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Based on its recent analysis of the workforce management (WFM) solutions market, Frost & Sullivan have recognised Teleopti with the 2016 EMEA Frost & Sullivan Award for Customer Value Leadership.

Teleopti's pioneering work in the WFM market, backed by the outstanding customer value of its full-featured product set, has earned it an eminent position in the market. Its commitment to product innovation is highlighted by the richness of its features in all areas, from forecasting and scheduling to performance management and agent enablement.

Teleopti was an early mover in the WFM market, and is now one of the last of the pure-play WFM providers, allowing it to focus on improving WFM and not spread resources over the other areas of agent performance optimisation (APO). It has a powerful, flexible, versatile, best-of-breed WFM solution that meets the diverse needs of European and global markets. Its solutions are available on-premise and in the cloud, allowing companies of all sizes to choose the option that best fits their budgets.

"Being able to deliver its solution on-premise, the company has an advantage in countries that are reluctant to move to the cloud. However, as with the rest of the industry, Teleopti provides cloud-based alternatives as well,” said Frost & Sullivan Principal Analyst, Nancy Jamison. She added, "Teleopti mainly sold cloud to smaller companies, but in 2015, its cloud business won many more enterprise customers, including large centres with thousands of agents."

 

Being headquartered in Sweden, in a region with numerous countries and various labor laws, has given Teleopti knowledge of specific needs across different regions. For instance, for the Middle East market, Teleopti created a prayer planning function within its product that inserts breaks at the required times. The agent screens also accommodate differences in language — including reading from right to left — and regional calendars.

The company differentiates itself through its consulting model and staffing tenured consultants with expertise in contact centres.

Customer engagements start with pre-installation analysis, but a critical component of the engagement is that the consultant sticks with the customer for the first half year after implementation, before handing off to a post-sales support team. This model tends to be expensive, but it has paid off for Teleopti by ensuring long-term customer satisfaction.

"Teleopti has been successful in its attempts to deliver top-class ownership experience, as evidenced by 9 out of 10 of Teleopti’s customers recommending the solution to others," noted Ms. Jamison. "Furthermore, customers have come to expect speed of innovation from the company. In the past 18 months, it has released six new feature modules, ranging from product integration with third-party suppliers to features that directly affect the agents, such as a notification system, talent management, advanced training planning, and overtime availability."

 

The company also places due emphasis on employee satisfaction, providing easy-to-use and visually appealing access for agents on mobile devices, supporting shift trading or requesting time off no matter where they are. Gamification is another key area designed to keep employees motivated and engaged.

Significantly, the company’s offerings have attracted notable partners, including system integrator and value-added reseller partners normally found in the ranks of well-established contact centre players. Longstanding partnerships with companies such as ZOOM International, ASC, and Telstrat enable Teleopti to go head-to-head against the more entrenched WFO suite providers.

Overall, strategic partnerships and a rich product line have ensured customer loyalty and profitability for Teleopti, making it a name to be reckoned with in the EMEA WFM market.

Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated excellence in implementing strategies that proactively create value for its customers with a focus on improving the return on the investment that customers make in its services or products. The award recognizes the company's inordinate focus on enhancing the value that its customers receive, beyond simply good customer service, leading to improved customer retention and, ultimately, customer base expansion.

Frost & Sullivan’s Best Practices Awards recognise companies in a variety of regional and global markets for outstanding achievement in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research.

 

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Company:

Intimus International Group is a leader in the Information Security industry.

They offer information security products that include everything from industrial paper shredders to high security and large capacity data destruction machines. Intimus operates in multiple countries across Europe and manages processes and workflows across multiple divisions.

They offer comprehensive solutions throughout the value chain in terms of innovation, development, manufacturing, sales and post-sales services.

Challenge:

“Intimus International wants to be the leading global supplier of security solutions for data management and cash management systems. We have over 11,000 customers in Benelux, and it is our mission to provide them with best-in-class service,” said Gunther Dehaes, General Manager, Intimus.

The company offers service contracts to repair and maintain its product line and the profitability of these service contracts depends on how efficiently the company can meet its obligations.

Working across multiple countries and following a merger and acquisition, Intimus found there were a number of bottlenecks with their existing workflows.

 

They needed to more efficiently coordinate communication between the back office and field engineers and wanted to be able to streamline the workflow as well as how they captured and processed data to and from the field.

