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June 28, 2021 | 8 Mins Read

6 Defining Traits of Digital Transformation Success

June 28, 2021 | 8 Mins Read

6 Defining Traits of Digital Transformation Success

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

The ability to deliver a measurable return on tech investment quickly (and to the satisfaction of internal stakeholders) is the number one concern for 64 percent of decision-makers when it comes to digital transformation initiatives. However, we know that, all too often, digital transformation desires don’t translate to reality.

When you consider the layers of complexity that exist in aligning and executing a digital transformation strategy, it’s easy to begin to identify numerous areas where the best of digital transformation intentions can go awry. But in striving for ROI, it’s worthwhile to examine the best practices and lessons learned of those who have already paved their path to success. With that in mind, here’s a collection of insights gleaned during Future of Field Service interviews that shed light on some of the defining traits of digital transformation done right.

#1: Eliminate Siloes

It is absolutely imperative to understand that digital transformation success hinges on an aligned, cohesive, and collaborative approach. The elimination of siloes between business and IT functions – as well as an overarching view of the digital future of the company – is essential. Digital transformation cannot be accomplished within functions or in the presence of siloes – it requires a company-wide agreement and effort.

Pekka Nurmi, Director of Corporate IT at Cimcorp, and I discussed this during his podcast interview. “I had a fantastic discussion with one of my colleagues from another company regarding this exact topic, and we were thinking, okay, 10 years ago how we would have solved this item at the time?” he says. “And we would have selected really dedicated IT people. Now, the business is much more involved and should be much more involved. It’s not like the IT side has become any less important, but today you have to solve the IT and business sides at the same time. This is the core change that has happened in the last 10 years.”

#2: Define Your Guiding Principles

A major barrier to digital transformation success is that it can be easy to veer off course or become distracted, even if those distractions are born of additional opportunities. When you allow scope creep within your project, ROI becomes increasingly difficult to achieve. This isn’t to say you cannot evolve your digital transformation efforts and add additional capabilities, but rather that you must clearly define your guiding principles so that you aren’t continually pulled out of focus.

Katie Hunt, Service Operations Leader at APi Group discussed the importance of guiding principles during her podcast.  “Guiding principles exist so that, as the inevitable ebbs and flows of the project occur, you know exactly what to stay focused on,” she explains. “We had four that we outlined to ensure everyone was aligned. The first was maintaining focus on end user needs. Our second one was being open to changing processes. The third one was leveraging the ideas and suggestions of our steering committee. And then the last one was valuing time over process changes, which was us saying that our go live date needed to be met and viewed not as a stopping point, but really as something we could continue and use as a springboard to keep developing upon.”

Guiding principles won’t look the same from company to company and are meant to be unique. The point is that you, as an organization, should know what is most important to you – your ‘why’ for the initiative – and you should develop these principles to help you stay focused on those overarching goals. Otherwise, you will inevitably get off course as challenges, curve balls, or new ideas come into play.

#3: Set the Stage for a Data-Driven Future

One of the goals for most companies’ digital transformation efforts is to create a stronger foundation for the world’s data-driven future. Data has become the most valuable asset for many businesses, not only for internal decision making and optimization but as a customer value proposition and tool of differentiation. As such, you want to be sure that you are putting a digital foundation in place that will support your long-term data goals.

Gyner Ozgul, COO of Smart Care Equipment Solutions discusses how the company has set the stage for a data-driven future with its pragmatic technology selection. “Looking at our future vision, we wanted to make sure we had a partner in technology that allows us to dictate the inflow of the data. In all data reporting or monetization out there, the inflow of data is critical. IFS helps us to master the seemingly simple things first, like building labor and parts accurately,” explains Ozgul. “That seems very fundamental but believe it or not it’s easy to do wrong and provides a ton of value when we get it right. With IFS we have a simpler platform with less integrations – and every integration is a breakage point, so this improves integrity. It gives us the ability to aggregate data, which is very unique and imperative for our long-term vision. Every single work order in IFS generates hundreds of data points and over time this allows us to generate very valuable insights, which is where we feel we can drive a significant point of differentiation for our business.”

#4: Work Smarter, Not Harder

I began covering these topics in 2008 and the advancements in technology just in that timeframe are astounding. To achieve digital transformation success, and to maximize ROI, it’s important to acknowledge not only the sophistication of the technology itself but also of the ecosystem that exists to aid you in your efforts. Pekka Nurmi, Director of Corporate IT at Cimcorp, discusses this using the phrase “work smarter, not harder.”

Working smarter can be accomplished in a variety of ways – reducing the number of systems in use to achieve greater simplicity, outsourcing responsibilities that aren’t necessary to handle in-house, and realizing that you may be surprised how well today’s technologies work sans time-consuming and expensive customizations. The general idea behind much of Pekka’s message is that modern IT is more about strategy and vision, and less about execution.

“The strategy is that we are always reducing the number of the systems in house to focus on what’s core to our business,” he says. “We also look for opportunities to outsource. There is so much new stuff we have to take care of, like a compliance, information security, and embedding IT and IT processes, so we always are trying to find things that we don’t have to do ourselves anymore.” Pekka and I discussed the fact that there seems to be a desire for control and even a sense of ego that prevents companies from utilizing the vast array of resources at their disposals today, but when you let go of the need for control you can often get more accomplished.

“It’s so important to try not to over-complicate any of the processes and topics,” says Pekka. “If we look at ERP systems or software in general, they already have built-in processes, and tried out ways of working. Have an open mind that maybe somebody has found the golden egg of approaches that’s already built into the system. We’ve worked to accept what the platform enables, and we’ve been trying to channel our energy to provide value to the customer using that. The innovation in that is really about finding a platform that fits your business and then accepting that platform.”

#5: Focus on Function Vs. Speed

There isn’t a scenario in which you can just opt out of the need for digital transformation. However, you also shouldn’t race ahead based on an “us too” mentality – digital transformation ROI isn’t a box you can check. As Trond Aune, Global ERP Manager at Jotun says, “doing it right is more important that doing it first, or fast.”

I can’t emphasize his point enough, because there are hoards of companies whose digital transformation initiatives have failed because they mistakenly assumed there was a shortcut to success. There are no shortcuts and racing will only result in determinantal mistakes. A steady-paced path of digital transformation that includes building a strong technological foundation, optimizing processes and cross-functional collaboration, and amply managing change will get you farther, faster than looking for a quick fix.

