Tag: blog

As AI Unlocks the Promise of IoT, It’s Time to Double Down on Service Innovation

From IoT to GenAI and Beyond: Advice for Building Intelligent Connected Solutions

What Does It Take to Thrive Vs. Merely Survive in the Experience Economy?

December 6, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

Speed: The Characteristic That is Both Critical and Detrimental to Fruitful Innovation

December 6, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

Speed: The Characteristic That is Both Critical and Detrimental to Fruitful Innovation

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

The market, technological, and environmental factors that create disruption to drive innovation are quite intense in today’s landscape. This puts pressure on business leaders to evolve and transform at a pace that allows them to remain relevant, keep competitive, and create differentiation. This pressure is not simply perceived – it is real, no doubt. But how that pressure causes leaders and companies to respond is quite interesting, and I think begs an exploration of the differences between urgency and haste.

On last week’s podcast, I welcomed Eduardo Bonefont, VP of Life Sciences Technical Services at BD for an insightful discussion around the conundrum of balancing short-term priorities and long-term success. He shares the story of how, in 2017, he was asked to take his current position to transform the service experience across BD Life Sciences globally because customer feedback wasn’t stellar, and he had a proven track record of aiding underperforming regions in transformation to better performance. He worked with leadership to create a transformation plan, which included investments in people, processes, and tools.

As he dug in, he realized that the mission to invest in new technology was in many ways at odds with the parallel mission to improve the employee experience – which he knew would equate to a better customer experience. In a nutshell, he and other leaders learned in their firsthand listening of frontline employees that the last thing teams wanted was investment in new technology – they wanted issues with their current systems that were causing daily struggles addressed first.

“It turned out that the cost to fix all the issues that they had, and there was a big list, was equal to the investments that we were going to make on new technology,” explains Eduardo. “Myself and the entire leadership team decided quickly that we needed to pivot our goal to refocus our efforts on fixing these issues to create a better experience for our associates. That became our “pause year” when we used everything that we had available to us in order for us to fix the old stuff before we began with new.”

The idea of BD’s “pause year” is so intriguing to me, for a few reasons. First, I think the pressure companies are under to innovate causes them to race – often past foundational issues that will ultimately inhibit their success. Second, it illustrates BD’s recognition of the very critical fact that employee experience is tied directly to customer experience. If your frontline service workers are frustrated, experiencing daily challenges, or disconnected from your strategy and roadmap for innovation, it’s almost impossible to accomplish your objectives. They are an essential aspect of your company’s differentiation, and ignoring their feedback, desires, or feelings – no matter how challenging to address – compromises the most important resource you depend upon to deliver the customer experience you’re striving for. Finally, it shows restraint in considering not just the short-term objectives or problems but in factoring in how the capacity for longer-term victory grows with a relatively short investment of time.

Set Sail for Service Success

“I am a sailor and in boating, if all of a sudden you run aground, there’s a sand dune or something, and you cannot move forward, the majority of boaters have an instinct to plow right ahead,” explains Eduardo. “They put the engine in full force, thinking ‘I’m going to get out of this. It’s not supposed to be here.’ But that can create damage to your boat, that can create damage to yourselves too. And it’s a very expensive proposal to go do that when the right answer along all along could have been, why don’t I just reverse? I already had a path behind me that’s working. If I take reverse, it’s the easiest way to get out of a sand dune when you’re stuck in order so you can move forward effectively.”

Eduardo and his team applied this analogy to the Life Sciences business and the overall objectives they had. Yes, they were trying to move ahead in improving customer experience. And yes, they believed that the incorporation of new technology was imperative to that mission. But they hit a sand dune when they uncovered the fact that their frontline workforce had some real issues they needed addressed. Rather than plow through those and risk damaging the business, they hit reverse and took the time to fix those issues so that the sail ahead would be safer, smoother, and with a higher likelihood of success. “Applying that analogy to the business, if you plow head, if you push forward, you could create a significant amount of damage and distrust that is just really hard to overcome in future years. At the end, you’re not going to get that continuous improvement if you don’t take the workforce into consideration.”

Knowing When to Hit the Gas vs. Hit the Brake

Eduardo was clear to point out that this pause year didn’t mean the entire business came to a halt while BD addressed employee concerns. They kept on with the day to day, and with focusing on improvements. But the brake was applied in terms of layering new technology investments on top of the tools the workforce felt weren’t working properly.

It can be challenging to determine when to apply gas versus when to hit the brake, particularly because pressures are high. While there’s no cut-and-dry formula for making the best decision, here are a few questions I think it helps to ask yourself and your team:

Are we balancing short-term pressures with long-term objectives and potential?
Will this decision harm us at all in reaching our longer-term goals?
Are we listening to and prioritizing what our customers want and need?
Are we taking into consideration, genuinely, the feedback of our employees and the realities of their experience?
Are we slowing down based on facts or fear?
Are we promoting employee creativity and employee voice enough, knowing that’s where many great innovative ideas come from?
Do we have technologies in place that we are keeping based on outdated criteria rather than a true consensus that they serve our current, and future, needs?

