Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News is joined on the Field Service News Digital Symposium by Aly Pinder Jr, Program Director of Service Innovation and Connected Products at IDC. Aly is a seasoned expert in the field service industry, technology and innovation and he always thinks forward and spots the upcoming trends in the industry.

During the conversation, the two discuss a wide range of topics related to the evolution of service, the rapid changes and challenges that occurred during the last year and what organisation should do to adapt and prepare for the future.

In this final excerpt from that full interview, Aly and Kris discuss the need of distinguishing between hardware and software for remote service delivery.

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Further Reading:

• Read more about Digital Transformation @ www.fieldservicenews.com/digital-transformation
• Read more about the impact of COVID-19 in the Field Service industry @ www.fieldservicenews.com/covid-19
• Read exclusive articles by Aly Pinder on Field Service News @ www.fieldservicenews.com/aly+pinder
• Follow Aly Pinder on Twitter @ twitter.com/Pinderjr
• Connect with Aly Pinder on LinkedIn @ linkedin.com/in/aly-pinder-jr

IFS, the global enterprise applications company, announces that Panasonic Appliances Air-Conditioning Europe, a leading provider of heating and cooling solutions, has chosen IFS Remote Assistance™, to enable installers, field technicians, engineers and customers to share real-life situational context with remote product experts so that hands-on service and repair instructions can be visually demonstrated and acted upon.

With a company-wide, strategic shift toward a servitized, subscription-based business model, the Panasonic Appliances Air-Conditioning Europe business, comprised of sales, support and technical service staff across Europe, needed a central software solution to ensure a consistently excellent service experience for its clients.

A MERGED-REALITY SOLUTION FROM IFS TO PROVIDE REMOTE PRODUCT SUPPORT

With IFS Remote Assistance, Panasonic Heating & Cooling Solutions is able to remotely diagnose issues, ensure real-time knowledge sharing, and significantly speed up repair rates, which was typically seven days. By reducing or even eliminating the need to make site visits, the company is also able to lower travel costs and environmental impact. 

“Our investment in the IFS solution is part of a larger strategy to transform our business mindset from product-centric to service-centric and to develop the maturity of our service organization,” Head of European Service at Panasonic Appliances Air-Conditioning Europe Karl Lowe said. “With IFS Remote Assistance, we are leveraging state-of-the-art technology to unleash the full potential of our highly skilled workforce, regardless of where they are based. Not only are we able to navigate constraints, we are actually able to improve repair rates and access real-time performance data to help us gauge and improve our service.”

Alain Laing, Managing Director, IFS UK and Ireland, added, “Across the globe, we are seeing visionary manufacturers invest in technology to enable a servitized business model. We are thrilled to be part of Panasonic’s transformation journey and look forward to doing our part to provide the tools they need so they can ensure the safety of its workforce and a great customer experience.”

Further Reading:

• Learn more about IFS Remote Assistance  @ www.ifs.com/remote-assistance
• Read more about Digital Transformation @ www.fieldservicenews.com/digital-transformation
• Read more about IFS on Field Service News @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/ifs
• Learn more about IFS @ www.ifs.com
• Read more about Panasonic @ www.panasonic.com

IFS, the global enterprise applications company, announces that BRITA, one of the world’s leading companies in drinking water optimization, has selected IFS’s comprehensive service management solution covering field service management, workforce scheduling & planning, and customer engagement.

BRITA is fully committed to customer service as the main point of competitive differentiation. To power its pursuit of becoming global market leader, the company needed a comprehensive service management solution that could ensure a consistent and positive customer experience globally while delivering workforce efficiency and data accuracy.

THE importance OF FIELD SERVICE management for global enterprises

Following a competitive bid process involving several enterprise software vendors, BRITA selected IFS based on the solution’s wide-ranging field service management functionality and native integration with workforce scheduling and planning capabilities. 

The central IFS solution will unify a number of manual processes with a holistic end-to-end platform that spans the entire service value chain, from service request management to automated technician dispatch and maintenance and repair completion. The solution will also help BRITA in the future to return and recycle spent water filter products. 

