can be used equally well within a wide range of businesses, from office cleaning, to automotive manufacturing, or the delivery of complex highway schemes. All three of these tasks have been analysed, broken down into steps, designed and redesigned to be as Lean as possible.

For decades, service companies have seen the value in similarly systematically removing unnecessary delays, materials, labour and costs from their processes. And yet, as the events began to wrap up, it became obvious to me that Lean thinking could have played a part in the case studies I had presented, and the networking conversations I had enjoyed.

I heard over and over again that the pain points are there. For example, getting the right service part to the right place at the right time is so important that, ironically, some businesses seem wary of making strategic changes. We heard stories about excessive inventory or significant costs related to same-day distribution being left unchallenged because ‘it works’. We know from analysis carried out recently for one organisation that 65% of items sent to site using same-day transport were returned by the engineer as good stock.

It doesn’t take much effort to start finding waste in that process, but what are the seven types of waste in Lean, and how might field service industries start finding some waste to eliminate?

Based on my experience at 2018 field service events, here are some examples, and how our customers are going about eliminating them:

 

Transport: Unnecessary movement of people or parts between processes

We saw one company save 640,000 miles of driving by delivering parts to app lockers at service sites, instead of using dispersed forward stocking locations. (FSLs)

 

Inventory: Excess raw material or finished parts 

Another firm had more than £1 million-worth of duplicated stock sitting in repair engineers’ vans.

The company cut spend significantly, by storing items specifically required by each location in secure on-site lockers

 

Waiting: People or parts waiting for the next step of a process

45 minutes per day, per engineer – that was the average waiting time saved by one organisation when it replaced PUDO collections with public locker collections.

 

Motions: Unnecessary movement of people or parts within a process

In our experience, the most advanced firms enable engineers to order parts for direct delivery, using a mobile app. This eliminates the unnecessary and inefficient movement of thousands of parts to and from warehouses, and can even enable firms to remove entire FSLs from their supply chains.

 

Rework: Correction or repetition of a process 

Forward-thinking firms also use mobile apps to assign condition codes for parts which need to be returned. This allows items to be directly routed to repairers, rather than return to the warehouse for evaluation. We’ve seen this contribute to a 40% reduction in total inventory for some firms, as well as a reduction in processing resources.

 

Overproduction: producing sooner or in greater quantities than customer demand

We saw one corporation reduce duplicate inventory by consolidating a UK stock-holding into a European warehouse. Delivery lead times and customer service levels were maintained by exploiting scheduled flights, and pre-8am distribution to lockers.

 

Over processing: Processing beyond standard required

Implementing a dedicated delivery point at a secure site reduced same-day transportation costs by 80% for one customer. In this use case same-day delivery was only used to ensure early next day availability.

 

It’s important to remember that the benefits of Lean thinking go above and beyond reducing waste, and into adding value to customers. For example, eliminating unnecessary movements often reduces overall lead-times -which in turn reduces risks to SLA compliance. And reducing transportation waste further supports carbon reduction targets.

I don’t pretend to be an expert in Lean thinking, however, as we seek to meet ever tighter service level requirements while simultaneously reducing costs these examples serve as reminders that there is plenty of waste to find if we go looking for it.

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Simon Fahie is Managing Director, Global Technologies for ByBox

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In a recent episode of The Field Service Podcast, Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News spoke with Simon Fahie, Managing Director of ByBox, and in what was a wide-ranging discussion the two touched on a number of key topics affecting field service organisations today...

Our industry is evolving rapidly. It seems like only yesterday when I first returned to the service sector and began writing about the key trends within field service, at the time for the now sadly departed Service Management magazine. In fact, that was some six or seven years ago now and crikey an awful lot has changed in that time.

Back then the over-riding discussions within the sector were around the practicalities and benefits of moving field service from its traditional position as a cost centre to becoming a profit centre.

Fast forward to today and the concept of field service as a core revenue-generating part of the business has become firnly established. Indeed, as we have covered extensively in Field Service News, more and more companies are becoming increasingly focused on delivering advanced services, a strategic shift in thinking that has become known as servitization.

Yet, whilst servitization promises to hold the key to increased profits, a greater share of customer wallets and deeper, longer term contracts that offer far greater financial stability, it is not a particularly easy nut to crack.

