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Author: joanna.darby@ifsworld.com

October 10, 2019 | 3 Mins Read

Alignment: The Key to True Digital Transformation Success

October 10, 2019 | 3 Mins Read

Alignment: The Key to True Digital Transformation Success

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By Greg Lush

You have already experienced change and value in applying the former stages of the hierarchy of digital adoption to your businesses: digital trust, contextual computing, and insights. The final component of the hierarchy we will discuss will propel us over the finish line as we take digital trust, contextual computing, and insights stages momentum to alter our business habits. Often the word "transformation" is bandied about, but who really knows what this term means? If Henry Ford, as he was contemplating the horseless carriage, had asked any person in Detroit what they wanted, most would have answered "a faster horse.” For me, transformation occurs as we permanently alter our institutional habits to leverage the digital enterprise. We achieve this by embracing the final stage of my Hierarchy of Digital Transformation: Alignment.

This series was written for all types of digital evangelists and advocates, and for most of you one of the four stages I’ve covered will be comfortable and the others will present some level of discomfort. Our first stage, digital trust, started our journey and required you to apply your emotional intelligence (EQ) over your technical skills. Generally speaking, if you are a hard-core technologist the first section on digital trust was awkward. The final section of alignment is also people-centric with a heavy dose of understanding the business. Technologists, who have been relegated to the data center or IT shop, and really interested in keeping the infrastructure live, will find this section challenging. Conversely, those in business management roles, who shined in the "insights" stage, will also find this final stage "alignment" hard to master. Hey, we are talking about the elusive "transformation,” a state of business rarely obtained.

So, what needs to happen to drive success through this final stage if nobody will be comfortable? The answer is just the point, we must align with one another. Digital transformation, a term which will likely fizzle out, is about us all rowing in the same direction. Alignment, a word which suggests teamwork, will continue to stand the test of time. Businesses have attempted to achieve alignment across their employees, clients, and partners, for decades; how is this 'alignment' anything more than letters on a page? As we get older, theoretically we get wiser. Life experiences, including success and failure (critical), no matter how trivial, are all contributors.

Yet, it is more than that, and therefore alignment, and eventually transformation, has a fighting chance. The answer to this riddle, you ask, is perspective. As humans we gain perspectives through experience, listening, social-economic factors; all of which eventually contribute to our perspectives. However, if we could take our perspectives, actions, and approaches and merge those with others, wouldn't that provide additional insight? Now, mix in trends, which in all honesty today are considered "hunches," by accessing artificial intelligence tools like algorithms, machine and deep learning, and myriad cognitive tools.  Imagine the perspective you could gain, learning things that you didn't know to ask, literally obliterating the idiom "you only know what you know."

I’m excited to share with you some final stories in the coming weeks, centered around alignment, and designed to get you thinking about how you may apply these concepts directly to your business. Hopefully, executing these in sequence as they are all designed to work into one another. Over the next few weeks, we will explore:

  • Business as unusual: understanding and aligning business priorities
  • Our story:
    • Algorithms; getting ready to share your story with a data scientist
    • Data; move past your historical references and how to handle internal and external data
    • Assumptions; seeing things differently, transitioning assumptions to action
  • Speed Learning
    • Learning like never before
    • From predictions to prescriptions

I look forward to diving into this final phase of the hierarchy of digital transformation with you!

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Live from the IFS / WorkWave User conference, Sarah sits down with Marne Martin, CEO Workwave & President Service Management Global Business Unit at IFS, Erica Brister, President & CEO of U.S. Pest Protection, Danielle Canup, President & COO at Duraclean, and Mary Mahoney, CEO at Pacific Lawn Sprinklers. The group discusses their personal experience and finding their voices as female leaders in service.

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October 7, 2019 | 3 Mins Read

The Death of the Service Dispatch

October 7, 2019 | 3 Mins Read

The Death of the Service Dispatch

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By Tom Paquin

In the face of constricting workforce and increased automation, one thing has become very clear: Industry-leading service companies are learning to do more with less. Through technology, and organizational optimization, fewer internal resources are now needed to complete a service job. That’s certainly true in the truck, but you could argue that it’s equally as true in the back office. Let’s talk about some of the implications of that change.