The IFS solution, which will be used by BRITA’s field and customer service staff in Germany, France, Switzerland, Benelux, and the UK, will be fully integrated with the company’s existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

“Customer service is a vital part of our value proposition and a key differentiator in our highly competitive market segment,” said Tanja Manegold, Senior Group Director Service Prof. Dispenser at BRITA. “Investing in a best-in-class service management suite will help us advance our leading position. IFS was able to present us with a fully integrated platform that can deliver one version of the truth, which will help us deliver on our service-level agreements and enhance our first-time fix rates.”

Marcus Pannier, IFS Managing Director, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, added, “We are honored to work alongside such a globally renowned brand such as BRITA. All around the world, leading-edge manufacturers like BRITA are looking to service and servitization strategies to boost revenues and earn more customer hearts and minds. At IFS, we have anticipated this shift and are ready to equip these early movers with robust enterprise software that is designed to enhance workforce efficiency while safeguarding a great customer experience.”

Further Reading:

• Learn more about IFS Service Management  @ https://www.ifs.com/service-management/
• Read more about Digital Transformation @ www.fieldservicenews.com/digital-transformation
• Read more about IFS on Field Service News @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/ifs
• Learn more about IFS @ www.ifs.com
• Read more about BRITA Group @ www.brita.com

Real-time service management platform drives 146 per cent productivity improvement with four extra jobs completed, per engineer, per day on average.

A panel debate on the best digital tools for achieving top-end service, strayed from shortlisting technologies and focused more on the end-user impact. Field Service News’ Deputy Editor Mark Glover attended the session – part of Field Service Europe 2018 – and saw discussion range from strategy to data, but always swinging back to the customer.
Among the many highlights from Field Service Europe, held in Amsterdam before Christmas, was a debate attempting to shortlist digital tools that can contribute to a world-class service process.

Panellists included Miguel Angel Hernanz, VP Head of Global Service Delivery Transformation at Phillips Healthcare; Karen Mehal, VP Field Service Lightning at Salesforce and David Nedohin, President at Scope Augmented Reality.

Chairing the debate, Field Service News’ Editor-in-Chief Kris Oldland began by defining world-class service and more specifically what it means to customers used to high-end service delivery from the likes of Uber and Amazon. “Service is no longer how we compete with our direct competitors,” he told delegates. “We’re now constantly at competition with the best service experiences customers have ever had. We’re now moving into a world where customer satisfaction is perhaps no longer the right phrase anymore.    
"It has to be about customer experience and understanding what the experience is to the customer and working back from there. Only then can we really start thinking about what world class service is,” he posed.  

Oldland put it to the panel that technology and digitisation in service should be perceived as “one continuous eco-system that compliments and feeds off one-another" rather than separate tools. Hernanz, who recently oversaw a large B2B and B2C contact center service transformation at Phillips Healthcare, was keen to set the focus on strategy and away from the tools. “The different tools are enablers," he said. You should first of all take a look at your strategy and secondly re-define your processes end-to-end, then use the different solutions or tools that are available in the market to make it happen.”    

He continued: “The problem with digitisation and the variety of tools in the market is that you get overloaded with information; you find opportunities all over the place and you want it all and you want it now and that is a big mistake.    “You should start doing a proof of concept. You try it, you learn, you correct and you scale up; if it is scalable. Or you dismiss it and you try something else” he urged.    

Servicecloud’s Karen Mehal agreed: “If you don’t understand what your objective is, how do you know you’re getting there? she asked, going on to question the use of the term digitisation. “We digitised field service technicians with laptops 20 years ago, did we not? We gave them a laptop. That was digitisation."   

It's a good point. The industry can be guilty of getting swept up in buzzwords without fully understanding what they mean, and more importantly how they can impact on customer service. “What’s the objective?” Mehal continued, “Is it around your customer? Is digitisation serving your customer? If it isn’t, it really should be. Or are you just taking your ERP and digitising it?    

If the customer service is the end goal, then digital tools should be used to empower that process. Putting this theory to David Nedohin, the co-founder and president of an Augmented Reality company, Oldland asked how such a new and innovative technology such as Augmented Reality can cut through the excitement and intrigue to become a genuine ROI. “It’s about identifying what the problems are but to also make sure there are measurements to it,” Nehan explained. “For example, if you are currently sending out your field service team to help support your customer on a certain percentage of problems, what is that costing you right now? And if you could implement a technology that could help reduce a certain percentage of those, then what is the actual cost savings?    

