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December 25, 2020 | 5 Mins Read

Finding Opportunities for Servitization in my Christmas Village

December 25, 2020 | 5 Mins Read

Finding Opportunities for Servitization in my Christmas Village

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By Tom Paquin

Today is Christmas, folks. So Merry Christmas, if that’s your thing. I’ve never been particularly fond of this holiday myself. With a currently-pregnant wife, I have a feeling that I’ll be singing a different tune in 354 days as I’m laying out presents from Santa, but for now bah humbug. I have always preferred January 3rd or so, when everyone else on the planet is just as miserable, cold, and depressed as I am all the time. There is but one Christmas tradition, self-imposed, for which I fully, extensively, and wholeheartedly commit, though, and that is my Christmas Village. Here it is, under construction:

Some background: I’ve been collecting Department 56 buildings and figurines since the early 90’s to assemble this village, having been inspired by my grandfather (about whom I have written before) who still painstakingly assembles an epic, pristine recreation of a semi-fictionalized 19th century London every year, which tells the story of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

My village, by contrast, is not Dickens Village, but instead New England Village, modeled after a semi-fictionalized version of the region of the United States where I live. And I love it. I’ve been assembling houses, people, landscapes, and electric doodads of one type or another since I was seven years old. Having discovered estate sales and Ebay, the village has expanded, spawned neighborhoods and sub-villages, and developed a warm character of its own. That character has created interlocking systems and considerations, ones that my service-oriented brain cannot help but consider. So let’s have a little fun.

Yes—this village is loosely set in the mid 19th century, as New England, cultural melting pot of the northeast, helped to solidify many of the Christmas traditions from around the world that would come to represent the American identity. But it’s also in my fleshy, corporeal living room in 2020, so I will not hesitate to consider modern technology as a viable option for these small ceramic houses.

Most of the businesses in my village offer simple services like horseshoes or bell casting. A few could easily benefit from modern service technologies. Here’s some considerations.

Cape Keag Fish Cannery

A product of the Napoleonic wars, depending on which side of “Mid 19th century” you choose to land, canning could easily be seen as cutting-edge technology for this village. You’d imagine, given its proximity to the ocean, that this cannery focuses mainly on canning oysters and other provisions brought in by fishermen each day. Light load on a calm morning? The canning equipment sits, unused.

We often think about servitization as an opportunity to build maintenance contracts, but businesses have an opportunity as well to, where appropriate, offer their equipment in ways that benefit non-commercial activities. We’ve seen this in COVID times among restaurant suppliers. Creating canning subscriptions could be a way to offset the uncertainties of fishing.

There are obviously considerations of volume and scheduling, if a great deal of commercial product is, in fact, coming in. In modern times, thinking holistically about your business allows you to consider your internal infrastructure as it relates specifically to the confluence commerce volume plus service volume. Perhaps service volume meets a threshold where you invest in additional canning machines. It’s that degree of cross-functional resource planning that only best-in-class software offers.

Blue Star Ice Co.

I imagine that when the tools were developed to harvest, store, and utilize ice for preservation, the technology was seen as revolutionary. “People will always need ice,” some old executives certainly crowed, chomping off the ends of their cigars, “How else will they keep their food fresh?”

It might not come today, it might not come tomorrow, but it’s time to start thinking seriously about future-proofing what once seemed like a sure thing. While refrigeration might be a few generations away, in the previous section of this very article, we discussed a technology that makes food reliably shelf-stable for indefinite periods of time. In the ice industry, the cracks of obsolescence are already forming. And yes—pun very much intended.

Is service the answer? Of course it is! Blue Star Ice Co. could convert to a full-time ice house, which has a variety of different purposes. Chief among them is that it offers coolant without electricity, which, for businesses who require products be kept at a certain temperature regardless of the state of the electric grid, would be incredibly useful. Even in the world of home refrigeration, a large ice house would have practical applications for larger items. Perhaps create service contracts with the local butcher or morgue (I should note that my village does not have a morgue, because nobody dies in my idyllic Christmas village).

The Emily Louise

I’m not at the stage of my life where “pleasure boating” has entered the equation but I love the ocean, and I love spending time on a boat. For that reason, the Emily Louise, one of my newest additions, is one of my favorites. This ship represents the best that field operations of the mid-1800’s have to offer. Whether or not they provide any explicit service, or just transcontinental delivery, the ability to use service-oriented functionality to improve the experiences of those waiting for them at the next port would be a compelling selling point.

