ARCHIVE FOR THE ‘software-and-apps’ CATEGORY

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

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

For example:

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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Field Service News speak exclusively to Evatic, CEO Pål Rødseth, about their ambitious plans to conquer the European SME market...

The field service industry has of course seen a lot of merger and acquisitions activity in the last couple of years, much of which has seen major global enterprises such as GE and Microsoft entering the market, through acquisitions of ServiceMax and FieldOne respectively, plus there has also much been private equity investment in established leading brands within the industry such as ClickSoftware, ServicePower and IFS.

However, there is another organisation on the acquisition trail which has gone beneath the radar of many of the more mainstream IT and Business focussed trade journals, yet they are perhaps set to have an equally big impact on the field service management landscape - that is Norwegian company Evatic who currently have offices in Norway, Sweden, Germany, France, Holland, UK, America and Singapore.

UK readers may well recognise the name as they acquired the highly respected British FSM pioneers Tesseract towards the end of last year - however that was just the first piece of the puzzle as the Nordic firm aim to build up a pan European organisation. Indeed, they’ve spent little time resting on their laurels and have recently added a second FSM provider to their growing family having recently acquired Swedish company WinServ.

However, whilst the acquisition of Tesseract was very much about securing the excellent IP that the UK team had developed as well as giving them a foothold into the UK market, with WinServ it seems Evatic are making a move that firmly establishes them as the number one player in their home sector.

 

“WinServ has been the toughest competitor to Evatic over many years in the Nordics,” explains Pål Rødseth, CEO, Evatic.

In fact, around 50% of the 330+ clients that currently use WinServ are in the copy/print sector - which is also Evatic’s main area of focus. Additionally WinServ’s clients are also predominantly spread across the Nordics with a large market share in Sweden. So for Evatic this move is more about building a dominant base in their primary sector to build upon rather than spreading their wings into different sectors or geographies.

Taken the two acquisitions separately, one may be mistaken in thinking that they were both merely opportunistic acquisitions for an ambitious company hungry for growth. Indeed, both Tesseract and WinServ were headed up by their original founders who were reaching retirement age - so there certainly is a certain grain of truth in that assertion. However, as Rødseth explains there is a much more focussed strategic approach to Evatic’s approach to acquisition pattern than merely picking up companies who happen to be in the right place at the right time.

“There are too many of these small companies that have all been around for twenty odd years that are not able to take the next leap forward in product development,” he explains.

“We see customers demanding more and more functionality. They are demanding new solutions be Cloud based, they are expecting business intelligence capabilities, they are demanding easy integrations. All of these things are only possible if you have a large enough customer base to spread the development cost across.”

“We believe that here is a need to consolidate these ten to twenty employee companies across Europe to be able to keep on developing solutions because if you don’t do that you will eventually lose your customers over time."

"You need to face up to what the bigger companies are doing in the service management space and be able to deliver the majority of that functionality down to the SMEs - which is our core customer base.”

It is an admirable approach and one that makes sense. The SME market remains largely under served and with so much money flowing into FSM providers at the moment the main battleground has become the enterprise sector - leaving plenty of space for someone like Evatic to come in and dominate amongst smaller organisations.

But of course, this can also be a very tricky path to negotiate. Will there come a point when by unifying the many smaller companies together essentially Evatic risk transforming into a big business themselves and lose the flexibility and adaptability that often makes smaller providers the right fit for their client base in the first place?

“We don’t want to become a Microsoft. We want to be able to retain flexibility and be able to take decisions quickly and work efficiently but we also want to scale the business more than we’ve done so far. We are moving into a new premise in Wycombe with Tesseract and that facility will have additional space for a good number of employees so we are planning to ramp up the Tesseract business and also expand into Europe.”

 

So how quickly can we expect Evatic to build their empire? With two quick-fire acquisitions back-to-back Rødseth perhaps wisely is planning a fallow year.

“We need to be realistic in what we are doing,” he explains.

“There are challenges in integrating businesses and there are challenges in getting people to work together when there are cultural differences and so forth - so I don’t think we will be making another acquisition in the next 6 to 12 months. We are more focussed currently on getting operational excellence in place. Doing M&A is challenging and the majority of such projects fail - we want to make sure ours doesn’t.”

“But we do have a list of 8 to 12 companies that we follow and we are in dialogue with them and we have investors that back our strategy and we do have the ability to move quickly if we need to.”

 

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FieldAware, a leader in made-for-mobile, cloud-based field service automation solutions, have recently launched FieldAware Forms to add enhanced data collection and workflow capabilities to its field service software. The improved solution increases data accuracy, speeds up data collection, automates data routing, and creates a seamless customer experience.

Field service professionals understand that accurate data collection is essential for a successful business, but this is often a lengthy and cumbersome task for those involved due to manual processes and duplicate data entry.

Paper-based processes are fraught with issues from delays in receiving vital information, to missing, incomplete information, or inconsistency in the data captured. With the enhanced capabilities of FieldAware Forms, organisations have reported a 300% improvement in customer response times and a 77% reduction in time taken to invoice by removing paper-based processes from their operations.

