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?

May 3, 2021 | 4 Mins Read

Are Contingent Workers the Missing Piece in Your Advanced Services Puzzle?

May 3, 2021 | 4 Mins Read

Are Contingent Workers the Missing Piece in Your Advanced Services Puzzle?

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Companies leading the charge in capitalizing on the strategic potential of service are all looking for ways to break away from break/fix and advance their service offerings, customer experiences, and revenue streams. Innovation abounds from industry to industry, with a common focus on bringing customers the utmost simplicity, peace of mind, and outcomes – whatever that looks like for each organization’s market. Companies are realizing the immense opportunity that exists in not only introducing more evolved iterations of its core service offerings, but advanced services that incorporate complimentary areas, sharing of expertise, and utilization of data.

As this focus on advanced services increases, the skillsets needed to execute on the outcomes customers desire change and grow. In a break/fix service environment, organizations have traditionally sought very mechanically inclined workers who were incentivized to fix fast and well but not really expected to think about or do much else. In this new world, a host of new skills are needed – the soft skills necessary to be seen by customers as a trusted advisor, skills outside of the historical competencies of the business as companies expand into adjacent areas, and skills that are well positioned to maximize the impact of data.

So how do contingent workers fit in where the necessary skills are becoming more – not less – sophisticated? Hear me out.

I talked recently with Chris La Fratta, Vice President & Head of Professional Services and Solutions Delivery at Philips, who is taking action to evolve and expand the customer outcomes that Philips enables. Chris and I talked at length about many factors related to the evolution to outcomes, and you can stay tuned for our full-length chat on this week’s podcast. That said, one of the points that stuck with me is how Chris is incorporating greater use of contingent workers to free up his W2 talent for the more sophisticated and value-add work that is fueling Philips’ service growth.

“At the end of the day, you can only focus on so much, and you must define what your core competencies are,” explains Chris. “And our core competencies have shifted from people who are really good mechanically and electrically to people more IT oriented, as I said, or people more consultative, which I think is even more kind of a unique skill.”

Being clear on what the focus is for skills allows Chris clarity on where to enlist help from contingent workers. “We've determined over time where we want to focus and develop folks. But guess what? At some point, when we ship product, there's a loading dock where there's tons of boxes of our stuff. We used to pay our staff whatever their hourly rates are to unbox things, and to stage things, and to prep them so that they can go into the hospital. That's a really easy example of where we've used third parties to supplement,” he explains. “It's not a skill that's highly specialized, it's not something that we want to develop a core competency in, and there's some variability around demand. So, if we have a really big fourth quarter, I don't want to hire 100 people and have them part of my fixed costs as we enter the next fiscal year, I want to be able to ramp them up and down as needed. It's really helped there.”

The examination of what’s value-added and what’s more basic can be applied throughout various service offerings and across the customer journey to determine where there are opportunities to free up your most valued resources to focus more on core competencies and development of their skills. “For instance, we do a lot of staging of servers and equipment that's pretty standard and can even be done remotely. So, there, even in the IT space, when it's something fairly basic like loading an image onto a server or doing some configuration, we work with third parties as well,” Chris says. “If I have a third party that shows up on site, they are part of the Philips team, they get treated as if they were a Philips employee, they get the same training, in many cases, that our employees would get. We really do a lot to ensure the quality is there. It's a little bit more difficult to control, if I'm honest with you, but we have a process to check in and make sure that the quality is there.”

While not without its challenges, the incorporation of contingent workers is a viable option to consider as you realize you can’t be a master of all and need to focus on developing skills around the core areas that will impact customers most. “The main benefit is being able to focus on what's core, and it offsets some costs and allows for a lot more flexibility,” says Chris. “It can be a tricky road to go down, but I think it's important. Like I said, the approach we've taken is we're allowing and promoting the development opportunities for our internal folks, so as we shift, they can grow. At the same time, it doesn't make sense for them to unbox equipment and to do basic configurations, so there we benefit from contingent help.”

I think we have to consider the fact that as service continues to advance and expand, we will have to make decisions around what skills are most important to invest more in than others. That will look different for each industry and each company, but how Chris is approaching this at Philips is great food for thought. Be sure to check out his podcast this week for far more insight into how Philips is evolving to deliver advanced services and impactful customer 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

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

April 30, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Living with COVID

April 30, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Living with COVID

By Tom Paquin

Nearly twenty years ago, I was sitting in a seminar hall during a class called “Issues in Biotechnology”. The week’s lesson was on pandemics. I had originally taken the class figuring it’d be a relatively easy way to fulfil a science requirement for my major that I could coast through while focusing on college’s many more important activities, but over the course of that day’s seminar, I was at full attention.