“If they don’t have those numbers, we work with them to find out what those numbers are so there’s a business case that can be presented to management,” he says, before adding: “It’s a strategy they need to put together to understand exactly why they’re solving that problem. You have to start with the problem, you have to start with the use-case.”     

Concurring, Oldland suggested that technology should underpin a wider business plan of evolution. “Digitisation is not a one-off process,” he said. “In a sense, we’re talking about a continuous improvement journey, it’s just that the tools behind that evolve too.”    

“I see a lot of people get lost in that,” offered Mehan, who by her own admission is customer-facing, “They get lost in the shiny object, such as Augmented Reality. But if your strategy is around customer support, better customer service, wouldn’t it be better to use digitisation to look at someone’s asset now and fix it now, rather than scheduling someone to go out there and fix it?    

“Our world is no longer traditional. We’re not in a traditional world, we’re not in a traditional software world, we’re not in a traditional field service world. We should not be bound by EAPs or by software. We should by bound by what serves out the customer,” she argued. “My questions are: are you doing that with your digitisation. Are you really taking care of the customer when you’re doing your strategy?” She said.   

Philips’ Hernanz admitted working in large organisations ,where many different stakeholders have many ideas can be difficult. However, all these opinions come second to that of the most important stakeholder: the customer. “You need to put the customer at the centre and listen to them,” he said. “This is very important. You must find out what they need and then start building solutions which are suitable for today, but also for the future because the whole process is also an evolution.”   

"We're not in a traditional software world, we're not in a traditional field service world..." (Mehal)

One digital tool that has made a significant impression on this process is data and, in particular, big data. Filtering the most useful information remains the challenge, given the reams of information that smart assets churn out. “There’s no point in having data if it’s not providing the right insight,” Oldland said to the panel, all of whom agreed and acknowledged all the customer cares about is fixing what needs fixing.   

Referencing a client who made industrial cooking equipment for fast food restaurants including Burger King and Macdonald’s, Mehner told the audience that when their client's equipment – such as a bun toaster – produced a fault the restaurant would call out a contract worker ill-equipped to isolate and solve the issue. “This piece of equipment,” Nedohin explained, “now has 20 or 30 tickets associated with it because the technician doesn’t know how to diagnose the problem, let alone fix it. The message is clear: we need to find a better way of fixing the assets.”    

The restaurant now uses remote support tools to directly contact the manufacturer, who can identify the model, the fault, diagnose the problem and send the right technician with the correct parts and asset knowledge   “There is data with this such as preventative maintenance,” Nedohin said. “But the customer doesn’t care, all they care about is getting the equipment working. That data is important to somebody and that somebody is in the manufacturer's office.   “The person at the end just needs to know what to do,” he concluded, summing up a key take away from the debate.   

Enlightened delegates left the session without a list of digital tools but an idea of what to do before you choose them. Data collection, Augmented reality can all complement a process, but without a strategy that also encompasses your customer’s needs, those tools may as well be blunt.  

The solution manages the workflow between central functions and field-based operatives by pulling together disparate back-office data and systems to enable reliable, seamless data flow throughout the organisation, the company says.
The software was integrated into Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council's Asset Management and Maintenance Service, and has been scaled across its Housing Management System, DRS and Job Manager applications.

Neil Martin, the Council's Business Manager said: “The system we have now is more reliable, and staff are more productive.” Ryan Davies, Senior Repairs Coordinator and Systems Officer at Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council added: “We are planning on widening the Work Hub to other services in Sandwell Council, so the relationship with Kirona will just grow and grow.” 

You can download the report here. 

Firm's AR software will now work across smartphone and tablets, complimenting its smart glasses functionality. 

Upskill, the Augmented Reality software provider, has added mobile functionality to its AR platform, which includes smart glasses and Microsoft HoloLens.

Aimed at the industrial workforce, the software encourages collaboration through live videos and insight capture while workers carry out tasks. 

Brian Ballard, Upskill CEO and co-founder said: “With the latest enhancements to Skylight, it makes critical data, peer collaboration and the unique fidelity provided by augmented reality even more accessible. Skylight accelerates organizations along their digital transformation journey, regardless of where they are today.”