“Our digitalization approach is not to be the fanciest or to utilize every digital tool that exists. We are very focused on making decisions either because it serves our customers or because it will improve our efficiency,” says Trond. “So, we are not jumping in all kinds of digitalization trends, but we are very focused on the activities we start. We pick our important areas which make us unique and that is where we focus our energy on digital transformation.”

#6: Embrace the Reality of Continual Evolution

The final common trait for those succeeding at digital transformation is an understanding that it really isn’t a transformation so much as a continuum – meaning, it’s a journey not a destination. Digitalization isn’t an effort you complete, but one you continually evolve and expand upon.

Klaus Glatz, Chief Digital Officer at ANDRITZ  discusses this continual evolution in his podcast episode. “Digitalization for us is on one hand internal, so optimizing processes, delivering new solutions, helping our people to really focus on what they need to do,” says Klaus. “And then on the other hand, we are digitalizing for our customers, creating additional revenue, implementing new models, like performance-based contracts or revenue sharing models up to equipment-as-a-service. Technology offers a lot of possibilities and, even though we’ve already done a lot, we are still in the learning phase. For instance, with AI and machine learning and anomaly detection, we are still in the phase of learning and understanding how we can use them. We’ve started, but we have so much to further explore in how we can use these technologies to further optimize what we are doing.”

To avoid the overwhelm that can come with a never-ending journey, Klaus suggests thinking big but starting small. In other words, have a big-picture idea of what you’re aiming for but work toward that picture in consumable chunks. “Our mission is to develop a fully-autonomous solution. Starting from zero, it’s very ambitious. That’s why you need to have a very clear plan, which steps you need today in order to get there,” he says. “We started very small, very easy but it’s also important not to work two years in your protected environment, go out to the customers and learn you’re off. Failing is also okay. This is also something we needed. Think big and start small has been key to our success.”

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June 25, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Super Service

June 25, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Super Service

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By Tom Paquin

Nowadays, the public discourse on comic book characters is so firmly entrenched into the mainstream that summer blockbuster season (at least in a normal year) is usually clogged with capes, tights, and, I don’t know, Iron Man suits or whatever. Partially because they’re owned by the evil mouse company, much of that discourse centers around Marvel properties, like Captain America, Spider-Man, The Hulk, and so on. And yes, people study this.

Child of the eighties as I am, this is not quite where I stand (I will say, however, that in the leadup to the birth of my daughter, my pregnant wife and I watched all of the Marvel movies in order and quite enjoyed them). For me and my ilk, owing overwhelmingly to the success of the 1989 Tim Burton film, Batman was the hero du jour (And he’s still overwhelmingly popular, of course). As a youngster, I got Batman comics (and occasionally Superman comics for a while, at least, after he died), had more than one Batman-themed birthday, and routinely dressed as Batman for Halloween.

I’m Vengeance.

We can certainly debate the ethics of a “hero” whose power is that he is so rich he can beat people indiscriminately, but that doesn’t change the fact that I was a DC kid, and if I’m going to spend the lead-up to a holiday discussing a superhero through a service lens, it’s going to be the one that I actually know a lot about.

And Batman is a great fit for service, actually. Every night, Batman patrols the streets, taking planned appointments, calls from regulators (frequent visits with Commissioner Gordon), and addressing random issues and crimes as they arrive. Heck, Batman even has a dispatcher, Oracle, feeding him information and offering hacking support remotely.

So what sort of service functionality might Batman benefit from? Here are some thoughts:

Asset Monitoring

Knowing the Penguin, there’s little chance that he can stay away from Gotham’s first national bank for very long. So—why not have sensors inside the vault that ensure normal use, and send out exception alerts any time there are anomalies? In a perfect world, predictive systems can be triggered if there’s for instance, a temperature spike (if, say, his henchmen are using blowtorches), so that Batman can be dispatched, even before there’s a breach.

With more complex assets, like, for instance, Gotham observatory, which Mr. Freeze might use to amplify his freezing ray, connectivity could allow for remote access. Going a step beyond remote assistance, this could allow, in many cases, for assets to be either shut down remotely, or controlled, throttled down, or adjusted, thus avoiding a break. Or in the Mr. Freeze case, freezing the entire city.

Knowledge Management

The Riddler’s big thing is, you know, riddles. On a very basic level, having historical access to his riddles, and perhaps the computational chops to assign patterns, might help Batman crack them without needing to bring the thing back to the Batcave to brainstorm with Robin.

More broadly, though, Batman is periodically put into extreme situations where he needs to either use a machine he’s not familiar with, or perhaps find an antidote for a toxin from The Joker or Scarecrow, or simply get the schematics for Gotham’s sewer system to figure out where Killer Croc might be hiding. Batman can’t take the time to scuttle back to his supercomputer in order to do that—all of those insights need to be made mobile. Better yet—they should be tied into his cowl so that he can utilize them in augmented reality where appropriate.

SLA Compliance

This should go without saying, but when you have a rogues gallery as deep as Batman’s, it’s sometimes hard to remember whether Kite Man is supposed to be in Arkham Asylum or Blackgate prison. When apprehending any supervillain, it’s important to know the expectations that you should follow. Though Batman doesn’t seem particularly interested in complying the authorities outside of the commissioner, he certainly doesn’t want to raise their ire, either. Knowing where to deposit the criminals he catches is undoubtedly key to successfully continuing his unregulated vigilantism.

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June 21, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

5 Necessities for Field Technician Retention in a Modern Service Landscape

June 21, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

5 Necessities for Field Technician Retention in a Modern Service Landscape

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

There’s a major emphasis among service organizations on the need to modernize and master the recruitment and hiring of a new wave of field talent. This emphasis is incredibly important, and we’ve discussed this topic in some of our content – but today’s article is about what it takes to keep the great talent you already have as the service landscape evolves.

Whether your field talent has been on board for two years or 20, there’s a strong likelihood their scope of work has changed and is continuing to change. With the majority of businesses embracing the move to delivering outcomes, what’s required of field technicians from now and into the future is different than it may have been when your existing talent signed up for the job. That doesn’t mean, however, that these employees can’t commit to or execute on the new service mission. In fact, it makes perfect sense to focus ample energy on maximizing the use of your existing resources rather than overlooking a treasure trove of talent by focusing only on what you don’t have.