 

FieldAware Forms improves productivity further by eliminating redundant data entry tasks, and features like dropdown menus minimize errors and ensure high data quality across systems.

The additional embedded capabilities of FieldAware Forms allow FieldAware customers to generate an unlimited number of customisable forms that can be completed and synced to the back office at the touch of a button. Captured data can easily be searched, extracted, and sent to an analytics engine— transforming collected data into actionable business intelligence.

“The enhancements FieldAware Forms has made to automated mobile workflows will transform the all-important data collection for our customers,” says Steve Wellen, CEO FieldAware. “FieldAware Forms simplifies field data collection, improves data quality, and enables real-time data sharing. The use of dynamic, customisable forms to capture data not only saves time and eliminates paperwork, but ensures accurate records are being kept that can be used to create insightful reporting.”

“FieldAware Forms, as part of the FieldAware solution, will benefit all field service organizations looking to improve their productivity, service quality and significantly adds even greater value to those carrying out inspections and audits with compliance or regulatory obligations as part of their operations.”

FieldAware Forms is available to all new and existing FieldAware customers, extending the feature set with the enhanced mobile forms capabilities.

For more information on FieldAware visit www.fieldaware.com

 

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IFS is now uniquely positioned to offer world leading service management software solutions to the full spectrum of service businesses, independent of size, level of operational complexity, vertical focus or geographical location.

IFS, the global enterprise applications company, has recently announces it has signed an agreement to purchase WorkWave LLC. WorkWave is a leading provider of highly scalable, cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions for the Field Service and Last Mile Delivery and Logistics industries. WorkWave primarily serves small & medium sized (SMB) service businesses, with specific vertical focus on Pest Control, Lawn & Landscape, Cleaning & Janitorial, Heating/Ventilation/AC, Plumbing & Electrical and Transportation.

WorkWave’s SaaS solutions seamlessly integrate the office to the field, enabling SMB service businesses to streamline back office tasks such as scheduling, planning and billing, increase field visibility and productivity, and automate marketing and sales activities. As a result, WorkWave’s clients are able to significantly improve efficiency, reduce cost, boost revenues and enhance customer satisfaction.

From its headquarters in Holmdel, New Jersey, WorkWave’s 260 employees support more than 7,300 customers who are primarily based in the U.S. Thanks to its deep industry expertise, cutting-edge technology and focus on customer service, WorkWave is proud to be recognised with multiple awards for its outstanding growth and culture, including the Inc. 5000 and Best Places to Work, among others.

 

Commenting on the acquisitions, Fredrik vom Hofe, Group Senior Vice President for Business Development at IFS said “This acquisition is further evidence of how IFS is investing to extend its global leadership in Service Management. WorkWave, with its very strong SaaS offering and deep knowledge of how to serve SMB service businesses, complements IFS’s already leading service management offering that is used by many larger service-centric companies. We can now offer the most complete, connected Service Management solutions across the full-spectrum of service organisations and service-intensive industries, globally! In addition, we have significantly strengthened our presence in North America, the world’s largest software market, meaning that the Americas is now the largest region in the IFS Group.” He continued: “We are very pleased to have WorkWave’s CEO, Chris Sullens, and the talented WorkWave team join IFS to continue our growth in Service Management.”

Chris Sullens, CEO of WorkWave, stated “We are very excited to join the IFS team and looking forward to mutually accelerating our growth in the field service and logistics industries - and beyond. This is a great opportunity for our clients, partners, and employees.” He added, “We now have the opportunity to leverage the resources of a leading service management software organization, while continuing to invest in and deliver exceptional products and services to our core clients in pest control and other field service verticals. Our combination of offerings will help service businesses of all sizes solve their operational and growth challenges through our market-leading software solutions.”

 The acquisition is expected to close in Q4 2017. The financial terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed.

 

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Disruption has become a phrase so widely used it is in danger of becoming hackneyed, but in terms of asset maintenance, the IoT is bringing true, genuine disruption writes Servicemax’s Dave Hart...

If you had to pick a moniker for this decade, then “disruption” is a pretty good one. It’s now so pervasive that it’s almost become a cliché of itself.

Everywhere you look, from banking to music to taxis and hotels, traditional business models and markets are being disrupted. All driven by technology being applied in innovative new ways. Now it seems it’s the turn of capital equipment assets and the machines themselves to be disrupted – or at least the way we manage, use and maintain them.

Industrial downtime is no joke. Unplanned downtime in just about every industry has a significant impact. The Aberdeen Group last year reported that the cost of downtime across industries went up to $260,000 per hour on average between 2014 and 2016. That’s a huge jump with a considerable hit on any business.

Time typically isn’t kind to equipment and machines.

As assets get older, parts need maintaining or replacing and more can go wrong. And when it does go wrong, service technicians are typically sent out on site with very little insight other than something isn’t working. On top of that, most companies don’t know how best to optimise uptime availability in different conditions, such as managing volatility, meeting peak demand or managing performance in extreme conditions. It’s an area of business that’s historically been very inefficient, and had very little intelligence or investment applied to it.