One technology that sticks out as particularly useful with respect are newly-minted location-tracking tools. The best show when you’re next, give you a map view, and let you connect directly with your service person. A few years ago, I mused that location tracking as a function has numerous caveats in practice. At the time, location tracking on its own actually lowered customer experience scored. What businesses have discovered since is that location tracking alone is not enough, and needs to be heavily curated into a tool for customer communication, and allow for that communication to run freely. With that sort of tech on the Emily Louise, ports can be prepared in advance of the ship’s arrival, so they can make the appropriate arrangements to prepare.

I don’t know about you, but all this talk about servitization and process optimization has really turned me around on Christmas. I feel downright jolly! Readers, in all sincereity, take care and stay safe. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. We can’t wait to share another year of great service stories with you all.

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December 21, 2020 | 5 Mins Read

3 Reasons Schneider Electric is Excited for Service in 2021 – And You Should Be Too

December 21, 2020 | 5 Mins Read

3 Reasons Schneider Electric is Excited for Service in 2021 – And You Should Be Too

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

We published a podcast last week with Jerome Soltani, Sr. VP of U.S. Services and Alex Gershman, Director of Strategy, Services and Solutions both of Schneider Electric during which we discussed the company’s journey to outcomes-based service. Like many other organizations making their way to delivering outcomes, there are challenges to overcome as progress takes place. However, during our conversation, it was evident how some of the challenges particular to 2020 are really paving the way for accelerated success. Jerome and Alex are quite excited about what will happen next as it relates to service, and I think their reasons are points many others share excitement around too.

#1: Customer Conversations are Changing

Jerome and Alex discussed the fact that Schneider Electric has been on the journey to delivering outcomes for a few years and has been making progress all along. But COVID has accelerated progress in some key areas, one of which is in what customers are asking for. “There are a couple of big mega trends that we’re seeing out in the marketplace driving the change in conversation,” says Alex. “Many of them have accelerated through the last year, through COVID. First is changes in investment shifts that our customers are making from big capital expenditures toward more operating, annual kinds of expenditures. And again, through COVID we hear the need to extend the life of assets.”

This point has been echoed by other manufacturing companies I’ve spoken with in the past few months that have seen significant increase in service and maintenance revenues. “That CapEx to OpEx shift has certainly changed the nature of conversations that we’re having,” says Alex. “We’re also seeing massive retirements on the part of the skilled labor inside of our customer organizations, meaning they’re turning more and more to companies like ours to help them with the services needs that they had that they may have relied on internally previously. Customers are feeling pressure to focus their efforts and attentions on their core business. Our candy makers want to make candy and they don’t want to necessarily focus on their infrastructure. So, again, they’re turning increasingly more and more to us to do that. Finally, with the rise of data connected technology, customers are looking to us to help them with making sense of the data that they have, being able to get toward the outcomes that they’re looking for with their customers.”

It almost feels to leaders like Jerome and Alex, who have been working hard to make progress on this journey for years, that customers have finally caught up with the vision of how outcomes-based service can deliver. This is exciting, because the conversation becomes mutually driven. “I think before COVID we had the feeling of being a little bit in advance. Not being arrogant, but you see when you’re a little bit too ahead of the market, you feel a little bit alone to create demand and create this awareness,” says Jerome. “But, I mean, COVID and the pandemic and the situation, working from home, nobody in the campus, in the university and so on, we saw this awareness and this acknowledgement coming from our user. It was a big relief for us, and it was great to see that finally the combination of our software portfolio connected product and services would make sense and would bring a lot of value to our user.”

#2: The Service Language is Catching On

Not only are customers now driving outcomes-based service conversations, the language has caught on internally as well. We’ve written a number of articles about the challenges in evolving from a product provider to service-based company. The cultural shift that must happen is immense and employing a service vernacular is a critical step. This is an area Jerome and Alex have focused a lot on and, again, have seen major strides in this year due in part to the real-world illustration of just how much service matters to the business. “The services journey started couple of years ago, but I think it was still at the operation level, at the country level, kind of second thought and not really a top priority. Now it’s a good thing that our CEO and our board members were strong believers and have been really promoting the services business for years and have made very structural and transformational investment into this different teams at country level,” says Jerome. “But what we saw this year is that COVID-19 has been a catalyst to prove that services is highly resilient, and the model that allows us to continue to deliver very strong profitability to our overall P&L. I mean, when I compare our traditional transactional equipment type of business versus services today, depending on the country, depending on the portfolio, you have a discrepancy between five to 10 points of growth between a services business and a traditional core CapEx driven business. It shows that this business is one of the most strong and reliable businesses, and resilient businesses in the economy.”