The Back-Office Benefit of FSM

It’s no secret that employing a Field Service Management platform, as all leading organizations have, naturally increases the dispatcher-to-tech ratio. One of the major benefits of software like that is its ability to optimize and automate repetitive processes, allowing staff to focus on more complex problems that are worthier of their time and attention. Couple this with self-service and zero-touch service solutions, along with chatbots and other customer service-specific utilities present in industry-leading FSM solutions, and moving more service employees out of the back office and into the field is a no-brainer. These benefits extend up and down the organization, and smart firms are finding a variety of ways to make the added efficiency and flexibility offered by these new technologies work best for them. This certainly starts today with a decrease in back office staff. Will it reach a point where the back office becomes a thing of the past?

The Totally-Mobile Workforce

While we’re entering the era of mid-stage digital transformation, advancements in technologies to service assets alongside the ways that business itself is conducted make a dispatch-free service organization an increasingly practical consideration for the next stage. For companies to do it, they’ll need to create a full-featured “service web” that automates or offloads every bookkeeping and logistical activity that would have occurred in the back office. Nearly all of those functions can be handled, at least in part, by technology today. With increased IoT connectivity, better data sources, and things like AI, the evolution of those technologies will continually mitigate the need for an extensive back office staff. Aside from the field service management software itself functioning as the brains of the operation, what are the other components that need to be in place? Naturally, this will differ from firm to firm, but if you break the service lifecycle into three broad categories: Pre-service, service, and post-service, it’s easy to start making sure that you have the right building blocks to move beyond dispatch.

Pre-service will vary most from organization to organization, as business decisions like whether you’ve moved to an outcomes-based model, or servitization, along with the simple nature of the serviceable assets that you manage, can influence the technologies utilized substantially. There are a few things that organizations will generally need: Smart scheduling, routing optimization, automatic dispatches, not to mention the aforementioned utilities like chatbots and self-service engines. Couple any of these with connected sensors on serviceable assets to predict failure and automatically schedule appointments, and that will take a lot of stress off of your back office.

When it comes to service itself, this naturally occurs mostly on the job-site anyway, but the most important piece today is ensuring that appointments are started and completed, notated, and documented using mobile field service utilities. Another key component that will help to mitigate back office tasks is a strong parts management and reverse logistics engine. This ostensibly democratizes a lot of the data entry that would otherwise be managed centrally. The best FSM systems automate the tedious so that techs can focus on the dynamic needs of their customers. Not only is this saving back office labor, it’s improving the service experience across the board.

Post-service falls into a few different categories, most obviously invoicing and ticket closing, which, again should happen via mobile device. That’s of course the beginning, and leading organizations also have the utilities in place to automatically schedule follow-up appointments, maintain an incident history, centralize data about enterprise assets, and use all of that data to automate sales and marketing efforts. This transforms a customer into a client while simultaneously saving on those back office resources. A true win-win. The dispatcher will likely not be going the way of the telephone operator in the immediate future, but with the right technology on your side, you can be sure that their time is being spent on the tasks most worthy of their talents.

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The State of Service Management Software Deployment is in the Cloud. Are you there yet?

October 4, 2019 | 3 Mins Read

The State of Service Management Software Deployment is in the Cloud. Are you there yet?

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By Tom Paquin

It should be obvious to everyone by this point that cloud is not the future anymore; it’s the present. That’s fine in theory, but when it comes to systems that you’ve invested time and physical real estate in, it can be a messy divorce. There’s a few major deviation points when it comes to Field Service and the cloud, and it’s important to be aware of them. Let’s take a few minutes to break it down.

In Service, Not All Clouds are the Same The benefits of moving from on-prem to cloud are, at this point, fairly obvious:

  • It offers dynamic consumption, allowing employees to access tools across desktop and mobile devices
  • If literally saves server space
  • It means you’re always running the latest software build
  • It allows greater flexibility for implementation

That’s just to name a few reasons, and with 5G on the horizon, the functionality, capabilities, and ease of use of cloud-based applications will continue to grow. That’s not to say all cloud applications are the same, though. There are a few points of divergence when it comes to cloud. These divergence points typically fall into two categories: Architectural, or Functional. Let’s start with architectural. Architectural differences in the cloud typically come down to host, security, or distribution, but one particular area of inflection is whether a cloud instance is single- or multi-tenant. The difference is subtle, but key for some businesses. Multi-tenant cloud software means that multiple organizations are running off the same instance of an application (It should be noted, however, that organizations are not able to see one another’s’ data or configurations). Single-tenant, as its name implies, is when an organization’s software instance is used exclusively for them. While organizations will need to weigh the pros and cons of both, some Service Management vendors force your hand one way or another by only offering one implementation option.