So keeping in mind that recruiting and hiring new talent is imperative, let’s put our focus here on five necessary areas when it comes to retaining the knowledgeable, skilled technicians you already have and fitting them into the new era of service.

#1: Invest in Connection

Change is hard for most humans, but connection is what helps your employees feel they are a part of the change rather than the change is happening to them. Regular communication, authentic interest in your employees as human beings, the ability for them to ask questions and provide feedback are all characteristics that are important to building and maintaining a connection with your talent that will fortify their relationship with you and the organization and strengthen the likelihood of their buy-in and emotional investment in your service evolution. Keep in mind, too, that COVID only increased the importance of connection and employees’ desire to feel that their overall wellbeing – physical, mental, and emotional – is important to their employer. Investing in connecting more frequently, more deeply, and more honestly with your employees will set a strong foundation for retaining talent.

#2: Set Clear Expectations

Ambiguity breeds frustration. No one can succeed at a role that is poorly defined or where the desired outcome is unclear. Even as your service business evolves, when things may be in flux, it is important for you to consider how to articulate your expectations of your field technicians. This is especially true when they may be moving from the very clear, basic expectations of a break/fix service environment to the more fluid and soft-skills centric expectations of an outcomes-based relationship. You’re of course responsible for providing your employees the knowledge and skill necessary to evolve from basic to advanced service execution, but even before knowledge and skill comes clarity around what you expect them to accomplish.

#3: Equip for Success

If you have current talent who is engaged and open to change, you must do everything in your power to equip them for success – not everyone is so lucky! It can help to build a field technician journey map to understand the various areas within their day-to-day where there is a need or opportunity for improvement in process, technology, or skill to make them more effective. User-friendly, streamlined digital tools that provide real-time access to customer history, a knowledge library, and any other information needed on-site are critical. In 2021, cumbersome or outdated technology is an unacceptable barrier to success for field technicians – especially as you look to modernize the customer experience and mature your service offerings. Beyond digitalization to automate manual processes and provide easy access to information, training and skill building are key. Most companies who are advancing services are requiring more soft skills and relationship-building capabilities from their service teams. You need to ensure you’re giving a willing employee every opportunity to build, improve, and polish those skills. If you’re unsure where your technicians are lacking in information, knowledge, or technology to do their jobs to the best of their abilities, ASK!

#4: Offer Options & Progression Opportunities

As service evolves, some long-term technicians will have an interest in or willingness to adapt and change and others will not. To the degree you can, try to offer options to your existing talent to ensure you can continue to leverage anyone that is useful to your mission. Perhaps it’s a tiered approach, where some technicians choose to grow and expand into a more evolved role and others continue to execute more basic functions. Maybe there’s an opportunity to leverage augmented reality to allow a technician who no longer wants to travel to train some newer hires remotely. A certain technician may incline naturally to some of the newer soft skills needed for the trusted advisor evolution of the role, and you may be able to call on them to lead other team members to similar success. Be as creative and flexible as you can in identifying the strengths of your existing talent and putting it to its best use, while giving ample opportunity for employees to evolve and grow.

#5: Focus on Empowerment

Your field technicians are the face of your brand. The customer experience, in many ways, rests in their hands. You need to focus on treating them like the treasured resources they are, and when you do you may be surprised how much you’ll get out of them. Some employees may be happy to show up day after day, be told what to do, and simply get it done. But for many, they want something more – they want to feel valued, important, and a part of the company’s success (or failure). The more you can foster trust, the more they will feel motivated to do good work. There’s a movement toward more of a “hire good talent and get out of their way” approach versus the more traditional micromanagement approach, and I think this is by-and-large a necessary evolution in order to continue to attract and retain the level of talent that will be needed for the modern service era.

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June 18, 2021 | 2 Mins Read

Dispatchers, Agents, and the Future of the Backoffice

June 18, 2021 | 2 Mins Read

Dispatchers, Agents, and the Future of the Backoffice

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By Tom Paquin

It feels crass, sometimes, discussing how software can help drop dispatcher-to-tech ratios for field operations. I know dispatchers, and I don’t want to support tech that makes them redundant. In spite of this, I think we all understand that automation of back office processes lessen the workload in the back office, which will lead to the flexibility to limit headcount. But I don’t necessarily think that’s the best way to think about it.

I’d argue, more than anything, that service automation software shouldn’t be seen as a way to limit back office workers, but instead as a way to eliminate the need to do simple, repeatable, time consuming tasks, like setting appointment schedules, thereby freeing up back office time to manage more call ins, develop broader service strategies, and focus on more complex, fulfilling, and consequential business decisions.

There are a few avenues where we can parse out the importance of automation as it relates to day-to-day office tasks, so let’s go ahead and put together a few examples.

Scheduling

Scheduling automation is one of the lowest automation bars that can be cleared, but its benefit for the back office is immediately tangible. Under ideal circumstances, service visits will be triaged and triggered through a variety of different channels. This starts with simple distinctions like an online scheduling portal, and can evolve into smart scheduling through alerts triggered by connected assets, chatbot-triggered scheduling, predictive scheduling through IoT, or simply automating routine appointments to take away the onus from the customer and the business.

A fully automated environment changes the role of dispatcher from order-taker to nuanced qualifier and quality expert. Their job transforms away from data entry to dynamically addressing complex or ambiguous requests, and providing the “human touch” that ties the business together.

High-Volume Planning

This, as a component of service scheduling, is one of my favorite topics, mostly because getting it right can be a huge asset for your business, and getting it wrong can saddle you with mediocre software for what can be a long time.

Let’s say you have 2,000 employees at a specific branch of your business, and they schedule, say, 10,000 appointments over the course of that day. With new appointments, exceptions, callouts, weather issues, and other unforeseen circumstances, a dispatcher could spend the entire day tweaking schedules, cancelling appointments, and doing just about anything other than ensuring exceptional customer service. Therefore, a system that automates these processes has the potential of being a huge benefit for dispatch, giving them more time back, since they don’t have to do that level of micromanagement.