“Our problem was the time it took to coordinate, communicate and process everything that happened in the field,” explained Erlyn Grevelt, Supply Chain Manager of Intimus. Dispatchers were having to have lengthy, often complex phone conversations with engineers for every service request. With each call taking up to ten minutes and more than 50 engineers in the field, the calls alone consumed more than 100 hours a week.

Then, as engineers completed service calls, they filled out the job details on paper, which were taken back to the office to be input manually. A team in accounting then reviewed all completed jobs before invoicing, so the entire process to bill a customer took a full day on average.

Operational improvements:

Having recently implemented Netsuite, a leading ERP system, to streamline and simplify their accounting practices and resource planning, Intimus wanted something compatible to improve their operational service, they turned their attention to field service management software.

“We knew from the start that we would need to extend our service needs and NetSuite has a strong partner programme and through that programme we found FieldAware,” explained Grevelt.

 

“FieldAware has a very simple mobile app for engineers and at the same time, it gives me a huge amount of complex information. When an IT solution can offer me that, I’m very pleased.”

Intimus selected FieldAware because of the deep integration with Netsuite, ease of implementation and ease of use for the schedulers and engineers.

The implementation of both Netsuite and FieldAware took just 40 days and with quick and high adoption from their field engineers, the positive impact was immediate.

Together, NetSuite OneWorld and FieldAware transformed the field service workflows in the company’s service operations and accounting, dramatically accelerating the job completion rates and invoicing processes.

Results:

The newly automated processes save considerable time for customers, dispatchers, engineers and back office staff alike. Engineers use FieldAware mobility software to schedule their own time based on customer location and availability.

FieldAware saves 80 hours each week for the dispatch team, and reduced the time required to generate invoices from one day to less than a minute.

“With FieldAware we are more efficient now,” said Peter Gils, Service Manager, Intimus “An engineer’s tablet has a complete list of the workflow he has to do, he can plan his own route without calling the office, we drive less miles which saves us money, and the customers are happy with the shorter response time.”

FieldAware optimised communications between dispatchers and field service engineers, so now dispatchers enter details of each service order into NetSuite, which instantly transfers them to technicians’ tablets. Engineers contact the customer and schedule jobs themselves. The press of a button tracks the service call and FieldAware automatically sends this data back to NetSuite for invoicing and management reporting.

 

“Results have been staggering and the outcome impressive”, said Grevelt. “Most importantly, FieldAware has taken the pressure off the coordination team.”

“In the past, we had to have multiple conversations to be able to service our customer,” added Grevelt.

“Now we have a direct line of communication to the customer through the engineer in the field. We only have one conversation, and that’s the only conversation that matters, and that’s the one with the customer.”

 

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Mobility is helping transform field service organisations. To download FieldAware’s new white paper – ‘Making the Move to Mobility: TheDigitalisation of Field Service’– please visit http://www.fieldaware.co.uk/movetomobility

 

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Nick Shipton of scheduling specialists Kirona outlines why flexibility is as much a key ingredient in scheduling as optimisation...

Mobilising field based staff is high on the agenda at the moment with many organisations looking to increase the effectiveness and efficiencies of their workforce alongside offering increased levels of customer service and satisfaction.

It is obviously key that in order to mobilise your field staff effectively a complimentary scheduling solution is required to efficiently organise the jobs before dispatching them at the appropriate time to the mobile device.

However, what is sometimes overlooked is an understanding that that scheduling solution may need to react to different types of work in different ways, and therefore it’s key that the solution offers flexible methods of scheduling to suit how you need to drive your organisation.

Organisations often offer a wide range of services to their customers which can result in diverse requirements in terms of how those services need to be accessed by the customer and how that demand needs to be planned, which can cause issues if your scheduler has been built to suit a particular vertical or service, and drives you to fit the service to the schedulers constraints rather than configure the schedule to suit the requirements.

Some services will require fairly simple allocation of one off tasks based on matching skill-sets to the type of work, but if you throw into the mix customers expecting appointments at the first point of contact whether that is via a phone call or self-service this simple offering becomes much more complex, especially if you also want to throw into the mix planned works and programmed works.

 

The key with offering an appointed service is that you need to be able to offer and steer the customer towards taking a slot which not only satisfies them in terms of service levels but also takes into account all the other jobs in the system at that point in time, and allows you at that first point of contact to firstly offer the most efficient slot for you organisation, therefore building in maximum efficiency for the workforce.