There are of course many more factors – if you have input on how you balance a proper sense of urgency with avoiding the risk of haste, I’d love to hear from you. And if you haven’t yet listened to Eduardo’s podcast episode, I urge you to do so – I really respect the balance he and his team have struck between prioritizing the employee experience and making progress on business outcomes.

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As AI Unlocks the Promise of IoT, It’s Time to Double Down on Service Innovation

From IoT to GenAI and Beyond: Advice for Building Intelligent Connected Solutions

Read the Article: What to Expect when you’re Expecting (Your Employees to Quit)

What Does It Take to Thrive Vs. Merely Survive in the Experience Economy?

December 3, 2021 | 2 Mins Read

Revisiting Old Articles: What to Expect When You’re Expecting (Your Employees to Quit)

December 3, 2021 | 2 Mins Read

Revisiting Old Articles: What to Expect When You’re Expecting (Your Employees to Quit)

By Tom Paquin

A few weeks back, I ran a quick retrospective on my first Future of Field Service article. This week, I’m going to fast forward a bit to an article from early 2020 which looks laughably quaint within the context of what was less than two months away.

Today of course, the situation is exacerbated, with 30% of workers reportedly voluntarily handing in resignations.

We know the reasons for this—COVID has, for many, redefined the boundaries of work/life balance, shifted expectations about what a job can be (both through technology and also through necessity) and fundamentally changed the dynamics of the global economy.

And while this impacts every industry, it invariably impacts service at a greater clip. Service has never been an easy profession, and in a job landscape where physical presence in an office is becoming out of style for many business, the idea of being beholden to traffic, and being tethered to on-site operations can be an unattractive option for many.

And frankly, a lot of the hiring practices outlined in the article still stand. Where they can be enhanced, iterated upon, and reengineered to better support the workforce, and attract new people, mostly relates to technology.

We’ve obviously spoken a lot about remote assistance, and will continue to into next year, as it kept businesses running through COVID, and now offers the means to avoid costly truck rolls for more routine operations. It could also serve as the catalyst that keeps employees on board and attracts new ones. If, for instance, employees were able to work “Hybrid shifts”, in the field some days, at home others, it would offer the level of flexibility than many crave.

This is just one example. A more decentralized dispatch, as well, might offer some reprieve. It also will allow service businesses to do more with less, which, with a leaner workforce, might be the best option.

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As AI Unlocks the Promise of IoT, It’s Time to Double Down on Service Innovation

From IoT to GenAI and Beyond: Advice for Building Intelligent Connected Solutions

What Does It Take to Thrive Vs. Merely Survive in the Experience Economy?

November 29, 2021 | 6 Mins Read

10 Non-Monetary Ways to Show Your Employees You Appreciate Them

November 29, 2021 | 6 Mins Read

10 Non-Monetary Ways to Show Your Employees You Appreciate Them

Last week was Thanksgiving in the United States and I love the reminder the holiday gives to reflect and practice gratitude. I also moderated a panel last week on the labor shortage and the combination had me thinking about the criticality of showing our employees we’re thankful for them. We know that retention is an imperative aspect of the labor shortage and I am not confident we’re doing all we can to show appreciation for our employees in non-monetary ways.

Of course, your employees expect fair and equitable pay and let’s hope you’re all providing that. But today’s employees expect far more, and many companies haven’t taken the time to gain a solid understanding of what’s important to the new generation of workforce and how elements beyond pay make a huge difference when it comes to the employee experience, employee engagement and, ultimately, employee retention.

On last week’s podcast, I spoke with Dr. Jack Wiley, who is recognized internationally for pioneering research linking employee work attitudes to measures of organizational success. Most recently, Dr. Wiley was professor of psychology for Manchester University, where he founded the undergraduate program in industrial organizational psychology. He currently serves as the chief scientific officer at Engage2Excel, and as the president and CEO of both Jack Wiley Consulting and Employee Centricity. He was on to discuss his most recent book, Employee Centricity, for which he conducted vast research on what it is employees want from their managers.

“I think we're all aware of the fact that over the last 18 months, the workplace dynamic has changed in some ways that will be more or less forever going forward. I think some of these changes are simply going to be changes that we're going to be dealing with in our careers as we move forward. So, that represents an unprecedented challenge for managers. They have a lot of additional issues that they need to be attending with, especially today in the United States, we saw the August numbers show that 4.4 million workers quit. A recent survey that I saw indicated about 65 percent of employees are actually considering leaving their current job,” he shares.

I’ve seen some of these statistics, so they didn’t shock me as much as what Dr. Wiley shared next. “Over 70 percent of managers in the United States, and I'm talking about all industries, all different levels of management, smaller organizations, larger organizations, over 70 percent of managers either had no training in people management or the training they had received was limited to no more than four hours,” he says. “And so, when we consider the centrality of people management responsibilities in the context of the overall role of the manager, and over 70 percent had no more than four hours at best, also I think is part of the problem.”