Witnessing that in real-time helped expand the understanding, acceptance, and language of service within the company. “Like everything else, it’s a journey and by no means what I declare victory. But I think, again, the position that we’re in now is markedly better and different than it was 12 months ago,” says Alex. “It starts for sure at the top down. There was a conversation maybe six months ago where it was basically said there are six priorities for the company: services and software, services and software, services and software. That helps, right? When you get that message from the CEO, people start to listen. Storytelling about customer successes are also impactful and resonate as you’re trying to make change.”

#3: We’re at an Inflection Point

While fraught with hard moments and complex challenges, for services COVID and the experiences of 2020 have left us at an inflection point. Companies have an opportunity here to build upon the increased awareness and acceptance, both internally and externally, to see significant progress in service success. “I think we’re going to look back on 2020 for a lot of reasons,” says Alex. “But if we think about what’s happened in the years before around service, there have been incremental changes that have happened – connectivity, customer demand, our own workforces. But given the intersection of external forces, acceleration of technology, from the customer demand perspective, from the sales perspective, from the delivery perspective, we’re going to look back at 2020 as a massive inflection point across the industry in how services are consumed and delivered as a whole and the value that a services organization is going to bring to customers.”

2020 has brought many changes that can be built upon in 2021 and I agree with Jerome that the opportunity is exciting. “I would say that for sure the outcomes-based services potential is exciting in the coming year,” Jerome says. “And we look at what is your current portfolio, based on what is your market or what is your customer landscape. What is relevant for your customers in terms of services based on this portfolio?” The possibilities are almost endless for those ready to make the most of this inflection point.

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December 18, 2020 | 3 Mins Read

Making Mobile Field Service a Better-Than-Desktop Experience

December 18, 2020 | 3 Mins Read

Making Mobile Field Service a Better-Than-Desktop Experience

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By Tom Paquin

Yeah, phones. We all have them, we all idly scroll through them, our kids can’t understand how it is that we managed to survive decades without them. They’ve naturally become assets in our personal lives, and have heavily penetrated service over the last decade as well, to the point that their near-ubiquity has created a sense of stagnation.

Still, some technicians struggle to push the buttons to start and stop appointments, log notes, or manage inventory and other elements on their mobile devices. There are a few reasons why this is the case, of course. Some technicians simply have their workflow worked out, they’ve been doing this for too long to add in steps that slow things down with no discernable benefit. Others have not been appropriately trained on the tools. Others still simply forget.

Much of this stems from a relative immaturity in the types of mobile tools that are put at your team’s disposal. There are a lot of ways to take mobile and do it wrong, so let’s break down some of the areas where businesses have seen success in leveraging mobile tools.

Making Mobile Matter

As I’ve said before, mobile needs to be much more than a pared-down portal with limited functionality, or—gasp—a webapp. True mobility takes advantage of the form factors at your disposal to deliver everything that’s available at a workstation and then some.

The Better-Than-Desktop Approach

This approach, which we will call the “Better than Desktop” approach, puts more power in the hands of technicians on the site than they’d have otherwise. Before we talk about what that means capability-wise, you need to think proactively about what your technicians are doing on a typical job site. Do they have access to both hands? Do they need to facilitate a handoff between hardware in the van or at their desk and hardware where they deliver service?

The bare minimum of this working is ensuring that your mobile utilities have identical functionality to desktop utilities. Technicians shouldn’t have to retreat to a laptop to bring up a part list or log notes, and if they’re in need of knowledge management, they need to be able to access it, not just completely, but quickly. No sifting through resource libraries. That’s enough of a pain on a full-fledged computer. How can you index and provide that information quickly and effectively on a job site?

A lot of that is going to come down to exactly what technicians are using on a job site.

Thinking about the Hardware

While rugged devices still abound, as well as the odd proprietary widget, but for the most part, when we think about mobile field service, we think about consumer-grade devices like phones and tablets. And yes—these generally should be the primary drivers of the mobile experience, as they’re ubiquitous, easy to develop for and to use, and relatively cheap to replace. But ancillary technology needs to be considered as well.

