Want to know more? The full white paper relating to this white paper is available as premium content to fieldservicenews.com subscribers...

sponsored by: 

Data usage note: By accessing this content you consent to the contact details submitted when you registered as a subscriber to fieldservicenews.com to be shared with the listed sponsor of this premium content who may contact you for legitimate business reasons to discuss the content of this content.  

Expert View: Tim Gallegos, Vice President Operations, Getronics

The field service industry is always evolving. From our perspective, the most significant change in how we approach field service involves taking the rigidity out of our service delivery model.

We focused on two areas in particular as we worked through this strategy. The first is in our service parts supply chain. Over the last two or three years, we evolved our model from specific-technician planning to a more market-based model.

This shift allowed us to reduce the amount of captive inventory we have at the edge of our service delivery model and has created more pools of shared inventory.

Local management and inventory-control personnel manage these pools to allow for proper governance and accounting of the inventory. Having these pools in-market is a prerequisite that enables us to facilitate another shift in our model, which is to broaden the human resource pool we can use to work through any given service call.

Behind all of this is robust resource management and service call assignment logic that takes into consideration things like the assigned SLA, the equipment type that needs repair, and the location of the site where the failed device resides.

Coming from a pure site-assignment model, using these data points helps develop better routing and service call assignment methodologies and has already increased our technician utilization rates and driven better cost-delivery models.

Used in combination, we now engage field service technicians differently and have expanded our universe of available talent to work for any particular service call bundle.

"Today, as we drive to roll trucks less, we need some alternative staffing models in place to support areas that aren’t as high in-service call volume as they were in the past..."

Within our organization, we are laser-focused on introducing more automation within our broader set of services. This automation is positively affecting how our service desk responds to end-user issues and problems. It drives less human-interface into our service model on the front-end of the customer experience.

This improvement on the front-end, of course, has implications in the field services space. If the goal is to minimize downtime, the answer is to fix as many issues using remote technologies as possible.

Doing so creates a different calculation on how we staff for truck rolls. Historically, our model was based on mass in the market and service call density in a given territory. Today, as we drive to roll trucks less, we need some alternative staffing models in place to support areas that aren’t as high in-service call volume as they were in the past.

Alternatives that we use to fill in white space include the use of platforms like Field Nation and the development of a robust management model around these types of solutions. At an opportunity level, these changes drive a better customer experience from an end-to-end standpoint. We do better on the front-end in terms of automation and don’t necessarily ‘break’ the field service delivery model on the back-end by having significant coverage gaps across the geography.

A decade ago, we saw a simpler management model. We could get away with a basic site assignment strategy where an individual technician is assigned based on-site address to support a portfolio of locations.

Today, with technology exponentially multiplying in these locations across broad categories like cloud, IoT, and Smart Structures, we needed to adjust our assignment model. We now factor in things like technician skill set, availability of service parts within SLA, and even real-time travel time to a given location.

Expert View: Mynul Khan CEO, Field Nation

The complexity in field delivery is ever-increasing, and you can’t manage that complexity without the right tools.

The questions I ask to field service managers are, ‘If your customers will require you to deliver anytime, anywhere - do you have the right model for that?’ ‘Can you ensure quality and cost at this pace and with this flexible model?’ Moreover, ‘Can you keep things simple for your staff so that they don’t have to worry about complexity?’

Today’s field service workforce is agile, nimble, and on-demand. This is the most significant shift in the workforce and companies need to be aware and capable of adapting to this shift. 

Field service leaders need to be aware of not only how to build this newer workforce, but how to ensure the same quality as the traditional full-time workforce. Plus, if you have a full-time workforce already, it’s imperative to learn how to blend these in an automated way.

Transparency is not only important, it is essential. For a good service organization, transparency is  the only way to do it.

In today’s world, no one should blindly outsource without knowing the specific worker’s credentials, past work history, ratings, and feedback. 

Platforms like Field Nation make this information seamlessly available, and it is vital that field service organizations take advantage of such capabilities within their own blended workforce.

Want to know more? The full white paper relating to this white paper is available as premium content to fieldservicenews.com subscribers...

sponsored by: 

Data usage note: By accessing this content you consent to the contact details submitted when you registered as a subscriber to fieldservicenews.com to be shared with the listed sponsor of this premium content who may contact you for legitimate business reasons to discuss the content of this content.