 

As a tech-enabled society, we are better than that. And it was only a matter of time before the wave of technology innovation and disruption made its way to changing how we optimise equipment and capital assets, and predict their maintenance and service requirements. By harvesting and applying intelligence that previously would have been impossible to obtain, companies are seeing a major step change this area.

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

The reality is that the Industrial Internet offers an opportunity to intelligently manage resources and manage performance. Machines with sensors feeding back performance data provide a raw pipe of potential intelligence that needs to be woven into the business. With the right tools, organisations can use this data to develop strategies that alleviate risk.

Asset-intensive companies always strive to reduce operating risk while improving efficiency, at the same as coping with regulatory demands and workforce development.

These are key challenges that are difficult to achieve without an intelligent asset performance management (APM) approach. The more forward thinking companies also have field service management (FSM) strategies in place in an effort to streamline and automate their service departments. They are wise investments as both APM and FSM each deliver significant value in their own right.

But here’s the real disruptor: By combing these two disciplines, businesses have, for the first time, a complete suite of intelligence at their fingertips to understand potential equipment issues, and pre-empt them or act upon them quickly and efficiently with the correct tools and parts, should machinery need fixing for example.

No second guessing, no wasted investigative journeys and much lower risk of downtime.

Now take this one step further and think of a digital twin that mirrors of all your physical assets globally, giving you a dashboard that reports back to you on the status, health and performance of how each piece of equipment in each location is working. One that proactively alerts you, through intelligent APM, when action is required, and automatically takes preventative measures, through FSM, when an issue arises. Suddenly downtime looks much less of a threat.

That’s because predictive analytics and work management through APM enable businesses to plan, schedule, execute and feedback on problems and solutions. Which equipment is failing or about to fail and why? What parts are needed to fix the problem, where and by whom? And FSM then automatically triggers scheduling, ordering and dispatch of a service technician if required, to ensure everything is up and running and downtime is minimised.

 

It’s interesting that service businesses represent around seventy per cent of the world’s economy, yet to date, only about a third of the world’s large service businesses use just FSM solutions. They are missing a trick.

A combined APM and FSM approach optimises the equipment strategy for a company, analyses the risk and cost of how often equipment should be inspected, saving money, increasing productivity and reducing risk of downtime.

So what does all this mean in real terms? By proactively optimising and managing equipment assets, business can expect, on average, a 10 percent inventory cost reduction, 40 percent reduction in reactive maintenance, 25 percent gain in employee productivity and a 25 percent reduction in total cost of ownership.

Likewise, field service management can generate an average 13 percent boost in revenues and an 11 percent increase in customer satisfaction.

Why wouldn’t you want to join the dots on metrics like those? Throw in the potential savings from reduced transport and failure rates, less downtime, plus the sustainability benefits, and you have a recipe for future growth.

Now that is compelling, not to mention disruptive.

 

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Resource Type: White Paper
Published by:  Field Service News (sponsored by Tesseract)
Title: Five fundamental elements to expect in a FSM system

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Want to know more? Access to this resource is available to Field Service News subscribers only - but if you are a Field Service Professional you may qualify for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription!

Click here to apply for your subscription now and we’ll send you this white paper to your inbox now instantly as a thank you for your time!

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Synopsis:

Field Service Management technology has become essential to service delivery excellence. Service excellence is no longer a USP but a baseline requirement.

However, whilst technologies such as IoT and Augmented Reality are grabbing the headlines their potential is greatly diminished unless you have a fundamental layer of technology in place already.

This white paper explores what to expect from a FSM system and offers best-practice tips to help you get the most from your investment..

Overview

The white paper explores the following five key elements of a Field Service Management (FSM) System explaining the importance and offering best practice advice of how to get the most from your own system...

1. Contract Manager:

Contract management is often viewed as the starting point of almost everything within field service management operations. Without a view of your service contracts you cannot have to hand the answers for critical questions such as:

• What is the SLA on any given contract?
• Is a client under warranty or do they have an enhanced level of service contract?
• Does a contract include spare parts and/or consumables?
• Is the service contract due for renewal?[/unordered_list]

You could be at risk of potentially not meeting your clients expectations and so putting the potential of renewing or upselling service to that client in danger in the future – or on the other side of the coin, you could be giving valuable service away for free.

Therefore, Contract Management is perhaps the most important of the fundamental building blocks that you should expect to find within a modern field service management solution and perhaps the first area that you should make sure your team is fully versed in utilising.

2. Scheduling:

Scheduling comes in a number of different guises and the various different names given to types of scheduling options can be a somewhat confusing but broadly scheduling will come in three flavours:

• Assisted
• Optimised
• Dynamic

It is often assumed that a dynamic solution is required for a larger mobile workforce, but whilst the size of your workforce is certainly one consideration in which type of scheduling engine would best suit your service operation - this is not the only factor.

The complexity of the service work, as well as the variety of service jobs you undertake is another significant factor. For example an organisation that has a field workforce that services multiple different asset types – perhaps from multiple OEMs, and therefore has a number of different engineer requirements for differing jobs - would likely benefit far more from an optimised scheduling engine than an organisation that just fixes one or two types of assets for which all of their engineers are qualified to undertake repairs and maintenance.