Perhaps the biggest shift in thinking from traditional break fix based centric service agreements and their servitized equivalent is the move away from service level agreements to guarantees of uptime. In an era of IoT and connected assets, the move towards predictive maintenance that such an approach requires could be deemed relatively easy to establish once the right processes and technologies are put in place.

The theory is relatively straight-forward. The asset feeds back real-time data, when it falls out of set acceptable parameters that have been determined to be indicators of probable forthcoming failure an engineer is dispatched to fix the fault ahead of the asset going down - giving the end customer a continuous service whilst allowing the service provider to schedule their field service operations far more efficiently.

 

"Whilst servitization promises to hold the key to increased profits, a greater share of customer wallets and deeper, longer-term contracts that offer far greater financial stability, it is not a particularly easy nut to crack..."

 

An obvious win-win all round - easy as that.

However, one of the obvious spanners that can be thrown into the works is the parts logistics aspect fo the equation. Getting the right engineer to the right place, at the right time has been the field service manager’s mantra for as long as I can remember. However, it all becomes a moot point if the engineer hasn’t got access to the right parts.

And in an age of increasing congestion, which can put a huge strain on service logistics - getting the right parts to an engineer can cause a huge problem for field service delivery, and when it comes to advanced services this issue becomes even more significant.

“I look at servitization and for me, it really exposes some of the weaknesses in a supply chain or the process of getting parts to the engineer,” explains Simon Fahie, Manging Director, ByBox when he joined me for a recent episode of the Field Service Podacst.

“Certainly, we are seeing conversations that are saying yesterday we could do a next day fix, now we are able to do a four hour fix. But it is not just fix-times that are open to discussion. Obviously, in a servitization scenario, you have lost revenues that are at stake,” he continued

“If the asset you are supplying is not working not only do you have a disgrunteled customer, you also have no revenues coming thorugh. In fact, in some instances, not being able to provide a fix stops the use of consumables as well.”

“So what we are seing as a growing trend is the need to position inventory actually on site, or very, very close, to be able to provide the very short fixtime that servitized contracts require.”

And this is exactly where ByBox come into the equation - with a network of lockers across the UK and Europe they offer an effective means of acheiving this - in the UK for example, Fahie states that most of their customers will have a locker within just a few miles of their location.

 

"If the asset you are supplying is not working not only do you have a disgruntled customer, you also have no revenues coming through..."

 

Yet their is more to the solution than just conveniently place lockers.

“The challenge is how do you control the parts?” Fahie asks retorically.

“How do you give secure access to them? How do you know that they are there? How do you know that they’ve gone out of stock? You can’t just hand over a cardboard box of parts and say leave that by the machine for the engineer when he comes. It is a lot more challenging than that.”

ByBox’s solution to these challenges is in many senses relatively simple, yet is hugely effective in overcoming exactly these problems. The lockers themselves are enabled with secure bluetooth functionality for delivering and removing parts which allows for the movement of parts to be logged - providing essentially visibility into the parts management process, which in turn opens up the doors to even greater streamlining possibilities as well.

“What this enables is the better efficiency of the field workforce,” explains Fahie.

“If you think about the scheduling challenge if a field worker has gone and got a part at 9 am they are then committed to that job that requires them and that part. However, if the part is available and can be collected at any time by anyone with the appropriate authorisation, the efficiency of the scheduling could be increased.”

“If we add into that mix the rise of the flexible or contingent workforce, now we are trying to get a part to a place that may be able difficult to deliver to, now we can have a part picked up and delivered by a person that you have never met before and may never meet again - but that is where the felxibility of the app base dcontrol comes into play - and it could lead to some really interesting new ways of improving the service supply chain that simply couldn’t have existed before.”

Indeed, given the increasing burden being felt within service logistics due to things like pedestrianisation of city centres and ever more congested roads, for servitization to thrive as it should, it is exactly such innovative ideas that field service companies will need to embrace.

Our industry is evolving rapidly, but fortunately, it appears we have the tools to hand to adapt with it.

 

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More features about ByBox including the investment by Fransisco partners discussed in the podcast can be found @ http://fieldservicenews.com/?s=ByBox