I sat, horrified, as the professor described the likelihood that animal-borne diseases would emerge. The prevailing theory at the time was that we’d be struck with an “avian flu”, since in the late nineties several poultry farmers had started to catch diseases from their chickens, though those diseases had not yet mutated to a stage where they could transfer from human to human. This still happens all the time. The pandemic would be an upper respiratory disease, and would have a devastating impact on, in the words of my professor, the elderly and the very young. “It’s not a matter of if,” he said, “It’s a matter of when. I don’t mean to be alarmist, but we should all be prepared.”

It will likely come as no surprise that, for literal years, I was overwhelmed with a dire sense of paranoia that the dark cloud of pandemic was imminent. As I rode the subway, I peered suspiciously at the human petri dishes around me, wondering about the devastation that any one of us could inflict upon our surroundings. In the intervening years, H1N1 came and went, and the spectre of worldwide pandemic seemed like less and less of a threat in the face of science and technology.

2020, though, showed how much worse reality could be than my expectations.

But now, the US has vaccinated half of its population, and the world is following suit (I will note that my western-centric view ignores the persistent and significant challenges that remain globally, but I am hopeful and confident that a unified effort to combat the virus can support with the resources and expertise to overcome those challenges). According to the New York Times, we’re seeing exponential case growth invert into exponential decay, meaning we’re entering a new phase of our relationship with COVID.

I am confident that the state of Global Pandemic will be lifted, hopefully this year. Dr. Fauci thinks we’ll be in a state of normality in the USA by July 4^th. But the trendlines all have something in common.

They never reach zero.

And yes—in the years since the “Swine flu panic” H1N1 has sidled itself into the shuffled deck of seasonal flus, and COVID-19 is likely to do something similar. And that is fine, in the long run, as our collective human consciousness makes sense of the new illness, but the fact that we have to live with the virus itself also means that we’ll be living, perhaps in perpetuity, with some of its effects. These effects, the tectonic changes in people’s behavior that we’ve normalized over fourteen months, will invariably impact service. For the next few weeks, we’re going to dissect s a few of the ways that things have changed, and what they mean long-term for service. Here’s a few of the topics we’ll be covering:

Meeting People Where They Are
Planning for Perpetual PPE
Decentralized Dispatch

With more to come as we reach the next, next, next, next normal.

On a personal note, my wife is nine months pregnant, with our daughter set to arrive at virtually any moment. In writing this series, I’ve had an opportunity to reflect on the world that she’s going to be born into. I think that it will ultimately be a better one than the one that we were in when the pandemic began. I will sure be trying to make it better for her in every way that I can.

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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

https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Confidence-Unleashing-Potential-Within/dp/038534936X

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

April 26, 2021 | 9 Mins Read

How To Nurture Creative Confidence to Fuel Innovation

April 26, 2021 | 9 Mins Read

How To Nurture Creative Confidence to Fuel Innovation

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I was recently chatting with Rangika Ekanayake, Sr. Manager of Software Engineering at IFS, and loved her insights around creativity. While she’s looking at creativity primarily through the lens of how to impact and improve UX in design, the principles she shares are applicable for anyone and any industry in need of thinking about how to further nurture creativity in an effort to innovate and maintain competitive edge.

In the world of service, we see an opportunity to grow revenue by offering a unique and differentiated experience or outcome to customers. The inception of that value proposition, however, requires a level of creativity that doesn’t always come naturally to every leader and every organization. The good news, according to Rangika, is that you have every opportunity – as individuals and as companies – to cultivate more creativity to fuel innovation.

Rangika is a self-inspired UX enthusiast with a deep passion for UX Research and UX Design and an enthusiasm for inspiring and helping others. She started her career at IFS 15 years ago as a Software Engineer and today is a Senior Manager of Software Engineering where she works with the R&D Projects leadership team to support continual improvement of software delivery within Projects and alongside contributing to the UX team in UX research. She has spoken on several SLASSCOM (Sri Lanka Association for Software Services Companies) webinars on the subject of UX Design and UX Research and has created a non-profit website, Journey2UX.com, to act as a repository of resources for industry newcomers. Here, Rangika shares her thoughts on how best to foster creativity.

Sarah: I think there can be an assumption that you’re either born “a creative” or not. Do you feel someone can be “born” creative? For those that aren’t, can creativity be learned?

Rangika: To quote Pablo Picasso, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Most people believe creativity is a trait an individual is born with – either they have it or they don’t. But I consider this a myth. I’m a strong believer that creativity is an attribute everyone has within themselves when they are born. But, because of socialization and formal education, some of us lose this creative impulse on our journey to adulthood.