When it comes to the industry at-large, Garter's recent Magic Quadrant report has shown that most cloud implementations now are single-tenant. As noted in the report, “Fifty-four percent of the respondents indicated that they utilize a dedicated instance hosted by their vendor (34%) or a third party (20%). The figure for multitenant was unchanged at 24%.” The other piece—the functional, will differ from application to application, but let’s take mobility as an example. Organizations often struggle with downsizing their applications to a mobile form-factor. This means that certain functions, certain views, and certain processes may be unavailable on mobile, while they remain available on the desktop. While in the immediate this may seem like a way to preserve the aesthetic integrity of your platform, with the current trend towards a shrinking back-office, and the need to maximize efficiency, fully mobile field service applications are increasingly becoming an imperative. These are just a few examples, but they help illustrate that nuanced differences in your cloud software, both architectural and functional, can have devastating effects on your business, so if you’ve already deployed in the cloud, now would be a great time to audit those systems to make sure they’re working right for you. If you are still on-prem, or haven’t invested in end-to-end service management, it’s more imperative now than ever to start seriously looking at a cloud solution.

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4 Real-World Roadblocks to Service Revenue Growth

September 30, 2019 | 4 Mins Read

4 Real-World Roadblocks to Service Revenue Growth

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Mid-September I attended the Service Council Symposium in Chicago, where I facilitated a workshop on the barriers to service revenue growth. The workshop had a great turnout with lively conversation. Everyone in the room shared a common desire and need to grow service revenue. This desire is born not only out of every company’s pressure to do more and make more, but also out of demands from customers. Those demands can cause significant frustration for the service organizations intended to fulfill them, but they are also representative of an incredible opportunity for those that are ready, willing, and able to step up to the plate.

However, those at the workshop commiserated that while the opportunity is clear, the outcome of revenue growth isn’t exactly easy to achieve. During our time together, numerous individuals shared some of their specific frustrations and challenges so that everyone in the room could weigh in (and also feel a sense of community in knowing they aren’t alone in their own challenges). While each person’s situation was unique, there were some common themes that surfaced during the conversation that I’ve categorized into four common roadblocks to service revenue growth.

#1: An Inability to Innovate

Reality is, many companies struggle with doing things differently than they’ve always been done. And in the experience economy, and on the path to outcomes-based service, that’s a problem. The inability to innovate can trace back to a variety of root causes – a lack of acknowledgement that customer needs have and are changing, resistance to new ways of thinking, not being willing or prepared to do business based on relationships versus transactions, and even simply not having the right mentality and skills internally to adjust. Whatever this looks like within an individual company, the first step on the path to creating new revenue from service is to do something differently – and that requires a common understanding that change is both needed and desired, and a willingness to innovate and evolve.

#2: Lacking Foundational Technology

Again, this challenge looks different from company to company. But another common theme is somehow lacking the technology to meet customer needs. This can be lacking proper systems to manage service in a way that results in poor efficiency and productivity, which not only dissatisfies customers but also is a foundation that is cracked and impossible to build upon. Or this challenge can be lacking the next-level functionality necessary to create new service offerings or provide insights that customers are willing to pay for, such as IoT and advanced data analytics. Companies also sometimes struggle even with solid technology in place when it comes to the adoption necessary to achieve the intended value. Getting your technology stack in order and having a plan for how you need to build upon it, is imperative to revenue growth.

#3: Operational Silos

While many companies have recognized the strategic potential of the service function and now treat it as such, there was evidence in the room during this workshop that some yet have not. A company with operational silos will have an incredibly difficult time adopting a culture of true customer centricity, which is essential for revenue growth. To capitalize on the opportunity that exists in service, companies need to be aligned from the top on what that opportunity looks like for them, how they need to innovate and evolve to reach that potential, and how functions will need to work together to meet the needs that exist. For some of the folks in the room, there were tales of friction between product and service, service and sales, service and IT, and so on. With the need for service experiences to be seamless and smooth, friction like this is detrimental to satisfaction (and growth).

