erin.hardwick@ifs.com, Author at Future of Field Service

Episode 275

In a session from Future of Field Service Live in Cologne, Germany, host Sarah Nicastro talks with Jelle Coppens, Product Domain Expert of Service and Repair at Electrolux, about how the company is working smarter to maximize the impact of its workforce.

Jelle has been with Electrolux for six years, starting as a resource planner for Electrolux Belgium and quickly becoming involved in the company's digital transformation. His expertise led him to join a project enhancing technical solutions across Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Denmark.

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Episode Highlights:

[04:04] - Before adopting a new technology, the biggest pain points for Electrolux were inefficiencies and lack of visibility in field operations. Jelle and his team planned technician schedules but couldn't track progress or respond to cancellations effectively, leading to wasted time and frustrated staff. By implementing the IFS service management solution, they connected their systems, improved resource planning, and minimized travel time, allowing technicians to focus on their strengths.
[15:36] - Implementing the IFS PSO (Planning and Scheduling Optimization) allowed Electrolux to significantly reduce idle time and increase productivity. This system integrates with the company's FSM app, giving resource planners real-time visibility into technician progress. When cancellations happen, Jelle and his team have streamlined the process to fill gaps quickly, ensuring efficient scheduling. Moreover, a dedicated gap-filling team has boosted visit rates by 8% in just a year.
[28:13] - Maximizing resource utilization offers exciting potential through creative solutions like online training platforms and stock-taking tools. By encouraging technicians to use idle time for short refresher courses or inventory checks, businesses can enhance efficiency and productivity. Exploring and sharing best practices with other companies can reveal even more opportunities to optimize and make the most of every resource.

On a recent trip to Texas, I made plans to stop and catch up with James Mylett, SVP U.S. Digital Buildings at Schneider Electric. I first met James over a decade ago when I interviewed him for the cover of Field Technologies magazine and I’ve since admired his demeanor, his open mindedness, and I always enjoy talking with him about how the world of service is evolving. He has a reputation for his impactful leadership, and we discussed his views on the demands of modern leadership in a two-part podcast, which you can find here and here.

When I arrived at Schneider’s Dallas Hub, James greeted me at the door with a smile and I got checked in. We stopped to get a drink in the common area and an employee visiting from California excitedly approached James and began “talking shop,” not realizing at first that I wasn’t another employee. The three of us chatted for a bit, James happy to engage and never once making her feel rushed. I was thinking about how they say that the best conversations happen around the water cooler and how, as employees walked by and waved to James, he must have many interactions just like this.

After we finished talking with her, we did a quick tour of the facility which was remodeled during Covid and is modern with a fun Texas energy. As we walked over to sit down at a table and talk, I asked James if his office was on the second floor. He responded, “Oh, I don’t have an office.” He travels on a frequent basis, visiting other offices across the country and well as partners and customers – but when he is in Dallas, he opts to set up his workspace in the common area and uses a conference room when he needs privacy for a call or a meeting. He explained that he much prefers being out in the open where he has the opportunity to have those casual catch ups and keep up on the pulse of the working environment.

Now in retrospect, I’m not at all surprised. But in that moment, I was thinking – an SVP in a massive company, and no corner office? If not unheard of, certainly uncommon.

Breaking Down Walls

So, what’s better than an open-door policy? Perhaps a no door policy! Forgoing the corner office is truly representative of James’s approach. He doesn’t have an ego to feed, feel the need to take up space based on his position, or have the urge to demonstrate any sort of power. He would rather be in the midst of it all not only because I think he genuinely enjoys it, but because he knows staying closely in tune with what’s going on with his employees is the best way to be effective in his role.

He shared with me that in the company’s most recent employee engagement assessment, the Dallas Hub had the highest scores, and I’m not at all surprised. This isn’t to say that is entirely attributed to James, but I know he plays an important role.

I share this for other leaders as food for thought around what we need more of in service (and beyond). There are still plenty of companies with leaders who sit in those corner offices, detached from the realities of the frontline workforce and enamored with their positions of power – and those companies are quickly falling behind, because the culture that creates is untenable in today’s talent landscape. Now I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with a leader having an office, or that everyone should move themselves out of theirs. My point is the mentality – that’s what matters.

We need more leaders with less ego and more of a mind to serve. We need more leaders who focus on diversity and inclusion not because they know it’s “important” but because they believe it is imperative to their organization’s success. We need more leaders who make employees feel valued, respected, and heard – in big ways and small. We need more leaders who are more interested in listening than in talking. We need more leaders who are more invested in helping build future leaders than they are in protecting their own value. We need more leaders who realize their role today isn’t to know it all, but to curate teams of talent that compliment one another and then allow that talent to be creative, to weigh in, and to make a difference. We need more leaders who are looking around them to see who they can lift up rather than looking in the mirror at their own accomplishments.

Episode 275

In this episode of the Unscripted podcast, host Sarah Nicastro talks with Clinten van der Merwe, SVP and Head of Global Service and Project Management at TOMRA Recycling, about moving away from the “aftermarket as an afterthought” mentality, his North Star process, and the importance of storytelling in creative influence. This session was recorded at Future of Field Service Live in Cologne.

Clinten is a well-established Senior Service Management and Leadership Professional with vast global experience leading significant business transformation and optimization initiatives. He excels in addressing complex business challenges and implementing process and cultural changes to enhance organizational effectiveness. Throughout his career, Clinten has contributed to companies like Rapiscan Systems, Alubat Middle East, Multi Glass and Mirror, and Glass South Africa.

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Full Show Notes

Sarah: Hello, welcome to the UNSCRIPTED Podcast, where you'll find discussions on what matters most in service, leadership, and business transformation. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Let's jump in. So before we get into it, I know we did our brief introductions, but tell everyone a little bit more about yourself, the business, whatever you want to share.

Clinten: Just easy to understand. I'm Clinten. I'm South African, and it's not a Dutch surname, it's an Afrikaans surname. So born in South Africa, grew up educated. Straight after school, I thought the best career for me would be in accounting. So I started accounting and then found out it's pretty boring and then started looking and then obviously entering the service industry. Worked in various industries from auto glass right through to building glass applications, architectural, then in aerospace, where I worked for quite a number of years in aerospace and defense industry. And back in 2016, moving up to Germany, where I currently reside with my family and now working for TOMRA. Joined TOMRA Recycling just a little bit two years ago. Very exciting industry to be in. TOMRA is a Norwegian company, provide different types of applications. It's on a collection side, for the ones of you that live in Germany or Netherlands, when you take your fund back to the shopping centers, those machines are coming from our collection division. We are on the recycling side. We actually provide sensor-based NIR technology type equipment that waste management companies use to sort different types of plastics, paper, which is quite trendy at the moment, especially from sustainability point of view. But also a very fast-growing type of industry that we see, especially due to regulate changes and sustainability is a major priority for a lot of corporations at the current moment.

Sarah: Okay. Just to frame our conversation for today, we spoke this morning about the move to outcomes-based service. You and I talked about the concept of aftermarket as an afterthought. That tends to be true in a lot of organizations where they still use that terminology of aftermarket service. A lot of times, aftermarket and afterthought can be synonyms. And for TOMRA, where are you at in that journey? And how are you thinking about, as a business, how are you viewing and thinking about service?

Clinten: Maybe I'll go back. I think a lot of us know in the 90s, they actually said, there's no place for field service going forward. Just due to the fact that people will manufacture stuff, they'll throw it away, buy a new one, manufacture, throw away. Guess what? It's actually been completely the opposite. And I think that's what's making it exciting. Although a lot of companies are still stuck in that traditional way of thinking. The mindset is still traditional, the culture is still set up in such a way that it's not really driving that change. We're still looking at processes that are still designed for just call Mr. Or Mrs. Fix-It, I'll go fix it, and everything goes well. When I joined TOMRA, because of the growth of the industry, I remember my EVP said to me during the, because I asked him, where do you want me to focus on first? And the first focus was catching up because the market was growing so fast. It was selling so many units and service took too long to actually transform. When I started, the first thing I started doing was looking at our organization and looking at how do we actually get a compelling vision and mission that we can design within the organization that looks sexy, that looks accommodating, that we can bring service more to the forefront. I got my team together. Some of my team members are here today as well. Got the team together and we started hammering it out. What does a mission look like? What does our customers want? What does the organization want? How do we embed everything within our DNA? Like, how do we do this? And this is why we started then with our mission, which is really a good tool for you to use as well internally and driving that mindset change of it's not aftermarket, afterthought. Service should be on the forefront of driving everything because we are involved in every facet of a business, although we are very complex. So if you speak to a CEO or CFO, they don't want to understand because it's too complex. So how do we actually change that mindset of making it a little bit more in bite-size? Not be too detailed or in the weeds, daily weeds, but really taking that back to your organization and then sharing that and also sharing the good news of what service really means.

Sarah: Yeah. And I think part of that complexity that people don't necessarily want to understand is that it's intangible. It's a lot easier to understand the products, the line items. It's a lot harder to understand the intangible value of service and everything that can represent. When you came in and you started trying to set the strategic vision, what were the biggest hurdles you faced when it comes to the legacy mentality or culture?

Clinten: Changing that mindset, I think, was in some cases a culture shock for different parts of the organization. What is really nice about service, and I think you all can resonate very well on that, is the fact that we are quite resilient and we're quite adaptable to change. Service is the easy one to convince. The most more difficult is that's upper-level management, your sales teams, your operation teams, your R&D teams, because there comes the tricky part. And you're 100% right. It is a complex organization. But if I look at 2019 BC, before Corona, companies didn't really think of service in such a way as a real revenue driver and as the unique selling point for your products. And when COVID happened, actually, companies then started switching around. And I know one of the companies before this total service revenue was only 30% of their total annual revenue. When COVID hit, it became 55% of annual revenue. Suddenly, the CEO started now understanding what service means and why service is very important, especially for a sustainable business platform. And I think this is really the tricky point. For me, it was more of how do we design that strategy? How do we break it down, you said, in smaller pieces that is understandable for the organization? Because if you come up with a big area, you are going to lose your audience. This is where we looked at, this is our strategy that we want to achieve over five years. And I'll get to my 10-year aspirations. And how did we break that down to come into what is our strategic priorities for this year? Small five, maximum five strategic priorities, which each of my direct report owns. And I have cross-functional support to drive that. And through that, we actually have a win situation. And we tick the box. Great. This is now in. We fixed the baseline in certain areas. Now we can grow and develop. Next year, we get together. We start doing the next strategic for that next second year to build further. And I think this is really important. Don't be too far. Otherwise, you lose the audience.

Sarah: Yeah. When we chatted, Clinten. you said when it comes to setting strategy, you want to think about what is aggressive, but attainable, inspiring, but relatable. Can you talk a little bit about looking at your remit through that frame and any advice you have on what strategy setting works that meets those criteria? Like, how do you achieve those objectives when you're laying something out? Obviously, you're talking about one year at a time, five things max. Any other advice for making it? Aggressive, but attainable, inspiring, but relatable.

Clinten: Again, a lot of the information that we get from customers are filtering through from our service organizations. A field service engineer sees a customer seven times more than a salesperson in a year timeframe. It's a known fact. And this information needs to come back to the organization. You need that information to build that strategy on where the areas are. Also need to fully understand where are your weaknesses. And weaknesses is a fantastic thing. I think in a previous service event, somebody brought up that, how will you improve if you don't know where you are going wrong? And that's really important because using that information, put the improvements in place and then convincing customers that things are working and working with those customers. Once your customer is your best speaking partner for the rest of the organization, when there's trade shows, I can share that we had a previous trade show and we only had good comments with what is happening in service and they speak to all, at all levels of the organization, so these customer feedback is absolutely important, and that really helps you to get that strategy in place and then get buy-in from others. Look, there's something happening within service that actually places you a little bit more on the forefront. And it helps them with the influencing. And it also helps me now to, as I said, quite an aggressive timeline for my 2035 vision. It helps me already to influence our board on what is going to be our investment needed over the next 10 years to reach that. And again, not just coming and say, I need 20 million investment in service. It's really just, listen, next year, maybe we have a million. The year after that, just chipping away at it. And then using that, as you said, as your business case starts growing.

Sarah: You might know you want 20 million over the course of however long, but you're not putting that all out there at one time. You're making it more digestible by having your bigger strategy, but sharing in a more pragmatic manner. I love the point you made about weaknesses. I always say the only difference between, challenge and opportunity is perception. And I think the same is, could be said between weaknesses and growth, right? If you can understand where you're weak, it gives you the opportunity to grow and be better. If you turn a blind eye to those weaknesses, you don't have that opportunity to improve and to evolve.

Clinten: Just to add to that, Sarah, the thing for me is, we all know SWOT analysis. I turn around and call it a toes analysis, which means rather focus on the threats as well as the weaknesses than on your strengths is important. You need to keep that as a baseline. Your opportunities will come at the end of the day, but really focus on the TO area, because that for me is really where it will help. What is the threats coming in from the market? And especially what I do quite often is, I do quite a bit of benchmarking, looking at benchmarking reports from different service industries, which really help you to see into the future what is coming. And we know there's a wave of skill shortages, people not, you can't find skills anymore. I mean, there's a lot of, everybody of us here today probably have field service roles open that we can't fill. In some cases, more than a year open. And this is threat that's coming to us as service industry. But we, instead of us just going, trying to hammer out the traditional way of let's get hiring, let's pay people more, let's do this more. Instead, what is it that we're going to do to really adapt to this? Because if the skills are not there in 10 years, you're going to be selling the machine, but you're not going to get the service. And just imagine you that are also a customer, if you buy a car, you best car on the market, want to pay top dollar, but you're unable to get a service technician to fix the thing for you. This is something that keeps me awake at night.

Sarah: Can you talk about your North Star process and the importance of that?

Clinten: Our industry is extremely fast growing, fast paced, as I mentioned before. And it's really a fantastic industry to be in. We talk with a lot of people, sustainability is important. Having circularity built in, in everything we use is extremely important. Although if you get onto the ground level where our people work, where our customers work, it's filtering through the waste that we generate every single day. Then it's not that sexy anymore, right? Although you're doing a fantastic job, you're doing a great job in terms of helping customers to sort through, turning that waste into a value for them, as well as building in that circularity. So it's fantastic. However, skill sets as well as people are lacking. And how I looked at this is we need to change. Because even we run a lot of university events where we want to attract new talent. And we speak to people. First, people, when I come to your field service, first question, can I work flexible work hours? A hundred percent. And it's, yeah, you can. But if you are three weeks in a field sorting out a customer site, you can't come home two days after that and tell the customer we'll come back again in three days time. It's not sustainable. But this is the viewpoint. And that made me think of how do we adapt rather than adapting to that? So I use the phrase always. How do I make sure that I have a field service engineer, to support the industry 24 by 7, working at their own flexible time, sitting in a coffee shop with their flip flops on fixing a machine? How do we get to that? And that's where I set the North Star. Our North Star vision is really related to how can we make things more sustainable for service? How can we make things more sustainable for our customers? Also giving a bit more leverage to our customers that we are a 24/7 organization, but not be able to parachute an FSE every five minutes onto a site because skill sets are not there or the people will not be there. So this is where we set the strategy that by 2035 will be fully digital, which is very ambitious. I know. And when I had that conversation and I shared that with our sales team, the eyes went, but as I mentioned before, the challenge is that we are going to have these, we don't want to sit in 10 years time selling machines, but unable to support our customer.

Sarah: Yeah. And you have to think big going back to the title of the session and some of what I spoke about this morning, if you are only focusing on incremental improvement, you're not going to be where you need to be 10 years from now. How would you describe the role and importance of storytelling in your process of setting the vision and then creating the influence to sort of get people on board with that vision and help you ultimately execute?

Clinten: Maybe a question, when you have customer, let's say customer compliance, normally it's the rooftop every time it comes through right up to the CEO level sometimes. But how many of us do share good customer comments coming back for that CEO? That's where it starts already. Start influencing there at your senior leadership team, sharing the good news. And I can tell you it's turned around already that we have about more than five good compliments come through. We have maybe one escalation now that gets top level. Escalations will happen. In any organization, it will happen. Something will go wrong. But we should not have that negativity towards what service need to fix this. And this mindset, I had to change for myself because in my previous organization, actually, I had some skip level discussions with some of our senior VPs. And I went to our HR VP and we asked her, what do you think of service? Straight question. And the question of the report back was, I think it's our get out of jail free card. That's really compelling to tell that to your people that you are only here to get the company out of sticky situations. That's not what service should be. We're not a get-out-of-jail-free card. We should be really in the forefront of using that success stories that we have and using that influencing skills and market ourselves. Also, what I've seen is we are all weak and I count myself in. I don't have marketing skills. I think I should have done an MBA on marketing. I should have because we need to market ourselves much better. And this is something that I'm adapting to at the moment is looking at how can we get marketing in place. And I know larger organizations already had a transition to have marketing individuals, service marketing already embedded within their service. But I think this is really also a key point in terms of how do you develop? How do you put service aldi? Because I can tell you in future, we will see that capital investments will become more scarcer. And you're going to see as a service will be taking a much more forefront because we see that in our organization. If you have as in as a service, you actually have more control over that product because then you look at sustainability. How can you get some of the components back? Do refurbishment on it. Send it back in, which lowers your costs, which helps the environment and which drives a lot of areas of modularity as well as if you design something that's modular, you don't need to send somebody there to fix it. Ask the customer to plug and play, send the old one back. You have a repair center. That's the type of thinking that you need to think. But it's one of the things that we do in TOMRA very well is our service department is embedded from gate zero process in our product planning, which is extremely important that you have a service individual there that can ask to keep on reminding people. How would you think we need to service that? Just questions like this so that you actually can start designing equipment that's serviceable and sustainable for the future. And it can actually help you drive some of that strategy, so.