For example, if we give set of blocks to group of children and ask them to build something, everyone will grab few pieces and they will start creating imaginary buildings, animals, etc. While at the task, how about we stop them and start to teach them to build a certain item in a specific way? Then there will be some who start doing it the way they were taught, and some will still prefer to do it in a way they imagined. Then, what if we punish some of them for doing it differently or if we tell them what they created is wrong or useless? Of course, some of them might stop what they are doing altogether or will start to build it in the exact way that we taught them, because of the fear of either getting judged, being wrong, or looking stupid. Then, consider the situation if we continue to do this for years and years. Day by day, some of these kids will lose their courage to become creative and some will still continue to carry it. When they become adults, society will categorize the people who still have the creative impulse as creative and others as noncreative.

But, can we boost up the creativity within these people who consider themselves as noncreative? Of course, we can. Because it is still within them, and we only have to retune their creative muscle. This is what’s referred to as helping them rediscover their creative confidence.

Sarah: How would you define “creative confidence?”

Rangika: “Creative confidence is believing in your ability to create change in the world around you. This self-assurance lies at the heart of innovation.” according to brothers Tom and David Kelley in their book, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential within us all.

Creative confidence is an individual’s belief that he/she is creative. When we were kids, we were often bold, inspired and acted daringly. Those days we were imaginative, curious, and endlessly creative, and we possessed endless capacity for innovation. So, in other words, creative confidence is our own self-assurance that we can regain that kid.

Sarah: As an individual, how can leaders foster their own personal creativity?

Rangika: According to Tom and David Kelley of IDEO, any individual can restore their creativity or creative confidence by overcoming their fear of failure, taking frequent doses of inspiration, and by stopping procrastination and starting “doing.”

Instead of fearing failure, start to learn from it. In schools, we were mostly being taught to avoid making mistakes and it is the same story in most workplaces. Therefore, we often avoid it at all cost. But as it turns out, failure can be one of our greatest teachers. Thomas Edison once said “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” So, we need to flip our mind to learn from failures rather been afraid of it.
Take frequent doses of inspiration to life. As our schedules get busy and responsibilities increase, it is hard to find time for inspiration. But inspiration is the fuel for creativity. So, how do we get fueled up? Be curious. Try to look beyond the obvious. Try to schedule daily space in your calendar to think, take a walk, or daydream. Keep some form of idea notebook to capture things that cross your radar. Practice empathy. Also, one of the best ways to get inspired is to step out of the context — look at something you might never expect to be helpful or relevant to the task at hand.
Stop overplanning and just start. Even though we have a creative idea, acting on it can be daunting. Therefore, to minimize the risk impact, adults spend lot of time on strategy and planning. But there are times where the best you can do is just get out there and take action — stop focusing on the huge, overall task and find a small piece you can tackle right away. Because creativity and creative problem solving is rooted in action. Studies show that teams who test five or more ideas at the same time are 50% more likely to launch successful solutions than those who explore a single solution.

Sarah: What’s your best advice for making time for creative thinking when facing many day-to-day pressures?

Rangika: As said earlier, try to schedule daily space in your calendar to think, take a walk, or daydream. It does not have to be a long duration – 15 minutes would do. No matter how packed your schedule might be, if you are willing to find some time, there will be a way. You can utilize the time you travel, shower, etc. But, the most important thing is to practice it consistently. Because creativity is also like a muscle; the more you practice, the more it is strengthened.

Also, it is important you keep some form of idea notebook to capture things that come to mind. Do not just let them drain away. In addition, when you try to generate ideas, focus on the quantity – shoot for 100 instead of 10. Aim for as many new ideas as possible. The greater the number of ideas you generate, the bigger your chances of producing a radical and effective one. On the other hand, it allows us to let our minds wonder without restriction and that’s how most of the best ideas are generated.

Sarah: From a company perspective, what’s key to creating a creative culture?

Rangika: If a certain company wishes to create a creative culture in their workplace, it is of utmost importance that they make sure to build a fail-safe environment for their employees. Because no matter how hard we request employees to be creative, if they don’t have an environment in the workplace where they can try out their ideas without the fear of being judged, evaluated or punished based on the result, employees will not bring forward their original ideas freely.

At “X - the moonshot factory," they live a simple mantra: "Fail fast, fail often." Terrible ideas and failure are not only embraced, but celebrated. In his TED Talk on “The unexpected benefit of celebrating failure”, Astro Teller, director of X, says, "We spend most of the time breaking things and trying to prove that we're wrong. That's it. That's the secret.”

In addition to creating a fail-safe environment, another aspect that companies need to focus on is encouraging inspiration and innovation. Because if we expect the employees to be creative, then we need to provide the space and time to be inspired and innovate. If their work schedules are tightly packed with other work items, even though they want to be creative and innovative, they won’t have the breathing space to do that. So, if a company desires its employees to become inspired and innovate, then they must empower their teams to be inspired; let them find ways to understand the users of their product, system, or service; and allocate some time to be creative.

Sarah: What are some tactical ways leaders can encourage their teams to build their own creative confidence?