3. Mobile tools and communications::

It is fair to say that the biggest revolution in field service has come from the rapid explosion in mobile computing power. Today’s smartphones are capable of greater computing tasks than even the laptops of just a few years back. For the field service organisation this is fantastic as it puts information at the field service engineers finger tips, empowers them to spend more time on maintenance and repair and less on activities such as paper work and enables them to deliver a far more effective and impressive service experience for the customer. Also, with the advent of smart phones, and then latterly tablets, has come greater communications tools than we could have ever expected ten years ago.

For example, engineer to engineer communications are seamless in today’s world, whether it be using dedicated built-for-purpose business tools or even free to use consumer solutions such as WhatsApp or Skype. From a FSM solution standpoint again whilst a mobile app was a USP, an add on or even a separate solution entirely just a few short years ago, now almost all FSM solutions will come with some mobile offering included.

 

However, whilst the mobile element in FSM technology is constantly evolving, essentially the most fundamental and core aspect that you want a mobile aspect of a FSM solution to do is to mirror your back-end solution and to do so in real-time.

4. Parts & Inventory Management::

Parts and Inventory management is perhaps an area that in the past has not received the focus and attention that it requires. It has often been the mantra of field service organisations that they are aiming to the get the right engineer to the right job, at the right time.

But that all becomes moot if the right engineer doesn’t have the right parts to hand as well. Consistently at industry conferences parts management remains a hot button and a common pain point for a huge amount of organisations. So whilst it is exciting to talk about emerging technologies such as IoT and Augmented Reality - a primary focus should be on ensuring our field service operation is as efficient as possible at a fundamental level, and that means getting a grip on parts management.

And whilst of course there are supply chain and logistics aspects to the conversation which can make things complicated – especially when you are using third party contractors – one of the most crucial aspects of good parts and inventory management is utilising a system that can keep track of where your inventory, including van inventory, is at any given point.

5. Integration:

We are living in a world of data lakes, data rivers, data mountains and all other types of data topography it seems! But all these vast swathes of data are meaningless unless you are able to draw insight from it, and quite often that means being able to let the data flow seamlessly from one set of business applications to another.

 

Of course, our vision of the future is that everything will be plug and play and all technologies will play well together nicely, but we aren’t quite there yet.

 

This is why integration is absolutely key in any modern business system – including FSM. Of course, our vision of the future is that everything will be plug and play and all technologies will play well together nicely, but we aren’t quite there yet.

 

Integration varies from provider to provider but often it is led by the integrations they have been asked to undertake, so if your current provider or a provider you have identified as being a good fit for your business don’t advertise integration with a specific system you are using – it is worth discussing the possibilities with them - especially if it is a common platform as making their product integrate may be useful for other future clients also.

 

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This White Paper offers further details on each of the above elements and how to get the most from them.

Want to know more? Access to this resource is available to Field Service News subscribers only - but if you are a Field Service Professional you may qualify for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription!

Click here to apply for your subscription now and we’ll send you this white paper to your inbox now instantly as a thank you for your time!

 

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In this sample from the Field Service News webinar Field Service System Overview: Microsoft Dynamics for Field Service and the eBECS added IP Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News hosts a Q&A session with the session presenters Michael Smythe and Alice Walton.

 

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Want to know more? The full webinar is available to Field Service News subscribers only - but if you are a field service professional then you can apply for a complimentary subscription now on the link below and we will send you links to access the full webinar as a thank you for your application!

Apply for Field Service News subscription now by clicking here

 

 

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Marne Martin, CEO of ServicePower describes what field service management professionals should expect from their solution providers and offers some excellent intel on how to pick a partner that is right for your business...

Customer service, customer satisfaction, customer experience. Those are more than buzz word, more than trends in field service.

Field service organisations have recognised that to achieve the highest levels of retention and overall growth in consumers, they must focus on providing the highest levels of service. High service levels may mean faster service, less break-downs, higher first time fix in the field depending on the given industry and customer expectations, but regardless, the focus needs to be on what the customer wants.

We frequently find that the account management or sales organisations which hold the customer relationship budget, aren’t engaging as effectively as they could be with the service side of the organisation to put existing or new technology to use. Customer experience is about more than the CRM!

Using the latest in technology and mobile workforce management software, field service organisations are able to create a sales to service experience that is game changing and seamless.

Using robust integrations or other sorts of data inputs to take customer information in, utilise intelligent online portals which customers can use to engage, schedule, communicate, track service appointments and even purchase additional services makes service events a walk in the park versus a departure down the crevasse. Artificial intelligence, IoT and schedule optimisation software can improve the service experience through proactive services, real time appointment booking, higher schedule adherence and increased first time fix rates.

 

They can also facilitate scheduling your most important or more profitable customers first. Mobile software can enable field techs with the data, access and processes to delight each and every customer on every service call that mobile techs are truly enabled to be experts for every customer and asset by technology, not just their memory.

The question is, why should a field service organisation expect less than the best ‘customer experience’ itself from its FSM vendor?