One of the many “better-then-desktop” utilities that should be considered on a jobsite is, naturally, remote assistance. End users are typically fine with using their phones for remote assistance, but what if you’re training up new staff on repair protocols? Remote Assistance can help onboard new technicians in significantly less time. And in those instances, it may be worth looking at augmented reality headsets, which create a more seamless field of view for drop-in, and even better persistent object tracking for more accurate overlays.

That’s one example, of course, but it speaks more broadly about how we can take mobile field service to the next level. Mobile devices themselves are full of uniquely useful sensors and cameras, including Apple’s newest iPhones, which ship with a LiDar sensor built in. Because of that, the opportunities to improve mobile functionality will continue to grow. If you start with a 1:1 mobile-to-desktop approach, you’ll be set up to capitalize upon it.

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How the Context of COVID is Growing A Culture of Service

December 14, 2020 | 6 Mins Read

How the Context of COVID is Growing A Culture of Service

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 By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I discussed earlier this year my thoughts on how COVID will speed Servitization progress and that belief has only been strengthened since. While an incredibly unfortunate and taxing situation, the pandemic is creating more openness to change both within companies and from their customers; greater appreciation of the digital tools that enable not only business continuity but also set the stage for business transformation; and affirmation of the role service plays in more resilient revenue streams.

I first welcomed Tim Baines, Professor of Operations Strategy at Aston Business School and Executive Director of the Advanced Services Group, to the podcast for episode 70 in August where he shared an overview of the Advanced Services Group’s research and explained how the firm categorizes the four forces behind Servitization. Last week, I welcomed Tim back to discuss his thoughts on how the events of this year will impact the Servitization trajectory and his predictions for 2021.

We discussed that, in navigating the complexities of COVID, what’s happened is that the context has shifted for many businesses. This context shift is having impact in several different ways that are likely to spur the Servitization efforts of many companies forth. “What has happened massively for us over this past year is that the context has shifted. And as a consequence, the decisions we’re making inside businesses has shifted also,” explains Tim. “If you accept that a lot of the forces which are shaping industry were there anyway, what COVID has done is to strip away the grayness of those forces. COVID has shown us that forces which are shaping industry have almost accelerated the shift.”

Primed for a Cultural Pivot

This evolution of context leaves companies primed for a cultural pivot towards Servitization and outcomes-based service. “When we think about Servitization inside the context of a broader firm, one of the big inhibitors of progress has always been almost the cultural change, the legacy of the production that’s sitting behind,” says Tim. If ever there’s been a (albeit forceful) nudge in the direction of advanced services, it is in the context of this year.

“I think businesses are at a crossroads,” says Tim. “Some businesses will look at what we have been through over this last year, they will look back at what has happened in the past and say, ‘Okay, as soon as we can get back to the old way of doing things, let’s do it.’ Then there will be others that say, ‘Okay, we’ve come from there to here and have found ourselves in a position where our people are actually quite ready for change. Let’s move forward.’”

Based on the conversations I’ve had this year, I think more companies than not have taken the challenges of this year and channeled them into a catalyst for change – I think the majority are primed for the cultural pivot necessary to bring Servitization visons to fruition. “The reality is, I am sure that the future direction will be a compromise of both decisions, and that’s fine,” says Tim. “But there are so many exciting opportunities to embrace these forces which COVID has made so apparent to us and capitalize on it through Servitization and advanced services.”

Financial Innovation

Tim predicts that beyond the ways in which context may impact culture in 2021, financial innovation will play a role in advancing companies’ Servitization and outcomes-based service journeys. “Eighteen months ago, I went to an asset financing conference in London to speak about Servitization. And I was really surprised to hear about all these financial institutions who were talking about Servitization,” he says. “We’d never come across this community before. They spoke about things like subscription charging, which we’re familiar with. But then it moves into conversations about asset financing, partnering with a manufacturer. It moves into conversations about ownership, moves into conversations about contracting. They’re looking at Servitization as innovation… almost what I would call the mechanism for revenue capture. When we talk about Servitization, we’re talking about how you’re bundling the service offerings together to build a bigger customer value proposition. Basically, this is all about, to me, the shift to an outcome-based society. The subscription charging can go hand-in-hand with that, but it’s slightly different things.”