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June 14, 2021 | 4 Mins Read

Cashing in on The Opportunity of Outcomes

June 14, 2021 | 4 Mins Read

Cashing in on The Opportunity of Outcomes

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Sometimes it feels like the majority of content I’m creating is around the move to delivering outcomes. But, guess what? That’s because it is THE single biggest trend – in the form of a truly monumental opportunity – that our audience needs to better grasp, understand, and navigate. In a recent report published by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the firm summarizes the importance of this topic quite nicely by saying, “As the focus of creating and capturing value shifts from one-time sales to long-term partnerships, it is driving higher customer retention as well as rapid account expansion. No wonder many CEOs are convinced that deploying outcome-based business models (OBMs, for short) is the best way to win the future.”

As business leaders take note of outcomes as the way to win the future, there’s a deeper recognition than ever before around the criticality of service – as well as the need for digitalization. In fact, BCG states that “Companies deliver outcomes mainly by combining servitization with digitalization.” I’ve never heard it put this simply, but I love this statement and it illustrates why both of these themes are so inextricably linked. While the statement of outcomes = servitization + digitalization makes it look so darn simple, the reality is that the journey to outcomes proves quite complex for those that seek to cash in on its opportunity.

What It Takes

BCG discusses the evidence of how pervasive the move to delivering outcomes is becoming. The firm also examines the three common characteristics they’ve recognized among adopters of an outcomes-based model. It’s well worth your time to read the report in full, but let me summarize here briefly in my own words:

  • Customer focused. The first characteristic is that these organizations are customer-driven, which is absolutely necessary to have success in this endeavor. If your focus of delivering outcomes is solely the impact it can have on the business in terms of revenue, without the focus on how you can actually help fulfill a customer need, you will fail. The report quotes a Harvard Business School Professor, Theodore Levitt, as writing: “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” You absolutely have to master the understanding of what it is your customers want and need.
  • Measurable results. The second characteristic the report discusses is the need to provide measurable, quantifiable results. If you think about the nature of outcomes, this makes sense. Customers will want evidence and tracking of the value they’ve been delivered, so as an organization, you have to think through how you will provide that level of insight.
  • Enabled by digital. The journey to outcomes isn’t possible without digitalization, and BCG discusses the fact that many recent digital transformation efforts have been put in place specifically to enable this move to outcomes. The availability of asset performance information, the real-time exchange of insights, and the ability to leverage data are all foundational elements of delivering on an outcomes-based model.

What Stands in the Way?

When you begin to really ponder the layers of an evolution from transaction-based business to an outcomes-based model, it becomes easy to uncover where the complexity comes in. While the bumps on this journey vary from industry to industry and company to company, there are a few common challenges we’ve uncovered in our Future of Field Service interviews:

  • Lack of alignment. For an outcomes-based model to be fully embraced and adopted, there must be agreement on the value of moving to outcomes and this agreement has to be shared by the top leadership of the company. Often, we speak with service leaders who are bullish about the opportunity outcomes presents their company but are working with top leadership who is very traditional and doesn’t share that perspective. Because the delivery of outcomes relies on an elimination of siloes and a cohesive, collaborative approach, alignment among leadership is imperative.
  • Layered legacy and change management. For most organizations, the move to outcomes represents a massive change and legacy mindset, culture, and practices often get in the way. From sales and marketing to operations and service, from R&D and production to IT and financials, everyone has to be on board with this change for it be successful and there are a lot of historical beliefs and processes that have to evolve. Overcoming resistance to change and creating buy-in on the value of migrating away from the company’s legacy is often the hardest challenge companies face on this journey.
  • Digital lag. As we discussed earlier, digitalization is essential in delivering outcomes. Companies that are laggards in their digital transformation efforts must first contend with modernizing their systems and creating foundational functionality before they can really dig into the introduction of an outcomes-based model. Whether the challenge is outdated, legacy technology, disparate and disjointed systems, or functionality gaps, a certain degree of digital competency must be achieved to fulfill the outcomes-based value proposition.

Will It be Worth It?

Absolutely, undoubtedly, 100-percent yes. The reality is, in fact, there’s no choice. Outcomes is the future, for service and for business overall. I couldn’t say it better than BCG does in the summary of their report: “A word of caution. As more customers start demanding outcomes, challenging suppliers and software vendors to deploy outcomes-based models, it may be dangerous to ignore them. Companies that can’t deliver outcomes and don’t have a role to play in their customers’ ecosystems may find they are expendable. They will give up market share, miss growth opportunities, and lose long-term buyers.”

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June 11, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

What Will Become of the Pure Service Provider?

June 11, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

What Will Become of the Pure Service Provider?

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By Tom Paquin

We spend a lot of our time here discussing servitizaiton: The act of repositioning traditionally product-oriented businesses with a more service-oriented mindset. It’s obvious why we do this: Servitization is a compelling trends, especially in manufacturing, but also in the ways in which industries like utilities, telecommunications, and others are embracing service.

We’ve centralized this conversation so much on the move towards product diversification that it’s easy to overlook the companies that have been there all along. Is there and equal, but opposite move in those organizations to “de-servitize”, thus creating internal product categories with which to service? From my experience, the answer is generally no—there’s a lot more of an incentive to become a service than to become a product provider.

But the move towards servitization does have an impact on pure service providers, of course. Suddenly, relationships with product categories, vendors, are fraught, as once allies in the battle for business could potentially become competitors.

These changes mean that pure service businesses need to make sure that their core offering—service—is of the highest possible quality. So from order scheduling, to routing, to parts, to follow-up, to customer retention, and everything in between, service companies need to go beyond optimization to make exceptional service a true value-add for their customers.

We’ve certainly been able to feature a lot of stories for how companies have done this well, but there are a few constants. Chief among them is making sure that their technical infrastructure is catered to the contours of their business specifically. This means choosing software that’s built with a service-first mindset, understands, broadly, your industry, and has tools that don’t just work for you in the abstract.

Below are links to some of my favorite pure service stories. While these three all service products in specific industries they each provide exceptional templates for making sure that the core of a service business is offered at a world-class level.

Smart Care

“We needed technology that would help us build a better customer experience. From an end user perspective, I call it the Amazon mentality or consumerization that’s happened so this whole expectation of service delivery and timing a service delivery and great communication and constant communication flow, but also things like information on the equipment you’re working on and work order management systems. Impacting the customer experience was first and foremost for us.”