Rangika: Most importantly leaders need to start, by believing everybody can be creative and by accepting failure as a natural part of the creative process. Just as the leaders encourage teams to be creative, they need to encourage the teams when ideas fail. Also, acknowledging a team’s hard work while reminding failure happens to everyone and motivating them to learn from failure rather than shying away from it will create a great impact on building creative confidence within the team.

In addition, consider introducing initiatives that encourage inspiration and innovation within team members - e.g. Innovation day, encouraging frequent field visits to get to know users better. Also, “Worst idea brainstorm” is a great method to help teams to overcome their fear of failure and to open up the imagination and help them get in touch with creativity. Additionally, an “Idea Diamond” is another method which encourages the teams to generate innovative ideas. Another tactic is starting off the discussions from the newest member in the forum. This not only opens up a fresh perspective, but also will make sure that these ideas won’t get shadowed by the perspectives of experienced members. Similarly, from time to time, disrupting the routine, such as changing the environment or team setup, can help teams to think and act differently. Finally, encouraging the teams to simply start rather than overplanning is a key factor.

Sarah: What final thoughts can you share?

Rangika: Creativity is not only for artists, designers, and musicians. It is not a fixed trait gifted only to specific people, and it is not only for kids. Creativity is essential for every individual, not only in their career, but also in their personal lives. Bill Moggridge, IDEO cofounder, strongly believed that most people are vastly more creative and capable than they know, and I believe the same. So, it is all about boosting up the creativity confidence within these people. But creative confidence cannot achieve only by reading, thinking, or talking about it. Rather, confidence in your creativity gets strengthen through action and practicing it often. So, try harder, give frequent space for your mind to roam free, start learning from your failures, get inspired, and simply just take action. The rewards and the individuality you will gain are well worth the effort.

If you’re interested in taking a deeper look, here are some references that Rangika suggests:

https://hbr.org/2012/12/reclaim-your-creative-confidence

https://www.creativeconfidence.com/about/

https://www.ideou.com/products/unlocking-creativity

https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-YScywp6AU

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_kelley_how_to_build_your_creative_confidence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEusrD8g-dM

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Back to Basics: Onboarding New Software Systems

April 23, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Back to Basics: Onboarding New Software Systems

By Tom Paquin

This is part of an ongoing series on the state and standards of service management software. Here are the previous articles in the series:

We’ve obviously spoken about implementation in the abstract before in this series, specifically with respect to replacing an old service provider, or implementing service technology for the first time, but I feel that it’s worth discussing the processes and pitfalls of what happens when the rubber hits the road.

We’ve seen how this can fail before. It’s important to build systems with employees in mind. This has been the subject of much of our discussion about selecting a service system to begin with. But when you’ve gone through the bid and selection process, what does the act of implementation look like?

There are ostensibly two stages to this—handling the technology, and handling your people. Let’s start with the tech.

Ripping Out the Old Wires

Whether you’re bringing in an end-to-end service system to manage all areas of service oversight, analysis, and optimization, or you’re installing a peripheral piece of software designed to enhance or simplify an experience, odds are good that you’re going to need to reroute some systems, and some thinking. I don’t need to tell you that timing is key, and most businesses build their sunset plans to overlap with deployment of a new solution.

How that looks can differ from business to business, and we’ll discuss in more detail exactly how that nuance can be developed below. It’s a tough balance, because you don’t want technicians to lean on old systems, and when a database is ported over, then that’s the end of it. But there’s inevitably benefits in holding off shutting the lights off until it’s time.

If you’re moving from one vendor to another, it’s often imperative that you look at how vendors have handled transitions from your old vendor in the past. There may be a list of considerations based on precedent, or there may be one particular integration partner that is more adept than others at managing and coordinating the transition.

Enabling Your Staff

Once the transition has begun, it’s time to start thinking about how you on-board staff. We’ve talked about the importance of building teams of player-coaches in the organization, how imperative it is to develop pilots (thus overlapping old a new technologies), and setting hard benchmarks for your team before, but it’s worth revisiting again.

This organizational agility will likely outlast your relationship with an implementation partner, so the onus of how effectively you wield the powerful tools you’ve been enabled with will depend greatly on how they are absorbed into your company culture. In my experience, small pilots are a great way to see what works with a given product.

If you’re going to pilot a new solution with, let’s say five percent of technicians, it’s important that they are not all high performers. Your pilot should represent the broad demography of your service technicians, with older and newer employees, and employees at different levels of output. It’s up to you whether you want to involve different disciplines in a pilot. In my experience many businesses opt to run pilots in a specific division first, then expand it out, but it’s feasible to run a pilot across all different types of service functions.

Pilots are meant to be temporary, of course, so taking it live is the next step. With a major update, many companies make rollout an event. We see organizations shut down operations for a day, onboard new technicians, sell the value of the new technology, and make every resource available to ensure success.