Effective, engaged managers and overall company culture are critical to employee retention – so we must do a better job of understanding what our workforce wants and needs and ensuring our leadership is both committed to and able to provide that. There are many layers to this, but employees that feel more appreciated and valued is an important piece of the puzzle. With that in mind, here are 10 ways you can show your employees you are thankful for them that have nothing to do with compensation:

Recognition. We all want to feel that what we do matters, and we all want to feel valued for our contributions. This doesn’t have to be complex, but it is often overlooked. When is the last time you genuinely thanked an employee? We can start by doing more of that and we can build upon that by ensuring others within the organization see the hard work of employees, creating programs that showcase efforts, and even giving awards for those going above and beyond. “Providing recognition is about psychological appreciation,” says Dr. Wiley. “’Thank you for a job well done. I'm not going to take credit for your good work, I'm going to make sure you're in the spotlight up the chain of command.’”
Listen. Again, this sounds simple but happens far less than it should. Employees want to feel their voice matters and they want to know their ideas are valued. They want to feel comfortable coming to managers with thoughts, concerns, personal needs, and so on. Moreover, the input of frontline employees is double the gift, because not only does listening help employees feel more important and engaged – but their ideas are often different and very valuable when it comes to setting strategy and making investments. Creating a culture where employees across the organization feel comfortable speaking up is a must today, and this includes a willingness to be open minded and a preparedness to have hard conversations. A great way to show an employee appreciation is to ask in earnest, “What do you think?”
Offer mentorships. Mentorships are a great way to help employees stay engaged, motivated, and keep personal connections that build longevity and loyalty. New employees can “learn the ropes” and mentors can get to know employees in a deeper way, which can help with building on strengths and developing their careers. A mentee who feels a mentor is investing time in them will appreciate the opportunity to learn and grow and will feel valued by the company providing such an opportunity.
Provide career mapping. It’s very important for today’s employees to have options for growth and career progression. Employees feel appreciated when they have an opportunity to grow their skills, their experiences, and themselves within an organization. Career mapping provides this to your employees, but it also helps for you to map talent within your organization to retain as much as possible and to put stars in optimal roles.
Value outcomes over output. The traditional working world rewarded hours clocked in or pieces of parts made – output. The new working world needs to shift to ensuring employees feel valued for the outcomes they can achieve, not the output alone. Setting success criteria based on desired outcomes, and then measuring employees based on that, enables you to give employees more latitude on how they accomplish what you need them to accomplish which helps them feel like a larger contributor. “Employees want more flexibility in how they go about their work. So, they're looking for their managers to provide them with more autonomy. Help me understand what the work is you want accomplished but give me more room to decide how I'm going to go about doing that myself,” explains Dr. Wiley.
Look for opportunities to reskill or upskill. A great way to thank employees for their hard work and dedication is to give them the opportunity to learn a new skill or to advance their training. Whether something as simple as a “we’ll buy you a book a month” program – which I love – to more formal training, an investment in your employees’ education and future is a great way to show you appreciate them.
Give time back. What’s more precious than money? Time. Another great way to show gratitude is to give the gift of time back. In 2020, IFS decided to give every employee their birthday off. We also have an annual CSR day that we can use to volunteer however we’d like. These small gestures have a big impact.
Show your trust. Being micromanaged is a fast path to employee frustration and disconnect. We must learn how better to empower our employees, and this requires trust. Feeling trusted is another way for employees to feel appreciated and my guess is that most of the time, employee outcomes improve when trust is increased.
Prioritize mental health. Showing your employees you care about them as human beings, not just for their performance at work, is a great way to show your gratitude. The last two years have been challenging and many people need more connection than they did pre-Covid. Offering support and resources around mental health is a way to say thank you and a way to ensure your employees maintain their wellbeing.
Promote fun. We don’t all need to have ping pong tables in our offices, but there’s nothing wrong with having fun at work. Nurturing an environment where employees are encouraged to have fun – or perhaps even coordinating a fun-only activity or outing every so often – keeps morale high and helps employees know you appreciate them.

What would you add to this list? I’d love to hear!

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My Thoughts from Field Service Palm Springs 2021: 5 Barriers to the Service Revolution

November 22, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

My Thoughts from Field Service Palm Springs 2021: 5 Barriers to the Service Revolution

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

When Field Service Palm Springs 2020 was cancelled, I wondered when we’d ever be at the point of being able to return. It’s an event I look forward to every year and last week, that return happened with Field Service Palm Springs 2021. I can’t explain how happy I was to be back in California, sharing thoughts, ideas, smiles, and, yes, drinks with so many colleagues, co-workers, friends, and new connections. The sentiment of not being able to replicate the energy you get from an in-person event any other way is one I heard shared by many attendees.