#4: Skills Gaps and Compensation Misalignment

The final common theme is around having – and harnessing – the talent to grown revenue. For some, this is a capacity problem – they barely have enough service talent to meet the current (basic) needs of their customers and maintain an acceptable degree of satisfaction, let alone focus on new service offerings and growth. Others have service talent but are struggling to determine what that looks like in a more consultative/relationship-based role. Some of the attendees have a commission-based structure in place for their technicians that works well, others shared stories of experiments gone wrong within their organizations – this illustrates the fact that determining not only the right skills, but the appropriate incentives, is a challenging task. Finally, two of the folks in the room were in marketing roles, which we discussed is a relatively new advancement for many service businesses, but likely key in the effort to create and market new offerings and in turn grow revenue. If you’re facing any of these challenges, know that you aren’t alone. The stories shared in the workshop were met with eager head nods and “me too’s.” However, the potential for service is far too large to not fight through these roadblocks and determine your path to revenue growth. We’ll be here cheering you on, sharing any insights we think are helpful in your efforts, and showcasing successes to help you realize it can be done.

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Use Your Words — The Bots Are Coming

September 26, 2019 | 6 Mins Read

Use Your Words — The Bots Are Coming

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By Greg Lush

"Use your words" was often said to me growing up as a young child. Now, it is not what you think — I was a relatively good kid. My identical twin and I formed a unique language that only he and I could understand. For those moments when my brother and I were not bickering, we would communicate using these words, which compelled our parents to remind us to "use our English words.” Our older sister was pretty good at interpreting, she would correlate the bundling of letters, often forming words, to our actions. Essentially, she was understanding our utterances and creating intent, not too different than the natural language processing engines we are just now starting to enjoy as part of our digital landscapes.

If you or your team are the ones tapped to introduce BOTs and Cognitive Speech services to your organization, welcome to a fantastic ride. Assuming you have been following along my prior posts, you should be good to go. A stronger engine does not exist than BOTs to wrap all your enterprise data into a nice package which is accessed by simply asking a question. Do you remember years ago when you waited for the newspaper or the morning news to understand what the weather would be like today? Now what do most of us do? Ask our digital assistants, "Hey XYZ, what does the weather look like today?" Did you feel a bit awkward asking a computer a question? It is interesting when I visit with folks, they seem to ask simple (and limited) questions to computers, almost like we are not very sure how the computer would like us to form the question to seek the proper response. Often we throw in words that we think the BOT will understand forming sentences that we would never verbalize to another human being. For crying out loud, stop the madness! With BOTs, and especially those more sophisticated approaches integrating natural language processing, you should be comfortable asking it a question just as you would a colleague. How the BOT is configured is critical, and your automation targets should be clearly defined and as narrow a scope as possible. Consumers of this technology are not forgiving, they will try once and if the return is not relevant, will often discount the value and may never ask the BOT a question again. Understanding that the sentence seems a bit dramatic, make sure that you have meaningful content which has been trained, repeatedly. You will only have one chance to impress! Three approaches are provided that will help you get started, they are organized by level of complexity.

1. Questions and Answers

Who has not heard of a frequently asked questions (FAQ) list or forum? Interestingly, back in the 70s a book was written suggesting the power of contextual, per software screen assistance known as Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS). Crazy to think that just in recent years the FAQ or Help screens have evolved past functional, and often disconnected from business need, contextual references and guidance. Although many computer users are disenchanted with Help, and they may refuse to return, this is a great opportunity for the simplest level of computer automation with a BOT. Take those FAQs and Help screen contents and work them into a question/answer-based BOT sequence. Add a bit more sophistication by adding natural language processing so you can encourage users to get comfortable asking questions as they would to a trusted colleague.

Delivery of the BOT content can vary widely between text messaging, web pages, embedded within Intranets, etc. For me, if I am asking questions regarding the use of a computer it is always easier receiving that information on another digital tool. Texting responses, with specific instructions or details, seems to work very well. Recipients may then use their phones to ask questions and the computer/tablet to run through the steps or advice. Most BOT engines will connect to an inexpensive tool like Twilio or other SMS service, providing dedicated numbers in a medium that most are comfortable, texting.