Sarah: I think the point you make about marketing is really interesting and important because going back to the point about storytelling. So I think storytelling is a really important skill, not only in marketing, but especially in marketing. But when you think about how this applies to service, there's a few different facets. So one is related to what you're talking about in terms of sharing those good stories along with the escalations, which, as you mentioned, are going to happen because you want to tell a more accurate story of what service means to the business. It isn't just the problems. It isn't just the get-out-of-jail-free card. It's all of these good things as well. That's how you end up telling the story of the potential and the possibility and the growth opportunity, etc. There's this storytelling component that you as a function have to do upward to get the investment you need, etc. Then there's the storytelling aspect to the market, to the customers, probably where you're thinking about the marketing. And this is a really big challenge in this space because we tend to not have a marketing function. So we go to market in internal language. I will never forget a conversation I had with a gentleman a few years ago. He was so frustrated and I felt for him so much. But he was saying, we've invested in IoT, but none of our customers want to buy it. Because they're going to market saying we've invested in IoT and here's why you should care. The customer doesn't care. They're taking their internal language and trying to sell it externally. And it's a failure every time. It's the same thing. It's just, again, flipping the narrative. You need to be able to think about, here's what we're doing internally, which we have to educate ourselves on. But what that means to our customers externally is what we need to go to market with. And then you have storytelling from the perspective of the talent landscape. How are you telling the story of what it means to work for your business today and in the future? How are you creating a compelling story that people who don't know what field service is, will want to buy into and become a part of? So it is an incredibly important skill. And I think your point about marketing is a good one because there's a lot of different applications for that skill set to help leverage the different places you need to be telling those stories, not just with the customers, but beyond that.

Clinten: And Sarah, that's the biggest killer for any strategy or losing gravitas in a business is once you fail. Once a customer says, service is presenting something, it means nothing to me as a customer. And that negativity then goes back to the organization again. Then you start losing that innovation, especially in service, where you want actually people to be more innovative.

Sarah: Yeah. Going back to your big vision for 2035, I want to break this out into a couple components. So you mentioned that you believe as a service is going to be the future for TOMRA. And I just want to kind of reinforce some of the things that you touched on in terms of how you think about your... I can't remember how you worded it, but your technician sitting in the coffee shop and flip-flops doing their work, right? I'm sure for some people that sounds far-fetched, but it isn't necessarily, right? And so I think this idea of as a service, right, maintaining ownership. The other benefit of that, if you remember what I spoke about this morning is, if you maintain ownership of those assets, you avoid the issue with not being physically on site to do service, right? Because at that point, when you're maintaining that ownership, it doesn't matter how you're guaranteeing the uptime or doing what needs to be done. The customer is paying you for the uptime, not the how of it, right? A lot of times, it's when we're trying to implement some of these technologies that allow for that 2035 vision for the technician, under a more traditional relationship, then we start to run into some barriers. So anything else you would say you're thinking about that is going to be key to making that 2035 vision come to life?

Clinten: Yeah, this is really the trick question. How do we get there? We are really looking at what is our customers' challenge and pain points today. And our customers are faced with similar issues. They also have engineering staff on site. They also have a churn of staff coming in, coming out. Skills are dropping. And I know, speaking to customers, they're looking at the future of having fully autonomous waste management plants. Just imagine everything dropped off, everything runs through. Somebody sits at home with a mobile phone just looking at the production process. And that's how we want to look at it. Because it is going to be a challenge to have the tangible. They pay, break and fix. Somebody arrives, speaks to the customer and replace that with the intangible of you actually having that proactive support that can actually give a heads up to somebody that something will go wrong and then obviously commercialize this. And this is part of our incremental steps that we are going to bring in. We're already looking at there are some more tougher regions. We're due to safety concerns, which you don't want to send people. And this is actually an ideal area for us to start using this as a proof of concept for us and start building this out over the next 10 years. But I think it's really just using that information coming in. But you need to have the right digital tools and you need to have the right processes in place. A lot of areas, making sure that you have a lot of automation in your processes. If you don't have that basics grant work done, any tool will fail. Any application that you will implement will fail. So that's basically where we are focusing on making it more standardized, easier to adapt, not over killing it, because I also speak to a lot of organizations where they have every tool under the sun, every applications, but nothing speaks to each other. So I don't know what's worse, not having it or having it. But this is where you really need to be careful of using something very quickly. Go too big, too fast. But at the same token is really just using the customer experience to drive some of this. And again, who's going to stand against, you know, an organization if customer needs something and you can provide that solution to them.

Sarah: What's interesting, Clinten, and something you said made me think of this. So you were talking about the difference in this world where in a break fix environment, everything's very visible. The technician shows up to fix what's wrong. They interact with the people, they leave. I don't think that's what a customer wants. They want the outcome. Right. But we're very accustomed to that physical experience. Okay. So one of the things that's interesting about the shift to outcomes for me is we talk a lot about like the customer wants ease. They want simplicity. They want peace of mind. They want the outcome. But they don't only want that. Right. Because the outcome is intangible and invisible. Really, if it's just always there, it's just always happening. So they actually want the outcome and they also want insights into how the outcome is achieved. So it comes back to storytelling in the sense of as you work toward that 2035 vision. You need to be thinking about how do we achieve the outcome in this new way of working and this new customer relationship. But how do we use storytelling to show the customer the value that we're ensuring, protecting, providing. Even though they don't see us doing it. Because they're not going to want to pay you if they don't have that context. They want the context. It just needs to be very simple and it needs to be in their terms. So we avoided X amount of downtime through this technology. We eliminated the need for an onsite repair through this, right? And understanding to your part earlier, what's the cost associated with that to them? And how can you then illustrate the value you're providing their business, even though they're not seeing you doing it? It's really interesting to me that we have to think not just about our ability to provide the outcome, but our capability to showcase in very simple value-oriented terms, how we've done that. So the customers understand where their investment is going.

Clinten: So in the aerospace defense industry, customers there were very much about uptime. So we had to sign up to service level agreement with 99% uptime availability, 15 minutes response, one five-minute response and a three-hour repair time. That's how critical it was to them. Just because and they only pay for throughput, throughput through the machine, how quickly and how is the safest way they could get a check-in luggage onto an airplane identified, fully secure. And that was the outcome that was there. Although it had the challenges where you couldn't connect to an airport remotely. So you actually had to throw people at this. But that taught me a lot of things in terms of what is the outcome that customers want. And this is what I've seen. In TOMRA, they require only uptime availability at the highest level. When I say level, sorting capacity. If something drops below a certain threshold, machine should be giving a signal through. This material dropping below this, you get a technician remotely to change the parameters slightly up. You send a quick report to the customer, say, Mr. Customer, just to let you know, you don't even know. Customers don't even know that this has happened. This is your percentage back again. And that's how we want to try to change the intangible is really sharing that a customer can see they get much better yield from the waste that goes through their plants. That's a few basics. But it's really just in our case, customers don't care if they only care about is that machine available? Is that machine available? Is it running? Is it running at their highest available parameters that's needed to get a better yield for them? Yes, they enjoy that. When I pick up the phone, I want to have the FSE there. With a service level agreement or without a service level agreement? They just want that machine to be fixed. And I think this is where we also need to think of, I see this as value add for customer at the end of the day. I think we all charge our customers, travel, accommodation, plus then the labor hours on site, plus this. Imagine you go to a customer and say, instead of me investing in Lufthansa, I'm not charging you, but you will pay for the hours that we actually do this proactive service for you. And that's where it comes down to, is really saving money and cost to our customers, that overall total cost of ownership, but getting to a place where you can actually put on a piece of paper that you're guaranteeing a certain level of uptime availability, being that 99% according to this target.

Sarah: Okay, you said just around two years, you've been in this role and you're creating this vision, you're working toward shifting the mindset, navigating the culture, managing change. I have to imagine there could be hard days, days where you might feel like you're fighting an uphill battle or anything like that. How do you stay positive and motivated to continue to push toward that vision?

Clinten: If you are frustrated with things quickly, you should not be in service. That's my advice. We are in service because we have a lot of resilience. Even if it is whatever happens in organization, you need to stay cool, calm, relaxed, and make sure that things happen. If you're unable to do that, like I said, then I would go back being a bookkeeper or an accounting department. I think this is one of the key learnings for me. And on top of this is, yes, there are frustrating days when things doesn't go according to plan. Yes, there are frustration in terms of some decisions that's been made that you haven't, but you need to adapt to it. You need to maybe just give that some thought. I think very younger in my career, I was one of the type of service managers that will take on everything. And I think I was the guy with that cape on. And if something goes wrong, I will make sure it gets fixed. And as I progressed through my career, one of my mentors said to me, you know what? You are too deep in the weeds. And because you are so good at what you are doing, you'll never move up in your career. But in the weeds is where I'm comfortable. That's where I am. Yes, it makes frustrated, but the most rewarding is getting something back on track, getting a customer to say, oh, fantastic work, Clinten. Yes, we had a problem, but you guys have sorted everything out. That was rewarding. Ultimately, what I also try and encourage my service team is don't get too stuck in that daily weeds because then you're starting to really losing perspective of the bigger picture. You have to take time out. And this is what I'm doing. I take enough time out to actually look at things. Are we progressing? How are we going according to our business plan? Asking questions, speaking to different people in the organization. And if I get really frustrated, I go see customers that are very happy with our service. It's also good to speak to those customers and just get a positive view back again.

Sarah: I think it's a really important point. And it sounds very simple. You have to keep time to look at the innovative things and think ahead. It's not easy to do at all, though. It is very easy to get consumed by the needs of the business today and just lose that track of time where you need to be thinking ahead. And so I think, though, you making time for that and you prioritizing that balance is what will be the difference between you hitting that 2035 vision and another company not being where you will be at that point, because it is incredibly important.

Clinten: It's also important to keep on transforming yourself. Prior, like I said, 2019 BC, I think this photo was, I think, taken then I was about 120 kilograms. And when COVID started striking, I still did work remotely from home, but I actually started running. Now, just imagine, I was 120 kilos. When I say running, I was walking 10 meters and then running five meters. But it progressed over time. I would have never thought I'm a runner, but today I'm running. I looked at my own health mentality, all of this type of areas, and it actually then starts helping you to think much more clearer of what it is that you want to set up. I think it's really, really important. Otherwise, we as service get pulled into the weeds too deep, too much, makes you frustrated. It doesn't give you job satisfaction. And you really need to look at, and then people start seeing that because they see that you are stressed. They see that you are under the cushion. And then nobody wants to kind of speak to service because they're scared you bite their heads off. So if you actually start transforming that much higher, keep the positivity, suddenly your CEO says, that's quite, I'm surprised that service is actually showing much more positivity in an organization. So it really starts from the top.

Sarah: Yeah, and I think if you want to be able to maintain that resilience in what you're trying to accomplish at work, you need to take care of yourself. You have to prioritize that as well. Clinten, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Episode 274

In this episode of the Unscripted podcast, host Sarah Nicastro welcomes Teresa Carneiro, Field Service Engineer at STEMCELL Technologies, for a conversation about what drew her to field service, what she enjoys about the FSE role, the realities of being a young woman in field service, and her perspective on how her career might evolve.

Teresa, a 24-year-old from Portugal, recently completed her master's degree in biomedical engineering following a bachelor's in the same field. Due to limited career opportunities in Portugal, she sought work abroad and aimed for Germany. For the past five months, Teresa has been working as a field service engineer in Munich for STEMCELL Technologies.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Full Show Notes

Teresa: I guess I can say as a young person's perspective that the companies that are investing in creating flexibility and creative environments and that are promoting professional but personal growth as well and that provide a safe space for learning are definitely on the right track. Believing in young people and their skills is crucial as is giving them a chance even if there are other candidates with more experience. We've all been there, everyone needs their first opportunity to show their worth. And ultimately the companies that claim that they are working hard to attract this new talent hold significant power, and including the younger generation.

Sarah: Welcome to the UNSCRIPTED Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. I'm really excited about our episode today because we're going to be diving inside the mind of the new talent that you all are seeking. I had the pleasure to meet today's guest at the Future of Field Service live event in Cologne in June, and it was wonderful to have her there to get her perspective, but also to see the people flocking to her and offering her jobs. I'm excited to welcome to today's podcast, Teresa Carneiro, who is a Field Service Engineer at STEMCELL Technologies. Teresa, welcome to the podcast.

Teresa: Thank you so much, Sarah. I would first like to thank you for inviting me for your podcast and for working so hard to give young women a voice in this industry.

Sarah: It's my pleasure.

Teresa: So I can start speaking a bit about me?

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. Tell anything you want to share about yourself, your background, and then we'll get into some of the points about how you landed in field service and what you're enjoying about it.

Teresa: Sure. To begin with, I am 24 years old and I'm from Portugal. And previously, I've just been finishing my master's degree in biomedical engineering. And before that, I've done a bachelor's in the same area. And unfortunately, in Portugal, it isn't very appealing for young people that want to start their career right now. I've only looked for jobs outside of Portugal, and my goal was to work in Germany. Currently, I've been working as a field service engineer, as you mentioned, in Munich for the past almost five months now in a company based in Vancouver, Canada called STEMCELL Technologies, which is mainly focused in improving research reliability and making researchers' life easier overall.

Sarah: Okay, excellent. What was interesting about you attending the Cologne event specifically for folks that are listening that weren't with us in person, we had a session with Daniel Turnbull from Thermo Fisher Scientific. And Daniel's actually been on the podcast before. So if any of you wanted to go back and listen to his interview, you could. But he was there to talk about some of the very specific steps that Thermo Fisher has taken beginning in Germany to improve diversity in their field force, and specifically to bring more women into field engineer roles. And so it just was very serendipitous that you were in the audience because you were able to kind of lend some firsthand perspective and so I reached out to Teresa after the event and said, our audience as a whole is working toward that objective and really struggling to figure out the best ways to bring in young talent to bring in more diversity to bring in women specifically. And so I know that they would value hearing from your firsthand experience. So here we are. So as you said, you've been in your field service engineer role now for about five months. So the first thing I want to talk about is, what attracted you to this role and this work?

Teresa: I think I would like to start by saying that one thing that I felt that was really lacking throughout my whole university experience was having some real examples of what it is possible to do after you finish your studies. And of course, you can do your own research, but having real life examples and people to talk about how their daily life actually looks like gives you a much clearer idea of what your own life can look like if you choose that path, but short story short, I had a friend that was working as a field service engineer. And when he described it to me, I thought that might be something that I really like to do, actually. This would give me the opportunity to travel, to be exposed to different environments. And it seemed like the type of job that is different every day, which for me was really appealing. And so that idea, I guess, just persisted on my mind. And when I graduated, I only searched and applied for these kind of roles. And eventually, STEMCELL believed in me and in my background. And here I am.

Sarah: Yeah, that's wonderful. But it's interesting, we have had a lot of conversations on the podcast about that. Oftentimes, the way we position it is field service has a branding problem. First of all, it's not a specific industry. It's a collection of a bunch of different industries. And that can be challenging. But also, it isn't a career that not only is it not shown by example in settings, like you mentioned, but oftentimes, it's hard for people to even picture what it is or what it could be. And so without having someone in your life personally, that is doing it and saying, hey, you might actually like this. It's just something that I don't think lands on a lot of people's radars. And so I think one of the challenges companies have is figuring out how do we create more awareness of this whole sort of career path for people earlier on in their education in their lives, so they can see some of that potential. So another thing we talk a lot about on this podcast is that traditionally or historically, companies have hired field engineers based on previous experience. And we have talked about the fact that those experienced engineers are becoming harder and harder and harder to find because they're aging out, they're retiring, there's just fewer and fewer of them. And so that companies need to become more adept at hiring talent that has potential and then training up and providing that experience. And I know you said to me that when you were applying to roles, you did really feel that not having previous experience was a barrier for you. So can you just share a little bit what your experience was like in that regard?

Teresa: Yes, of course. I think it is very curious because ever since I actually joined the industry, I have heard all sorts of companies saying exactly how hard it is to get young talent in their teams. But I must say that having very recently searched for a job, I felt exactly the opposite. I felt that I was always behind because I didn't have any previous experience in this industry. And even when you come across some entry-level jobs, they often ask for years of experience. Yeah, it can be a bit discouraging to find that most job ads require some sort of years of experience. And especially this type of role, because I feel that this type of job, you need lots and lots of training, regardless of your previous experience, because of how specific it is. And I truly believe that recently graduated students can bring a lot to the table. We are used to learn so many different things in such short time-frame.

Sarah: Learning was your full-time job for the last however many years.

Teresa: And the amount of detail we can retain is also really high, which I think is essential in this type of jobs. For me personally, and coming back a bit to your original question about my experience, I was doing research before and I knew I wanted to transition to this industry. And fortunately, I have found a job that allows me to keep in touch with this research environment. As I've said, my company focuses mainly in helping researchers. And so for me, being able to bridge this gap between industry and research makes me feel really accomplished and that I'm doing something meaningful. And yet again, young people can bring so much more to the table than it might seem at first sight.