The event took place over three days and included mainstage keynote sessions, panels, fireside chats, and afternoon breakout track session and roundtables. It was interesting to hear stories of how companies weathered the storm of the pandemic and what’s top of mind as we move ahead. There were some great success stories shared by folks like Larry Blue of Bell and Howell, Tim Spencer of BUNN, and Gyner Ozgul of Smart Care Equipment Solutions. And while I think it’s important to listen to how others are making progress and learn from their journeys, I think it’s also critical that we work to examine some of the barriers holding field service back from its ultimate success.

So, with that in mind, I’m sharing here the five barriers I heard this week that seem to be in the way of companies deriving the full potential of service.

Barrier #1: No Service Identity

We know there’s a continuum of service maturity that companies are progressing through, from break-fix on one end to outcomes-based service at the other. And no company matures in one big leap. However, the barrier here seems to be a lack of service identity for some organizations. To achieve true outcomes-based service, you’re talking about a fundamental change in how business is conducted. In reality, it’s a change in company identity versus service identity – or the incorporation of service identity into the overall company identity.

The evolution to outcomes cannot be achieved in the service function alone – it requires a top-level recognition of the opportunity service presents for the business and a company-wide commitment to the journey of adopting that identity. I believe that for us to witness a surge in progress through that continuum, we need greater and more pervasive acceptance of the fact that service must become a part of the company’s identity. We made strides when we moved from perceiving service as a profit center versus a cost center but what’s needed now is the elimination of the silo in total and for it to be seen as an integral aspect of the company value proposition.

Barrier #2: Digital Alignment

This is tied to business identity in a way, because as companies work to create a more cohesive and service-centric value proposition, the realization occurs that greater digital alignment is required. Rather than a disparity of digital tools in use across the business, however well-functioning they are, companies need to become more cohesive in their digital strategy and digital investments.

We discussed this need here where we explored the barriers to digital transformation success and the idea of building the Digital Dream Team. To create the customer experiences we need to, we must look at digital more holistically so that we ensure a seamless customer journey, so we gather the right data at the right time, and so we set the stage to be able to leverage that data as a strategic differentiator.

Barrier #3: Legacy Company Culture

The need for innovation has never been greater, but for many organizations there’s a legacy culture really stifling creativity and employee empowerment. This disparity was evident in some of my discussions where you could see almost two entirely different worlds exist – on one end, you have companies that are embracing change and working to create environments where employees feel valued, know they can provide feedback and share ideas, and feel comfortable speaking up and trying things because failure is seen as an opportunity not a disaster.

On the other hand, you hear people talking about how rigid the management is, how narrow the focus, how outdated the employee experience. And I would say that, right now, this is sadly still the majority. But I do believe it won’t be for long. There’s simply no way to remain relevant without adapting and adopting a more modern culture. Your customers will demand it and your employees will, too. There are so many resources on employee engagement, company culture, and modern leadership and my opinion is that these topics absolutely need to be woven into the event agenda more going forward because this is an area that needs attention.

Barrier #4: The Talent Gap

This was one of the number one topics of discussion, and of course we do a lot of content on this topic. You can read my advice on how to control the controllables around the talent gap here, but while on site I also recorded a podcast with Roy Dockery of Swisslog that you’ll see soon. Roy has strong opinions on this subject and at the heart his though is, “There isn’t a talent gap, companies are just lazy in how they hire.” He’s not wrong.

What he means is that companies have always hired on experience, and that experience is quite frankly becoming extinct. We must then become more creative and, yes, work harder to find talent and develop it versus expecting experienced workers to show up in droves. There are layers to this to explore, including more modern recruiting practices, the importance of the employee value proposition, company culture and employee engagement and retention, and how technology can ease the burden. It’s a topic that will continue to be important, but I hope the audience is willing to listen to Roy’s point and begin to think differently about how to close the gap.

Barrier #5: Data Aggregation vs. Storytelling

There was a lot of discussion at the event around collecting data and leveraging ML and AI, but the barrier I believe is that companies are still focused on the aggregation of the data rather than the stories it can tell. Of course, the aggregation must come first, but ample attention needs to be put into knowing what you can do with that data and ensuring you have systems – and talent – to appropriately translate your data into valuable business insights.

This isn’t necessarily a barrier, but more data storytelling and a deeper understanding of how to use data to drive customer value is absolutely key to the future of service and I think there’s a lot of exploration to do on best practices around this topic.

If you attended the event, I’d love to hear your thoughts and takeaways! Also, the event is back to its normal schedule for 2022 and will be happening April 26-28. If you missed last week’s event, stay tuned here for the agenda and perhaps I’ll see you in the Spring.

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Field Service Comes to Medical Care

November 19, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Field Service Comes to Medical Care

By Tom Paquin

In November 2020, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services launched the Acute Hospital Care At Home program to provide hospitals expanded flexibility to care for patients in their homes. This is but one of many at-home hospital care programs that have begun to pop up, in an effort to keep high-risk patients safe, mitigate capacity issues at hospitals, and to simply allow people the dignity of care from their own home. And while we’ve spoken about medical devices before, it’s interesting to take this conversation into medical care itself.