2. Business Process

"Let's not boil the ocean" is an idiom often said when enthusiasm meets the pragmatist. Those close to me would say I lean closer to the enthusiasm or dreamer role; however, do not hesitate to refer to me as a pragmatic technocrat. Much of my career, after I came in from the field, was filled with business process assessments. Heck, you need a few different skills to help an organization evolve into a digital enterprise. A passion and curiosity of available technology tools; listening and question asking skills, the ability to see the big picture, and business process mapping. Once high-level business objectives and strategies are mapped it is important to break these down to micro-process improvements. No business, at least that I have ever seen, is not in need of some type of business process engineering. I suppose two books, which you may find interesting, have influenced my perspectives for years, they are:

  • The Goal [Eli Goldratt]: a book read by many in manufacturing; however, the concepts suggested applying to every business. Eli discusses and provides examples of the "theory of constraints," suggesting that you focus on and resolve one constraint, a new constraint will appear. A never-ending process of continuous improvement.
  • How to measure anything [Douglas Hubbard]: fantastic book for anyone and reminds us that anything can be measured.

Deploying process modification within a business without clear objectives and points of measurement is a fool’s errand. When it comes to BOTs and process automation this could not be more important. Sure, many things within a business could stand shoring up; however, which will have the greatest value on your investment? In a perfect world your first process automation target will fund future BOT and process re-engineering efforts. As a friend and former co-worker used to remind us; make informed and deliberate decisions. Prioritizing the business value and potentially choosing an area of improvement which is not that "sexy" is a reality you should be willing to accept in order to be successful. If you only hunt elephants, you may starve while tripping over the rabbits.

3. Industrial IoT

For years my work has been focused on elevating the conditions for the last mile of the field workers. One of my favorite areas of digital interest has been around taking advantage of the consumerization of equipment-based digital fingerprints. Many refer to this as IoT or the Internet of things. While the concept of IoT is not new the amount of information which we are collecting, essentially based on the affordability of the event producer, is tremendous. However, we now must make this information actionable in a meaningful and relevant way which compels a different outcome at the point of service. This interaction with the field worker is the area which has piqued my interest regarding the use of conversational bots.

Sometimes people confuse these bots with sophisticated search algorithms, this is not the area that had any interest to me. Instead, the bot, in my mind, can be used to take advantage of and make meaningful the correlation between a multitude of transactional systems (work order, accounting, CRM, etc.).

Transactional systems can reside either within or outside of your computing environments. One of the greatest advantages, which struck me immediately, was the ability to simply carry on a conversation with a field worker. In the background predicting and guiding the field worker through bots-based responses. Why should a field worker be concerned with what system they must enter this… or go to find that?

As you begin to explore the technology which offers this humanistic conversation-based approach, you will also realize that our possibilities are endless. Not only can we apply these bots, and their underlying algorithms and machine learning routines to field workers, but also apply it to sales, project crews, etc.  Anyplace that we need to correlate and leverage transactional systems in our daily working routines. So, are the bots coming? Yes, I believe in the next few years we will see bots everywhere performing small functions and helping us consume multiple perspectives; so, we as humans can make better decisions.  Are you ready?

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Creating Alignment Between Field Service & IT

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Creating Alignment Between Field Service & IT

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More from Chicago, as Sarah sits down with Charles Hughes, VP of Technical Site Services at Acuative, Tim Spencer, SVP and General Manager of Service Operations for Bunn, and John Barr, Head of IT in Americas for Kone. The panel shares their experiences on where IT and Service Management meet.

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4 Reasons Why Your Service Supply Chain is Failing

September 23, 2019 | 5 Mins Read

4 Reasons Why Your Service Supply Chain is Failing

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By Tom Paquin

Last week at the Service Council Symposium, I had the opportunity to host a roundtable discussion with several service leaders on the topic of the service supply chain and reverse logistics.

As we went around the room and each person shared the current state of parts management across their organization, I couldn’t help my surprise at the immaturity of some of their systems. This reinforced a belief that I’ve had for a long time: When businesses are thinking about service transformation, they’re not thinking about service holistically. They’re thinking about the binary relationship between customers and technicians, and, because of that, the operational underpinnings that actually make a service business work—like parts—are neglected. Is that true of everyone? Obviously not, but this roundtable represented service leaders with not just the forethought to attend a service technology summit, but also the forethought to sign up for a reverse logistics roundtable. Imagine what this looks like for the service leaders who opted to answer emails rather than attend the session! I wish I could say that there’s a long list of “To-Dos” that came out of this session, but what it pretty starkly illuminated, instead, were some of the failure points that businesses were running into. Here are some key elements that will have a negative effect on your ability to manage your service supply chain effectively.