With any technology initiative, starting off on the right foot is imperative. Set yourself up for success with the right tools, a solid implementation plan, and the right people to take it over the finish line.

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April 19, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Mastering the Moment of Service: Art or Science?

April 19, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Mastering the Moment of Service: Art or Science?

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

In today’s customer-centric culture, the moment of service means more than ever. The moment of service is a moment of engagement, a moment of opportunity, moment of innovation, a moment of potential growth. There’s a whole lot riding on your ability to execute on those moments if you realize service for the powerful potential it holds.

For most businesses, mastering the moment of service has become a major priority. This mastery requires the business to navigate and streamline immense complexity to deliver what the customer wants in the moment it matters – a seamless and positive experience. So, is this mastery an art or a science? I’d argue it’s the perfect blend of both.

The Art of Exceptional Service

The art of service, at its root, is in adeptly uncovering, understanding, articulating, and addressing your customers’ challenges and opportunities in the form of your value proposition. A customer-driven value proposition requires relationships, listening, and trust. It requires an innovative mindset and a willingness departure from business-as-usual, and that in and of itself is an art many struggle with.

This art of customer-driven value propositions is enabled by the artful creation of a customer-centric company culture that recognizes the role service plays in success and growth. This culture welcomes innovative ideas and input and recognizes the criticality of employee engagement in delivering on the moment of service.

I also think that redefining the field service role is an art. Hiring folks to show up, fix something, and leave is a thing of the past. To master the moment of service, you need to redefine what service means to your business and reassess what the field service role entails. Most customers are looking for a trusted advisor, a more consultative and value-led relationship, and execution of that requires a different skill set than break/fix service does.

The Science of Service Excellence

To be impactful, the art of customer-driven value proposition, service-centric culture, employee engagement, and modernized service roles must be complimented by some science. One of the most important areas of science in service excellence is the evaluation, optimization, and standardization of processes. While arduous, this exercise is essential to creating a consistent and uniform experience to represent and reaffirm your brand.

Digital transformation and automation are other important elements of the science of mastering the moment of service. Customers want simplicity, and technology is key to being able to navigate and streamline complexity to deliver that simplicity. Whether it’s a consistent view of operations, more efficient planning and utilization of resources, remote service capabilities, or predictive analytics, today’s customer expectations can’t be met without a modern, cohesive digital infrastructure.

That digital infrastructure equips your company to master perhaps the most important science of this all: data. Data is what powers your moment of service – it’s what helps you operate efficiently and intelligently enough to be able to not only offer but guarantee the outcomes your customers want. But, in many instances, data is also an increasingly important part of the customer value proposition as well.

There are, of course, many more aspects to both the art and science sides of this equation. And then there are areas, like communication, that span both – communication is an art, but can be driven by the science of systems.

All too often, when companies struggle with mastering the moment of service and recognizing the potential of service on their business, it’s because they are focusing too narrowly on just one side of this equation. The art and the science are both very important and investing in resources who are strong in either area is important. But marrying the two is ultimately how you’ll master the moment of service and truly seize the service opportunity.

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April 16, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Containerization is the Bellwether of Service Software Flexibility

April 16, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Containerization is the Bellwether of Service Software Flexibility

By Tom Paquin

I have always been of a mind that the most important thing that software—any software—can do is to get out of your way. Even social media platforms, cultural cancers that they are, know that their key purpose (communication) needs to be easy, accessible, and provide the necessary feedback to show that it is working (“likes”, as it were). These are the keys of solid programming, and they’re how and why we use the devices that we do in the ways that we do.

This takes on a slightly different precedence in service, wherein the goal is not just to allow the technology to make completing actions seamless, the goal is to enhance the service process while not disrupting it in any major way. Here's an example of bad software design: If, in order to build schedules, you need to have availability loadouts three weeks in advance, and can’t update them same-day because of illness, or because of a high-priority outage that just came up, then that software is worse than pen and paper, and it’s actually an impediment to your growth.

It’s incredible how many software providers don’t understand this fact, and it’s why some firms struggle to get their teams to use the technologies at their disposal in the first place.

Today, though, I don’t want to talk about the user experience of software applications. We do that all the time. I want to take this concept outside of the day-to-day utilization of software, and look at the framework of the software itself.

Because here’s the thing: Service firms are complex. They are, frequently, a mismatch of cultures, either through means of acquisitions, or organizations working alongside OEMs, or distributors, or aftermarket part manufacturers, or contingent employees, or some Frankensteinian combination of these elements. And service delivery itself doesn’t fit into a neat box. There are different tiers (telcos, for instance, balancing commercial and residential service visits), different types of workforces, and different systems employed depending on the nature of a fix, or a routine appointment, or an emergency, or a predicted event, and so on, and so on, and so on.