While this certainly is a nice option for individuals with chronic conditions who would prefer to stay in their own home rather than make regular trips to the hospital, it’s impossible to not see this as what it is: Yet another vector for field service management. And in-home medical care being another service option means that what was once a simple, centralized function now has tendrils that extend far outside a single network of buildings. Let’s talk about what that means.

Scheduling in the Another Dimension
Under even the rosiest of circumstances, coordinating a staff of personnel across a business is a challenge. Take “Making the rounds” and move it to a statewide scale, and you’ve added another dimension of challenges, logistics, and pain. Do you embed individuals in homes? Do you subdivide labor between at-home and in-office? Do you bring on contingent labor and merge them with salaried staff?

In service, we know that this can be most effectively managed by a full-featured optimization system. For staffing effectiveness (especially in the face of a labor shortage), this is an imperative. Getting this right will allow hospitals and associated organizations to offer the care that patients need, when they need it, in a way that maximizes value and limits overhead.

Decentralizing the Service Supply Chain
For medical devices, especially consumables, there’s a variety of interesting opportunities to provide decentralized service. Should consumables be sent directly to the patient? What are the compliance risks of doing so? What about remittance and disposal of hazardous materials? There’s a lot of potential for value add, money saved, and more thoughtful utilization of materials.

Getting all that figured out will be beholden to understanding parts management and reverse logistics across all channels of care. That means fusing in-office care with field care, in a single view, across use cases.

Always-on Device Management
I can imagine that home medical care would be particularly appealing to individuals on dialysis, or who receive lengthy treatments of other kinds. Obviously many of those types of treatments require and include complex machinery in order to function correctly. And when that equipment falls out of physical view, tracking becomes all the more important.

We’re quick to articulate the invaluable connection between asset management and service management, and that becomes doubly true when medical property is in a customer’s home. For things to run efficiently, you need to know that there’s an issue with a piece of equipment before the appointment, not at the beginning of an appointment.

Whenever service comes into play, these sorts of considerations naturally arise. And while it’s important for all service organizations to get service right, the stakes are often much higher for medical care. Fortunately, today’s tools for service deliver can rise to meet those challenges, and help initiatives like this succeed.

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Are Misperceptions Holding You Back from the Potential of As-a-Service?

November 15, 2021 | 4 Mins Read

Are Misperceptions Holding You Back from the Potential of As-a-Service?

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

If you listened to the recent podcast with Dave Mackerness of Kaer, you should understand the value that the As-a-Service business model holds. However, it seems that there are some common myths around what it really means to introduce an As-a-Service offering that holds companies back from it potential. On this week’s podcast, I welcome Kevin Bowers, Director of Field Service Research at Technology & Services Industry Association to discuss the myths and truths of As-A-Service.

Kevin recently wrote a column on this topic that prompted me reaching out and inviting him for a podcast discussion. In that column, he shares the two most common misperceptions he’s witnessed – that As-a-Service means simply leasing equipment or that it is related to a cloud offering. “My boss’s boss often says, do you know what the S in as a service stands for? It doesn't stand for subscription. It doesn't stand for solution. It's for the service,” says Kevin. “It's about adding value to that piece of equipment. It's not, like you said, CAPEX, OPEX. It's about helping the customers achieve something that they're after. And it doesn't have to be in the cloud.”

I agree with these points fully. As-a-Service gets brushed off as nothing more than giving customers a way to pay that is OPEX versus CAPEX, but the true value of this opportunity is in delivering far more than different payment terms. It’s about offering customers an outcome they need, an experience they desire, and the peace of mind they seek. As such providing something As-a-Service is really one method of migrating to an outcomes-based model. When companies simply try to re-label their traditional products and services “As-a-Service” and wonder why customers aren’t interested, it’s because the true value of the model is in the outcome not in the offer.

Simplicity Sells

One of the benefits of introducing As-a-Service is in its simplicity – you are solving a problem your customer has, reliably and consistently, as a service. This is easy to understand, highly compelling, and likely to succeed. What happens, though, is that companies over-complicate the idea of As-a-Service based on legacy thinking by trying to position it as the capabilities that enable the company to provide X-as-a-Service rather than articulating the outcome to the customer.

What companies must understand is that today’s customers are far less interested than ever in the products you sell or even the services you provide – they care about how you can help them. This is the root of As-a-Service. It doesn’t mean repackaging what you’ve always done with a shiny new bow, it means reorienting your business to guarantee outcomes that your customers need and value. “At TSIA, we've been saying it for seven, eight years now: customers don't care about your product,” says Kevin. “You posted about your experience at your event in Netherlands recently, talking about how it's not about the product, the service. It's about the story, and more and more, that story is about outcomes. And to be clear, it's about the customer's outcome, not your outcome. I think that idea still ruffles feathers.”