Solution deployment

Field service management solutions are used by a wide range of organisations across many different verticals. The best FSM software should be configurable enough to support standard service processes, while also supporting processes unique to particular business requirement- without unexpected development.

And though business in general has become more accepting of cloud deployments, due to improved security, increased power of distributed computing and reduced costs related to hosted infrastructure, there remain industries, particularly in insurance, healthcare and finance, which cannot and will not migrate to a cloud-based deployment. The most versatile FSM vendors will not force migration to a newly built cloud platform simply to comply with its own roadmap, nor sunset functionality without providing similar, better options.

Look for vendors which can support your business today and in the future, based your requirements, not theirs.

Support

I find it ironic that with so much focus on improving the end-customer experience that so many FSM vendors in fact provide poor customer service to the field service organisation which they support.

Customer satisfaction isn’t solely focused on the end user. It starts with the sales process and moves through deployment, validation and recurring process improvement. The best FSM vendors define a solid picture of the desired end state for a deployment and then build a robust SOW around the deployment such that the intended outcome is achieved and improved upon without unanticipated cost or time overruns.

Evolving business requirements and changing consumer expectations dictate a continuously improved mobile workforce solution. To expect less than the incorporation of emerging technologies, new features and improved deployment options is ridiculous. Expect more. Rely on your FSM partner to proactively provide a better solution to support you and your customers, for the long term.

Value add

Deploying a software solution and walking away shouldn’t be the business norm. Nor is simply providing annual software upgrades the only ‘value added service’ you should expect. After all, you’re probably paying for support and maintenance. That’s what the fees are for!

Value added services are what increases your ability to provide the best customer experience to your customer, and in our mind, are really what define the best customer experience for your organisation.

The best FSM vendors can provide not only software solutions which improve your ability to execute the best service experience, but also your utilisation of the software, your labour strategy and possibly your labour capacity.

 

ServicePower’s team of experts excels at post sale value add.

Our teams, with an annual tenure of 15+ years working in software and field service management, work with your field service and IT teams to fine tune your deployment, prove your business case, improve performance, and plan for the evolution of your business and upgrades.

ServicePower also uniquely provides workforce strategy planning and outsourced managed services both in North America and EMEA.

Our client success teams have been on the ground, managing employed technicians and contractors for some of the biggest field service organisations in the world. We can lend that expertise to your teams in terms of evaluating your workforce, optimising your resources and executing a plan to integrate a contracted workforce element to maintain and improve your service levels.

We also offer a fully managed network of 3rd party service providers to enable rapid and high-quality on-demand “spill-over” servicing at peak times and in hard-to-reach locations across North America and the Europe.

ServicePower considers its clients partners, not ‘contracts’. We enter into relationships with the expectation that we’ll be our client partners trusted advisors, trusted providers of the best possible customer experience for themselves and their end customers.

 

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It has now been ten months since GE Digital acquired field service management solution provider for a cool $915 Million. Even against a backdrop of constant M&A activity within our industry, it was a deal that made the wider world sit up and pay attention to the field service sector. But how have ServiceMax slotted in two the GE Digital fold and how big a part will they play in GE’s vision of how best to serve the industrial markets of the future?

Kris Oldland, spoke exclusively to Scott Berg, COO, ServiceMax just before he participated in their first major outing as a GE Digital company at the Minds and Machines conference...

With the Minds and Machines 2017 event just days away it was an opportune time to reconnect with Scott Berg, COO of ServiceMax.

The last time I spoke with a member of the senior executive team at the Californian based Field Service Management Solution provider was when I spoke with their CEO Dave Yarnold, literally a few hours ahead of the announcement that ServiceMax was being acquired for a figure just shy of a Billion dollars by General Electric (GE) and would become part of their expanding GE Digital portfolio.

And whilst field service management is undoubtedly a hot ticket for investment at the moment, with the list of acquisitions within the market being a veritable who’s who of FSM vendors including ClickSoftware, ServicePower and IFS amongst others, nothing has come even close to matching the size of deal between GE and ServiceMax.

But then no one in the field service sector has really come close to matching ServiceMax in terms of their success story across the last decade either - growing from a three man start-up in a rented office in San Francisco to an industry leader worth close to a Billion Dollars within ten years takes some doing, yet when I spoke with Yarnold back in November last year, it wasn’t achievement I heard in his tone, but yet further ambition.

 

He talked excitedly about the reasons why he had decided GE could be a suitable home for ServiceMax, outlining hugely ambitious plans to work with GE to build out a working IT platform for entirety of the industrial sector, something that connected people, assets and workflows together to drive business forwards in the twenty first century.

Indeed, it is often hard to not get caught up in Yarnold’s enthusiasm, and sometimes the trick is to separate the passion from the plans, the hyperbole from the reality - although in fairness he and the ServiceMax team do tend to have a habit of meeting the ambitious plans he puts forward.

But has that ability to rise to the challenge been hampered or enhanced whilst being taken under the wing at GE?

Just ahead of the Minds and Machines conference is a great time to sit back and assess that question, whilst Scott Berg, is perhaps the perfect barometer.