On a frankly more basic level, some companies simply require, perhaps for regulatory reasons, their solutions to be managed on-prem. Others have managed cloud space of their own that they want to employ. Others, still, are in a position to move to the cloud. None of these (or any other adoption permutation) are wrong, and software that supports that flexibility will be engineered to support flexibility further down the value chain as well.

Service software deployment demands flexibility. This begins with containerization.

The concept of containerization, in its simplest terms, means that software is packaged (or ‘contained’ I suppose) in a way, with all ancillary processes, that enables it to be deployed at the discretion of the end user.

Today, the way that this most commonly works is that businesses build a cloud-first product, and they’re willing to sell it to you in the cloud, managing upkeep, upgrades, licenses, and operations for you wholly. Some companies consider this “The future” and refuse to practically look beyond it, even though it’s not only “the present”, it’s our very messy present. An inherently containerized product, though—one that lives in the cloud natively—can be just as easily packaged and deployed on a home server, with the same internal structure, same APIs, and to the same effect. Or that container can be handed off to another cloud host, managed independently of the “multi-tenant” cloud instance upon which the software was built. So “single tenant” cloud hosting.

Call it containerization, or Kubernetes, or whatever you want. To my estimation, it’s really the bellwether that defines product flexibility down-the-line. Software that cares enough about your business to offer you that degree of deployment flexibility understands your business. In my experience, that means that their actual functionality will be built to contour to the shape of your actual operations, not force you to work around them.

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The Future of the Service Workforce: 5 Pillars of Preparation

April 12, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

The Future of the Service Workforce: 5 Pillars of Preparation

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

The future of work is a topic that comes up in almost every conversation I have in one way or another. Service leaders are grappling with a lack of available talent, working to determine how the field service role is changing, and balancing the management and retention of both older and young workers who have significantly different needs and desires. There are many layers to this conversation, all of which we will continue to dig into here at Future of Field Service. The common understanding, though, is that preparing for the future of the service workforce will be one of the biggest challenges among our audience in the coming handful of years. Today I’m going to discuss five pillars of preparation that are key to setting your company up to navigate this massive challenge with the highest chance of success.

Pillar #1: Redefine

The role of the field technician has changed, is changing, and will continue to change. You need to work hard to consider how the role is being redefined based on your company’s journey toward Servitization or leveraging advanced services as a competitive differentiator or path to revenue growth. What does this mean for your needs today as well as for your needs over the next five years?

For most organizations, what’s happening is that the role is evolving to require more than the traditional technical skill sets. Today’s field technicians are needing more soft skills to succeed in the role of trusted advisor as customer relationships and service value propositions evolve. This trend will only continue, so it’s essential to map where your company is heading in terms of what services you’ll be providing and how and then how that translates to the skills needed from your field technicians to accomplish those goals.

Perhaps you can evolve the role of your field technician to meet your future needs; perhaps you’ll need to add new roles as your business model matures. Being clear on the redefinition, though, from what was required historically to what you’ll need over the next five years gives you the insights needed to determine where the gaps lie, how to reframe job requirements and postings as well as training programs and progression paths, and prioritize greatest needs.

Pillar #2: Redesign

Once you have better defined your current state as it relates to talent and what’s needed to meet your service objectives, you can work to redesign your recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and progression processes to be in line with what you need – versus what you’ve always done. As skill sets needed change, so too should job descriptions and recruiting practices. Training may need to focus more heavily on soft skills and relationship management, as well as use of technology, than it has in the past.

Many companies complain of a “talent gap” when really what they’re frustrated with is an “experience gap,” meaning they are accustomed to being able to hire technicians with years of experience and those tenured technicians are becoming harder to come by. This doesn’t mean that talent doesn’t exist, though, it just means you have to work harder for it than you have in the past. This is a new normal you need to adjust to, and it means redesigning your definitions of talent, experience, and fit.

Some of the top areas of “redesign” underway when it comes to creating a workforce for the future are modernizing job roles and requirements to attract a more diverse pool of candidates, being sure to create appeal for the younger generation, introducing new roles based on your redefined requirements, and – perhaps most importantly – thinking about how to foster more talent versus simply attracting it.

Companies like Tetra Pak, for example, have created programs to foster future talent. This need to become more creative, and take more ownership, around meeting the needs you have for your field workforce teams is I think one of the biggest areas of redesign that’s essential. You cannot continue to post jobs and expect a wave of ready-to-hire applicants; you need to become more inventive around how you can take smart, capable people and meld them into the talent you need to exceed.

Pillar #3: Outsource

Outsourcing field work isn’t for everyone, but it is a growing trend. And here’s why – what many companies are doing is outsourcing the more basic, traditional break-fix work in an effort to have more time and energy to focus on upskilling and developing their in-house talent to do some of the more sophisticated work around advanced services.