Sarah: Yeah. And you made a good point when we were chatting. You said not only what you just said, which is people that are coming out of school are really in that learning mindset, but also that they're moldable, right? When you have someone that has 10, 15, 20 years of experience, they're also coming into the role with maybe some bad habits or some really firm opinions that if that doesn't fit the new role have to be overcome. So there's clearly pros and cons. But as we've stated on this podcast before, I think companies that refuse to see the need to recreate that process and how they're looking and what they're willing to do to train internally are really going to fall behind. All right. So I think one thing I wanted to ask you on that is, so for STEMCELL where you landed, what was different in their approach? Was it just that, like, were you applying for those roles, even though they were asking for experience and you didn't have it? Or did you just not apply? And then for STEMCELL, were they just not requiring experience?

Teresa: For me, at first, when I started to apply for jobs, I would be very specific. If I don't meet the requires, I would not apply. And then I started to understand that I cannot go this road and I need to apply and then prove myself in the interviews because my curriculum might not be what they are looking for. But if they meet me, I might change their minds. And that's what happened. So for me, I had not only the experience side of things, but I also had the language side of things because most ads asked for German, which I also don't speak very well yet. And so STEMCELL did ask for German and I cannot remember, but they might have asked for some years of experience, nothing crazy. And I applied anyway, because I figured, what do I have to lose? And I encourage young people to do the same. And whenever I'm talking with friends that are searching for new jobs, I always say, apply even if you don't fit every requirement. Because it might change their mind when they need you and talk to you.

Sarah: Yeah. No, it's a really important point. And I think there's obviously research that shows when we're talking specifically about trying to bring more women into field service roles, women are less likely to apply for jobs where they don't match all of the criteria. So one, I'm really glad that you did that anyway. But two, companies need to think about the fact of who they are leaving out when they're creating their job postings. Okay, what I wanna talk about next is, I know you're still pretty early in, but what do you find you enjoy about the role?

Teresa: I would say that my favorite thing so far is having the opportunity to be exposed to different labs. This early on in my career, I believe that having the opportunity to create so many contacts and be exposed to so many different environments is a big advantage for me and a great learning opportunity. Of course, the traveling that this implies is also a big highlight for me as I do love traveling and having the opportunity to visit countries, not only Germany, but also other countries in Europe is also a big plus for me. In this job, I also like to talk to people and establish communication with our customers. I like to see this job not only as servicing machines, but also listening and understanding our customers, which in my case are researchers. And I think this is where my previous experience in research really gives me leverage because I can relate to them and I can understand their urgency. And I guess the other thing I would like to mention is the flexible work hours. I like that not every day is the same. Like on the same week, I can have some days working from home, others traveling, and also some days in the labs. So not having that regular nine to five job at this point is also one of the reasons this role is so appealing to me.

Sarah: Yeah, those are all great things. And you also mentioned earlier, and I think we hear this a lot, particularly when you think about, generational differences in the workplace. There was a point in time where, and some leadership and companies are still in the mentality of pay being the only thing that matters, right? That was the most important thing. It was really the only thing. Obviously it remains very important, but you also mentioned earlier that for you, because you care so much about the research world, having this role that kind of builds that bridge gives you that sense of purpose. And I think that's something that we hear a lot with younger talent. That they want to feel like what they're doing matters. They want to feel like they have a purpose. So again, it doesn't have to be your particular industry. It can be a number of industries. I mean, service in so many ways is what keeps the world running. But I think for organizations who are trying to reimagine how they're positioning roles and how they're hiring for roles, keeping in mind that money isn't the only thing people are looking for. They're looking for flexibility. They're looking for that sense of purpose. They're looking for some of these different things. It's really important to balance out that employee value proposition to bring in different people.

Teresa: The younger generation is more and more concerned with work-life balance than the previous generation was definitely.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And so flexibility plays a big role. And so does, and we're going to talk about this a bit as well, leadership style. There's a lot of different elements to consider. But before we get to that, what challenges have you faced?

Teresa: Would say that so far I've not really faced any big challenges. As I've mentioned, I've just started not even five months ago. So far, everything has run pretty smoothly. However, all of my visits so far have been joint visits as I'm still in training. And I guess that another thing that might make me feel more comfortable and secure is that I work mainly with research labs. Where in contrast with field service, there are a lot of women working. I feel that compared to other industries, this one might be a bit easier to fit in as a woman, even though all of my field service colleagues are men. I would say that the only comment that has stuck in my head was nothing big, but was when I visited a lab with my manager the other day and I was introduced by him to the lab manager as the new person responsible for their lab. His first comment to my manager was asking, if he would keep tagging along regardless. Of course, this makes you think if the customer is going to trust you or because of my age or whatever, they might be a bit skeptical of my skills. But then again, it can be that they are just happy with my manager's work. And when you're happy with someone's work, change is not always seen as a good thing, you know? Yeah, I don't want to make any assumptions. But it was the only thing that I could think of.

Sarah: Yeah. No, and I'm really glad that your experience has been positive. But we did dig into this a little bit when we were chatting because I think your feeling was more so that that comment, if anything, had to do with age versus you being a woman. And it doesn't necessarily matter. But I do think your observations are spot on. And I think the reason that I wanted to ask this question isn't to make any assumptions or anything like that, but more so just remind folks that when you're trying really hard to bring in new talent, we can't get them in the same place and then stop thinking about it and assume everything's going to be great. We do have to think about what is that experience like for them. And that brings us to a bunch of different points. When that talent is different in any way from the traditional talent, we do need to think about, okay, are they being welcomed by internal teams? Are they being treated well by customers? We need to think about the leadership. So your manager in that moment, when that was said by a customer, that person's response, matters a lot. You know, if they make a joke about you, you could feel a certain way versus if they show confidence in your ability is you're going to feel more empowered. These all seem like these very little things, but for a new employee that is already new, so there's always that getting adjusted and maybe being a bit nervous. It's a new role. It's a new experience. They're different somehow than the existing or traditional workforce. These little things can matter a lot, particularly if they're occurring on a frequent basis. I think it's really important for managers to stay tuned into what is that experience? Is there, and the way I'm asking you what challenges, managers should be asking all new employees on a regular basis. How are you feeling? What are the challenges? Is there anything you need help with? Because these aren't things either where every employee is going to come running back and say, so-and-so just said this, or this made me uncomfortable. Oftentimes they'll keep it quiet because they're trying to fit in. Right. But then it can cause challenges. So I'm really glad that your experience has been positive so far. And I just bring this up because I think it's an important point for people to think about. That being said, is there anything, knowing that you've had a very positive experience, is there anything you think is helpful to share that you feel your company has done well to make sure that you feel welcome, you feel enabled, you feel prepared to, do those visits and learn and eventually get out on your own?

Teresa: Yeah, I can start by saying that from the first moment, still during interviews, my manager expressed a good concern regarding me being a woman. Like he included a woman during the interviews, even though she was not in field service, he wanted me to feel comfortable. So there's always been that concern and I do really appreciate it. I've been really feeling protected from the get-go and I feel that my company's culture is overall very welcoming. One thing that I really appreciate is that my team, everyone is super available to include me and have me joining customers visits. They always take extra time to explain and train me properly. They never make me feel like a burden or like I'm delaying their work or making them stay longer or anything. I think that the other thing that was also reassuring is that I was never given a time limit to when I need to be ready to start going alone. So my company has always reiterated that I will only continue. I go alone when I feel comfortable and ready. And that's, of course, super reassuring because I can take my time and be very confident before I start going alone.

Sarah: Yeah. Two things on that. And one thing I want to say, I don't think you'll take offense to this, but I think when you say concern, that word could be a little bit misleading because it almost gives a negative. It's more awareness, I think, is what you mean.

Teresa: Exactly.

Sarah: Because it wasn't concern where he was worried. It was concern where he was conscious of wanting you to be comfortable. I think there's just a way that can be done very well. And there's a way it could be patronizing as a woman. Do you know what I mean? And so I just want to point that out because those, again, are the little things that matter a lot. The other thing I wanted to say is knowing that in their job posting, there was small experience requirement that you didn't meet, but you were obviously brought on anyway. So in the training process, have you felt that as a challenge at all? Or do you genuinely feel like you are just as equipped as someone who would have come in with any experience?

Teresa: Yeah, I definitely think that with all the training, I've had two intensive training weeks in Canada in the headquarters. And with that, I feel really equipped. And all of the subsequent joint visits also made me sure that I'm ready. I feel that, as I've said before, the training is so specific that even if I've had previous experience, it would not help me necessarily with this equipment. I don't think that would make such a difference. I don't know, maybe in a few years when if I choose another job, I will have a different take on this. But for now, no, I don't feel that having previous experience would make that be of a difference.

Sarah: Yeah, I would imagine that is accurate. And I think it's just another important reminder for people of how many great candidates they're leaving out if they're continuing to hold that requirement, even when it is specific. Now, going back to the conversation at the Cologne event and the previous podcast with Daniel, there are instances where, if you remember in his conversation, they were saying that there was a specific requirement that they have for their role. That is one of the reasons, a certification, one of the reasons that they had previously required that experience. And so when they realized, though, that that was a barrier to bringing in people that didn't already have experience, they split the role to where there was more of a truer entry-level role where that certification wasn't necessary and they bring people into that role, then they can certify them while they're working to be able to do the second piece of that as well. So my point being, if there are true requirements like that, there's always a way to provide them or to work for them. It's just a matter of companies being very stuck to the way they've always done it versus being willing to reflect or to try something different. The other thing I wanted to ask you about, Teresa, is your views on empowerment. So we talked about enablement, you coming in out of a school setting, you feeling like you are being trained well, you're being supported well by your teams, you're not made to feel a burden. You can take the time you need to feel comfortable going on your own. But I think the other important piece, particularly today, is leaders who are focused on this sense of ownership, the employees feeling confident to do the job well, but do it in their own way and bring their own personality to things, bring their opinions and ideas to work, et cetera. So what are your thoughts on that?

Teresa: I think that at this point, at least for me, this question's answer is highly dependent on who my manager is and how much freedom do they allow. And I've currently so far been really lucky with my current manager because there is no micromanagement whatsoever. And of course, this gives me all the freedom I need to organize my day, organize my trips in the way that it suits me best and makes me feel more comfortable with it. And I think that the sense of ownership that you mentioned comes mainly from, of course, being given the tools that you need, but also having the freedom to explore the way you're most comfortable doing things and tackling issues in your own way, even if it's not the way other people are doing it. I guess instead of just being told how I need to approach services, I have also been given space. And actually, I've been highly encouraged to, ever since my first training in Vancouver, I've been highly encouraged to find the way that it's the best way for me to carry the services. I feel that in that sense, they really invest on making the employees feel that they can do the things on their own way and everyone can have a different way to do things as long as they're doing it. I guess they are done well and on time.

Sarah: Yeah, there's standards, but then you're given a creative freedom to build your own relationships and bring your own personality to it. And I think this correlates back to some of the things that you have said that attracted you to the space or that you enjoy about the role. You find a sense of purpose in what you're doing. I think it's really hard when you have employees who have that sense of purpose and they have drive and they have passion about what they're doing, but then you have a manager that's telling them basically to be a robot and to do things in this uniform fashion and no, I don't want your ideas. This is how it's done. Then you're not creating an environment where one, those people are going to want to stay, but two, they can have the impact they're able to have on the customer experience. Yeah, I would point people back to there was an episode of the podcast that was with Venkata from Bruker Nano, and we talked a lot about his leadership style. And I just feel like this idea of... I love empowerment and that building that sense of ownership is so important in actually getting the most of today's talent once they've come on board. So I'm really glad that you're having, again, a positive experience, though. That's good. Okay, Teresa, so when you think ahead, I know, again, it's still early on. So some of these questions are probably a little hard because you're like, I'm still getting up to speed. But I mean, obviously, you have your own goals and dreams and objectives and whatnot. So when you think about the potential growth that could exist for you for a career in field service, how do you envision that?

Teresa: As you've said, to be honest, like, of course, I've given some thought to that. But as this is my first job and it's super early on, I've mostly been taking the opportunity to learn as much as I can right now. And once I'm more settled, I'm sure I'll give way more thought than I have to this question. But to quickly answer, I think that over time, I just hope that I'm given more and more responsibility, that I am trusted by my team and that perhaps I'll be able to train people when it comes to it. And of course, the possibility of managing a team would also be interesting. But then again, I'm not saying that I'm staying in this field forever. But yeah, it's a possibility and it's interesting possibility.

Sarah: Let me word it this way. When you came into STEMCELL when you interviewed, when you came on board throughout your sort of orientation and training, like, have they presented to you what growth could look like? Or is it still just focused on this role specifically?

Teresa: I think it's pretty focused on this role specifically, but I do have some close examples that started as field service engineers and now have higher positions in the company. They are always open to that. But I've also been given this advice, which is. If you don't want to be a field service engineer for the rest of your life, don't do it for more than five or six years. Otherwise, you might want to be stuck at this.

Sarah: Yeah.

Teresa: And you don't not, I might want to explore different roles. I don't know. But I think there is a possibility to grow within the company. At least that's what I feel right now. But yeah, it's not on my plans in the near future, at least.

Sarah: You're getting situated.

Teresa: Yeah.

Sarah: That makes sense. I think this is just another thing that we hear a lot in conversations about talent is that particularly younger talent coming in, they want to progress. So it doesn't mean, I mean, you're five months in, obviously. I'm not saying you're there yet. But it's important for companies to have the understanding that, again, historically technicians or engineers would come into the company and they might do that role for 30 years. We need to understand that the majority of talent today is not going to want to do that. They're going to want to do it for a few years and have an opportunity for growth and evolve. And so number one, I think just understanding that reality is important in how we or how they orient their organizations to account for that. And then number two, there's been different conversations I've had of how companies are working to show new hires that potential when they come in so that they know it's there, they can work at their own pace, they can be as motivated to progress or not, but that they know that that potential exists within that organization versus them being in that role for a couple years, getting bored, and then jumping to a different organization. So it's just another point to consider, but it's also good to hear that you're not like, I think there's also this misperception that young talent has this unrealistic desire to just come in to a field service engineer role and be CEO in six months. You know what I mean? And it's also maybe dispelling that myth that you're saying, hey, right now I'm just focused on doing this job well, and then I'll think about what's next.

Teresa: Of course, of course. But don't get me wrong. I'm not thinking about growing right now, but of course, there's something that's an ambition, of course. But I know these things take time, and I'm not in a rush. And as I've said, I'm taking the opportunity to learn as much as I can right now, and that's my main goal now. But of course, that's on my mind, and I think it's good for people to be ambitious.

Sarah: Yeah. It's also another important point back to the importance of good leadership, because a lot of those conversations... Sure, someone can show you a chart, when you're getting hired, of what the different growth potential is, but that's not relevant at that moment, right? You're focused on coming in to do the job you were hired for. It's having those close, having that relationship with your leader, having those interactions, having them not just saying, are you doing a good job? Great. But how are you feeling? What are your goals, et cetera, over time? So yeah.

Teresa: Of course.

Sarah: Okay, so here's maybe a tough question for you. We talked about some of the things that you enjoy about the role and you're young. So have you thought about how the things you enjoy a lot now could change in other phases of your life and how you might navigate that?

Teresa: I think that this is where you want this question to go. I think that when I picture my phases of life, what's next or not next necessarily, but in the future is having a family eventually. Of course, this is the kind of job that makes you think how it will be when you have a family because we have to travel a lot. And so whenever I meet someone in this field with a family and especially with little kids or babies, it really inspires me and makes me think that it is actually possible to have and do both. However, of course, I have no idea how my life is going to look like in a few years. And I don't know if I will enjoy traveling as much as I do now, and especially spending so much nights away from home. Finding out that some companies, specifically Daniel that you've already mentioned, are already investing in finding solutions for people that do want to be in field service, but do not wish to travel as much as it usually implies. Is really heartwarming. Like it gives me hope that companies are more invested and creative in finding solutions for different types of people and in finding ways for more flexibility in these fields. And still in this topic, I would just like to quickly point out that these questions about balancing this type of job with parenthood are often framed as exclusively a woman's problem, such as how do you see yourself managing this lifestyle when you become a mom? And of course you did not frame it that way, nor did you assume that I do want to have children, which is also not an assumption that should be made for every woman. But this balance is not just a woman's problem. This might be a concern for anyone who wants to start a family and knows how much time we spend away from home in this type of job. So companies should tackle this problem and get creative, having everyone in mind and not just women.