Spencer Technologies

“In today’s always-on world, customers demand insight. We realized about 18 months ago that we weren’t giving them enough information – they wanted more from us, and we needed to better use our technology to deliver. Customers want to know, at a glance, how we’re performing against our SLA, how long the technicians have been on-site, the reason for any delays or re-visits. They want to check in continuously to get that status update and know everything is happening as planned.”

Park Place Technologies

“In light of this pandemic, digital capability is more important now than ever. It’s been instrumental in our ability to make sure that our customers can safely work remotely, but at the same time know that their data centers, for example, are running healthy and they can support their end users, and their customers, and their essential services.”

Brady Services

“Sometimes when you’ve been successful in doing things a certain way for a long time, it’s hard to understand why you’d need to do something a different way. We’ve really focused in the last several years on our culture and have been very intentional about how we wanted to preserve the good and evolve as we’ve needed to. It’s really come down to getting good leaders in place and having a culture that is very performance-based, very data-driven and very process-focused, and helping everybody understand that that’s not a bad thing. That’s a good thing and it’s going to help us continue to grow and continue to distinguish ourselves from our competitors in the marketplace. Sounds easy, but it’s a lot of work to take an organization in that direction.”

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The Value of Fresh Perspective in Field Service: 4 Real-World Examples of Impact

June 7, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

The Value of Fresh Perspective in Field Service: 4 Real-World Examples of Impact

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

True innovation rarely happens in a bubble. The best ideas are born of creative freedom, collaboration, a fail-forward environment, and by seeking the perspective of others to fuel your inspiration, ideas, and plans. This resource, Future of Field Service, and the community group I run exist largely to serve the purpose of having a place to find peer insights and to glean lightbulb moments from tales of success, failure, and lessons learned.

But perhaps your company’s struggles to transform and innovate service demand more than what you can gain from listening to a podcast or even having a one-on-one chat with a peer. If this is the case, you might want to consider the value of bringing in some fresh perspective. I’ve noticed over the last couple of months more and more examples of how companies looking to advance service offerings are recognizing the need to embrace and leverage outside expertise.

This fresh perspective can take many different forms. In fact, we’ve seen several examples within some of our recent content – partnership with very hands-on consultants, bringing expertise in from another industry, and hiring proven transformative leadership to replicate past successes. Culturally, of course, there can be a tendency to want to own the path or claim the success of transformation. However, the amount of change happening in field service today is immense and letting go of ego to recognize the significant impact some outside expertise or fresh eyes could bring may be the key to your success.

Let’s examine what this can look like in practice based on some examples I’ve taken from recent Future of Field Service interviews:

  • Value Proposition & Selling. Last week we published the first half of a two-part podcast with Howard Bowland, VP Field Services Australia at Schneider Electric and Scott Weller, Partner at Mossrake. The two previously worked together at Hewlett-Packard and have teamed up to introduce the as-a-Service model into Schneider Electric. Howard is leading this initiative inside the company, and Mossrake is assisting as a consultant partner. In the podcast, Howard speaks at length about not only seeing the potential for as-a-Service within Schneider and advocating to bring that potential to life, but in the benefit of working alongside a partner who has real-world success in such a transformation. This benefit has been particularly true in the value Mossrake has added in helping to develop the go-to-market with Schneider Electric as well as taking a SWAT-team approach to introducing the value proposition to customers and helping to upskill and train the Schneider sales talent who is accustomed to selling in a completely different manner to often a totally different audience. When you think about how big of a shift advanced and outcomes-based service offerings are when it comes to creating, articulating, and influencing on the value proposition, you can see how leveraging new talent and/or an experienced partner to bring the value proposition to life and bring the teams up to speed could be immensely beneficial.
  • So, selling the new value proposition is one thing, but how do you grow awareness of the modern incarnation of your company and feed your funnel? Marketing. We recently had on the podcast Jennifer Deutsch, CMO of Park Place Technologies, who joined the company four years ago from outside the industry. Jennifer has 38 years of marketing experience and has worked for brands such as Marriott, Ritz-Carlton, and Nestle. The fresh perspective she’s brought into PPT has added a layer of punchiness, simplicity, and draw to the company’s marketing that, in my opinion, is very impactful. For example, the company’s tagline “Uptime All the Time” speaks to what matters most to customers in an attention-grabbing way. As the value of service evolves and expands, marketing is another area that perhaps could benefit from the innovative look of someone with experience outside the organization or even industry.
  • Operational Transformation. A little over a year ago, Karl Lowe joined Panasonic Heating and Cooling Solutions Europe as the Head of Panasonic European Service. On the podcast, Karl speaks of his experience over the last 10 years developing service organizations for OEMs. At Panasonic, he’s been tasked with determining how best the company can leverage service as a strategic differentiator. As a historically very product-centric business, the idea of brining in talent that has experience leading service in more service-centric organizations, or better yet, has a track record of helping organizations grow into more service centric businesses, can be a very smart move. The operational change needed in order to transform to advanced or outcomes-based service is no small feat, and someone who has learned some of the hard lessons of the journey firsthand can help navigate the choppy waters in a smoother way. Karl came into Panasonic with a clear mind and quickly got to work on assessing the current state of the operations, defining desired outcomes, and determining the path to success. This sort of objectivity can be hard to attain from those closest to present-day operations, so augmenting your current leadership who are masters of where you’ve been with someone who has experience from where you’d like to be is a good way to strike balance.
  • Modernization of IT. Pekka Nurmi, Director of Corporate IT at Cimcorp, was a management consultant before joining Cimcorp around five years ago. Now, he is taking a fresh approach to the company’s IT strategy that focuses more on leading and less on doing. In his podcast interview, Pekka discusses how he feels his consulting background gives him a good appreciation for the business side of things which helps him be a stronger IT leader. He is making some major changes at Cimcorp, focusing on how technology has and continues to rapidly evolve, to help the company keep pace with change and stay ahead of demand. I was struck by Pekka’s fresh take, objective observances, and clear goals and I think IT is another area of immense opportunity for brining in a new perspective.

These are just a couple of recent examples – when you think about how the necessary skillsets are expanding and evolving with the introduction of more advanced services, you can think of many other areas where outside viewpoints, skills, and help could be beneficial. For example, data is another major area of growth and opportunity. Another approach we’ve seen is the introduction of a centralized, functional role to drive the fresh perspective and innovation so that the leadership in place can continue to focus on current business and operations while the functional team works to leverage those leaders as subject matter experts to chart the path and drive the success for the future of the business.