This mindset or identity shift can prevent companies from seeing the realities of the transition to As-a-Service, which then prohibits their success because they are hedging their bets instead of taking a leap. One important aspect of As-a-Service to understand is that risk is inherent, and the more you try to mitigate your risk, the less value you’re delivering to customers which means that your shift to the model will appear unsuccessful when you never truly embraced the model at all. Companies who offer outcomes take on a certain amount of risk, which is part of the appeal for customers. There’s no way around that, so rather than looking for a shortcut, you should spend your energy determining what you need to change within the business to be confident in accepting more risk.

This is where technology plays a huge role. It’s incredibly challenging, if not impossible, for a company to scale its operations to guaranteed outcomes with manpower and sheer will. You need data, automation, and intelligence of modern tools to enable this transition. “Historically a missed SLA was a missed SLA. In the world of outcomes, when field service doesn’t arrive on time, you don’t get paid,” explains Kevin. “This means you have to have the right infrastructure in place. You can't run field service on an Excel sheet anymore and have pipe dreams that you're going to deliver an outcome.”

This brings about another misperception, which is that the introduction of As-a-Service is a service transformation. It’s not, it’s a business transformation. You cannot, as a company, introduce As-a-Service in just one silo – it is an overarching strategy and shift in companywide approach. This realization can scare some folks away and it needn’t. While ultimately the move to delivering outcomes is a change in company identity, it isn’t a matter of flipping a switch – it can most certainly start and be proven in an area of the business and then expanded strategically over time. This approach was discussed in the podcast with Kaer and Kevin gives another example in our discussion this week.

The truth Kevin and I, along with many others, agree on is that As-a-Service isn’t a trend or fad but a proven business model that will only continue to become more prevalent. So, take stock of what misperceptions you may have and consider what you stand to gain by breaking those down and examining the truths of companies like Kaer seeing immense success from embracing risk and being willing to innovate.

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Revisiting Old Articles: Part 1

November 12, 2021 | 2 Mins Read

Revisiting Old Articles: Part 1

By Tom Paquin

If you’ve been following the work that we’ve done on State of Service here at FoFS, you’d have a fresh view on how the many challenges of the last two years have culminated in our current expectations around service delivery. So I figured let’s dig into the archives and see what we were saying back when this site got started.

Sarah brought me into the Future of Field Service family in early 2019, and my tenure began with a couple of articles in January of that year. Let’s take a look at some of them, how things have changed, and what remains the same. Here’s my first article for FoFS:

Is Field Service The Retail Game Changer?
Most of the existing examples listed here have been among companies selling complex tech products, but that should not be the limit to retail’s service footprint. If field service right in every instance? Absolutely not. I think we’d all be a bit alarmed if a Victoria’s Secret technician rang your doorbell for a 3PM hosiery service appointment. But Victoria’s Secret actually does have a robust in-store service offering that works great for them. Think of what would have happened if Border’s, or Circuit City, or Blockbuster had developed service systems in-store for consultation and unique services. These companies failed because they tried to compete against the superior capabilities of competitors, rather than improving, and utilizing their unique set of strengths.

Have you been to your local mall recently? Yikes.

I remember the first time I ventured into an indoor mall during COVID times, and I was shocked by the dramatically different landscape. Legacy brands and corporate strongholds had eroded, leaving a swath of vacancies, some new local businesses, and a surprising number of storefronts now taken up by something I wouldn’t even think that they were zoned for: Restaurants.

With Amazon slowly gobbling up the world of retail commerce like a big, exploitative Galactus, businesses have needed to flex their services in order to stay relevant. This is true across retail, from grocery curbside and delivery to personal shopping, to vastly expanded pick up in store.

Some businesses are more creative than others, and in what is apparently a burgeoning “Metaverse”, the utilization of online channels to deliver service solutions will increase as well.

The reality is that brick and mortar stores were tasked with the drive to innovate or die before COVID, and COVID advanced digital transformation by a half-decade or so. Some businesses have not survived the transition, while others are innovating their way towards new revenue, better customer experiences, and meeting (often literally) their customers where they are.

Next time, we’ll talk about the death of the frankensystem.

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What Does Milk Have to Do with Servitization? (No Really, Hear Me Out)

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

When you talk about the future of service, the terms “outcomes,” “Servitization,” and “as-a-Service” are all sure to pop up. In reality, these terms all mean different things but are inextricably linked. Customers are more and more demanding outcomes (versus products and/or services), and “as-a-Service” is a method of delivering those outcomes that can work particularly well for manufacturers looking to Servitize their businesses – aka evolve from being a product provider to trusted advisor.

The intricacies can be a lot to wrap your head around, I know. Which is why stories like Kaer’s are so powerful – early adopters who make sense of it all in a way that achieves results, and then share that success for others to more easily envision how it applies to their own businesses and industries. I recently spoke with Dave Mackerness, Director at Kaer, to talk about the company’s journey to cooling as a service.

Kaer in a Singapore-based cooling company that serves South East Asia. The company has been in business for about 70 years and Dave with the organization for the last 12. In 2012, led by the company’s CEO, Kaer introduced Cooling-as-a-Service. Five years later, the company went “all-in” by focusing its efforts entirely on the new business model based not only on the success it saw as a company, but also based on how the modern business model positively impacted both the customer experience and the environment.