Sarah: Absolutely, yeah. You said when we were talking about this, yeah, it's a consideration, but it's just as much a consideration for my partner as it is for me. And I love that. Now, I will say I get inspired hearing you say that because it shows the change and the growth in thinking. I'm 42, I have two sons and I have traveled throughout my career. And I am still often asked in 2024, who's taking care of your children? And I'm like, their dad. You know? And it's unfortunate, but it is still very much a reality. And I think that's why I wanted to bring it up. So there's a few important things we talked about. Number one, and I said this at the event, I think, I have been asked questions before as a woman and as a mother of, you know, well, we need more women in service because they're nurturing or we need to think about this or this. And we need to be very careful of assuming that all women want to have children. That's just not a reality that we should assume for a variety of reasons. That's number one. Number two, to your point, we need to be creative and think about how we bring in more flexibility and more options to field service roles for everyone. Because the only way that this continues to evolve and get better is if it's possible for anyone to do it. The more we think about it through the lens of how do we make it easier for women? All we're doing is reinforcing the mentality that it's a woman's job alone to have that consideration. I read this quote recently. I think I shared it on LinkedIn. It made me think so much, but it said, giving women more opportunity in the workplace without expecting more from men at home is not empowerment, it's exploitation. And I absolutely love that. And that's coming from someone who, at least for my age, is in a pretty egalitarian relationship. But the beliefs, the things that are really deeply embedded are really deeply embedded. And we have to continue to challenge those. So I'm really glad that you bring up that point. And also really glad that you said, my partner is thinking about this just as much as I am. The other thing I wanted to reinforce that you said is for a woman or a couple that does choose to have children, it also doesn't automatically, mean they don't want a role where they travel. Yes, some people might decide they don't want that anymore for any reason. Some people just get sick of it, even if they don't have kids. Or they might decide one doesn't, whatever. But to your point, you said that when you see people doing it, it's inspiring to you. And so I also want to kind of reinforce for listeners, there is no rule that says once someone has a family, they don't want to travel anymore. So I think the lesson here is, one, not to make assumptions. And two, to think creatively about how we can build different options into the work structure so that it can fit. A variety of different needs, and we can have the greatest success possible. Bringing in good talent and retaining that good talent through different phases.

Teresa: Yeah, definitely. Thank you for complimenting what I said in such a clear way. Yeah.

Sarah: Well, I'm very passionate about it as well. It's a really layered topic. And I will admit, I've admitted this many times, as a mom, I do have guilt for being gone. And I'm not saying I should. I'm just saying I do. And so when I'm away from my family and there's stuff going on here and someone makes a comment like that, it's not easy to just brush off always. And so I think that I want to see that change. It doesn't help anyone to continue to reinforce that thinking. And I think there's, with your generation, a huge wave of change coming because of the work that my generation and others have done, right? It's we're building on it, but it just takes time, so.

Teresa: Of course.

Sarah: Okay. Any other advice you would offer companies who are really working hard to bring in new talent? Things you can think that they should do, things they shouldn't do. From your perspective, having recently gone through this, is there anything we haven't touched on that comes to mind that you think it would be good for folks to be thinking about?

Teresa: I don't, of course, have a recipe or anything about what should or shouldn't be done, especially because I'm so new to all of this. I might have some more insights. As I gain more understanding of this industry. But I guess I can say as a young person's perspective that the companies that are investing in creating flexibility and creative environments and that are promoting professional but personal growth as well and that provide a safe space for learning are definitely on the right track. Believing in young people and their skills is crucial as is giving them a chance, even if there are other candidates with more experience. We've all been there. Everyone needs their first opportunity to show their work. And ultimately, the companies that claim that they are working hard to attract this new talent hold significant power in including the younger generation. I don't know. It's also very good that companies are showing more and more concern in having a more diverse team. And for example, I think that for including women, it might be easier to look in the younger generation as we've discussed. There are way more female engineers, for example, nowadays than there were before. So if you really want to make a change, you need to go on all fronts. And also one thing that I think that field service industry can take advantage of is that they're offering a different type of routine compared to more traditional jobs. And I believe that nowadays young people are craving for a more fast-paced environment. They are keen to learning from different environments at the same time and from different people. And so having a more diverse experience overall is appealing to young people. And I think it's something that field service can bring. I think that highlighting this aspect of the job might be a good way to attract young people.

Sarah: Absolutely. So I feel bad going back to something because that was such a good conclusion. But I did just think of one thing that you brought up that I want to touch on because I think it would be helpful for listeners, which is you mentioned in that variety. So you just kind of mentioned it. You said that you travel. Some days you're in the lab. Some days you're working from home. And so I wanted to ask you, is that because you're in training or will that be the same when you are on your own? Will you still have days you're working from home and you'll have days that you're traveling, days that you're in the lab? And is that something that will be the same throughout?

Teresa: Yes. The routine will be almost the same, meaning there are really no routine. But I will have days at home, which might involve getting some paperwork done or getting involved in some other projects that a company might have going on. And then, of course, travel days sometimes take the whole day. But yeah, days from home are also good because, of course, you're not looking at your computer waiting for an email to drop at all. So it also gives me the opportunity to explore other hobbies and gives me some free time that I think that in a regular nine-to-five job, again, you wouldn't have the chance to explore this other side.

Sarah: Yeah. No. And I wanted to go back to that because a lot of times we think about these roles as even if it isn't travel, like get on an airplane or get on a train. It's just like in the car. It's Monday through Friday or whatever the schedule is. It's boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Right. And don't get me wrong. There's different service environments based on different industries. I understand that. But I do think maybe in your industry, that sort of variety is more naturally occurring. But even for those, it isn't where there's this daily demand for service job after service job. Thinking about is there a way to rotate or split work where you can build in some of that variety, where maybe two days a week technicians or engineers are doing remote service from home. And three days a week, they're traveling or something like that. Again, going back to your point of just being conscious that flexibility, that creativity, that variety is very important. I just want to challenge people to think about, I believe there's always a way to provide more of that. It's just a matter of whether you're willing to do things differently or you're trying to fit today's talent into a very outdated mold. So I just wanted to go back to that because we're seeing more of that. I think that as companies adopt more remote service capabilities, they can have engineers working from home a couple days a week doing remote service and then be on site. And I think, again, we talked about travel can be incredibly exciting for a while. But I think for some people, it will get old regardless of what the next phase of life looks like. So just having options for different ways to different roles to offer different ways to build schedules, different alternatives is, I think, really important for the future.

Teresa: Yeah, me too. And that's why I mentioned Daniel's work, because that's the most familiar work I've been with so far. And it's really what I hope in a company. And it's creating that space for you to be comfortable with whichever phase you're in and having that flexibility. So you're not traveling all the time or you can spend some time troubleshooting at home. You might also like that. So, yeah, given that choices, it makes you happier. And overall, I think that having your employees happy makes your customers happier. So it's all a big cycle.

Sarah: I just thought of one other question. We're going to keep going. This is going to be like a three hour episode. I'm just kidding. Last one, I promise. So there's major, major buzz everywhere right now about AI. So I want to ask from the perspective of a young field service engineer, how do you feel about AI?

Teresa: I feel that AI can be a really good tool if you know how to use it. And if you are aware of its limitations, I think that it's still evolving. I have to be honest, I'm not an expert in the subject, but we did discuss some really interesting things in the event we met. And there were discussions of having these interactive videos where you can ask questions because we're training. Everyone knows that if you don't have customers that have that specific machine and you don't go there very often, you might forget. So having, I think that AI can be a really good tool for training, for example. But of course, you need to acknowledge there are limitations, at least for now. It's not 100% reliable, of course. And everyone needs to be aware of that.

Sarah: It's not something that makes you fear for your job.

Teresa: I think it will complement my job. I don't know if it will grow fast enough. I'm sure it will grow very, very fast, but I don't know if it will grow fast enough or, again, I don't know if it will be 100% reliable ever. So I think that having the human input is always good and it can be a great tool to complement that work. But yeah, I would like to believe that we are still needed in the long run.

Sarah: Yeah. I agree a thousand percent. I don't see a time, regardless of how sophisticated it becomes, that we don't need to think about it as how it complements human effort versus overtakes it. But I was just really interested to ask your perspective because it's something that I think sometimes, and maybe it's more threatening for people that have been in the workforce longer that see it as such a massive change. But I think it's important for us to think about how we put people at ease of looking at it as a tool to help them in their roles, not looking at it as a threat. Okay. Thanks for letting me ask you a bunch of questions that I was curious about. I absolutely loved it. I appreciate your perspective. I'm very excited to see where your career takes you because you're going to do amazing things and we'll definitely love to have you back at some point.

Teresa: Yeah, thank you so much again for the invite. I really enjoyed our conversation. It's always great to hear your inputs. I think we have very similar intakes in some of the main topics. So it's good to have this podcast to have continuity in these topics.

Sarah: Yes, thank you for being a part of it. I appreciate it.

Teresa: Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah: You all can find more by visiting the home of UNSCRIPTED at futureoffieldservice.com. I will try and make sure we link in the show notes the episode that we did with Daniel at Thermo Fisher and Venkata at Bruker Nano that we mentioned in this episode. The Unscripted podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. And as always, thank you for listening.

When I began in this space, efficiency ruled the world of field service. Field service was perceived as a cost center of the business, and efforts to maximize efficiency took center stage. While efficiency is still important today, in a landscape where service is a differentiator for your business and a potential avenue of growth, the concept of employee engagement and empowerment has become far more important.

This begs the question, is it possible to balance efficiency and empowerment – or are they innately at odds? My belief is that we can, and must, find a balance. Companies that remain focused only on wringing every last ounce of productivity out of their field force with no regard to employee engagement (let alone how the impact of that type of management mentality trickles down to the customer experience) will fail in today’s talent landscape (and beyond).

What’s Your Perspective?

Finding the balance has a lot to do with perspective. If your leadership style is “command and control” or your company’s focus is too narrowly on the quarter-by-quarter financials, it’s time to evolve and consider the value of a more employee-centric approach. For those of you who are rolling your eyes, trust me when I say this doesn’t mean abandoning standards, or rules, or even a focus on efficiency; it simply means that you consider the more modern thinking that if you trust, enable, and empower your employees they will take ownership in their roles and meet – or exceed – your expectations. Without micromanagement!

If you find yourself rooted in skepticism, there is ample evidence of the correlation between employee engagement and productivity (among other benefits). For instance, according to Gallup, companies with highly engaged employees are 17% more productive and 21% more profitable than companies with disengaged employees. Gallup also states that, “engaged employees are more motivated to complete tasks on time and successfully, and they're better at meeting customer needs, which can lead to more sales and higher revenues. They also tend to be more innovative and efficient and have higher customer retention rates.”

Moreover, today’s talent is unlikely to tolerate working in the efficiency-at-all-costs environments of yesteryear. They seek environments that offer flexibility, invite their creativity, provide a sense of purpose, and uphold a sense of humanity. So not only is it proven that employee-centric environments yield better performance, but you’re unlikely to be able to fill roles and retain talent if you aren’t putting genuine effort into creating and nurturing employee engagement and empowerment.

Empowerment > Efficiency

When it comes down to it, I believe leaders must prioritize empowerment. Prioritizing efficiency illustrates a disbelief in, or disregard of, the correlation highlighted above, and while it’s fine to have measures in place to focus on or improve efficiency, weighting the importance of that above employee engagement is foolish.

So how do we create environments where employees feel empowered, and we are maximizing efficiency? Here are some thoughts:

Employee-centric cultures often happen from the top-down, with alignment on the importance and value of the approach
Leaders must create relationships with each of their team members and prioritize one-on-ones to understand their goals, motivators, communication preferences, and so on
Leaders need to ask a lot of questions, inviting teams to provide feedback, take part in brainstorming and problem-solving, and feel invested in team and company objectives
Employees need to feel valued, respected, and heard. Ensuring communication channels are varied, all opinions are welcome, and efforts are acknowledged and rewarded
Employees should have standards to adhere to, but be given room to be authentic and personalize their approach
Expectations should be clear and well-rounded (not short sighted) – metrics like customer satisfaction and retention should be weighted more than efficiency-driven metrics like jobs per day, because they are more indicative of success in an environment where service is a differentiator
Efforts around efficiency should be geared toward alleviating friction from the employees day-to-day work and removing barriers for them, not driving them to work harder and harder; we must balance what’s possible with what’s reasonable
Companies can use technologies that improve efficiency to create better employee engagement and satisfaction. For instance, one IFS Planning & Scheduling Optimization customer has used the intelligence of the tool to allow technicians to select their own start and end time each day, giving them something back from the benefit of automation. Stuart Thompson of ABB also shared in this podcast how as they’ve automated weekly reporting, rather than the company clawing back every moment of productivity, they’ve given the employees some of their time back
Enablement, through proper training, effective tools, ample knowledge management, and more leads to greater efficiency – the goal should be one of maximum effectiveness versus maximum efficiency

This is just what quickly comes to my mind – what would you add to the list? And how do you balance the criticality of empowerment with the need for efficiency? I’d love to hear from you!

Sustainability is a topic that impacts each of us personally and plays an increasingly integrated role in the business landscape. From the perspective of how companies comply with and support sustainability requirements to how they aid customers with sustainable offerings or their own initiatives, it’s a topic that impacts just about every area of today’s business. Perhaps one area that is underrepresented though is the intersection of service and sustainability.

To discuss this and more, I recently welcomed back to the UNSCRIPTED podcast Rainer Karcher, sustainability enthusiast, “climate activist in a suit,” and former Chief Sustainability Officer, who has recently departed the corporate world to start helping companies work toward their sustainability objectives through his own organization, Heartprint.

As the Founder and Managing Director of Heartprint, he brings more than 25 years of IT experience from companies like Allianz Technology, IBM, and Siemens AG. His expertise spans support, infrastructure, data centers, service operations, and IT sustainability. For Rainer, sustainability extends beyond environmental protection to encompass a holistic approach aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Agenda, addressing all ESG aspects – and his passion for this work is contagious, so I strongly recommend listening to the full discussion.

There’s Always a “Why” for Sustainability

Let’s start with ensuring we’re all operating from the same understanding that everyone – and every business – should be invested in this topic and committed to taking action. There’s always a “why” for sustainability, it’s just a matter of through which lens the view resonates with you most.

“Start with your own health,” says Rainer. “If you take the SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals, good health and well-being is part of sustainability. So, this is already a first advantage. The second is, if you for example eat less meat, you help the planet. Even by reducing consumption to maybe once or twice per week, you can consume the higher quality products, helping animal treatment, saving you money, and more. From the perspective of a company, there’s the topic of inclusion – a company that is inclusive has an advantage. If you provide a surrounding for employees to work towards a better future, the growing numbers for whom it’s a private passion will be happier in their jobs – so it can play a role in talent attraction and retention. Then we get into all of the ways these trends are impacting companies, there’s just so many reasons why this matters.”

As you read through the trends we discussed, you’ll see that whether you share a personal passion for this topic, feel invested in leaving a better future for your children, or are looking at it from strictly a business perspective, sustainability matters. There are demands to comply with, but also opportunities to win customer mindshare and marketshare by leading the way, and even create offerings to help customers on their own sustainability journeys.

Current Sustainability Trends

So, what are those trends? In an hour discussion there’s no way to cover everything, but Rainer and I focused on talking about the areas that would be especially relevant for service-centric businesses. Here’s a synopsis:

Regulatory pressures. “With the European Green Deal, but also impacting companies in the U.S. and across the world, there are guidelines impacting how companies do business. Depending on revenue, but going down to even the small business world, is the CSRD, Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, and it is replacing the non-financial reporting of the past. This is nothing completely new, but brings a broader and deeper granularity when it comes to sustainability. It contains the typical environmental aspects like carbon footprint, like water consumption, air quality, it goes into biodiversity aspects as well but also goes into social, including pay gaps, diversity, inclusion, accessibility, all those features. And finally, the governance aspect goes into the supply chain aspects. What is the code of conduct of a company to work together throughout the supply chain? It is impacting companies all over the world. We do have, depending on relationships and customer scenarios, for sure, always the need to make things transparent. And this is the biggest achievement of initiatives like CSRD and some others as well. On the other side, it does regulate where investments are going into the part of CSRD and that Green Deal called EU taxonomy. So, this is defining what is sustainable investments. I think the equivalent in the US is a bit the Inflation Reduction Act.”
Increasing Transparency. “Regulations require you to create a transparency on where your emissions are coming from and how you are making progress to further reduce and to get to carbon neutrality in the future, then until 2050 by latest to stick with that 1.5 degree Paris Agreement. To those of you who are not familiar, the objective of that is to limit the global average increase of temperature to 1.5 degrees. To achieve that, you have to look into, for example, the way you travel. In field service, employees normally spend a lot of time on the road. To get to your customers the sooner the better, you mostly aren’t taking any public transport or trains. You jump maybe onto a plane or into a car to get there. This is part of the regulatory for the environmental aspect, but also brings us to finding ways to lower that footprint.”
Lowering Environmental Footprint. “We have to find ways to lower your footprint, meaning maybe changing to electrical vehicles if it's on short ranges or mid ranges. Maybe changing to sustainable aviation fuel if you have to fly and if you have to.” There are also a number of ways in field service to use modern technologies to reduce your environmental footprint. For example, the incorporation of remote service capabilities that allow customer self-service and/or remote resolution help organizations avoid unnecessary on-site visits and also ensure that when a visit is needed, the information to achieve first-time fix has already been gathered. Moreover, technologies like IFS Planning & Scheduling Optimization (PSO) help to maximize efficiency and reduce travel time, helping to make sure you are keeping the footprint that is necessary as small as possible.
Accessibility. “The accessibility aspect in the U.S. is now coming over to Europe. We're quite behind here in Germany and in Europe. We have the European Accessibility Act, which is now enforcing companies starting in summer of next year to make their products and services accessible for anyone. That means inclusiveness for blind people, for people with any kind of mental diseases or disabilities. That is something which affects for sure service and field service as well.”
Human Rights. “In Germany, for example, we've started already last year, the German Supply Chain Act and now the European Union is enhancing that most likely in 2026 with the CSDDD (Corporate Supply Chain Due Diligence Directive). This focuses on the whole aspect on human rights treatments, children, labor, modern slavery and so on, throughout the whole supply chain. If I'm, for example, working with a call center in India, I have to ensure being the company who is providing the service, that even if it's a third or fourth tier supplier, that they are treating humans right and providing fair payment the way it is defined in the local area region. So, I have to ensure this is in my own responsibility and not just handed to the supply chain.”
Investment Decisions. “I don't make an investment into a company which I have to be afraid might not be existent in a year or two. I'd like to understand that whatever they do is resilient, in regard of the whole supply chain and even reputational aspects. I do not want to work with a company, invest into a company, or insure a company I might see a risk of getting into press and media in a negative way, or maybe in a year or two and they go bankrupt. I don't know for the U.S. market, but I know for the European and in particular German market, banking is heavily looking at who is getting loans and for what conditions. Companies who have a clear sustainability commitment, the target setting, and resilience and transparency already, they get loans to far better conditions than companies who not.”
Supply Chain. “A perfect example we've seen already throughout the pandemic. If you remember that ship blocking the Panama Channel for a couple of days, brought a lot of companies really to their limits. If I have an understanding of my suppliers throughout the whole chain and transparency of what is their impact and what could bring my supply chain to risk. With human rights, the fashion industry has been an example of poor working conditions and reputational aspects. Every company leader, every C-level in a company, whether it's 50, 500, 5,000, 500,000 employees, has to take responsibility.”
Sustainable Product Design. “If you design a product in the way that you're first of all able to repair it quite well, and when it's not able to be repaired anymore can be fully reused, you are acknowledging that our resources on Earth are limited. We don't have unlimited resources. In many cases today, we produce something, we use it, and at the end of the life cycle we throw it away often to landfill, often exported to sub-Saharan Africa or elsewhere, and we just waste and dump. This has to change. If we design products for longevity and to where we can dismantle components, separate metals from plastics, and so on, it will not only lower costs but create more circularity and lessen the environmental harm.”
Circular Economy’s Service Potential. The circular economy is not only better for the environment, but it can present opportunity for service providers. In a recent post on LinkedIn, Lucas Rigotto, CSO, Liquid and Powder Technologies at GEA Group, shared how he feels many research organizations and news sources discussing sustainability miss the opportunity to touch on the intersection with service. He says, “In some of our recent Sustainability and Circular Economy discussions, I came away feeling incredibly energized about the crucial role service plays in our organizational goals but even more on impact for the industry to be more efficient, profitable and really deliver outcomes from a circular approach. Service is in a prime position to help our customers achieve their sustainability goals by focusing on upgrades, modernizations, service contracts, and digital solutions. We’re ensuring products run smoothly and efficiently for longer periods, reducing waste, and conserving resources. How do we do it? Upgrades and modernizations give our customers’ assets a new lease on life. Service contracts provide ongoing care to keep everything in top shape and minimize unnecessary downtime. Our digital solutions bring process insights, help optimize their operations with our autopilot like applications and real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance, ensuring our customers and their industries are always one step ahead. By adhering to these practices, we’re not just assisting our customers; we’re also making a significant positive impact on the planet. We keep pushing forward, embracing the 5Rs, and demonstrating how our strategic service activities are paving the way for a more sustainable future. It’s a win-win for the environment, for our business and mostly for our customers and society!”
Artificial Intelligence. “If you look into the digital and IT world, everyone is talking AI. Everyone is looking into trying to find real use cases for AI. I just recently had a service experience myself where I called my mobile provider with a need and after about five minutes of conversation, realized I wasn’t talking with a human. We are just at the beginning of that – AI capabilities are tremendously changing the way we live, the way we work, what we do and how we do things. In service areas, you can take the simple first-level support and free up the people doing that on a day-to-day basis to work on creative, innovative things. From that aspect, there is a huge opportunity to improve our lives with artificial intelligence. On the flip side of the coin, it always comes with a price. And AI is consuming already a huge amount of energy. For example, if you Google yourself versus putting your name into ChatGPT4, ChatGPT will bring up more or less the same results but costs you 100 times more energy than Google does, and this goes for any AI solution. The energy consumption is incredible, and it requires a huge amount of data centers to be built. There’s also the ethical aspects of artificial intelligence, including the treatment of people entering the data, the issue of bias, and the question on its impact on humanity as a whole. If it sounds like I'm an enemy of AI, I am not. I am quite sure we need to have it. It's part of a solution, but we have to treat it right.”

The Issue of Greenwashing

I was curious to ask Rainer whether, with the mandated increases in transparency, greenwashing is still a major issue. According to him, greenwashing won’t go away. “As long as you have humans who are intelligent and smart at using the right words and the right visuals, there will always be greenwashing from an outside perspective,” he says. “Things like the CSRD are aimed to reduce that and it is being enhanced with a clean claims directive to regulate how you have to set up your strategy to be allowed to talk on carbon neutral or net zero. For example, to stick with that, you have to reduce your own footprint by 90% and only 10% is allowed to be compensated and offset with certificates. If you have to compensate more, then you are not allowed officially to use the term net zero. Does it keep all the companies away from greenwashing? Surely not I’m pretty confident if you keep your eyes open and trust your gut feeling, you’ll be able to identify those who are serious in their efforts and those who are doing the check-the-box thing.”

What’s Next?

Curious what Rainer anticipates the next 12 months will bring in terms of the trends discussed above, and more? “Twelve months will definitely be the time in which we’ll see AI dramatically increasing. I think we need to have a way bigger focus on resilience and the awareness that what we’ve already seen in terms of the effects of climate crisis aren’t going away. We’re still focused on things like transparency for the as-is, but we need to put a dramatically fast focus on what will happen in the future. So AI will have a huge role in prediction and helping us adapt to situations and find alternatives. I also think the world is connecting more and more – we as humanity and as the enterprise world are connecting globally. We have a global issue, so we have to treat it as such – not as competitive advantage, not with intellectual properly, but with collaboration and working towards one goal together.”

And with that, you can likely understand why Rainer named his new company Heartprint. His enthusiasm for and view around this work comes from the heart, and companies who are most committed to doing the work will know that along with creating a strategy and a blueprint, you will be most successful if you genuinely care.

Episode 272

In this episode of the Unscripted podcast, host Sarah Nicastro welcomes back Rainer Karcher, sustainability enthusiast, “climate activist in a suit,” and former Chief Sustainability Officer, who has recently departed the corporate world to start helping companies work toward their sustainability objectives. Rainer shares knowledge on current trends, common missteps, and the reasons why every organization should be invested in this topic.

Rainer is the Founder and Managing Director of Heartprint. He brings over 25 years of IT experience from leading companies like Allianz Technology, IBM, and Siemens AG. His expertise spans support, infrastructure, data centers, service operations, and IT sustainability. For Rainer, sustainability extends beyond environmental protection to encompass a holistic approach aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Agenda, addressing all ESG aspects.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Full Show Notes

Rainer: So if we talk on sustainability in ESG, environmental, social, and governance, the social aspects then goes into pay gaps, diversity, inclusion, accessibility, all those features. And finally, then the governance aspect goes into the supply chain aspects. What is the code of conduct of a company to work together with throughout the supply chain? So what it definitely means is it is impacting companies all over the world. We do have, depending on relationships and customer scenarios, for sure, always the need to make things transparent. And this is the biggest aspect and the biggest achievement of initiatives like CSRD and some others as well.

Sarah: Welcome to the UNSCRIPTED Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we're going to be talking about sustainability, particularly the sustainability trends that should be top of mind for service organizations and service leaders. I would say in the last 12 to 18 months, sustainability is a topic that has been coming up more and more and more in the conversations I have and the events I attend, not because it wasn't an important consideration before then, but because I think there's an increasing awareness of the opportunities we have in the world of service to positively impact these initiatives and to take action. So I'm thrilled to welcome back to the podcast, Mr. Rainer Karcher, who is currently the Founder and CEO of Heartprint, Inc. We're going to talk a bit about that. Some of you that have been with us a while may remember Rainer. He was on the podcast back in 2022, I believe. And so a lot has changed since then. And I'm happy to have you back and talk a bit about what is going on in the world of sustainability today. So before we get into our topic, just tell everyone a little bit more about yourself, your background, and we'll go from there.

Rainer: Thank you very much, Sarah. And thank you for the warm welcome. It's so great to be back. And it's indeed, it's 2022. I mean, look at that. It's time is flying. This is incredible. For those of you who haven't heard at that time, if you would jump back, you would see me at the big corporate world. In the meantime, I'm Founder and CEO, exactly as Sarah already mentioned, from Heartprint Inc., a company who is a focus on advising and incubating SMEs all over the world in regard of digital and sustainable aspects. So twin transformation is my key focus. In general, I'm an IT person since 27 years. I'm based in Munich, father of three. I do have 46 years currently on my back, and I am trying to put sustainability into every angle of what I do in my private as well as in my professional life. I'm very much interested in helping those who are interested in doing something, which is really working towards sustainability with experience, which I've made in the last couple of years in big enterprises, as I already said. So I did work for more than 10 years for Siemens. And then afterwards for the last nearly two years then for Allianz, so the insurance company and Allianz technology in that part, so the IT version in Allianz. And so this is a bit of me. As I said, I'm really looking forward now to give a bit of new thoughts, new experience, and enhance what we've already spoken about two and a half years back, Sarah.

Sarah: Yes. Going back to, so Rainer not only was on the podcast in 2022, but when we started the Future of Field Service live events, our first year doing those was 2022. And you joined us for a session in Frankfurt. If you remember how incredibly hot it was that day, that's what always stands out in my mind. We were roasting on the top floor of a building with no air con. And it was just uncharacteristically hot for that event. So what stood out to me about you then and still does is just the incredible passion you have for what you do and the energy you bring to this topic. And so you've taken that along with your corporate experience and you've recently begun your own organization, Heartprint Inc., as you mentioned. And so one of the things that is intriguing to me, and we talked a little bit about this recently, is the choice of name. Okay, so can you talk a little bit about the relevance of the name and the importance of a Heartprint when it comes to sustainability initiatives?

Rainer: Yeah, with big pleasure. And indeed, it was a well-taken choice to call my company Heartprint. So quite some time back in 2019, 2020, as I've started my journey in the corporate world at Siemens at that time towards sustainability, I've always looked in a holistic, full, big-picture approach to sustainability. So the SDGs of the United Nations is, to me, at least the most fundamental aspect to look at when we are talking on sustainability. But in fact, if it goes through the current priorities, we are mostly talking on climate crisis. We are talking on footprint, on handprint. So where is the own footprint to be reduced? Where could we improve the environmental impact and lower the damage we take? And the second aspect is to look into handprint aspect through digitalization, through automation. So where is IT able to help and to maybe release some pressure to automate reporting's and all those things? And what are they missing at that time? So in 2019, as I've started that journey, was an emotional connection. Because if we're honest, sustainability is a buzzword in the meantime. Everybody's talking about it. And if you look into the news, there is always big news on, I don't know, flying from the US to Germany is the equivalent of 3.5 tons of carbon emissions. Well, but the majority of people, let's be honest, 90%, 95% of humanity doesn't even know. Is that a lot or is it not? Is it something I can change? But what everybody is understanding definitely is that we have to do something. If you look around, if you see flooding's, if you see wildfires, like we've had been seeing it in beginning of the year in Canada, for example. If you see a drought, if you see the current situation all over the world, then there is an emotion. And that emotion is something we have to transport and translate into action and activity. So I am trying to establish the Heartprint as a third pillar beside the footprint and the handprint to connect both with people and with human beings. If we talk on sustainability, mostly there is environmental protection, but all the activities we do is, in fact, not protecting the environment. It's protecting the foundation of living for us human beings. If we go into diversity, if we go into inclusivity, if we go to, I don't know, accessibility aspects, all of that is improving our lives, the life of humans. And that human aspect comes with heart. And the heart is something which we always have to include to really make things happen. And this is exactly why I display myself already with the objective of who I'm able and willing to work with. And so my future customers, my potential customers should be those who are really interested in making things happen and really changing. And finally, then, with the last comment on that, sustainability is a transformation. And the transformation, which is not only for companies, for the economy and the society, it's for us, for human beings, the biggest challenge in general. We have to change our habits. We have to change lives. Does it mean that we always have to reduce luxury? No, it does not. But we have to do less, that's for sure. And we have to change. And if I do have a passion for it, if I do have an understanding that it's worth it, and there is love within and there is a heart within, then I have the willingness to adopt and to change and to go that way of transforming. And this is exactly what I'd like to do. And like I've said already earlier, I'm hoping for a lot of clients worldwide, which I'm able to help with my experience, which I've gathered over the last couple of years, and to create a vision, to create a strategy, to define a roadmap, and set priorities and get the journey started.

Sarah: I love that. And I think it's a very fitting name for you. I had shared with you when we spoke, what came to mind for me is this is an area, different elements of sustainability are all areas that folks know are important. They know that they should have a mission around or a plan for, right? But those who are making the biggest difference in any areas of this topic are doing so because they have that passion. So they're not doing it just because they have to. They're not doing it because they're expected to or because they need to check a box of having X, Y, or Z strategy, but they're doing it because they see how it matters and why it matters. And I think I had said to you, as you help organizations build their blueprint for their sustainability initiatives, leading with that Heartprint, which I think of as the why, right? Why does this matter? Why is this so important? It's just such a good fit. So awesome.

Rainer: Thank you.

Sarah: All right. So let's talk about some of the current trends in the sustainability world that might be impacting the service realm. So I have a list here. I can read them off and you can just talk a little bit and then we'll see if there's any that I missed. So first is around regulatory pressures.

Rainer: Yeah, that's definitely something which, at least here on the European side, but even going and impacting companies in the US and in the world in general, we do have a so-called European Green Deal, which has been implemented three years ago already. And it's now slightly matching to companies. Depending on their sizes, depending on their revenues over the last next now four years, matching even companies with more than 20 employees and 4 million euros of revenue. So this will go down to the small SME world and as well over that time. It's a regulatory called CSRD, Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, and it is replacing the non-financial reporting on the past. So this is nothing completely new. It's just now with a different focus and a way broader and deeper granularity if it comes to sustainability. So it does contain the typical environmental aspects like carbon footprint, like water consumption, air quality. It goes into biodiversity aspects as well but goes into social. So if you talk on sustainability in ESG, environmental, social, and governance, the social aspects then goes into pay gaps, diversity, inclusion, accessibility, all those features. And finally, then the governance aspect goes into the supply chain aspects. What is the code of conduct of a company to work together with throughout the supply chain? So what it definitely means is it is impacting companies all over the world. We do have, depending on relationships and customer scenarios, for sure, always the need to make things transparent. And this is the biggest aspect. And the biggest achievement of initiatives like CSRD and some others as well. On the other side, it does regulate where is investments going into the part of CSRD and that Green Deal is called EU taxonomy. So this is defining what is sustainable investments and how could I do that? I think the equivalent in the US is a bit the Inflation Reduction Act. So this goes a bit in a similar direction. And we do have definitely, therefore, a huge impact to all companies independent of where they work. And I think in particular, as you have to create a transparency on where your emissions are coming from and how you are making progress to further reduce and to get to carbon neutrality in the future, then until 2050 by latest to stick with that 1.5 degree Paris Agreement, which is to those of you who are not familiar with the objective of what science defined. We should limit the global average increase of temperature to 1.5 degrees, which in brackets, by the way, we currently already have achieved and got to. So we have already the 1.5 degrees. So we have to really fight hard to stick with it. But the thing is, to achieve that, you have to look into, for example, travel and the way you travel. So if you have field service, you normally spend a lot of time on the road. You get to your customers, you try to achieve them the sooner the better. So you mostly take not any public transport or trains. You jump maybe into a plane or you take a car and drive there. That has to be reported. So we have to find ways to lower your footprint, meaning maybe changing to better electrical vehicles if it's on short ranges or mid ranges. Maybe changing to sustainable aviation feel if you fly and if you have to. So there is always advantages and alternatives, but we have to focus onto that and you have to be aware on what you get. So this is the part of regulatory for environmental aspect. What I think in the US is quite well known is accessibility. So there is WRC. So the accessibility aspect there is now coming over to Europe. So in that remark, we're quite behind here and in Germany and in Europe. So we have the European Accessibility Act, who is now enforcing companies. Starting in summer next year. So in about a year from now on to make their product, their services accessible for anyone. So that means inclusiveness for blind people, for people with any kind of mental diseases or disabilities. That is something which affects for sure service and field service as well. Because if you have maybe online portals to start with your own service to reset the password or whatever it might be, this is definitely something which affects the field service in general and has very huge impact then to sustainability as well. And then. And finally, there is the aspect of human rights treatments. So in Germany, for example, we've started already last year, the so-called German Supply Chain Act. Now the European Union is enhancing that most likely in 2026 with the so-called CSDDD. And this is the Corporate Supply Chain Due Diligence Directive. And this then focuses on the whole aspect on human rights treatments, children, labor, modern slavery and name them throughout the whole supply chain. And again, if I'm, for example, working with a call center in India, I have to ensure being the company who is providing the service, that even if it's a third or fourth supplier to a tier three supplier. That they are treating human rights and payment, for example, the way it is defined in my local area and my local region. So I have to ensure this is in my own responsibility and not just handed to the supply chain and I just put my hands away. And so this is three major areas where, from my perspective, regulatory is definitely impacting what we currently do and even more in the future.