However you look at it, or however you incorporate it, there’s always value in a more diverse set of opinions, in better vetting new ideas, and in incorporating various sets of expertise.

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Cybersecurity can’t be an Afterthought in Service

June 4, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

Cybersecurity can’t be an Afterthought in Service

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By Tom Paquin

Why is it that people never want to take preventative measures? I’m reminded of Y2K, when we were told that a catastrophic glitch in computer systems would lead to widespread outages, unexpected nuclear missile launches, and all other manner of nightmare. This prompted years of thoughtful preventative action from programmers, who meticulously re-coded systems and prepared our digital infrastructure. On January 1, 2000, when we woke up to an undisturbed world, the simple minded people of the world wondered why we took it all so seriously. “Nothing even happened,” they would say. Perhaps nothing happened because responsible people acknowledged and addressed the issue before it became a catastrophe.

This simpleminded philosophy of only having the mental capacity to address things as they’re happening is why people put off physician visits, why people don’t invest in health insurance, and why cybersecurity and continuity planning are so often shuffled to the side of the public discourse.

A recent series of high-profile cybersecurity incidents have, it would seem, opened the eyes of some of those simple-minded people, causing them to conclude that yes, this could even happen to them. Our lives are a lot more than simply enhanced by technology in 2021—for many of us, our ability to function is contingent upon technology.

In service, this is overwhelmingly the case. Imagine if you woke up tomorrow and lost access to schedules, customer lists, payroll, scheduling tools, your bank, or your vehicle.

Catastrophic, right? And the reality is that these threats come from different sources. Hopefully none of this is news to you, but let’s talk about some of these sources in plain terms.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)

For quite a while when a business was “hacked”, they were often actually the victim of a DDoS attack. These things still happen all the time. A distributed denial of service attack essentially weaponizes web traffic in order to cripple a site. A website is like a road, and the more cars you put on the road, the slower it’s going to go. If enough cars all converge on a single road, from different directions, then nobody can go anywhere. And this is what a DDoS attack does—sending web queries from thousands of IP addresses simultaneously until a service crashes, this “denying service”.

Imagine that your service firm has online scheduling, and that you’re the target of a DDoS attack. Hackers will initiate thousands of scheduling requests, thus crippling the queue and crashing the site. How are you prepared for this? Are you able to pull requests from the queue? Do you have a CAPTCHA set up to ensure that traffic is actually human? What is your continuity plan for when a webpage goes down? Each businesses understands implicitly its own service needs and urgency, here, and each will establish its own criteria, but this is yet another reminder of the importance of planning ahead.

Phishing

Phishing would be the other end of the “I was hacked” coin alongside DDoS, and I’m extremely hopeful that I’m not breaking new ground for anyone that’s reading this. We should all know what phishing is, and we should all be cognizant and suspicious of it in our day to day lives.

Phishing is when hackers attempt to capture credentialed information by sending out official-seeming emails and creating webpages that look like legitimate email or bank websites, in the hopes that you’ll put in your email address and password before you realize that you’ve made a mistake.

So yes, we should all be on the lookout for phishing in our day-to-day lives, but phishing is also the means by which many businesses install tracking software on computers. More maliciously, if a high-level service professional is the victim of phishing, then suddenly external forces may have access to sensitive information like location, total number of assets, asset performance, or even more maliciously, the ability to remotely interact with assets. We don’t want disconnected HVAC systems or unrestrained capital equipment.

Preventing phishing tends to be, primarily, an awareness campaign for businesses, and while it’s useful to have a training when an employee joins the organization, it’s arguably more important to create mandatory re-training benchmarks for employees. Look—we all have been guilty of skimming an official looking email and clicking on a link when we’re in the middle of three different things. We just need to be mindful of what we’re doing, and that is where smart training is key.

Ransomware

Ransomware, like the others, is nothing new. Often, it’s initiated by a phishing attempt, or alternatively by remotely accessing someone’s computer (often through a bogus tech support phone call), visiting a malicious website that downloads the software in the background, or via physical media like a USB stick.

What ransomware does is it encrypts everything on a user’s computer (or ideally their network), and holds your machine for ransom. Typically, the only message on the screen will be directions, or a bitcoin account, and a threat to release public information, or to continue to restrict access to computers. Obviously, even minutes without access to integral systems could spell doom for a digital organization. For that reason, the ransoms are often paid, and the perpetrators, perhaps surprisingly true to their word, typically restore access to the website.

Because it can originate from many places, ransomware is hard to prevent, but in service, it’s doubly important to protect field equipment from meddling. Technicians should have equipment best practices with respect to mobile and rugged devices, ensuring that they’re in their possession at all times, or locked in a vehicle.

Unfortunately, like anything, there’s no 100% safe way to tackle all of this, and one could look at this article and question our digital transformation strategy as moving too fast, or relying too much on automation, but the fact of the matter is that the digital good outweighs the digital bad. Companies looking to succeed in business, therefore, owe it to themselves to have a solid contingency plan in place for cybersecurity. Planning ahead now will position you to avoid catastrophe down the road.

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What You Can Learn from Schneider Electric’s Unique Approach to Delivering Outcomes-Based Service

May 31, 2021 | 9 Mins Read

What You Can Learn from Schneider Electric’s Unique Approach to Delivering Outcomes-Based Service

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I absolutely love sitting down to talk with different service leaders about how they are spearheading innovation and transformation within their companies. Across industries and regions, the evolution from break-fix service to delivering experiences and outcomes holds so much potential and excitement. There’s so much to learn from listening to how various organizations are tackling the complexity that comes with this migration.

I recently had the chance to sit down with Howard Bowland, VP Field Services Australia at Schneider Electric to talk about how he’s led the region on a journey to delivering power-as-a-service. He’s enlisted the help of former Hewlett-Packard Enterprise colleague Scott Weller, who is a partner at Mossrake, to use his region of Schneider Electric as a blueprint for success for the global organization.

Both Howard and Scott have experience at HPE and realize that the IT industry’s progress in outcomes-based service is just as possible in a wide variety of other industries. “Any time you have a long-lived asset that may require specialty skills to maintain, it's a perfect setup for pay-as-you-go pricing,” says Scott. “Then, if you think about a business that thinks of these assets as critical but not core, it's not the business they're in. It's not a core competency. It's very clear that this is a perfect setup for as-a-service models and really a shift to a focus to outcomes.”