Like Yarnold, Berg has been on the ServiceMax journey from Day 1, and whilst he undoubtedly shares much of Yarnold’s passion not just for their product but for the service industry at large as well, with Berg one also gets the feeling that, that passion is tempered just a tad by a keen analytical mind, that is acutely aware of not only the size of the opportunity but also the size of the challenge, and as Chief Operating Officer, it is his job to overcome that challenge.

 

As such he is a perfect foil for Yarnold, the two compliment each other well, (in fact that is trait that seems to be apparent throughout the whole ServiceMax family, there is a shared ‘something’ in the DNA and it seem that at all levels the team members feed well off each other) so who better to discuss how the integration with GE has progressed and whether the roadmap for Servicemax as part of GE remains on a similar course, to that which Yarnold described?

“This is really the first opportunity for us to be a GE Digital company and showcase some announcements of what we are planning,” explains Berg when we catch up to discuss what we can expect to come out of the event.

“I think this is the first time that we’ve made a public announcement where people can start to see some of the synergies across the GE Digital portfolio and the big news for us is the integration between the ServiceMax Field Service Management (FSM) Solution and Asset Performance Management (APM) within the GE portfolio. It’s big news and I think it’s a first proof point around GE’s thinking around the Industrial Internet and what role services and assets will play within that world.”

Indeed, when ServiceMax launched their Connected Field Service offering in the beginning of last year the vision was very much to bring the install base to the forefront of an FSM system, rather than just being focussed on the mobile workforce - which had traditionally been the primary focus of industry tools to date. Connected Field Service of course leveraged IoT, and from my limited understanding of AMP this was a solution that could build on that?

“Yes, it is a really interesting evolution on the concept,” Berg says helping fill in the gaps of my own understanding.

 

“If you think about our field service strategy it was about getting data from the machine and the asset. Basically, letting the machine become the sensor rather than the customer being the sensor when something goes wrong.”

“That is still very much part of the on-going strategy, what APM adds to the process is a significant amount of additional intelligence around preventative maintenance.”

“The concept has always been about avoiding unplanned downtime and in terms of providing preventative maintenance there is a rapid evolution going on where we are moving quickly from interval based maintenance i.e. perform this maintenance every 6 months or a year, to condition based maintenance - which is perform maintenance every 1,000 cycles of a machine. But now with APM combined with IoT we basically have data from the machine itself, embedded into a sophisticated analytics engine in APM, combined with the finance and the strategy to optimally operate an asset and to do so in the most profitable manner.”

“So what APM adds, fed by this IoT data, is basically recommendations and intelligence of when maintenance should most optimally be performed. For example right now, or next week or next month. It can even do things like suggest the maintenance shouldn’t even happen at all. It may be that the best strategy and profit outcome on a particular asset would be to let it burn out its useful life - it might be more profitable to replace it than it is to make the repair. And if so that is what APM will suggest.”:

“It is an evolution in the concepts around maintenance. From interval, to conditioned and now to predictive analytic schedules. And when combined with the power we already had in ServiceMax, which was taking this IoT feed from the machine and suggesting when service can happen, it becomes a very powerful tool indeed.”

One thing that is of particular interest with APM is how the solution can work from fleet level through to sub-component level.

“We are definitely down at the component level now if we look at the areas such as the Power industry or Oil and Gas - vibration sensing, the speed things are rotating at, the temperature of bearings and how do those factors impact performance behaviours or how do they impact output or throughput of a machine. It could be the volume of fluid passing through something, It could be on a grander scale, the level of power production from a thermo-nuclear plant that is converting fossil fuels to electrical output,“ Berg explains as we discuss the importance of being able to see the health of various levels of both components and assets.

“But, the important factor with APM is that it can also can apply it to systems of assets as well. You could have a situation where you have multiple assets, each with sub-components and you want them all performing hopefully in unison - or at least in tandem, to produce an overall outcome so you can ‘zero’ in on where maintenance should occur to optimise the output. It could be on one asset , it could be on one sub-component of an asset.”

 

Essentially this is perhaps where APM can deliver the most value, in helping make the vast streams of data from assets connected to the IoT, truly useful.

As Berg alludes to when he comments: “I think one of the big struggles people always have with IoT is that they basically drown in the data. You’re being sent all these readings but how do you make sense of it?”

“What APM does is make sense of that data in light of maximising the uptime and the output of an asset and its components. It’s that added layer of intelligence that IoT on it’s own doesn’t have. It’s making that data useful essentially,” he adds.

Of course, one of the big benefits of FSM tools such as ServiceMax is allowing the service organisation to empower their field service technicians by putting such rich layers of customer information, ultimately being able to put the core intelligence of the organisation itself, into the hands of the field service technician.

Given that the integration between ServiceMax and APM is geared towards increasing the efficiency of preventative maintenance strategies, I was intrigued to see how much of this intelligence would be filtered down to the engineer. For example if he was on site fixing asset A would he be able to see that in fact Asset B was due to for maintenance in the next few weeks and therefore potentially undertake the second maintenance job whilst on site to save an unnecessary future truck role?