You Don’t Have a Clear Path to End-of-Life for your Serviceable Assets

They don’t make them the way that they used to, right? Apparently so, since some businesses are still servicing 75-year-old machines with cast iron parts manufactured in a warehouse that was converted into condos in 2004. Because of this, organizations are forced to carry excess inventory on-hand (since they obviously can’t reorder these parts), which stretches the concept of “aging inventory” beyond the average lifespan of most mammals. That is an extreme example, but consider the other extreme: Cell phone manufacturers sunset their assets after five years. That means that each year, as the number of skus or service parts increase for new products, you drop close to the same number of skus for end-of-life. Perhaps we can find a happy medium between five years and seventy-five years. Here’s an idea—Each year, increase the part value for repair parts by, say 5% for each part used, and set an additional rule that, once a repair costs 50% of the price of a new machine, that product is automatically sunsetted. With that, you’ll clear inventory space, and you’ll sell new units!

Your Technicians Are Hoarders

I recently reorganized a drawer in my kitchen. In said drawer, I found thirteen wooden spoons that my wife and I have apparently accumulated over the years. We registered for exactly one when we got married, bought several of them, and have received more than one as gifts (thanks?). I was thinking about that, as one member of the roundtable told me that some of his technicians touch certain parts exactly one time a year, when they run inventory on their trucks. The kicker—this organizations’ #1 reason for failed first-time resolution? The technician didn’t have the parts they needed on the truck. Fixing this requires thoughtful internal governance—and a good piece of parts management technology—to make sure that if parts aren’t used in an allotted time, they’re offloaded to a warehouse, sent to a higher-volume branch, or returned wholesale, clearing up shelf space for parts that they will actually use. There are a lot of variances to this that are worth discussing, including peak seasons and routine visits, but that’s why it’s important to have a complete picture of your service business.

You Have Dealer Disconnect

There are two different types of dealers that we’ll talk about here. One would be the dealers from which you are buying parts, the other is the dealers who use your parts to conduct service. We will start with the latter of the two. When you work with a dealer network, in many instances, they’re buying service parts from you, at which point the parts might completely leave your system. There’s a lot of trust, then, that they’re delivering on aftermarket service appropriately. And that’s fine, but as the old adage goes, Trust, but verify. The solution, generally, is to gain some oversight into the operations of your dealer network. The silver bullet is having them employ an extension of your parts management system. That can be like herding cats, sure, but if you start small and build out there is a proven pathway to success, there. Now on to the former: When you’re being supplied with parts from a dealer, there are some complex ins and outs to consider. For example, one leader talked about how they have a system to manage parts brought in from all dealers except for one. For that one dealer—they purchase parts only when they need them. This creates a massive logistical asynchronicity that serves to arbitrarily inflate time to resolution for any repair that requires one category of parts. They do this because of the cost-prohibitive nature of the one line. They simply can’t afford aging inventory of that part category. The solution here is smarter forecasting, which will help to mitigate aging inventory. Buy what you know you’ll need each month, get it in your system, and make it available on demand.

You Lack the Right Tech

We’ve tiptoed around this over the course of this article, but I’ll leave you with one last story from the conference. A utility company, who oversees a global network of branches, dispatches a person to do cycle counts once a week to reorder parts. Well—not real cycle counts, as much as they look into each of the 300 bins that parts are in and make sure they’re at least half full. When I heard that, I nearly fell out of my seat. Imagine how simple it would be to make that process so much more efficient from an accuracy and manpower perspective with technology. A fuller, more accurate, and more automated picture of parts management and reverse logistics has the capacity to make a huge impact on your bottom line. As we often say around here, though, technology in and of itself is not enough. The managerial will, and technician buy-in is key to ensuring that the pieces actually work. Parts management in particular is tricky because any break in the chain breaks down the machine, and often requires multiple stakeholders be involved, often some from outside of your business. Because of that, any tech implementation should be managed with a solid implementation partner. There are many other things that we can discuss beyond this, such as parts disposal, refurbs, and how your inventory is distributed, but I know that for many businesses, they can’t have those discussions until they feel comfortable that the basic underpinnings of parts management are in place. Start there, and plan to build on it.

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Onstage at The Service Council Field Service Symposium, Sarah is joined by Stephanie Borowski, President & CEO of GPS Educational Partners, Eric Reisner, Vice President & General Manager of Hobart Service, Maria Pallotta, Chief of Staff, Canopy Lawn Care, and Roy Dockery, Vice President of Customer Care, Swisslog Healthcare. The group shares their insight, experiences, and recommendations for finding, recruiting, and retaining service superstars.

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