Even if your organisation has only a small proportion of these ‘fixed’ appointed jobs they become the key jobs in the solution to plan other work around that has a more flexible time window, as we can’t break the direct promise we’ve made to the customer via that appointment.

Generally planned works have a more flexible planning window so we may need to carry out the job within the next X days or complete the jobs once a week, or once a month but we are not too worried about when we carry it out within that period.

Most scheduling systems will handle this well as there is plenty of flexibility within the large planning window to continually optimise your routes until you are satisfied with the schedule, but if you have an appointment to satisfy then that can throw an expensive spanner in the works as the scheduler doesn’t have the ability to move it where it may want to.

To further complicate matters other services may be carrying out far more complex works such as those which have dependencies and sequencing of tasks required to ensure they are carried not only in the most efficient manner but also in the correct order, or have a service that needs to deal with a very high volume of jobs with a short duration within small geographical locations.

All of the above pose different scheduling questions and of course you could look at implementing different solutions for these different scenarios however you lose the ability to get a complete view of the workforce and lose the ability to look at whether further efficiencies can be gained by carrying out more work at one location whilst you have resources there.

Reporting also becomes a trickier task as you are unable to easily view within one system how different services or regions may be performing.

Analysis can then be done to look if the location and levels of field based staff are correct and whether with a slight adjustment to these levels and locations performance can be improved.

You can also start to look at hierarchical KPI’s, so right down to operative level we can start to look at where and how the business can be improved.

The ability to implement a truly flexible scheduling solution such as Kirona’s DRS not only allows you to both improve the day to day operation of the organisation but also analyse how it can continually improve.

 

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Optical measuring solutions provider GOM UK, whose clients include many major automotive & aerospace companies, is utilising innovative lone worker security solution, StaySafe.

The app, which tracks an employee’s location via GPS and alerts their manager if they do not check-in within a specified time, will be used to ensure that GOM’s engineers are safe whilst visiting and travelling between sites.

GOM works across a range of industries such as medical and transportation, and engineers are responsible for the maintenance and repair of GOM technologies.

The app has been put in place on the advice of health and safety consultants who flagged lone worker safety as a priority focus for the business in 2016.

 

The app works on iPhone, Android and Windows and offers a wide range of functions including a panic button, working session expiry and low battery warnings, GPS tracking, inactivity and duress alerts making it a powerful device for protecting employees working alone. User monitoring can be done in‐house via an online Hub or outsourced to one of StaySafe’s professional partners.

Tim Collier at GOM explains their decision to work with StaySafe; “Our staff are not what you would traditionally call ‘high risk’ but fully meeting our duty of care to all employees is paramount to us. We have just issued all employees with new smartphones so a lone worker solution that would work on their smartphones without the need for any additional technology really appealed. The app has been easy to set up and use and monitoring the app requires minimal resource, which is great”.

Don Cameron, CEO, StaySafe adds “The StaySafe app is a great solution for organisations like GOM who want to provide a high level of security provision for their lone workers without the expense and hassle of providing new technology. The prevalent use of smartphones amongst all age groups means that the app is cost effective and quickly becomes part of an employee’s routine”.

 

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A contractor job management platform for field service and facilities companies has been developed by UK software company Okappy.

As many field service organisations have discovered, it's no fun trying to manage lots of subcontractors when they don’t have access to your internal job management software and take an age to return job sheets or reply to emails. The Okappy job management platform resolves these issues by allowing customers, employees and subcontractors to share information.

Field service organisations can connect to their customers and subcontractors, and receive jobs and then monitor the status of those jobs as they are updated by employees or subcontractors wherever they are. Job sheets can be tailored to suit specific requirements and images and signatures can be added.  Technicians can view customer history electronically and complete invoices.

“In the past jobs sent to subcontractors entered a black hole leading to the same problems that companies thought they’d got away from when they introduced job management software for their own employees,” points out Richard Harris, CEO of Okappy.

The Okappy platform was initially launched last year to plumbing and electrical contractors and already has thousands of users. Benefits reported include reduced paperwork and better management of their employees and subcontractors.