When Howard joined Schneider Electric, he recognized the opportunity to introduce his learnings into the organization and transform service. “Coming into this company, a slightly different segment from the IT industry, I was coming from having worked with the IT industry in developing that cloud economics for IT assets and for really operationalizing that in the Asian Pacific theater,” he describes. “As I came into Schneider Electric, there really wasn't anything in place around providing customer greater value over and above the traditional asset-ownership model. It first started with the thought of, "Could we do this? Why couldn't we do this with the kind of assets that the customers are acquiring from Schneider Electric?"

From that initial thought has grown a project under Howard’s leadership, with Scott and Mossrake’s help, that has brought Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure outcomes-based service model to fruition. Coming up this week and next on the Future of Field Service podcast, I do a deep dive with Howard and Scott into the project – from vision to future plans. Be sure to stay tuned for the two-part discussion, but in the meantime, here are five worthwhile aspects of their approach you may be able to learn from.

#1 – Enlist Help

Howard, having worked with Scott at HPE, knew firsthand his expertise in building an outcomes-based model. He decided that if he were to introduce this evolution into Schneider Electric, he would need to enlist help to juggle both the day-to-day work and a major transformation. “Some people might think of consultants as advisors that can write a report, for example, but, really, the Mossrake team and Scott were in the trenches actually developing the offer,” he explains. “What it gave me the opportunity to do was to have confidence that we had done it, that we had people that knew how we could navigate it in a new location, and then to bring my own people on that journey and see and learn from being part of that. What I found was that people wanted to join the team and wanted to be part of it because they saw the excitement through in the innovation, the learning opportunity to do something really quite new. And introducing a new business model into a company of any kind is even more challenging than you think even if you've done it before.”

One of the most common challenges I hear from service leaders working to progress on the outcomes-based service journey is the constraint that comes from essentially working two full-time jobs; one leading the current business, and one building the future business. Brining in outside help may be a great option to temporarily augment your team with folks that have fresh perspective and vetted skillsets. “We came into this opportunity with Howard having all that experience back at HPE, so we knew, certainly lived through, the trenches of trying to introduce a new business model like this into a large, multinational company,” says Scott. “Of course, we started with a look at the market but then quickly turned to an internal view: the culture, the appetite for innovation, the process for innovation, looking at the full value chain from sales channel, delivery operations. We came to the conclusion, that there was a huge opportunity for Schneider Electric. We built a plan, and the plan was really based on the premise of agile development.”

#2 – Take a Pilot Approach

To introduce this type of change at a macro scale in a multi-national corporation seems a bit daunting, right? It certainly would be. Therefore, what Schneider Electric did, was allow Howard, his team, and Mossrake to essentially pilot the transformation within his region with the intent of documenting the journey in detail to serve as a blueprint for expansion to other regions. “This is also the approach we took at HP. We've done it with Howard and Schneider Electric, and we're working on a couple of other clients as well,” says Scott. “I would say the beauty of this is being able to do this in a microcosm, where if it were to fail for some reason, the risk to the company is small. The reputational risk, primarily, but even operationally, even financially, the risk is very small. It lets you learn, because inevitably you're going to learn. No two companies are the same. No two as-a-service offers are going to be the same, so you have to allow for that.”

Using the pilot approach allows you to contain those learnings to a region, so that you can adjust and improve and determine exactly what works before you take the transformation to scale. “Being able to de-risk the journey helps for a lot of companies who first consider stakeholder perception,” explains Scott. “If you think about yourself as a dividends-value company, moving to a model like this may really upset stakeholder perception, so it gives you time to succeed, learn, and really be planful about how you want to pivot the company around something like this in a way that you can talk to your stakeholders about, you can talk to your employees about. It's really, we think, the right approach.”

#3 – Leverage a SWAT Team to Build Acceptance, Foster Skill Building and Minimize Risk

Howard, Scott, and I discuss in detail within the podcast that far and away the most challenging aspect of this journey is around the go-to-market. Because the value proposition of an outcomes-based or as-a-Service model is so fundamentally different, getting this part right is absolutely critical to success. What Schneider Electric did is use a SWAT team approach to protect its customer experience and ensure buy-in was built among internal and external stakeholders.

“There's definitely complexity in migrating the go-to-market model and the sales approach is vastly different,” says Howard. “In the early stages, in fact, you want to keep the uneducated or uninitiated salespeople away from the customer conversation. The SWAT team can come and start profiling the customers before you go meet them with the salespeople, and then act as specialized resources who introduce the conversation,” explains Howard. “From there you can offer sales tools and some training to help the general sales force understand the concept better, helps us profile the customer better, and build the skill to have those conversations. But to work customers through the pipeline, we need to still have a pretty high degree of specialization.”

If you can leverage skilled resources to lead those initial conversations in this SWAT approach, you can more adeptly familiarize your talent with exactly how different of a story the outcomes-based service value proposition is. “The sale cycle is completely different, much longer, typically. They have to be accustomed to doing that. If they're more transactional, it's very difficult for those individuals to transition, and so there's just a lot of work involved in bringing the go to market around,” says Scott. “What I had to do is build a SWAT force, because you couldn't rely on bringing people along fast enough. You had to show and do and bring people along that way, figure out who could come along on the journey to this new kind of go to market. In a way, with Howard, we've done a little bit of that, injecting people who, both from our firm and other folks within the organization, to be that SWAT deployment to go after the early deals and bring the rest of the organization along.”

#4 – Adopt Agile Methodology & Strong Documentation to Refine and Expand

Howard and Scott agreed from the beginning in an agile approach. “The agile method is key. We're making this thing work. The customer sees a good outcome. Inside, we've got people running around on treadmills, but we'll replace that with systems and automation and so on at the right times,” says Howard. “It's just keeping ahead of that curve. That makes it an affordable way to develop it. If we tried to develop all the capability and have it readied and put in place so that we could cut the ribbon it, it would be a much more challenging assignment to get the investment for it.”