Sarah: Yeah. So I just want to make a couple of comments for our audience. So one, going back to the point you made about field service and the frequent travel, right? So you mentioned looking into electric vehicles. I know that there's interesting geographical differences there because of the amount of travel or the distance of travel that's common in the US. And also the infrastructure is lagging and catching up. But it is something that is going to be continuing to progress and more and more important to evaluate. But I also wanted to point out this is where we see so many and we've had so many conversations on this podcast about the evolution of service delivery and looking at opportunities to do more remote diagnostics and remote resolution, right? So you can, in many cases, completely avoid travel that is just wholly unnecessary and has just been done because it's the way it's been done. If nothing else, through the remote diagnostics, you can understand what exactly it is you're going on site to do so that you eliminate any repeat visits. So, again, really looking to maximize the efficiency of that travel. Then there are also tools IFS1, that is a planning and scheduling optimization engine that does a really good job of making sure that you're appropriately leveraging your resources. You're minimizing travel. You can set whatever criteria you want to prioritize for companies that are particularly focused on sustainability. You could set the highest parameter to avoid travel or to reduce those emissions. So there's a lot you can do there. The other thing I wanted to say that is relevant to a lot of our service providers is to think about what regulatory pressures your customers might be up against, right? Because there are opportunities to maybe aid in that and have new service offerings come out of your ability to help them meet the guidelines they need to meet. I just wanted to add that. Now, you mentioned an investor preferences. So this is becoming more heavily weighted in investment decisions, which is another really important point for any organization that's going to be looking for investors is, you know, it's taking more and more precedent in those decisions. Another thing to consider is customer preferences. So can you talk a little bit about what we see related to how consumers and even business consumers are looking at the selection of their providers based on this commitment?

Rainer: Yeah, with pleasure. And thanks for that question. And thanks for the addition. You're totally right. So the geographical differences between Europe and particularly in Germany and the US is quite massive. So for absolutely there is definitely different addresses. So to the customer and to the investor aspect, I think in both areas, first of all, the awareness is dramatically increasing nowadays. And at least those customers who do have and if you're talking from B to C now, we do have a huge, huge topic that everyone is talking on. Am I part of the solution? Am I part of the problem? And everyone tries to be part of the solution for sure and tries to take an impact and influence into environmental aspects, into human rights treatments and all those things. So I think there is pressure coming from that angle generally anyhow. But even in the business surrounding B2B, we do have huge companies who do have set their own targets, but they are not able to achieve them if the providers and the companies they are working together with do not. So therefore, it's always a dependency on each other. Exactly as I said it earlier already, companies are able to help their customers, their clients to achieve their targets or they can even go against them. So therefore, I think that's a huge aspect which you always have to think twice about. In addition, I think what comes dramatically from the investor's perspective and now my last station I've been worked on prior to my own company was the insurance world and banking, financial insurance investment. This is quite close from the perspective. What they need to have there is reliability and a long-term planning. So I don't make an investment into a company which I have to be afraid of might not be existent anymore in a year or two. I'd like to understand that whatever they do is resilient. And resilient means in regard of the whole supply chain, if it comes to materials, if it is on maybe a reputational aspects. I do not want to work with a company. I don't want to invest into a company or I don't want to insure a company who I might see a risk that whatever business they have might get into press and media in a negative way, maybe in a year or two and they go bankrupt. And the third is if you just see one of the outcomes of climate crisis is strong weather results. So there is tornadoes, there is thunderstorms, there is flooding, there is massive heat or massive cold periods. And if a company is not at all focusing on those things and just simply working and hoping that nothing will happen, this might turn out against them. And if it just take a where to place a factory, how to set up maybe a service field where there's people maybe working in outside. If there's current temperatures, what we've seen in India or even in the US, I think there is a huge heat wave right now that doesn't work anymore. And this is exactly talking on resilience and prediction of what is coming next and what is maybe happening in five years or in 10. All of that is quite of importance if it comes to investments, if it comes to financial aspects and even the small little things loans, at least here. I don't know for the US market, but I know for the European and in particular German market. Banking is heavily looking who is getting a loan and for what conditions. So those companies who have a clear commitment, a clear sustainability commitment and the target setting and do have resilience and transparency already, they get loans to way better conditions than those companies who do have not. And maybe depending on the amount of investments or of the loan you'd like to get, you don't even get one. So therefore, this is already impacting heavily. And so we have two perspectives and two angles why it does make sense to focus on that.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. What about supply chain?

Rainer: Yeah, supply chain, I think, is a perfect example we've seen already throughout the pandemic. And I think mostly if you just remember that ship, which was in the Panama Channel, just blocking that for a couple of days, which brought a lot of companies really to their limits. This is, again, a matter of reliability and prediction. If I do have an understanding of who are my suppliers and not just the tier one supplier, but throughout the whole chain. And if I have a transparency of what is their impact and what could be an impact, if there is maybe, again, coming back to that strong weather results, if there is companies working in surroundings, mining, for example, where there might be huge flooding's or just temperatures in which people are not able to work anymore under such conditions, that brings my supply chain at risk. If I go to human rights aspect, fashion industry is a perfect example on that. We might still have in mind where there was in Bangladesh, I think, the stitching company who did put weight too many persons and people into one building and it collapsed and a lot of people died. The reputational aspect for those companies who got their clothes stitched there was tremendous. And this is exactly where I think we always have to have a bigger picture in regard of supply chain. We have to first understand who I'm working together with. And throughout the whole thing to the last moment, I have to make transparent. Is that the same values I am able to work with in my own company? I'd like to see throughout that whole aspect. And finally, what we always have to remind ourselves if the world would be perfect, if everything would be right, then we wouldn't have to do something. But it's not. If we just look around, if we just see what is happening all over in the world, then this is a bit of a responsibility. Every company leader, every C-level in a company has an independent of the size of that company, whether it's 50, 500, 5,000, 500,000 employees. You have to take responsibility and have to change.

Sarah: Yeah. The other area we talked about is circular economy and product design, things like that.

Rainer: Yeah. And that's a perfect example in particular for the aspect of service and fuel service. If you design a product in the way that you're first of all able to repair it quite well, and if it's not able to repair it anymore or for safety reasons has to be exchanged, for example, in aviation or in trains or transport, then it should be made in a way that you are able to fully reuse all the materials there. All the minerals, all the rare materials are limited on Earth. We don't have unlimited resources. We weigh more consumed currently than what we have on that planet. And it's very much linear. So we produce something, we use it at the end of the life cycle. We throw it away often to landfill, often exported to sub-Saharan Africa or elsewhere, and we just waste things and dump it. And this is exactly something which we have to change, which will first of all lower the cost. So this is the first thing. So it will have an improvement on financial aspects, economical aspects then as well. Secondly, it will help us to understand our products even better. If we design them in a way that we are able to just dismantle components and separate metals from plastics and from whatever type of things. And we are able then to create, I think, a longevity aspect then to our products as well. If we do have a focus on that, that it's not just like it used to be in the past. Electronical components are mostly the best example. My fridge just recently collapsed on Sunday in the evening. So at a time when everybody wants to have it, it was exactly 10 years and three weeks old. And that is something weird. I don't want to buy a fridge every 10 years. I would like to keep it as long as it can. And this is a bit of product design aspect. So we have to always keep that in mind while designing products. This might be more easy with one product, a bit more easy than with others. But in general, that circularity aspect and longevity aspect, this is two things which we definitely have to put more into focus.

Sarah: Yeah, and it's an interesting conversation. We have a podcast we did a while back that I will link in the show notes on the intersection of sustainability and servitization. When you start thinking about remanufacturing, recycling, and designing for lifecycle versus initial acquisition costs, there's a really big tie-in to this idea of offering products as a service, right? Because when the manufacturer is maintaining ownership of those assets, it makes some of those things easier to do. It's interesting to think about that intersection point. But regardless of what the plans are for the go-to-market of the organization, it's important to be thinking about those things. Are there any big trends that I missed?

Rainer: Well, the big trend currently, in particular, if you look into the digital and IT world, is artificial intelligence. So everyone is talking on AI. Everyone is looking into trying to find real use cases for AI. I think in particular in the service field, I just recently made the experience just myself. As I've started my own company, I had to do some contracts with a mobile phone provider and stuff. And it was a bit of typical German complexity and organizational background things. And I had to call that mobile provider company. And I reached out to, I thought at least at the beginning, a person I'd been talking to. I've explained the situation. And then after about five minutes of conversation, I had a bit of an awkward feeling. And I thought, well, that questions, even if the sound of that voice is very natural, if the questions are quite natural, but the way it's being questioned, this sounds to me scripted. So either there is a person who is just reading a script from screen or it's an AI behind. And I've asked that simple question. May I ask you, and maybe that sounds ridiculous. Are you real? Or are you? Artificial? And the answer was simple. I am an artificial and I'm a computer system helping you right now. And so I think we are just at the beginning of that. I think AI and the capabilities of AI are tremendously changing the way we live, the way we work, what we do and how we do things. In particular, in service areas, if you take the simple first-level support, if you take the simple questions and tasks, resetting a password, getting simple changes done in a contract, adding a new phone number, changing, I don't know, responsible persons and stuff. We should not have people who are distracted in doing that on a day-to-day basis. People should be working on creative things, on innovative things. People should be focusing on those things which really make fun to work with each day. So I think on that aspect there is a huge aspect to improve our lives with artificial intelligence. On the flip side of the coin it always comes with a price. And in particular AI is consuming already a huge amount of energy. So this is tremendous increase what what we've seen in the last couple of months now. Take the example, very tangible, Google yourself and put your own name into OpenAI, into ChatGPT4. Putting it into ChatGPT will bring up more or less the same results than what it is in Google, but it costs you 100 times more energy in ChatGPT than what it is in Google. And this is not just ChatGPT, this is any AI solution. This is already giving a bit of flavor of where we are going. And if you see the current offerings which are on the market, you can just now create video footage, which is perfectly well made. It looks real. It looks like it has been filmed from a huge professional group, but it's just based on a script. You can just enter text and just describe the scenery, what it should look like, and then AI will create the movie footage out of that. The thing is, the energy consumption through that is incredible and it requires a huge amount of compute powers or data centers, which means they need to be built. Currently, the data centers of the big providers are built in Canada and in Spain, in Europe. So both areas, Canada, we've spoken about the wildfires. Maybe not the best idea to put a data center there. Spain is currently running through dryness like never seen before. So in the city of Barcelona, I just recently spoke to a friend of mine who was living there. They are not allowed to water their flowers or their grasses anymore. They're not allowed to wash their cars anymore. It's even a risk that if it stays dry like it is currently, they are turning off water supplies every second day. So we're not allowed to shower anymore. There is still no tap water, because they're just running out of water completely. And this is the second area where there is a data center being built. Huge amount of data centers which require water cooling. So this is the flip side of the coin in regard of energy consumption. A second aspect, and I think the Times Magazine in the US just brought up a report about a year ago about ethical aspects of artificial intelligence and the treatment of, first of all, those people who are entering the data. So this is the one aspect, mostly, heavily underpaid in poor conditions, mental pressure, and then as well because there is people who have to enter nearly everything which comes to your mind and even those things which does not. And then in addition, we do have still a biased situation in artificial intelligence as well. So mostly the coders and descriptors behind artificial intelligence are like I, male, white, middle-aged and academic background. And does that reflect the humanity as a whole? Not at all. The thing is, AI will develop to mostly super intelligence and rapidly going towards self-educating itself without human interaction within the next four to five years. So this is what science currently says. So we have to set the layers and the foundation and the directions now. But, if we don't do it now, then it will go wrong into the angles, which we don't even want to have it. So this is a bit of the flip side. But still, even if it sounds like I'm an enemy of AI, I am not. I am quite sure we need to have it. It's part of a solution, but we have to treat it right.

Sarah: Yeah. No, it's a massive opportunity, but also something we need to be very conscious to use appropriately, to your point, and to protect humanity. Not to sound too extreme, but I think that's the biggest risk, right, is we need to be thinking about how it can augment our lives, not detract from them. Okay, so you said to me recently, there's always an advantage for sustainability. And I love this viewpoint because we're talking about a lot of the trends, but they can be relevant for people for different reasons. And there isn't necessarily a right or wrong reason. But your point is, there's always a reason and there's always an advantage. So can you talk about some of the important advantages that people need to be keeping in mind.

Rainer: Absolutely. And thank you for that question. I think we still have too much of a discussion on whether it's true or not. Is climate crisis man-made? Is it not? Is science right? Is it not? I do have a very clear position on that. But independent of this, go down to the simple things. If you consume less meat, if you drink more water instead of, I don't know, co-course things, this is improving your own health. So this is the first thing. And your own health, if you take the SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals, good health and well-being is part of sustainability. So this is already a first advantage. So it's extending your life. It's bringing you into a better health situation, making you maybe more mobile. You can just do more things with your kids, with your family, with your relatives. So this is the first thing. The second is, if you stick with that example of eating less meat, that helps the planet. It helps maybe to get a higher quality of meat because you're saving money. If you do not consume meat each day, but only maybe once per week or twice, you can consume the higher quality products, helping then the animals and the animal treatment as well and reducing in many, many aspects, therefore sustainability, negative topics then too. It saves you money. So it has an economical aspect then in addition and brings an overall aspect or take it from a perspective of a company. And now going to the angle of inclusion, we do have, and this is where the US is quite, quite, quite advanced, for example, towards in particular Germany. You've always been way more inclusive in the US than what we've seen here in Germany. We are now putting a focus on that for multiple reasons. So if you take as an employer, those into consideration to be employed, to be working for us as a company, who might be blind people, who might be on the neurodivergent spectrum, people with autism, which we've completely excluded in the past. We've not even provided working environment, which had been capable for those people. If we now do, we are lacking talents tremendously over in the world already. So a company who is more inclusive just has an advantage. It's easier then to get functional situations covered and get people working for you and being happy for working for you. Sticking with the company topic, if you are providing a surrounding where people can really heavily work towards a better future and in that remark, take their maybe private passion and their own drivers into their jobs, into their day-to-day operational aspects, that makes them more happy. So this is a bit of talent attraction, talent retention. People are motivated to stay and go the extra mile, because it's not all about money. And if we're talking on that, if you go to maybe not our age, if you not go to those who already are in 15 or 20 years of employment, but those who are now starting Gen Z or even more Gen A, who will come next, I think the majority of them, they want to work for a company who is not focusing just on a career on, I don't know, car allowance or the next step of salary and advancement. So for them, it is very much important to have purpose. And the purpose comes with sustainability focus as well in multiple angles. So there is an additional advantage. And if you then take just us as human beings, I'd like to provide a surrounding to my kids. And I have three, as I've said at the beginning, which is at least as good as it has been in the past as I've known it or maybe even better. So the advantage to me is to leave something behind which I can be proud of, which I had been actively working towards and which is helping then my kids as well, and not just mine, but kids all over the world. And I'd like to improve it and not damage.

Sarah: Yeah. No, those are all good points. And I think there's so many different lenses to look at this through in terms of the personal benefit and the benefit to the organization of doing these things. The other thing we've talked about before is if you have people who are perhaps less altruistic, there's a lot of areas where we talked specifically about travel with field service. There are a lot of areas where putting action to this focus both improves the sustainability aspect, but also can reduce costs or improve efficiency. And so there's those things as well. And then, of course, we talked about the aspect of competitive differentiation of the customer and investment decisions starting to be more and more weighted toward organizations who are taking real action, et. cetera. So I guess the point is there's so many different ways to look at this that come back to doing something, right, and taking action. I just thought of another question, which is going back to, we talked about the Heartprint piece and why it's so important. But as I mentioned, there's all of these reasons we've talked about today to have initiatives in place. And unfortunately, there are still organizations who are then coming at this from the perspective of checking a box versus a true commitment. And I was just curious to ask your perspective on the current risk of greenwashing. I mean, this is something that has never been good. But I have to think with the growing movement and increased focus. And also from a technology standpoint, we've talked about the realities of transparency, right? And being able to more easily assess who is full of it. So what's the status of greenwashing? Do you think it's going away? Do you think it's still a problem? What do you think will happen as we build toward more and more transparency?

Rainer: So it's a very good question and already upfront firsthand, it won't go away. As long as you do have humans who are intelligent, smart in using the right words, the right visuals, the right transparency in their own perspective and the way I'd like to see it and I'd like to use it, there will always be greenwashing from an outside perspective. That's for sure. I mean, there is the attempt now to regulate even that. So the already spoken about CSRD, so the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive is now being enhanced with a clean claims directive. So, the green claims directive is regulating when are you able, for example, and how do you have to set up your strategy to be allowed to talk on carbon neutral or net zero? You have to, for example, to stick with that, you have to reduce your own footprint by 90% and only 10% is allowed to be compensated and offset with certificates. If you have to compensate more, then you are not allowed officially to use the term net zero. So this is already on its way. So this will be implemented pretty soon. Does it keep all the companies away from greenwashing, surely not. There will always be ways to display things a bit better. On the other side, I think more and more people who are working in those surroundings. So sustainability managers, chief sustainability officers in those company, at least those I know they all have a passion for what they do like I and do you have it. So they are really trying to impact things and they are not willing to greenwash, they are not willing to support companies. They must speaking for 100% all of them know and not. So there is surely so to say, black sheep in between there is even here. But the majority is interested in really taking impact. And I think over time, those companies were still trying to fake and just making a check in the box, they will be very quickly get transparent in comparison with others. So it's always very little companies who are providing a service as a single company, there is always comparisons with others. And you'll always be able to identify those who really make things serious and mean things serious and are really in that transformational process. And those who are just doing the check in the box thing and just throw it away then. So I'm pretty confident if you just keep your eyes open, if you trust them to your own gut feeling to your own heart, if you listen to what they are talking about, then you're definitely identified.