Tim explains how he sees this financial innovation having an impact in 2021 and beyond. “Let’s take a practical example. In the U.K., fossil fuel heating on new-build properties will not be allowed by 2025, even retrofitting. The alternative technology is technology like heat pump technology. It’s expensive, so how do you get that new technology into it? If you or I went out and bought a fossil fuel heating system, it might cost us $2,000. The heat pump system for a house or equivalent property might cost us $20,000. How do we do it? Well, we obviously need financing. And if that financing can be bundled together in terms of a subscription charging, where we don’t feel the pain as a big lump investment, but rather, the pain is spread out over multiple, maybe five-year contract. Then, we’re going to feel more ready acceptance of the technology.” Thinking through how the proliferation of financial models like this could impact the ability to combine product, technology, and service sales across a variety of industries is certainly compelling.

Environmental Pull

Finally, Tim expressed just how big of a role he believes environmental sustainability will play in advanced service efforts over the coming years. “COVID has made the environmental context more apparent to people,” he says. “In the U.K. particularly, people are spending more time at home, they’re spending more time at the gardens, they’re looking around them and they’re seeing what’s happening. They’re more aware of their environment, and they’re saying, ‘Hey, we like this. We want to spend more time with this environment, we want to care with it more.’”

This growing awareness, acceptance of responsibility, and commitment to action is shared by many of the companies I’m speaking with. I do agree with Tim that sustainability will play a greater role in serving as motivation for advanced services efforts going forward – both in the objectives of the companies to minimize carbon footprint and also from the perspective of the customer looking to choose more environmentally conscious companies to buy from. “The environmental pull is becoming more apparent, so how can industry respond to it? Well, you’ve got all the technology which is required to be put in place and got out there, that manufacturing can provide and get into the marketplace,” says Tim. “There are services upon services, whether it’s heat pump technology, whether it’s hydrogen for house heating, whether it’s shift in mobility, all these different technologies which can be got out there through advanced services.”

While 2020 has been an immensely challenging year and isn’t over yet, I take heart that there is a lot of good to come for companies looking to grow their culture of service. And we’re at a perfect point to do just that. “The potential is great. It’s the bundling between the cultural organization to offer the services that the product enables, coupled with the technologies which help us to monitor how the product is used and build up intelligence, coupled with the financing which gets those innovations into the marketplace as quickly as we can,” says Tim. “If you look at the evidence of data coming out of the World Bank in terms of where gross domestic product is generated, the fact is that services supersede products and production. I think it’s extremely difficult to argue against the adoption of Servitization.”

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December 11, 2020 | 3 Mins Read

The Path to Sustainability Runs Through Service

December 11, 2020 | 3 Mins Read

The Path to Sustainability Runs Through Service

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By Tom Paquin

Let’s start with the obvious: There’s a moral imperative for businesses to increase their sustainability. While individual waste and pollution certainly has a greater-than-zero effect on the health of our planet, businesses, by virtue of their scale, have an outsized effect on our ability to impact our environment, and while these organizations may not have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to be conscious of their waste, they certainly have a duty to humanity. And many firms have chosen sustainability as a practice for that reason, but in reality, there’s not just a moral imperative, but an economic imperative as well.

For our purposes, we’re going to focus on managing, and mitigating waste, and the catalyst for minimizing waste is the well-covered concept of the Circular Economy. For the uninitiated, the circular economy is the process of eliminating the linearity of delivery by rethinking supply chains, workflows, and delivery cycles. Here’s a short video that considers it from a consumer perspective:

This is obviously a multi-year process that requires significant investment and organizational restructuring, but at its heart, it is aided by rethinking the compact that you, the supplier of goods, makes with your customer. Specifically (and no surprise here!) I’m talking about service.

Structuring Around Service
Service has the effect of taking the seemingly transactional relationship that many businesses have with customers past the sale into their utilization of products and services. If any of that is news to you, I don’t know what to tell you. As we’ve said repeatedly here, building a business around service is good for business. Apple’s products are great, but Apple’s service is why they’re a leader. And that service mindset has helped Apple set itself apart as an example of sustainability.

By keeping your hands on your products past the sale, you can use the resources at your disposal to, of course, ensure that the products are working optimally for the customers. But furthermore, this allows you to more fully control the lifecycle of your products, identify with authority a point of obsolescence, and remit, recycle, and rebuild products, this lowering the bottom-line and keeping hazardous materials out of landfills.

Building a Sunset Plan for Assets
I’ve spoken with a variety of leaders about how they go about the process of evaluating sunset plans for assets, and the list runs the gamut—from choosing a five-year sunset plan for assets that refresh at quick rates, to mandating that products be replaced if repairs costs exceed 50% of the cost of a new unit. The means to gauge this sit unique with each business, thought here are certainly some industry analogues in place. It’s likely that a variant of this policy exists within your service organization at some point already.