“Often these companies will have already invited their own customers on to the platform so it’s not a great leap for larger companies to get started and see the benefit as well”, says Harris

 

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When software giant Microsoft announced a raft of highly service orientated features in the latest roll out of Microsoft Dynamics it was clear they were aiming to help their customers, help their customers. But how does that translate into Field service, the dedicated FSM solution acquired by Microsoft last year? Kris Oldland spoke to Carsten Groth to find out more...

Often when a major player in the software world acquires a smaller, niche business one of two things happen.

Either the smaller company gets swallowed up never to be heard of again, or they continue with their brand but as priorities and focusses change they slowly lose a grip on what it is that made them a success in the first place.

Either way there are usually a few fairly easily found voices of discontent somewhere.

But when Microsoft acquired FieldOne (now rebranded to Field Service) in the summer of last year the move went particularly smoothly and it seems to have continued in that vein ever since.

Carsten Groth, A Technology Solution Professional within Microsoft explained that much of the seamless transition could be put down to the way in which Microsoft work with partner developers and ISVs, which is driven by a technology platform that fosters collaboration and integration across the network.

“Basically it is because under the hood of Microsoft Dynamics CRM we have something called the XRM framework which allows partners as well as ISVs to build on top of it,” he explains.

“Think of it like a Lego brick system, so Dynamics CRM is that Lego brick system, then you decide if you build a police station or a fire station.”

“The FieldOne solution came from a global ISV standpoint and what they did was build that ISV solution based on the XRM framework so they reused certain functionalities and entities coming from Dynamic’s CRM because they saw that inside field service there was a definite niche for certain types of data,”he adds.

“They [the FieldOne team] already knew about field service, what are the needs, what are the pain points in it and then they built on top of that XRM framework a field service solution.” “So when FieldOne was acquired by Microsoft there were no pain points as it was a hundred per cent solution fitting inside that XRM story.”

“Basically the only adjustment was the transition from having FieldOne as accompany to having Microsoft as a bigger company.”

So how is the product evolving from FieldOne to Field Service with such heavyweight backing?

“We think of field service as a broad area,” begins Groth, “we do have small specialisations like the medical industry or automotive, but I think perhaps 69% to 75% of challenges are maybe equal.”

“But processes are ever changing and what we as a concept are trying to bring out ‘is here is a change management ability inside your organisation’. Should you buy new software every-time you make changes to your processes? Of course not – and it would be even better if you could make adjustments on your own.”

“For example, feedback from one of your field service technicians saying ‘every day I’m starting my business day it is a lot of effort for me to give you a status feedback - can we simplify it? Is there a way to do that?’ This is exactly what we are able to do inside Field Service. We come up with systems with an easy, simple UI experience that allow companies to form a better connection between mobility devices and all those interactions with the back office.”

“We are trying to change the way field service companies engage both internally and with their customers, by introducing what we call Connected Field Service, which you can now do in the Cloud, with a concept that is a horizontal solution which will still totally align to your vertical business. We then have vertical instruments such as healthcare for instance, to provide a nice smooth kick-off within that system.”

Given Microsoft’s position as a top tier Cloud  services provider, and Groth’s reference to Field Service’s own Cloud functionality, this seems like a perfect time to address the ever-present elephant in the room. Namely Cloud security.

“One of the biggest benefits that Microsoft has is that we can do both the Cloud experience as well as the on-premise experience,” replies Groth.

“So if there is any reason that we cannot go with you to those Cloud services, we can still fall back to the on-premise models.”

[quote float="left"]"We do have customers struggling with firewalls, policies, or they might even have more specific laws inside certain countries, so what we are trying to do is find spots where we can introduce Cloud services and then make their lives easier..."[/quote]“We do have customers struggling with firewalls, policies, or they might even have more specific laws inside certain countries, so what we are trying to do is find spots where we can introduce Cloud services and then make their lives easier.”

“Sometimes the worries are simply because they read news stories about the unsafe Cloud and different types of compliance issues inside the Cloud. But that is changing, it’s changing a lot.”

So does Groth see a growing momentum, in terms of companies wanting to move their field service offerings to the Cloud?

“We do have customers struggling with firewalls, policies, or they might even have more specific laws inside certain countries, so what we are trying to do is find spots where we can introduce Cloud services and then make their lives easier.”

“Definitely, people are struggling with making their work easier and the Cloud and Cloud Services can definitely do that.”