“I think that layer of insight is there on two different levels,” Berg responds when I put this point across to him.

“From a back office standpoint certainly, APM will suggest maintenance should occur on machine number one based on a threshold that’s been reached, but more importantly than that, it will also look at the fleet of the assets and see anything else that is approaching that same level of wear and tear (or that same maintenance condition) and alongside what we’ve already created within Connected Field Service - where we are pushing that machine data down to the technician, we can use our install base management capabilities to identify the fleet of assets that are at his location and highlight those near the warning condition or those that would approach it soon.”

“This data can then be fed to the technician who can make recommendations whilst on-site with the customer to say ‘well I’m here for pump number six but whilst I’m here I can see that also pumps number three and four are in a similar condition so I’ll go ahead and fix those in advance, or perhaps even explain to the customer “well, this one I’m going to leave run as it is for a bit longer because the recommendation is to push this a little bit further before we do the maintenance activity, to allow you to get maximum output.”

 

One interesting if indirect result of giving the technician this level of insight is that by being able to relay such information to the customer, he can also reestablishes the importance of the maintenance visit in the first place.

In today’s markets as we see companies moving to outcome-based services and preventative maintenance strategies in ever greater numbers, there is the new challenge of the workload of the technician perhaps going unseen by the client. In the old traditional break-fix model there was the theatre of the service engineer being the superhero, coming in to rescue the poor Ops Manager who has had to put an exasperated call in to say - “Hey! I can’t produce anything!’ Then the engineer comes in, meets his SLA and makes everything work again. Going above and beyond and generally being a hero.

In today’s world of outcome-based contracts there is a challenge to make sure you are effectively communicating the work your technicians have done for the client, to demonstrate the value your service provides them.

With the tools Berg is discussing, it seems there is the potential to almost move the engineer into something more of a consultative role. Someone who can say I’ve come to undertake the maintenance on ‘a,b,c’ but I can also advise you that ‘x,y,z’ could be also be done today and this will improve your output by ‘n’.

“I think there is a great opportunity here to improve the lifestyle of the technician themselves,” Berg comments as we bring the conversation onto this point. “Sure, there is the heroic experience of saving the day but that is also a high anxiety moment as well. When we consider the psychology of the technician, the challenging bit is to go out there by yourself, with no one to help you, then when encounter a really bad situation hopefully you’re the one that can resolve it. It can be a life with a lot of tension, which is sometimes overlooked.”

“Alongside that I also think that customer expectations are shifting as well,” he continues.

“There is the classic metaphor that people don’t want to go out and buy a drill they want to buy a hole and the concept is largely about outcomes. I think more and more customers of the machinery don’t really care so much about the details of the machine. They don’t want it to break down, they want it to produce what they bought it for, and they want to extend and maximise its life so that it produces more of what they bought it for.”

 

“So now you put a technician in the position to not only be the hero by just fixing something retrospectively, but to be the hero that proactively maximises the customers output and production from an asset they acquired? I think that is not only going above and beyond but it is catering to more of the outcome-based mentality that companies now want to consume output rather than buy a set amount of machines.”

So it seems at least on the technology side of things there is already progress being made between the two organisations coming together, although it could be argued that this is the result of the two separate existing technologies just being plugged into each other.

The real fruits of the union are likely some way off, although how far could largely depend on how quickly and easily the ServiceMax team are integrating into the wider GE group. I mentioned Yarnold’s views at the time of the acquisition about the two organisations having a shared understanding and a similar DNA in terms of the view they both held of what ‘good service looks like’ - as well as the importance of service within industry as we move further into the twenty first century.

And of course, I was keen to see if that was holding out now the ServiceMax is fully embedded within GE.

“I think it is and I think it was very prescient of Dave to be highlighting that right at the start of us coming together,” Berg replies.

“There are several things here. Firstly, we’ve always served markets that I would largely classify as OEM manufacturers or industrial companies and certainly these are the companies and sectors that GE is already working amongst. As a direct result of that we are already seeing great energy and sales momentum by our alignment with GE business units around Oil and Gas, Energy, Power - as these were the industries we would have sold to anyway.”

[quote]I think with GE being largely a company and culture built around engineers, we have both shared an asset centric perspective on service.

“Secondly, I think with GE being largely a company and culture built around engineers, we have both shared an asset centric perspective on service. For us, it was always about a system of assets in the field that customers wanted outputs and outcomes from - we were never about being your typical field service, scheduling only solution. For us it was an awareness of the people, the schedule and the asset. And certainly GE‘s culture is grounded in engineering, machinery and assets - so we are on the same page.”

 

“The third thing that I think is interesting is that GE was one of our largest customers and if you look at GE as a company, I like to call it the largest field service company in the world. There are tens of thousands of technicians, and the vast majority of revenue at GE is derived from service contracts - so there is definitely a kindred spirit and a kind of alignment with GE because of these vertical focussed, asset centric mentalities. Plus then there is a shared passion for service which is such a big contributor to the GE business.”

Of course one would think that as one of their biggest clients, having the GE team on hand to add weight to their cause could also add some heavy kudos and gravitas at times that they need to call in the big guns.