As with any transformation, starting with small successes and then building is a consumable, practical approach. The journey to outcomes can be similar. “Agile doesn't mean just winging it. You have to have a sense of where you're trying to get to. You have to have a fundamental vision and a belief, as Howard mentioned, and then that guides you,” says Scott. “Even though, on any given day, you might be working on pricing, or you might be working on a revised channel program, which itself takes several steps to mature through, but you know where you're going. It's just a matter of accepting that you won't have a completely finished product on day one. You've already stated that. You've got a minimum product. That's going to be good enough to have a conversation with the customer about, and even sell to them, in a pilot sense.”

Also key to Schneider Electric’s initiative was impeccable documentation so that this pilot-approach transformation could be followed by any region to come. “I felt that it was important that this be repeatable and we document our journey,” says Howard. “As we went on this journey as well, we, strengthened our existing process documentation for just our regular bricks of service capability. There was a systematic approach to building out the blueprint for how to do this and document that, and that was a key part of what Mossrake brought to us, what our team worked on, and we've created that repository of documentation and learnings and insights, which has been really useful to keep us on track and will be useful as other regions of Schneider replicate what we're doing here.”

The deliverable of this documentation and blueprint was another area of value from brining in expert help. “One of the key deliverables from our work together is this operational blueprint, which covers every aspect of the value chain, and then, on top of that, the operational description for actually how the run what's effectively an engagement with the customer,” explains Scott. “As-a-service ends up looking like a consulting engagement that just doesn't necessarily have an endpoint. All of that is what, in our conversations with other countries and regions within Schneider, that's the foundational element is that operational blueprint.”

#5 – Be Tenacious in Your Pursuit of Potential

Finally, know that the journey will not be smooth sailing. “I have to give a lot of credit to Howard,” says Scott. “It takes a lot of stamina and tenacity to really navigate this into a big company, especially if you're sitting in a region. You're not at worldwide, where a lot of the innovation is expected to come from.”

Howard reflects on his experiences at HPE as motivation for seeing this potential come to life at Schneider Electric. “We’d had this success at HPE, and so I knew it was challenging but I also understood it could be done,” he explains. “I had the advantage of my upstream management being open to discussions and then ultimately finding a global leader that was really passionate about it as well to help the funding. But there's a lot of people between that person and getting it done, and that's where it takes a lot of energy. You have to understand the importance of not taking no as the answer. You've got to find the person that can say yes and get support. We could easily have stopped at various points because it looked like it wasn't going to be possible to do what we wanted to do. That tenacity comes in in making sure you continue to look for the way.”

Click on the link for more information on Schneider Electric’s innovative aaS offer EcoStruxure Outcomes: Secure Power as a Service - www.se.com/au/outcomes

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Living with COVID: Decentralizing Dispatch

May 28, 2021 | 4 Mins Read

Living with COVID: Decentralizing Dispatch

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By Tom Paquin

Office work sure ain’t what it used to be (eighteen months ago). Businesses are hybrid-izing work expectations and streamlining office space for a more streamlined in-office staff, ISPs are being pushed to the brink to support home office videoconferencing on a whole new level, and many people are discovering what some of us have known for a while: Working from home can be really, truly, what you need to (literally) get the job done.

I’ve written about the service ramifications of this from ITSM, wherein businesses now need to think very carefully about supply chain, device management, and triage in order to manage how, where, and why service vehicles are deployed at all. But this new paradigm has internal and external ramifications across a wide array of different axes. Let’s explore one of them.

The truth of the matter is that service businesses may be just as likely as any other busines to want to limit the amount of physical footprint that they have, chiefly within the context of the backoffice. Obviously this is less of a possibility for manufacturers, telco providers, or utilities, where there’s more of a need of physical infrastructure. For straight service providers, though, there are certainly some possibilities.

Is the prospect of shuttering a great deal of physical real estate a unique challenge? Obviously, yes, but with a set plan of how you’re going to proceed, and what you need to do to make these moves equitable to your staff, there are a lot of tools that can support. As we always say here, your business’ unique needs will shift marginally from certain elements of what we outline here. Nevertheless, it’s worth considering. Let’s break down some elements:

Getting a holistic view

Service businesses can’t build a coherent strategy if dispatch centers are siloed islands of data and operational utilities. If, for instance, you have a telco that has commercial tower services disconnected from consumer services, you’re doing it wrong. Systems feed off of a shared resource base, even if the technicians or parts will never cross over between two groups. Businesses looking to decentralize their understanding of their business need to start by centralizing the insights of service, parts, and asset management.

Increasing the ratio of technicians to dispatchers

Thinking about reducing the size of internal offices means naturally thinking about how resource allocation meets the dispatch. We of course already know how businesses succeed at doing this: They employ true scheduling optimization. Not drag-and-drop schedules and pretty colors, like what some companies call “optimization”, but AI-powered utilities that offer a single view of asset performance, available resources, and SLA-powered job expectations, all synthesized in a system that can update in real-time across the whole of your company, not just a single location.

Getting in all on mobile

Yeah, I know that I’m a broken record on mobile supremacy, but whether or not your technicians have office time, they need 100% of their desktop resources on their mobile devices, no exceptions. Mobile field service is so mature that treating it like some sort of ornamental dongle is just plain reckless. What it will take to make this work for your business will depend a lot on what you do, obviously, but at the very least, systems need to be unified across all platforms. No redundancies, no forgotten work order submissions or part requests.

Rethinking parts and logistics

I love a good depot, don’t get me wrong. Be it a train depot, where I spent a lot of my young commuter life, or a Home Depot, where I dump thousands of dollars a year into landscape fabric and screwdrivers, there’s something very nice about a place that has a confluence of all the things. Whether that depot needs to be within spitting distance of a technician’s truck or not is another question. If you’re disseminating service and limiting office space, you have an opportunity to expand service territories out much farther. You just have to think about how you get parts to technicians, or, conversely, how you get materials from technicians available for repair and remanufacturing. You’ll find the mix that works best for you, but with a holistic view, you shouldn’t have a problem employing parts and reverse logistics systems to meet employees wherever you find them, including their homes, or the homes of your customers. The right tools are right in front of you, waiting for you to set the criterial for what they do.

These are but a few small considerations for what the future of work might look like for service, and there are a lot of others worth evaluating as we continue on our post-pandemic journey. While the last year and change has not been particularly fun, the ripples of change offer us all an opportunity to reflect, and reposition ourselves to make the future a lot brighter than it was before.

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