Sarah: Yeah, that makes sense. What do you think are the most significant changes we're going to see in this space over the next 12 months?

Rainer: Yeah, 12 months will definitely be the time in which we'll see artificial intelligence, as already spoken about, dramatically increasing. There will be new technologies arising, which we might not even be able to think about right now. If you're just seeing the latest trends and the development of GPT and open AI, this is changing the world in a massive speed life never seen before. So this is the first thing. Second is, I think we have to have a way bigger focus on resilience and to be aware that things which we've already seen now. So, the effects on climate crisis, which is not going away anymore. So if you're still talking on make things transparent and report the as is, we have to put a bigger focus and we will have to dramatically fast focus on what will happen in the future. So prediction will be one of the aspects where both AI and resilience will have a huge role into it. So we have to adapt to situations. We have to get alternatives. We have to find ways to treat things and to handle things for us being human beings. But as well for companies and for service technicians, for example, then as well, for sure. And I think finally, what I hope and this is, I'm an optimist by heart. So glasses half full for me, not glass half empty. I think the world is connecting more and more. And what I've recently seen is that even those who a lot of people still think there is absolutely no awareness. So mostly what I hear if I'm talking to people, it's like, yeah, but what are we able to do if China is still treating how things is being treated in China? So China, for example, is the country which installed the biggest amount of renewable electricity over the last 12 months. So they've massively increased. For sure, not only for sustainability reasons, but they did. And the second is China is now implementing a third of the KPIs in the measurements of the European corporate sustainability reporting directly. So they're taking it over. They've seen based on our example. It does obviously work out. Well, not only for ecological reasons but for economical reasons as well. It does give advantage as competitors on the market. So they're just adopting it. They're taking it up. And this is, to me, a piece of hope that we as humanity and as in particular the enterprise world and the companies and the SME world, we are connecting globally. We have a global issue. We have a global problem. So we have to treat it global, not as competitive advantage, not with intellectual property, but with collaboration and with working towards one goal together with everyone who's in the world. And I think this is the three main aspects which I will, and I'm knocking on wood that it will make come true in the next 12 months, which will happen.

Sarah: All right, last question is, what are you most excited about in being out on your own with your own organization, helping companies work through this through Heartprint?

Rainer: Oh, wow. That's a very good question. So the one part which I'm really happy is speed. I mean, the big difference between the enterprise world and the SME world is definitely a yes in the enterprise world means yes. But we have to talk and listen and maybe make a concept here and do a pilot case there. So this is always time-wise, very slow and complex through the complexity of the organization. So it's something which was in regard of the speed we have to have for fighting climate crises and advancing and doing good things. This was something which worried me and which annoyed me in a lot of cases. And the SME world, I think in that remark, a yes means yes. And then it means yes now. And a no means no. And this is a bit of what I'm very much looking forward to being confronted with. If I'm able to maybe convince someone to really do things and execute things and they are willing to do it, then that means that we are doing it. And then that means we're doing it now and not in two years or in three. And so this is the one part. And the second is I'm a very straightforward person, as you know me already, Sarah, and the listeners might have identified over the last 40 minutes already as well. And now I'm not under the requirement to politically adjust everything. I say this is what makes me really happy. I'm able to just talk the way I am, to position myself the way I am, to go straightforward and just execute things, the way I'd like to see them and I'd like to make things happen. And this is helping them as well.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. You're able to really lean into your authenticity. And I'm excited to see how that helps you have an impact on these others and helps them have an impact on their objectives. So really happy for you, excited for you, and really appreciate you coming to share. We will make sure all of your contact details are in the show notes. So if people want to get in touch to talk about their journeys, they will be able to do that. And of course, we hope to have you back again sometime.

Rainer: I would be hoping to, not only in two years, but maybe a bit earlier. And always a pleasure talking to you. Thank you much for the time. And thanks for having me, Sarah. Thank you.

Sarah: Thank you. You can find more by visiting the home of UNSCRIPTED at futureoffieldservice.com. The podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.ai. As always, thank you for listening.

An artificial intelligence (AI) search company called Lucidworks recently published a report on what they characterized as a slowdown in AI spending, and it brought to mind a roundtable discussion at our recent Future of Field Service Live event in Cologne, Germany.

During my final interview with Jelle Coppens, Product Domain Expert for Service and Repair at Electrolux, the discussion turned to AI. Electrolux is using IFS's AI-powered planning and scheduling optimization engine (PSO) and plans to expand their use of the technology. The conversation was a great real-world use case of AI in action, but what struck me was that during the roundtable sessions after the session, some participants said they are growing tired of hearing about AI.

I get it. AI is an inescapable topic, no matter what industry you are in. Much of the roundtable venting had to do with the volume of AI coverage and the lack of specifics on exactly where and how to use the technology. (“We are tired of hearing about this technology” is not part of the Gartner hype cycle, but maybe it should be!)

That's why the Lucidworks report caught my eye, because their data indicates actual deployment experiences are throwing some cold water on AI-mania, and that will probably help make the projects that do move forward a lot more successful. I think what has happened is that the bandwagon took off without many defining a clear business case or selecting proven, functional tools. Now we are stepping back to assess how best to make use of AI, and I can see how all of the conversation can cause some to grow weary.

However, I do believe AI is an incredible opportunity – in field service and beyond. One we need to take caution to harness appropriately and balance with humanity, but the potential to layer more intelligence into existing digital ecosystems is massive.

AI in Field Service

In field service, AI is (at least near term) best suited for what the tech industry now refers to as co-pilot scenarios, where the algorithm exists to enhance or augment workflows, rather than supplanting the real humans doing that work. In applications where there are simply too many variables or too much data for a person to possibly evaluate accurately, AI can help narrow choices and point people in the right direction. It can also help to automate work that is time consuming but low value, and to heighten predictive capabilities.

AI projects that are not well planned or properly implemented can quickly prove to be costly and useless. Large language models (LLMs) trained on unfiltered data can hallucinate, and models that ingest AI-created data can suffer from what is known as model collapse (I talked about this back in April).

The Lucidworks survey indicates that AI adoption is beginning to slow because of some of these concerns, with just 63% of organizations planning to increase AI spending this year, compared to 93% in 2023. According to the study, just around one quarter of planned projects are fully implemented, and 42% have not produced significant benefits. In many cases, projects haven’t made it out of the pilot stage.

The number of companies worried about project cost has gone up 14 times compared to 2023, and concerns about response accuracy have increased by a factor of five, The more complex the application, the more these concerns increase (along with costs), while success is harder to achieve.

The WBR Insights "AI in Field Service Report" also mirrors some of the Lucidworks findings. In that survey, 92% of respondents said they struggled with legacy integration in their AI implementations, and 74% were challenged by a lack of data quantity or quality. Costs were a problem for 62% of organizations.

Most of the companies in the WBR were already using AI for predictive maintenance (88%), parts wastage prevention (82%), case predictions (58%), and call deflection (57%).

When it is deployed successfully, AI can produce notable benefits in time savings, increased first-time fix rates, reduced parts wastage, and faster resolution times. For instance, another report from MarketsandMarkets claims the integration of mobility and AI in field service can result in 30% to 40% productivity gains.

So, are we facing AI fatigue? In some cases, yes – but not because the technology is overhyped. Rather because many companies leapt into AI projects haphazardly when the buzz began, only to learn the business benefits of AI demand a much more fastidious approach. To me that’s what this data represents; a collective step back to take a more tempered, strategic approach to AI, which will ultimately pay off.

Episode 271

In this episode of the Unscripted podcast, host Sarah Nicastro takes the hot seat as she is interviewed by Professor Hany Salah of the American University in Cairo about the relevance of service transformation. They focus on the shift from viewing service as a cost center to a profit center and the importance of mindset shifts and change management. They further discuss best practices and trends impacting how companies are innovating and evolving.

Sarah Nicastro is the creator of Future of Field Service and VP, Customer Engagement at IFS. After completing her bachelor’s degree in psychology and then her MBA, Sarah intended to get into the non-profit sector, but life had other plans. She began her career in the media with Field Technologies magazine never even having heard the term “field service.” Expecting to grow bored quickly, she was surprised to fall in love with the layers of evolution and innovation that have kept things interesting for all these years.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Full Show Notes

Sarah: Involve your workforce early on in the process to make them feel a part of it. And also, it's not just like a change management trick to make them feel a part of it. We also need to respect the fact that our frontline employees that are engaging with customers on a day-to-day basis often have a far better understanding of what the needs actually are than managers that sit layers and layers and layers above. So it's not just sort of an exercise to placate them and to make them feel part of the journey. They really can contribute significantly to helping you achieve the best outcome, but involve them early and all the way through.

Hany: First, thank you, Sarah, for your participation with me today. My pleasure to have you in my strategic management course with my participant. My pleasure.

Sarah: Happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Hany: I like it a lot, the term customer engagement. So what does it mean, customer engagement in real, related to a lot of buzzwords, how we can consider customer feedback, customer satisfaction, customer experience, and customer centricity? What does it mean, customer engagement?

Sarah: Yeah, that's a really good question. So the way I like to think of it is customer experience is probably the most common focus for people. So when they're considering themselves as customer centric, they think about the customer experience. And then when you think about the customer experience, oftentimes, different terms come into play of the customer journey, customer feedback, customer sentiment, those sorts of things. I think for me, customer engagement is sort of, if customer experience is more of the brain side, customer engagement is more of the heart side. Okay, so where customer experience is more thinking about what happens when a customer purchases our product or engages with our service, how do they feel leaving that interaction? Customer engagement, to me, is about the relationship so not just on an individual transaction basis or experience basis, but more, how does the customer feel about our brand and our value as a whole? And are we diversifying the value that we're providing, not just through our primary products or services, but other ways that we're being a trusted advisor or building that relationship. So that's how I think about it.

Hany: Great. Related to services transformation strategies, how can an organization effectively identify the services need regarding transformation, the net full change management, how we can change our processes in real in order to increase the efficiency profitability from the business generated under term services transformation strategy?

Sarah: So how do you identify what the need for service transformation is?

Hany: Yeah.

Sarah: Right. Okay. So there's a lot of different ways you could look at answering that question. Okay. So. A lot of it depends on how the company is perceiving service to the function of its business. What I mean by this, when I said that early on in my career, I became very intrigued by what was going on. There was a shift that took place then where service traditionally had been perceived as a cost center. It was a necessary evil. It was a means to an end. And the entire focus was on keeping costs low, keeping efficiency high. And there was a shift to companies starting to recognize that service can actually be a very strong competitive differentiator. It can be a huge potential profit center for businesses. And so part of how you would answer that question depends on how a company perceives the service function. So if it is one where it's fundamental to their value proposition and it's seen as a potential profit center, then I would say one of the first things you need to understand to answer the question of how you must transform is what it is your customers want and need. Okay. So I always suggest starting outside in instead of inside out. Okay. So I think that would be where I would begin is really trying to understand what do our customers think about what we deliver today, but also what aren't we doing that they would find value in or what are others doing that they find value in and really sort of assess how much of that competitive advantage you are delivering on. Okay. Then you have to have a good understanding of where you are today. So if there are these different opportunities for you to deliver more value to your customers in a way that would help you make more money, what would it take to do that? Is it different skills, different service delivery model, et cetera, et cetera? And then that's where you figure out sort of where you need to transform. There's also the whole consideration of the internal side. So how efficient are you versus how efficient do you need to be? but I think the best starting place to answer that question is looking at it through the lens of the customer, because if you're harnessing the potential of service as a competitive differentiator, you're able to increase your profit margin where not that you don't want to be efficient, but like that shouldn't be the primary focus. I feel like efficiency is the primary focus for an organization who's still sort of perceiving service as a cost center, not a profit center. So I would say starting with really understanding what your customers want, need and value, and then kind of assessing how much of that you're delivering today or how much you could potentially deliver.

Hany: From your perspective, what are some common challenges in front of organization to increase the services efficiency from internal perspective and from external perspective in order to engage a lot of stakeholders during end-to-end lifecycle?

Sarah: So I can think of a few big challenges. The first is really that mindset shift. So kind of what we just talked about of how service is perceived. It's an early challenge, but it's one that a lot of companies get hung up on because particularly when you think about a company that has a long history of delivering products and or products and services, that mindset shift of not thinking about the product or the service or the line item that you're offering and instead thinking about what brings value to the customer. So the outcome or the peace of mind and what does that look like? That can be a really big hurdle for companies to get over that I think is sort of the starting line for the journey. So that mindset shift is one and that mindset shift has to start at the top, but it trickles down through the organization. So generally speaking human beings are hardwired to resist change. And so when you start really changing the way that you are approaching customers, what the go-to-market might look like, how you're delivering service and what tools employees are using or how they're engaging with customers, it can be a lot of change for people to come on board with. So change management becomes incredibly important. I think the next one is really the technology landscape, because I heard someone say at a conference a few weeks ago, and I liked the way they phrased it. They said, the technology landscape has become more and more sophisticated, but have we? So the technology landscape, there's a ton of capability. The challenge is not in the capability, it's in readying the business to be able to apply that capability. And so that can be a challenge. And also it's evolving so quickly. So there's this pace of change from a technological innovation perspective that companies really have to keep up with. But it's tricky because you also can't race ahead of where the business is. You have to bring the business along. So I think that can be very challenging. And I would say for the vast majority, of companies that I talk with, another really big challenge today is talent. So attracting new talent into service at the pace that existing talent is retiring or leaving the workforce, understanding that the historical practice of hiring based on prior experience is really, really not sustainable. We need to think about how we train employees that have potential, or aptitude, but not necessarily experience. And that just means doing a lot of things differently within the organization to sort of adapt to just the realities of the talent landscape today. So that's another.

Hany: Another point linked to your direction. In a lot of organizations, we are struggling to serve customer SLAs. So from your perspective, how we can accelerate our SLAs from a response time perspective, resolve time perspective, and how we can rely on technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, any cloud application to serve Mr. Customer better, specifically from SLAs scope obligations.

Sarah: Good question. And this is an area that is really exciting because the technology is there and it's ready to help. OK, so I think there's a couple of layers to that question. The first is, are we leveraging remote capabilities to assess what's going on? So right out of the gate, if we can understand what the problem is, sometimes we can remotely resolve that problem. Sometimes we can't, but we can significantly increase first time fix if we just know what we're going to do. Right. So organizations who aren't doing any sort of remote diagnostics, remote service, attempting remote resolution. That's a big shift taking place right now because you have the AI and the machine learning capabilities. So if you have connected devices, you're able to sort of start to predict. Potential failure points, you're able to monitor for issues, et cetera. And then you have tools like augmented reality that there's a wide range of things where you can have a technician to customer interaction. You can have a technician to technician interaction. But there's a lot of ways that we can start to use some sort of remote triage or remote assessment as our first line of defense. So right there, you can avoid any unnecessary trips, things that are really simple to fix. Sometimes you even have human error. Customers think there's a problem, but really you need to just tell them, switch this, do this, et cetera. So eliminate any of those unnecessary visits with remote capabilities. Then there's incredibly sophisticated technology on the market right now. IFS has its own AI-powered planning and scheduling optimization tool. So I could tell you stories of a bunch of different companies that are using it that just what you're saying. So the thing that's really interesting is you can set the criteria based on what's most important to you. So for your example, you're asking about meeting customer SLAs, okay? So you put in those SLA requirements, you put in your talent, you put in your parts, you put in all of the data, and it will automate the process of planning, scheduling, and dispatching so that you are meeting SLAs, you're minimizing travel time, you're minimizing repeat visits. So there's a lot of efficiency and productivity gains that can come from using those technologies. The other thing that's interesting about the planning and scheduling optimization tool is the criteria isn't the same for every company. So you were asking about customer SLAs, but let's say that you're in an industry where response time isn't mission critical, but the customer has really strong sustainability initiatives. You can then set the criteria around least travel time or least emissions, right? So you can pick whatever it is that your primary goals are and then automate your operations based on that and compared to a lot of the manual processes that companies still have in place for dispatching, it can provide a huge, not only cost savings, efficiency gains, faster response, etc.

Hany: I totally agree. My criteria to measure the efficiency regarding how we can implement service in real, how we can measure the gap between what we say and what we do. So in order to increase our efficiency and by the end of the day have the readiness to apply all scope obligation based on SLA's obligation and scope of work, we have to measure the gap and work in real how we can decrease this gap in order to be real in front of our customers. Most of us and most of my participants working in a busy organization from process perspective, we have very sophisticated process, a lot of milestone, a lot of buy-in, a lot of approvals, a lot of key stakeholders to obtain the buy-in according to DOE. From your perspective, how we can compromise or at least make the balance between the internal customization and external personalization in front of customers. By the end of the day, Mr. Customer needs personalization experience. And. At the same time, we have a lot of challenges regarding internal processes, a lot of approval cycles. We need to review and validate and back to subject matter experts in order to obtain the approval. How we can implement a balance considering Mr. Customer experience and his personalization perspective or needs.