There have been some reservations around leveraging third-party workers, and I don’t think those reservations are entirely without merit. But as the gig economy grows it becomes a more practical choice for many, and with today’s technologies, many of the concerns around the management of those workers and the control over brand experience are being minimized.

Perhaps for you it isn’t a move to outsourcing, but to creating a hierarchy of field technician within your company – an entry level position that handles some of the basics and a progression of positions that tackle more sophisticated service offerings. However you decide to tackle it, you shouldn’t rule out outsourcing without doing some due diligence.

Pillar #4: Automate

Another critical element of the future of work strategy is automation. How can you leverage predictive technology to anticipate versus react to needs, and to better prepare technicians for the work they’ll do on site? How can you leverage AI for knowledge capture and management, so that as your most experienced technicians retire you don’t lose a lifetime of knowledge along with them?

How does remote service fit into your service strategy? Using remote assistance and AR for a remote-first approach can act similar to outsourcing in the sense of eliminating the most basic level of service requirements by handling remotely tasks that can be resolved easily and quickly.

How enabled are your customers with self-service? Self service fulfills the customer’s desire for more control and autonomy, while often reducing the burden of the service provider in some ways.

Today’s technologies are powerful, sophisticated, and ready to help you morph your workforce into the future. Examining your options around automation, what can be automated and how, is key to managing the significant demands on service organizations that are only increasing.

Pillar #5: Innovate

Like all areas of service transformation, the conversation around the workforce is one that requires an innovative mindset. Break free of the “this is how we’ve done it” and you’ll be halfway there. Your business is likely changing (or it should be!), and therefore your workforce needs to change too. Look at how other businesses in your industry but maybe more importantly outside of your industry are tackling this universal challenge. Be open to new ideas, new roles, new processes, and new technologies. Those that exceed at creating the workforce of the future will do so by thinking out of the box, by creating a unique culture and challenge for their teams, and by understanding that your frontline workforce is absolutely imperative to your success as a service organization.

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Preparing for the Future of Aftermarket Service Providers

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Preparing for the Future of Aftermarket Service Providers

By Tom Paquin

Oh how we love servitization. We talk all the time about traditional companies product-izing repairs and regular service, building product categories around utilities that previously were seen as a cost center, or relegated to other organizations altogether. But what about those businesses who have been delivering service all along? We certainly talk about them, and we talk to them. Their experience extends, under many circumstances, far beyond that of new entrants.

And as the expectations of these new entrants have changed, so too have the expectations of these aftermarket service companies. Whether it be through companies attempting to corral their work under a licensee framework, or the pinch of OEMs encroaching upon their well-worn turf, challenges mount for legacy companies.

As always, not every challenge will be the same. Not every business will be up against the same types of competition, nor the same environmental challenges. But for many, there are a few issues worth confronting before the metastasize into more complex problems. Here’s a few such problems, and how our legacy service brethren can work to address them.

Rising Tides Sink Old Ships

Ok—I’m not saying that every service provider will be wiped out by a wave of servitization, in which the brands that are serviced build internal infrastructure to compete with you. Dealer service centers and private mechanics are able to live and work side-by-side, have access to the same materials, and offer comparable services.

But in a new environment where businesses are selling outcomes, not products to consumers, the need to pivot services to embrace that might be the key. For some, that might look like, as mentioned before, becoming part of a network of certified service providers for a single brand. Often, that means that the onus of optimization, parts management, and repair coordination is taken out of your hands. But it also means that you need to have the right tools in hand—and the willingness to adapt those tools—to meet the needs of the manufacturer or distributor of serviceable products.

If you’re a service provider against numerous products in a specific industry, like commercial kitchens, retail, or HVAC, that model isn’t as feasible. For those companies, you’ll often lack the ability to connect as closely to specific assets as a manufacturer. For these companies, delivering exceptional service at the greatest value is the key to success. It’s imperative, then, to think about the tools you’re using today to capture that success.

The Agony and Ecstasy of Maturity

Legacy aftermarket service providers have an obvious leg-up in the service wars of the future…they’ve been doing it for a very long time, so they have the infrastructure, systems, processes, and procedures that have been iterated upon for years to produce the New York Yankees of service technology stacks (as a Masshole, this pains me to type).

But also…

Legacy aftermarket service providers have an obvious detriment in the service wars of the future…they’ve been doing it for a very long time, so they’re saddled with dozens of overwritten technologies, iterated into a mob of indiscernible wires to produce the Miami Marlins of service technology stacks (sorry Floridians…the Marlins are bad).

This duality emphasizes the importance of auditing your service processes. In the next few weeks, we’ll present some questions that we can ask to help you evaluate the integrity of your software. It’s certainly tough to turn the mirror onto processes, especially when those processes are day-in, day-out activities of your service business. But taking the time to step back and make those evaluations could spell the difference between success and failure.