When you think about the timeframes here, I would consider 2012 an early adopter of an As-a-Service model, particularly for the cooling industry. When I asked Dave what sparked Kaer’s early willingness to embrace this level of innovation and change, the answer shocked me – it had to do with milk.

Dave joined Kaer after this journey had begun, so he retells how the CEO explained it all to him. “This is how my CEO explained it to me and then I stole the idea for my own presentations,” he says. “When we are looking at Servitization, at innovation, we look in different industries and we looked at different companies. There are standard companies that come up when you think about what's disruptive and what's innovative, like Zoom, Office 365, Spotify, Netflix, IBM Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Grab Food, Uber, and so on. We wanted to determine what they have in common. What we realized was, what they had in common is that they stole their business idea from someone else and not just from someone else, but they stole their business ideas from the same person.”

Wondering where milk comes in? We’re getting there. “The person they stole the idea from was a guy called GW Maxwell. In 1906 I believe it was in the U.S., GW Maxwell invented the milk carton and he allowed people to get the benefits of milk that they wanted without buying a cow,” says Dave. “They could now buy milk, without buying the cow. And we had this analogy that we should be buying milk, we shouldn't need to be buying cows.”

This early example of Servitization illustrates this still in-demand concept of allowing customers to benefit from an outcome – in this case milk – without investing in a particular product – in this case the cow. “If we want milk in our coffee or our cereal in the morning, none of us own a cow in our and most of us don’t have the ability to do so,” adds Dave. “So it was that milk carton, that was the first time we had ever seen the service business model utilized, which is back in 1906. Since then, every single company has used that or stolen that idea whether in entertainment, logistics, ride hailing, or in cooling. It's not specific to a particular industry. So that's the cow analogy. We say buy milk, don't buy cows – and that prompted us to look at how to offer Cooling-as-a-Service.”

The reality is, many of you are still selling cows – metaphorically speaking. But your customers want milk. And if you don’t find a way to offer it, a competitor will. Kaer’s journey to Cooling-as-a-Service is evidence that while the evolution isn’t a simple one, it is worthwhile in a number of ways.

As-a-Service Impact on CX

First and foremost, it delivers a better customer experience which will, in turn, keep your business in business. “Cooling-as-a-Service delivers a far better experience for our customers,” explains Dave. “Someone who was used to buying CDs and has moved to Spotify or was used to going to Blockbuster and now signs into Netflix, knows there’s a very obvious difference. It's chalk and cheese, in terms of the experience you get and that was the first thing that became apparent to us.”

The business model itself forces a greater focus on the customer needs and holds companies accountable for not just saying they are customer-centric but proving it in actions. “As-a-Service forces a relentless focus on your customer and I think that every company now says they’re customer centric. Everyone wants to be but, do they actually do it? Is their business set up around it, or do they just throw catchphrases out into the marketplace?” asks Dave. “Under this model, the only way to keep your customers or to get new customers is by differentiating through experience. Because at the end of the day, our 24-degrees air is a commodity. I mean anyone can put that together; it’s how you deliver it and how you give confidence to your customers that they will have that exactly when they need it with the exact requirements that they have is really important. Also, how you build relationships around that, how they interact with you as a provider is really important.”

While a product-centric model reinforces practices around incremental improvement, a Servitized model pushes companies to be more innovative and to focus more on experience and outcomes. “In the historical business model, you get customers by product innovation, so can you get slightly incremental improvement on the speed of your computer and so on. It's all about product features and price and branding and marketing as well of course,” says Dave. “But if you think about... look at Spotify and Apple Music. They're offering very similar things to kind of the same people and if I sign up to Spotify today, I can sign off tomorrow and stop my contract with them. The only way they can hold onto customers is better experience and so it's forces you to deliver just that.”

The Impact Around Sustainability is Clear

The other area of immense benefit Kaer has witness in its move to Cooling-as-a-Service is around sustainability. And while perhaps the benefit here is compounded by cooling’s impact on energy consumption, the reality is that even in other As-a-Service examples, the ability to positively impact the environment through more efficient and extended use of assets, higher asset utilization, and more built-in product innovation is proven.

“Cooling now makes up 10 percent of the world's energy consumption. That's today. The need for cooling is going to triple in the next 30 years, so if we don't have more sustainable systems and better performing systems, the energy consumption of the world will be 30 percent cooling and we can't manage that,” says Dave. “So, at the moment in the cooling industry, you buy your equipment, you put it into the building, and you cannot change because it's big infrastructure in the basement of your buildings. As that building goes through its life cycle, if it needs change, you're stuck with the same system that you had when you built it or when you estimated what you were going to need. You’re locked in a system and you just have to do the best you can with it. Generally, that's not a great approach and then at the end of the life you throw it away or recycle it, you get rid of it and build a new system. Very linear.”