Sarah: Great question. So when you think about it, offering a personalized experience to every single customer is not a scalable business practice, right? So that being said, to your point, part of customers' expectations is they want the experience to feel personalized. They don't want to feel like one of thousands or millions. They want to feel unique and important. So I think a big part of this, honestly, is in communication. It's in understanding how the sales process is different in this landscape, like this outcomes-based landscape versus a more transactional business model of the past so what I mean by that is you can really personalize a customer's experience quite a bit just based on speaking in a value narrative instead of in a transactional narrative. That being said, of course, they're going to expect some choice, like some real personalization behind that. And I think most companies have the best success in sort of creating almost templatized personalization. So essentially, you have a core solution, but you have some different offerings on top of that, that customers can select from. Okay, so it offers that personalized feel. But in reality, they are choosing from some things that you would already sort of expect them to find important. A lot of this comes down to when you get into the outcomes-based service conversation, it becomes really important to understand your customer personas. So if you're selling into different industries or different environments, different size organizations, once you can sort of understand the commonalities of what's important to them, you can create these options based on things that you know they will find important, but they're choosing from. So then they're... Feeling a sense of autonomy and personalization, but you're able to plan as an organization for most of what they're going to select.

Hany: Another point regarding to internal perspective, any organization has three legs, people, process, and application. So from your perspective, from your point of view, how we can implement smart integration criteria to rely on services to reach a successful balance between people perspective, process perspective, and application perspective?

Sarah: I think the people part is always the hardest. I think because anytime you're trying to align those three or you're trying to make changes to the process or to the application, the people part is where the challenges will lie. So I think for me, it sort of comes back to the change management, giving people a voice, listening to feedback, making sure that communication is very strong and any sort of change or alignment that's taking place, they understand the cause of and also understand how it can benefit them. I think of those three things, people will always be the toughest to stay ahead of.

Speaker: Sure, there is a common challenges and roadblocks for us during the implementing this transformation, service transformation. So what are the common challenges that we might face and how we can overcome it?

Sarah: I talked about the mindset shift and the change management. A couple notes on that just before I talk about another thing is we need to be conscious of the fact that while most leaders within service businesses understand that we have a shortage of talent, and if anything, we need to become more efficient because we can't bring in talent at the pace we need to there is still this fear within frontline workers of the technology. I think they still see it as a potential risk to their livelihoods. So even though that fear might seem misplaced to us, we need to be putting them at ease. We need to be celebrating not just achievement, but effort. And we need to be really considering how we're communicating change, et cetera. I would say the other big stumbling block, like if I think about introducing new technology to transform service is it always seems easier than it's going to be because there inevitably will be processes that need changed, things that need to be addressed. So try and have realistic expectations and try and find a partner who will help you have realistic expectations. And then depending on what you're doing, there's sort of a data readiness consideration, particularly when you think about leveraging AI. It's something that's in every headline everywhere with good reason, but if companies aren't at a point where they have done a good job of building their data infrastructure, it can seem a lot easier to just put in place than it is. So I would say those are some of the challenges to be prepared for.

Speaker: How important is employee engagement or let them buy in during the service transformation process to be engaged and to keep them in the comfort zone and keeping them engaged?

Sarah: I would say it's critical because I mentioned back when I sort of came into this space and I saw that shift from cost center to profit center. Soon after that, companies started really focusing on customer experience. So service organizations, once they recognized that service was a path to differentiation, to revenue, they started really focusing on customer experience and trying to better understand what their customers valued, how they felt about their service experience, etc. I think if we're being honest, I think we sort of did that at the detriment of our employee experience and our employee engagement. We focused so much on the customer that we really overlooked the connection of those two things. So in field service specifically, the technician that is going into a customer location to provide service is often the most frequent face-to-face interaction that a customer has with the brand. They really are representing the company and the brand. And so if you have someone going to do that who is unhappy, not engaged, not empowered, you can imagine that they're not going to deliver a great customer experience. So it's very, very important for us to acknowledge the connection between employee engagement and customer satisfaction. And the other thing I would say is it's important to acknowledge that connection. It's important to make it a priority in the business, not just during a transformation, especially during a transformation, but really all of the time. We need to be able to make sure that our employees feel valued. They're adequately recognized for their contribution. They have a good relationship with their line manager. They are able to understand their potential for career advancement and so on and so on. In a time of transformation, I think one of the most important things is to make them feel a part of it from very early on. So when you sort of identify whatever the need for transformation is. Getting together sort of a key stakeholder group, including different functions of the business, different layers of responsibility where everyone feels represented. And having them contribute to the selection of the technology, the refinement of the solution, and then ultimately the deployment of the solution. So that they feel that they're a part of the change versus the change happening to them.

Speaker: How can an organization make a balance or what is the balance needed between for agility and flexibility from our side and with the need for stability and reliability during the service transformation?

Sarah: Yeah, so I think there's definitely a need for both, obviously. If I think about this from a technology standpoint, one of the things that can get very complex is that there's so many tools available today that can provide different capabilities, different benefits. What we have to keep in mind is that I think that reliability, that solid capability, I think comes from having a good core solution that you're using, whatever you use to have everyone have visibility into what's going on within the business, have access to customer history, to knowledge that they might need to conduct their jobs. Something that really acts as a source of truth for the organization to run off of. That's really important for that sort of consistency. Everyone sees the same information. Everyone can access the same information. It's updated in real time, et cetera. When we start to want to achieve some of these different things we've talked about today. Okay, we could use IoT to have access to analytics on our equipment, and then we could apply machine learning and AI to that to predict failures, and then we could use augmented reality so that technicians can talk to one another, et cetera. If we start to bolt too many things on, we start to introduce a lot of potential failure points. So one of the things that's important to balance is benefiting from the sophistication of technology, but also making sure that you aren't creating more complexity than you need, because each point of complexity starts to bring with it a potential for a breakdown in communication or a potential failure. I would say the other thing is true in terms of the flexibility standpoint. So we need to be looking for, and I don't know the technicality of everyone on the call, but 10, 15 years ago, when a company deployed a service management solution, it was done often on premise and typically would then be in place for 10, 15, 20 plus years. With the evolution of the technology and now a lot more cloud-based solutions, that practice is very outdated. And what happens is you end up putting a solution in place that meets the needs of the business at that particular time but the needs of the business change. So you need to be seeking technology that can allow those business changes without a significant investment, meaning time, money, energy, effort, etc. to upgrade all of the time. All right. So there's ways to do that that allow you to have more agility built into the system you're using to manage your operations so that as the way you need to deliver service evolves, or as your customer expectations evolve, you can build that in instead of essentially starting over. So that's kind of the best way I guess I can answer that right now. It's both are very, very important. But in a lot of ways, there are less odds with one another than you might

Speaker: think. When it comes to your past experience with organizations, what do you think are the best practices or steps that an organization can take to begin this service transformation journey?

Sarah: I would say this, have internal alignment on what the role of and potential for services in the business and what you're aiming to achieve. Have a really good understanding of what's important to your customers. And like we talked about earlier, sort of use that to then assess where you are today versus where you need to be. Assuming that there will be a need for technology, I would say always make sure that you are asking for customer case studies and customer references from any technology provider that you are assessing. Make sure you're looking at things like their longevity in the market, their financial stability. You have a lot of smaller players that will pop up and go away. And that can be a real headache if you invest in a solution that then a few years later is out of support. And then, as I mentioned, involve your workforce early on in the process to make them feel a part of it. And also, it's not just like a change management trick to make them feel a part of it. We also need to respect the fact that our frontline employees that are engaging with customers on a day-to-day basis often have a far better understanding of what the needs actually are than managers that sit layers and layers and layers above. So it's not just sort of an exercise to placate them and to make them feel part of the journey. They really can contribute significantly to helping you achieve the best outcome. But involve them early and all the way through. And then the last thing I would say is, when I was asked earlier about how do we know if we need to be transforming, everyone does. So be prepared to go right into a practice of continual innovation. So there is no finish line anymore. Like this is something that is ongoing for every business.

Hany: Unfortunately, we reached it to the end of today's session. So I would like to have final comment from you, Sarah, in order to close the session.

Sarah: Yeah, well, I mean, you put me on the spot there. I've said a lot, you know, I think get excited about the potential, I think would be my biggest piece of advice. Oftentimes it's because there's so much or because the pace of change is so fast, it can be overwhelming, but the only difference between a challenge and an opportunity is your perspective. So think about it as an opportunity and be excited about the ability to contribute. If you have other questions, Hany, feel free to give out my email and I appreciate having you.

Hany: My pleasure having you, Sarah, and for all participants, don't forget the service business is a people business. So we have to do believe the future is still very human.

Episode 270

In this solo episode of the Unscripted Podcast, host Sarah Nicastro recaps the Future of Field Service Live event in Cologne, Germany, highlighting key insights from experts at Rolls Royce Power Systems, TOMRA Recycling, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Electrolux on industry innovation, strategic vision, talent diversity, and service transformation. The conference emphasized the importance of attracting and retaining talent while maximizing existing resources to drive efficiency and innovation in the field service industry.

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Full Show Notes

Sarah: I had someone who was a first-time attendee say how much they appreciated feeling comforted by the fact that they often feel these challenges are unique to their business. And then coming and hearing from everyone, you know, they were comforted by realizing that across these industries and even across geographies, we had a lot of different areas in the room. There are people at different parts of the journey, but everyone is sort of navigating the same challenges.

Welcome to the UNSCRIPTED Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. This is gonna be a quick one and it's gonna be a solo one. I am on my way home from our Future of Field Service live event in Cologne, Germany. But as I always do, I wanted to record a quick solo episode and share with everyone a bit of a recap of yesterday's event.

So as I mentioned, we were in Cologne. This is our third Future of Field Service live event in Germany, but first time in the city of Cologne. It was a great day, great location on the Rhine, and we had a wonderful line-up of speakers. So we started the day with a bit of the lay of the land and my state of the industry overview. Our first speaker was Joern Lindstaedt, who is the Vice President for Global Customer Service at Rolls-Royce Power Systems. Now Joern is in the Power Systems group, but he has been with Rolls-Royce for over 18 years, and he's worked in different divisions in that time. So he has a lot of knowledge about the company's history in servitization. Rolls-Royce is known for its innovative hour-by-the-hour offering. In many ways, I think was the originator of the servitization concept. But in his division today, the Power Systems division, they are still working on servitizing that part of the business and figuring out what makes sense for an advanced services offering in the Power Systems space. So he talked about some of his historical knowledge, having worked in the aviation part of the business, but also how that applies to the way that the Power Systems business is transforming today and the idea of continual innovation. So he had some wonderful insights. He talked a lot about important considerations, some of the things that you have to balance, and some of the pragmatic steps that it takes to sort of work through that advanced services journey. And it was a really great conversation. A big part of it, obviously, tied in with talent and figuring out how to offer more flexibility to talent because that's what everyone wants. We also talked about how the servitization journey really hinges on the ability to execute service flawlessly. And so a lot of those considerations. So it was a great session, very knowledgeable person and a really good conversation.

Next up, we had Clinten van der Merwe. I'm sure I didn't say that correctly. Clinten, I'm sorry. Who is the head of global service and project management at TOMRA Recycling. So Clinten spoke about the importance of thinking big and specifically how to set a compelling strategic vision for service. So I really love this session because Clinten also has a lot of experience in service. He's been in his role at TOMRA for just two years. And so he's coming into the organization to do a lot of this innovation. And he talked about the necessity of really thinking outside of the box, of really pushing boundaries, of really working to shift legacy mindset. And he also, though, talked about how, you have to think also about how to give that to folks in bite-sized chunks if it's something that is going to be a bit overwhelming for them. So we talked about the importance of thinking big, but then he also talked about how he has set his strategy in a way that is aggressive, but attainable and inspiring, but relatable, which I just loved. He talked about the fact that he had a quite intense, 10-year vision. He calls that his North Star. That is what he's focused on in 10 years. But from the perspective of sharing his strategy within the organization, he has a five-year vision and then a strategy year by year. So talking about thinking big, but when you're communicating that vision to someone, being able to make sure that it's digestible and it isn't too overwhelming, etc. Part of his vision for 2035 is that field technicians will be able to work, I think he said, from their laptop in a coffee shop with flip-flops on. And I love that he's thinking that way because he's really thinking about what's possible and what would help the industry and be more appealing to new waves of talent. We also talked a lot in that session about the importance of storytelling and what that looks like communicating, a strategy and a vision to different stakeholders. So that was another really great session.

We took a little break for lunch. And then in the afternoon, our first session was with Daniel Trabel, who is the director of field service for EMEA at Thermo Fisher Scientific. You may recognize Daniel's name because he was on the podcast not too long ago. And we had a session talking about how to modernize the field service talent approach to drive greater diversity and impact. This made a lot of sense because talent came up in both conversations in our morning sessions. And so Daniel was able to really put a lot of context to why diversity is so important, not just because we're struggling with talent or we need to find new ways to find new talent, but because of the value it brings to the business. And then he was able to share some of the specific steps Thermo has taken to review and reshape job postings, to even redefine and reconfigure service roles to create opportunities for people that didn't have certain certifications and also people that wanted more flexible work structure and not as much travel and how that's helped them to make service more attractive to candidates that maybe wouldn't have been interested in it before, how it's allowed them to bring more women into field service and then work to advance those women throughout the ranks of the organization. So some really good specifics about how they did that, how it's impacted their business, how they're now expanding that focus outside of just service and what the future might hold and some of the forward-looking things that we could be thinking about to take this forward. I really, really loved this session because it gave such good specific advice to folks, because I think I even said as we were kicking things off, a lot of organizations are very cognizant of the talent challenge. They are very quick to complain a lot about it. Not nearly as many are doing what Thermo has done, which is really accept the reality and get very, very creative on what to do differently. So I think it's just a wonderful story to show what's possible when you just essentially stop making excuses and start forcing yourself to adapt and think differently. It was also interesting, because there was a woman in the audience who is a field service engineer, and she was able to weigh in and contribute to the conversation as well, which was just serendipitous and really cool.

The last interview session of the day was with Jelle Coppens, who is Product Domain Expert for Service and Repair at Electrolux. And we talked in that session about the ways that Electrolux is working to maximize service resource utilization. I liked how this session fit in because, again, when we think about, you know, the challenges field service organizations have today to meet customer demands, we talk a lot about needing to bring in new talent, needing to train talent up, needing to retain talent. We don't talk as much about the areas where we may be underutilizing, drastically sometimes underutilizing the talent that we do have. So this was a really good look at how Electrolux has embarked on service transformation journey to make sure that they have that visibility, that they're able to maximize utilization, minimize idle time. But we also talked about the need to balance that with not just trying to wring every last ounce of productivity out of a person, making sure we keep in mind that the technicians are people, they need to have work-life balance, we need to be thinking about how we balance those things, but certainly thinking about, from the perspective of how we use technology to work smarter and make sure that we are complementing all of our efforts from the perspective of innovation and strategy and modernizing our talent approach with the very pragmatic practices of making sure we have those foundational systems in place where we don't have these significant inefficiencies in our processes and we're making sure that we're working smart. We talked in some of the breakout sessions.

So after Jelle's session, we had some roundtable discussions and AI came up a lot. Some people were saying they're sick of hearing about it. Others were talking about, you know, wanting to see how people are using it. So there was conversations on that continuum. But we talked about the fact that, you know, number one, as Electrolux is doing, you need to really find the ways to make sure that you have that solid system and processes in place that you can build upon, and then Jelle spoke about how, you know, not only is the company using IFS's AI-powered planning and scheduling optimization engine, but they have a lot of plans for the future about how they can layer in different areas of automation through different parts of the workflow and basically continue to expand on that concept of utilizing resources while working smart, etc.

So we ended the day after those roundtable discussions with some drinks and networking. We were fortunate to have beautiful weather in Cologne, and it was a great day. I enjoyed myself as I always do. I had someone who was a first-time attendee say how much they appreciated feeling comforted by the fact that they often feel these challenges are unique to their business. And then coming and hearing from everyone, you know, they were comforted by realizing that across these industries, and even across geographies, we had a lot of different areas in the room. There are people at different parts of the journey, but everyone is sort of navigating the same challenges. I also had someone who has come to all three events we've done in Germany who said he was a little nervous that it would be repetitive and was very pleasantly surprised that with the content, he was able to see the progression of concepts and themes over that time and see how people really are, you know, maybe not super rapidly, but working to evolve and keep pace with the change that is happening. So I really appreciated that feedback. I really appreciate having these opportunities to, you know, not only meet with these folks in person myself, but to allow them this space to come together and see people scanning each other's LinkedIn profiles and saying, let's catch up. I want to hear more about this. I think the woman field service engineer got a few job offers, throughout the day. So there's a lot of value that comes from getting together in these ways. So it was a great event. It's the last one for a bit. So I'm going to focus on spending some time with my family and just doing my weekly work from home. But we did recently launch the future of field service standout 50 leadership awards, which I'm really excited about. And we will continue to share about nominations are open until July 15th and at the next event, which will take place alongside IFS unleashed, we will be announcing our first ever top 50. So very excited about that and also excited to have a bit of a break. So as always, you can find information on the awards and everything else we have going on at futureoffieldservice.com. The podcast was published in partnership with IFS. To learn more at ifs.com. And as always, thank you for listening.

How Electrolux is Maximizing Service Resource Utilization

How Electrolux is Maximizing Service Resource Utilization

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Episode 275

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