“But it’s new technology and new methodology that we have to learn. It’s like if your not well trained in Outlook, you may well end up having an inbox with 2000 or more unread emails – should it be like that? Definitely not!”

“Why is it like that? It’s because you’ve not been trained in the Outlook experience. And it’s pretty much the same with the Cloud – you must be trained to use Cloud Services and what they are.”

This leads us to the question of whether the selection of a field service management software solution should fall under the remit of IT, Operations or both.

“It’s actually even more complicated because we also have the management conversation as well, bringing in processes and organisational structure elements as well” comments Groth.

“So we have the management coming in and saying this is the way we set out our internal processes are you able to actually adjust the software, or are we able to adjust the software, to continue to allow us to do these processes in this way?”

When Microsoft rolled out the latest feature set of Dynamics in the 2016 release their was a lot of focus on knowledge sharing, to empower contact centre agents by putting the right information they need in front of them as quickly and effortlessly as possible.

With knowledge sharing being a critical tool for field service companies facing a potential crisis, with the prospect of an ageing workforce set to leave on mass in the not too distant future, it would be interesting to see if this level of functionality could now be ingrained into the Field Service product suite as well.

Fortunately, it seems this is very much all part of the plan at Microsoft.

As Groth outlines “Imagine you’re a field technician, trained on a specific device, scheduled to perform maintenance on a customer site. You open up the log board and maintenance files and figure out it’s not revision A that you have been trained on but revision B that is required.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice to have the capabilities of accessing a knowledge base on the fly to see what are the differences between revision A and revision B? Maybe there are not that many changes in the revision so the field service technician could still provide the maintenance to that customer on site once he sees the difference between A and B?”

“We enabled this by offering, inside Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016, capabilities for these knowledge banks. We even go a little bit further where we are enabling the field service technicians as well as others to comment whether that specific article was useful or not.”

So it seems again the strength of the wider Microsoft platform, is adding weight to the feature set of Field Service.

Of course, other field service solutions, as Groth (who previously worked for German based scheduling and optimisation solution providers FLS) will attest, are easily able to plug into the XRM framework too, or even add further functionality to Field Service, adding ‘one more Lego block to the tower’ as Groth describes it.

But there is also a tangible shift towards field service solutions being part of a wider ecosystem with the likes of Oracle and Salesforce following in the footsteps of ERP provider IFS who made a concerted effort to embed field service within their platform with the purchase of Metric and 360 Scheduling a few years ago.

There are of course arguments both for and against the case for integrated solutions versus stand-alone, and that is consideration each individual company must take.

However, with the acquisition and integration of Field One into their platform Microsoft are now a very, very solid option once more for field service.

 

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Argon Office Systems, one of the Isle of Man’s leading suppliers of IT and Print services, has upgraded its service support capability after installing 2serv, the service management software solution from Purpose Software. 

The new system will enable the organisation to streamline internal workflow processes and deliver an even better level of support to customers operating in the telecommunications, media, healthcare, retail, transport, public, financial services and professional services sectors.

Argon wanted to further increase the efficiency of its service operation after recently achieving a Konica Minolta Business Solutions (UK) 5 Star service accreditation by demonstrating compliance with the highest standards in training, handling of field service calls, service call processing, customer satisfaction.  Konica Minolta recommended Purpose Software, the leading developer of service management solutions for document and managed print services providers.

2serv enables Argon to increase the efficiency of the whole service operation which is responsible for supporting a wide range of technologies from complete IT infastructures through to multifunctional devices, copiers, fax machines and printers along with other paper handling systems such as shredders, binders and laminators.

 

“Purpose Software understood the unique challenges faced by organisations such as Argon and worked closely with our IT team to ensure an incident-free installation process,” commented Iain Fairbairn, Managing Director of Argon. “2serv has increased the efficiency of our service operation and enabled us to integrate our service, stock and accounting functions to provide more proactive support to customers, whether supplying a single toner cartridge or a complete IT infrastructure project.”

2serv provides instant access to real-time data relating to maintenance and support contracts, installed equipment and outstanding service calls.  It also improves the control of parts and consumables whether in the warehouse, at customer sites or carried as car stock by engineers.  Purchase orders are automatically generated to maintain optimum stock levels, eliminate the incidence of double ordering and ensure compliance with customer SLAs.