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Insights Gleaned in The Trenches of Servitization

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Insights Gleaned in The Trenches of Servitization

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I’m hopeful by now you’ve seen the special report we published recently, The Service Centricity Playbook: 7 Phases of Morphing from Product Provider to Trusted Advisor. The report looks at the common steps along the journey that companies take when servitizing their businesses. But we all know that the real value comes in when you can spend time with people that have done the work and are willing to share the good, the bad, and the ugly of what it took to achieve success. The team from Noventum and I hosted a discussion with Wolfgang Kuenkler, VP – Head of Global Retail & Delivery Services at Diebold Nixdorf and Roel Rentmeesters, Director of Global Customer Service at Munters to hear their tales of living the “playbook” in real life. Here are some of the insights they shared.

Servitization Isn’t Service Transformation, It’s Business Transformation

One of the biggest misperceptions around this journey is that it is a service journey but, in reality, it is a journey for the entire organization – and success only comes when the entire business gets on board. “It was a quite a difficult journey to start with, because it's a mindset and it’s a highly cross-functional journey as well,” says Roel. “This is not just a service journey. R&D spot trends on what is coming up. Product management, who has a relationship with customers as well, bring in what they feel as demands. And so together, this is where you develop this service strategy and vision, and how to bring it to life. And on top, what's so exciting is the fact that it doesn't stop.”

The deeper and richer your history as a product-centric business, the more challenging this shift can be for the business. “If you are coming into the beginning as a pure, product-based company, service is something which over time will change your organization,” says Wolfgang. “You cannot compare product sales to services sales; it is totally different. Everybody in the company must understand that service is not for free. Service is really a big business and it could be very profitable for the company. This is the first step to solution sales. Diebold Nixdorf was really product-driven until 2008 when the economic crisis hit, and the product sales went down dramatically. Our stability came from our long-term contracts. We have long term contracts, three years, five years, so we had that permanent income. This helped to change the mindset of the account management, executive management, and everyone involved. From this point on, service was very important for us on the same level as product – it is 50 percent of our business.”

Standardization is Key to Servitization Success

Wolfgang and Roel agreed on the importance of global standardization. “Diebold Nixdorf has a global service organization of about 16,000 people. Our main customers are global customers from the oil industry, from fishing industries or sales of furniture and, of course, global banks,” explains Wolfgang. “What they're expecting is that an engineer in Indonesia and Malaysia and Brazil is working in the same way as an engineer in U.K. or in the Netherlands or in Denmark. Standardization is key to achieving this. So, what we are doing is being standard in our services, our contracts, our sales processes, our service delivery, our support, our logistics, everything. It is possible, from my point of view, that people are acting in all the countries in the same way, because this is what customers expect from us.”

At Munters, where the journey is earlier in process, standardization is being worked toward by a dedicated team. “I am a strong believer that central services can take away a lot of the burden of the countries and inconsistencies in the way we operate,” says Roel. “We involve them in creating the standards based on best practices that they might have on one side and best practices that come from other companies that are working in a standard way. We have a central services management team that looks into the infrastructure, the product development and the processes, and the business systems we want to use to serve as an incubator and facilitator for the countries that are actually executing the business. We can dedicate resources specifically on the initiatives and steps we are taking, the work to implement them for the countries to benefit from.”

Regardless of what stage of the journey, continual optimization is the name of the game. “We have a continual improvement manager that specifically looks into the end-to-end processes, to make sure that everything flows where it needs to flow,” explains Roel. “If you use companies like IFS with an ERP system, they often base that on a standard process, embedded in there as a framework that you can use. It’s not just customer value that you will be able to create by implementing standard processes; it is your internal way of operating that will change as well. You will become more efficient and that means that you need to adapt your processes to what you implement. If you implement a remote management center that will change your processes, then the way you sell things and the way you train the people that need to sell that to customers also need to change. It’s a continuous journey of learning and refining.”

Streamlined Technology Enables Streamlined Service

Finally, it’s important to realize that the level of cohesiveness you need to achieve for Servitization success is impossible to come by without modernized, streamlined technology. “For IT, we are the service experts and we define the processes. It helps us to optimize our processes,” says Wolfgang. “Our goal is to have only a limited number of tools, because each tool increases the number of complexity costs. To master data services without master data will not work. For IT infrastructure and service, you need a vision. In the same way its important to have a service vision, so also is a vision for IT. There are too many tools on the market at the moment and you must be clear on your requirements to find the right fit.”

You may want to consider having a dedicated resource that is responsible for tying this together. “We have a VP of Digital and that person is really targeting how the company needs to do digitalize and what it needs to do to support the business. We did an inventory on the needs that we saw from a business perspective and are creating a roadmap based on that,” explains Roel. “New technology is key, and alignment between IT and the business is a must.”

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