In particular GE have been early adopters in the move towards outcome based models in a number of verticals. Is that helping the ServiceMax team when they go into conversations with prospective customers?

Of course, the move to outcome-based services is heavily tied to the use of the cutting-edge technology that ServiceMax provide, so it is in their vested interest to be avid promoters of such shifts in thinking.

But the reality is a move to outcome-based contracts can be a hard sell for service businesses to their own clients, whilst many still may need some convincing that a shift away from recurring spare parts revenue within the break-fix model is indeed the future of the Aftermarket sector.

However, having the back story of now being part of GE, who have already taken that path and who are able to say we believe this is the future because we’ve already gone out and done it in our own business, that must surely be a powerful tool when it comes to talking to those companies who are more reticent to make such a switch?

“This is actually one of the core themes at Minds and Machines,” Berg replies.

“The concept our chairman will be talking about is how our digital transformation at GE from an industrial company to a digital industrial company is really focussed on three different markets.”

“Firstly there is GE for GE, which is how we help ourselves go through this digital transformation towards outcome-centric models. Secondly, we have GE for Customers and this is looking at the business units which GE serves and the companies they sell to, and we want to help and advise them - sharing what we’ve learnt from our own experiences with them.”

“The final one is called GE for the World. What has been interesting with this and what has truly surprised me is the amount of times we’ve been speaking to companies who are traditionally staunch GE competitors, but they are curious about what we are doing.”

“The whole idea behind this is to share the experience GE has had broadly around digital transformation of industrial businesses.”

 

Given this experience and the broad touch-points Berg has access to I was curious to find out what his take on the shift to servitization was. Is it becoming as prevalent as it seems from behind my admittedly sometimes magnified field service lens? Indeed, are there many companies still in need of persuading that outcome-centric models are the best way forward, or has acceptance of the need to move towards servitized business models become widespread?

“It is interesting because I’ve yet to see much real push back on the concept,” Berg comments. “It is a as if everyone has come to accept that an outcome based model, i.e. a Service as a Product model - is the essential thing to do.

I think that value GE plays in those conversations is more geared towards telling these companies what is the first step to take on a journey like that. Sharing what our experiences have been, how we’ve done it and what our accomplishments have been.”

“It’s really interesting that in practical selling situations to potential customers one of the most impactful people we can bring into a scenario like that is someone like a CIO form one of the GE business who has made these investments, made it happen and can show you the results. I think the door is open but I think people are perhaps a bit confused as to how and where to start and that’s what GE can help them. We can outline how to start their journey and how best to stay on the right path.”

As we come to the end of our time together, a few things have become apparent throughout our conversation.

The first is that the technology seems to be a natural fit and combining ServiceMax with APM is a natural evolution, that is set to yield impressive results for those that are in place to put the two together.

The second is that Yarnold’s earlier prediction about their being a shared vision across the two organisations seems to be bang on target. As Berg explains their future plans to me there is a real sense not just of unity between the two organisations but also of continuity in terms of the original ServiceMax core beliefs that were so fundamental to their success.

However, one other thing that was apparent was the number of times Berg used the word industrial. This of course makes sense when we factor GE into the conversational mix - but one of the things that ServiceMax developed a strong reputation for pre GE, was for that every Sony, GE or Scheider they worked with - there were also the companies like Service2 - i.e. small local companies with less than twenty engineers.

Will these SMEs still be of relevance to ServiceMax or will they be forgotten as ServiceMax under GE goes hunting for a place amongst the industries enterprise elite?

 

“I think the conversation has changed a little bit for smaller companies but in a positive way,” Berg responds. “The GE brand credibility is really helping us send a positive message to smaller companies. We continue to serve all those markets and in fact one thing you will see from us is an expansion in the market at this level.”

“We see three separate groups of customers, one is the OEM manufacturers which has been a sweet spot for our business, people that make complex machines, such as medical devices or heavy machinery.”

“One expansion will be in what we call asset operators so you could think of in that realm are the power producers. Electric and Oil and Renewables who basically don’t make anything, they buy a whole bunch of assets and then produce something. Then the third group would be one that we’ve always focussed on, namely the service providers and that’s where you get a lot of these smaller companies.”

“The really interesting thing is if you take any one of the seven or eight business units in GE and think of it as an ecosystem of something like Oil and Gas then certainly you could be talking to someone like Shell or BP doing oil exploration and production but as soon as you take a step back from the centre of that industry, that’s where those relatively smaller providers are really important. What’s really interesting is that they are also really important to the GE verticals as well because there is an ecosystem of those service providers working with a GE - or maybe competing with a GE but supplementing the value in that market. So we will continue to focus on those types of companies and actually a lot of the companies we’ve historically sold to in those spaces are aligned to the GE ecosystems anyway.”

“We really think that effective field service execution is a combination of people, assets and outcomes,” Berg offers in closing.

“I think that our integration into the digital portfolio combined with the GE business experience puts us in an incredibly unique position to not only help our clients manage their people but also to help manage their install base of assets and make this shift to this outcome-based mentality around preventative maintenance a less painful and more fruitful path to follow.”

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