2serv generates a wide range of reports at the press of a button, enabling decision-making to be improved in every area of the business.  It eliminates the need for staff to manually compile spreadsheet-based reports and provides an efficient way to measure performance against KPIs such as service and profitability at customer, model and device level.

 The installation also includes 2roam which allows field service engineers equipped with tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices to access and update 2serv from any location across the island.

 

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With the recent launch of ServiceMax Service Performance Metrics™ the Californian based field service software provider has created a new tool that sits between the worlds of consulting and technology. But what exactly is Service Performance Metrics and will this see a shift towards professional services for ServiceMax? To find out more Kris Oldland spoke exclusively to Rei Kasai...

KO: You’ve mentioned previously that you see ServiceMax very much as a field service company providing technology rather than a technology company providing a field service solution. How big of a differentiator is that amongst those other companies in the space?

RK: I think to be fair, it’s why we have been successful. Going back to comments from customers on why they choose us; they view us as experts, they view us as “You are field service”. It’s interesting seeing it that way because it’s not just the technology, that’s just one aspect of it and there are many great technology companies out there; but the big difference is, how do you apply those things into real-world business problems and solve them at scale?

And I think, if you look at what we’re doing, it’s not just taking these technologies but empowering them into these common practices and I think that’s what the big difference is.

 

We need to democratise this and make this knowledge more widely available, that’s our job as a company to bring this value set to everyone in our ecosystem. So we brought those best practices, from a measurement point of view and then put them into a product so our clients can take advantage of it.

These are common metrics, all interpreted in a different way, but we made it so that it could be available to anyone as a customer.

KO: So what makes this new development so exciting, because let’s face it, every FSM software company out there seems to be talking about analytics tools right now...

RK: They’re talking about the technology aspect.

But there’s two components of what we are doing; one is that if you cannot measure, you can’t improve. So we start with what should I measure? Well, we have an opinion on what you should be measuring and that is based on what the best-in-class companies are measuring and then we codify that as eight standard metrics within the technology.

How do I visualise that in a dashboard, how do I slice that data over time? That’s the technology aspect.

But to even come to an opinion on first time to fix, time to repair with a contract attached etc, you need to understand what you should be measuring.

In the second piece, we have what we call ‘catalyst’ and catalyst is what you can imagine as the packaging of process.

Service has not really changed from a procedure point of view over the last 20 years. How you execute that process has changed over a period of time because as technology evolves more and more and we get into the IoT era and age you keep on pushing that, but these are just extensions of how you use that to utilise the process, the base processes haven’t changed.

 

Some companies may or may not know what those processes should be and so going back to why they come to us, it’s like “Oh, you understand how service business should run. You understand how we run” and so we could even help them run better.

KO: Would you say that this is positioning ServiceMax essentially as a much as a consultancy as you are a technology company?

RK: No, we’re still a software company.

KO: But there’s something more here, isn’t there? 

RK: I ‘d say it’s really about capturing the knowledge of hundreds of years of domain experience by all these industry people that we’ve hired onto our team.

Because it’s one thing to consult a customer, to gauge and understand their problems and eventually come up with solutions to them but how do you enable that into the technology so you can scale this?

You may not be able to afford those expensive services but how do I democratise this for everyone in the ServiceMax family?

KO: Is this something that’s going to embed ServiceMax ever closer with your customer’s processes and the way they work - basically build more long-term relationships?

 

RK: Exactly. I think in the end, from a customer point of view, there’s a whole personal connection - but how do they drive value? How do they become the champion within the organisation? They become the leader and we enable them in that way.

KO: Is it applicable across all different verticals?

RK: I think at minimum it’s having the understanding and part of that is education, some customers may not know any better. So, how do we empower them with the knowledge to do something better for their business and then drive that?

I think that’s part of our major difference why people choose us.

KO: That’s an interesting point because obviously there’s a journey of continuous improvement for most companies so how easily does the solution evolve? Because obviously today’s best practice may not be tomorrow’s...

RK: Exactly. And that’s why I think, how do we make it flexible? Because we know that we want people to change as part of how we believe we can make the biggest advances.

We want people to change, so how does the technology allow that? We have to measure that change so we can improve it, it all circles back to if you can’t measure, you can’t improve.

But at the same time a measurement and also a solution, is a point in time of where that company was in their lifecycle. As it grows and we help companies go through that maturity, how do we enable our customers beyond this?

That is all part of our product strategy and as we add other elements and components into the solutions we will see it evolve further.