Cooling-as-a-Service enables a more circular approach. “Now, we're working in a portfolio manner. Let me give you an example. During Covid we had customers that fell into one of three categories, one was customers that weren't really affected with cooling requirements (not many), others whose cooling requirements significantly decreased (think about offices and shopping malls in the last year), and those whose needs went through the roof (like pharmaceutical manufacturing and data centers),” explains Dave. “What would happen in those cases under a traditional model is they would have very poorly performing systems. With Cooling-as-a-Service, the customers that had increased capacities could serve that new requirement. We could take from where we had excess capacity and move to where we need capacity over here. We design modularly we can plug and play cooling capacity. We can change out technology to increase or adjust capacity with this approach, which has really changed and extended the life of our assets.”

Opportunity, Meet Risk

Dave talks further in the podcast about the benefits Kaer has seen in migrating to Cooling-as-a-Service and why he and other company stakeholders are, as a result, so passionate about educating others on the potential of embracing the opportunity to evolve in this way. However, a word of caution he offers is that if you are considering As-a-Service, you need to be ready to go all in.

This means risk. The model isn’t the model without it, and he tells tale of those trying – unsuccessfully – to mitigate risk or push it back onto customers in a way that all but guarantees failure. “This model requires a different investment of dollars in infrastructure and what happens is that the providers then get nervous around return on investment. You cannot look at it this way; you have to understand what your business risk is and you cannot mitigate your own risk by putting on your customers contract clauses and penalties that you bake into the business model or essentially tying them down into things or locking them into things to secure your revenue. It kills the business model,” cautions Dave.

Thinking about this in terms of Netflix helps drive home his point. “When Netflix comes to me and asks for ten dollars a month for all I can watch, I wonder what happens when I have watched all I want – but I know I can cancel anytime, so I go for it,” Dave says. “If Netflix asked me for ten dollars a month but told me I needed to sign a ten-year contract and pay in advance for the first year and if I needed to terminate the contract be held to a penalty of six years’ worth of revenue, they wouldn’t have a business model. For this to work, you have to stay true to the business model.”

As we discuss what the future holds related to this evolution, we agree that adoption of this model is – and will continue to be – on the rise. Dave leaves you with some last words of wisdom: “If you're looking at Servitizing your business, you will hear many times why it can't be done and many times why you need to write difficult contracts or complicated contracts in order to do it. My advice is – go back to that philosophy I was always told to ask why five times and if they can't answer on the fifth time then you know it's not a real reason. Change it a little bit, ask why not five times and every time someone gives you a follow up just say, why not and why not, and you'll get to the fifth one and you'll realize there is no good reason to stick to the old way of doing things.”

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Avoiding the ISV Trap in Field Service

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Avoiding the ISV Trap in Field Service

By Tom Paquin

We are quick to point out here at Future of Field Service that service does not stop and start with appointment booking. Service—true service—extends throughout a company’s lifecycle, and properly operationalizing, automating, cataloging, and tracking service requires a holistic understanding of business elements, from human resources, to parts, to procurement, to fleet management, and everything in between.

To cover their inability to meet these expectations, many service software providers gloss over their lack of capabilities by developing wide networks of ISVs: Independent Software Vendors. ISVs offer software that, when sold in tandem with a platform, provide functional support absent in the core system.

There are invariably some benefits to working with ISVs. If you work in a specialized industry, ensuring that you have all the modules that you need to be successful often requires configuration across a broader network than just what a core function offers. Furthermore, integration flexibility offers the ability to add on modules on the fly, so you can start with a core system, and deploy new systems as-needed.

For all the good, though, there’s a bad side, and it comes when you tip the scale from supported ISVs towards building an ISV Frankensystem on an underpowered core platform. The reality is that if you’re buying roadmap or implementations, you’re not buying software stability, and it’s imperative that you explore those options out of the gate. Here are some traps to avoid:

Implementation
We all know that you want to avoid as much customization as possible when implementing any system. Doing so means that the software is less likely to break, updates and further integrations are easier, and your “vanilla” experience is easier to support. ISVs often lead to a ballooning effect with customizations, which in turn increases the cost, resources, and time associated with implementing a new product.

Updates
The fraught nature of this patchwork post-implementation means that updates then can become a challenge. With inconstant product-by-product upgrade cycles, you suddenly run the risk of incompatible software, certain business-critical modules losing support, or inconsistent compatibility issued with specific hardware or internal processes.

Apps
We know that getting technicians to push the buttons they need to in order to use their software is often easier said than done, so using a specific FSM mobile app piles another layer of challenges on top of that. ISVs have the potential of extending that swath of apps beyond one to several, each, again, with their own UI ad idiosyncrasies. In the world of mobile apps, consistency is key, and more solutions means more possible failure points.

These are a few examples of where ISVs can let you down. I would preface this by saying that not all ISVs or ISV relationships are created equally. Many are very well-integrated, communicative with the core vendor, and avoid many of these pitfalls. But the broader the ISV network you employ, the more you roll the dice. That’s why it’s important to evaluate what actually comes in the box when you’re investing in new service technology.

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