KO: Coming back to the Service Performance Metrics specifically as a tool, how much is it about the technology and algorithms and how much is about the insight from your customer transformation team?

RK: This is where we get into some of how we design products, in effect it’s about not coming up with technology and then trying to find use cases but instead everything is brimming out from the use cases.

I think that with some of the team we have on board, especially on the customer transformation team, they know exactly how businesses measure success and failure.

 

And so, with that foresight, it’s very easy to engineer those things because if you have that foresight to know where you want to go with it, it’s much easier to plan and much easier to execute and I think that has really helped us.

I think with the global customer transformation team and the engineering team being in close partnership has enabled us to deliver these analytics but that’s just the first stage. You have 96% contract attachment rate - great, so...what does that mean?

But the reality is it’s comparisons that will add value. 

So we also have a notion of time-based series analytics built in. It’s analytics of how you do in comparisons over a period of time as it relates to revenue, cost and time. Those are some of the metrics that we are able to measure.

KO: There’s a position I firmly believe in, which is that in field services the implementation of any service provider software should be viewed as a business investment rather than a technology investment.

RK: It is.

KO: So do you think products like Service Performance Metrics will help service directors make this distinction to their executive boards?

RK: Absolutely. Because it’s ‘How do I translate the business case into true requirements for a solution.’ But also keep in mind the day to day realities of executing the processes.

It’s not similar for many places and it’s too flippant to say, “make it simple,” and so I think it’s important that you’ve got to balance the two. And I think it’s important that when you get back to your observations, ask can we connect these two worlds in an easier way?

 

Having that point of view and the team understanding that as a goal, and as an outcome focused point of view -it changes the way that you implement.

You really don’t want to re-implement again in the near future so instead of looking at it from the point of view, of ‘I’ve got to get this solution live as fast as possible and just re-do what I have now, but with some automation’, understand that this is a time for change. And if you were to think of it in that way, what should you measure and act on? What are the key things that you need to measure to move the business forward? Then think about how you can implement the solution to achieve that.

I think that approach can really help. We see our most successful implementations driven this way especially compared to those companies who go ‘Here are 300 features, go implement them’.

 

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Independent power producer and energy services provider ENGIE is introducing a Digital Factory to accelerate the delivery of mobile applications for its customers, partners and employees, in France and globally, as part of the company’s new three-year transformation plan. It will be built on Kony Inc.'s industry-leading Enterprise Mobility Platform.

ENGIE employs around 155,000 people worldwide and operates in 70 countries. Impressed by Kony’s ability to quickly design, build and deploy secure, enterprise-grade mobile apps across multiple devices and operating systems, the company chose Kony’s Mobility Platform and solutions for its enterprise-wide digital transformation initiative. As part of the Digital Factory, Kony will help the group build several consumer-facing and employee productivity mobile apps.

“The global partnership between ENGIE and Kony was born from a desire to support our digital transformation initiative through new value-added services,” said Isabelle Kocher, CEO, ENGIE. “It also aims to enhance the digital skills of our teams and enable us to meet the needs of our business units to accelerate the time to market of mobile application projects for customers, partners and employees.”

By fully adopting enterprise mobility across their organisation, the utility company aims to drive significant improvements in customer satisfaction, increase market share and lower costs through faster mobile application development cycles through the Digital Factory.

“Digital will transform virtually all industries, companies, and geographies,” said Thomas E. Hogan, chairman and CEO, Kony, Inc.”  “It will transcend and shape value, service levels, quality, and the customer experience.  Companies will either lead, become a fast-follower, or perish.  Fortunately for ENGIE and its customers, Isabelle Kocher has elected to assert ENGIE as a digital innovator and leader in the new energy world.  Kony is thrilled to partner with this visionary leader and an iconic brand, and to leverage our market leading mobility solutions in their digital journey.”

The Kony Enterprise Mobility Platform is an open and standards-based, integrated mobility platform for mobile app development and beyond. It supports the entire application software development lifecycle and operations lifecycle, empowering enterprises to quickly design, build, deploy and manage multi-edge app experiences. The solution encompasses unique app UI design and development tools, powered by Kony’s mobile backend-as-a-service and backend application development offering, as well as testing and analytics. Kony Apps allows customers to deliver secure, enterprise-grade mobile apps faster to market.

 

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