Once it’s formalized and socialized, it needs to make its way into your repair systems by default. When logging a job, service workers should be prompted automatically in real-time when a repair passes a specific threshold. With those business rules in place, there’s no second-guessing or questions on the job site.

Building the Right Reverse Logistics Processes
What happens after that is where sustainability takes center-stage, and assuming your service software has prompted a product refresh, and that replacement has concluded, the crux of sustainabile business comes with figuring out what to do with the old asset. This is where a solid, full-featured reverse logistics engine come in.

We’ve spoken about reverse logistics previously, mostly in terms of how it impacts the repair-remittance cycle, but thinking about it through the lens of sustainability, when scrapped parts are returned, remitting them appropriately becomes a unique new challenge. What internal materials must be sent where, what is recyclable, and how must non-recyclable materials be safely disposed of.

You can and should build those rules, and those supply chains, into your reverse logistics workflow, and maintain the ability to adjust them however you need to. This echoes the necessity that you, the business, maintain the levers of the recycling process for your customers. You have the resources (and the incentive) to break apart their products, so that they don’t end up in a landfill.

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December 7, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

Managing COVID-19 Complexity: Real-World Lessons to Help Navigate the Second Wave

December 7, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

Managing COVID-19 Complexity: Real-World Lessons to Help Navigate the Second Wave

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

When we began lockdown in March of this year, I thought – maybe naïvely – that the pandemic would be in our review mirror by year end. Here we are, however, with cases rising in many regions across the world and second waves of lockdown in certain areas. While we all long for our lives to normalize, we must find fortitude to wait this out with safe practices and patience.

I recently held a Focus Group with some of the Future of Field Service Advisory Forum members to discuss what best practices they could share from how their companies have handled COVID thus far that may help their peers prepare for this second wave. It was a great conversation – I continue to be heartened by the connectedness among the industry and the inclination to come together during this crazy time to help one another along. Here are some of the points that came up in conversation – thought processes, strategies, and steps that participants felt served them well in navigating COVID challenges.

Let Go of Business as Usual – It’s Time to Get Creative

There were a number of points brought up in conversation about how companies’ normal course of business has been significantly impacted by COVID. Particularly companies that serve retail locations and restaurants have seen drastic declines. Even those who haven’t been hit as heavily have had to alter the normal business processes to comply with lockdowns and keep employees and customers safe. While the outcome varies from company to company, what was shared in conversation was a willingness to let go of business as usual and quickly get creative. This may mean diversifying the business, embracing innovation, altering delivery methods, introducing new services, or a variety of other things. But the commonality is that companies who have navigated COVID successfully haven’t done so by being tied to the legacy of how things have been done.

Lean on Digital Tools to Maximize Safety and Adapt to a Virtual World

Some companies have been able to adopt tools like Remote Assistance to move to a remote-first service strategy. This enabled organization to persist in providing customers service during lockdowns, and really sets the stage for a more evolved way of working even post-pandemic. Much of the conversation within the Focus Group centered around the fact that the focus on physical intervention as the first line of field service will be a thing of the past even once COVID passes. Looking beyond service, companies also discussed technologies being used to replace other functions that were previously conducted in person – like training, for instance. And those whose organizations have needed to continue with essential, in-person service throughout the pandemic discussed ways they’ve been able to rely on planning and automation tools to optimally schedule and route technicians in a way that reduces travel and minimizes exposure through avoiding peak times to keep both employees and customers safe.

Don’t Downplay Employee Emotions

This has been a hard year for everyone, and it is essential not to overlook or minimize the emotions your employees have. Not only are they likely struggling with concerns around health and safety, but those concerns may be compounded worry over the future of t heir job or overwhelm from the introduction of new technologies or processes. Companies that have done well managing COVID share a focus on empathy – a dedication to remembering the human side of all of this and recognizing and addressing the emotions of their employees as best they can. Leaders have gone out of their way to develop more personal means of checking in and staying connected in this virtual world. Some companies have noticed that as remote service ramps up, technicians fear for their jobs – and are working hard to address these concerns and put minds at ease about what’s to come. In a time where we have to move fast to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances, don’t overlook the need to put your people first.

Act Global; Empower Local

Global organizations have faced an extra layer of complexity because COVID cases, management, and restrictions vary so much from region to region. As such, it was brought up that there isn’t any real way to centralize the rection to local COVID circumstances. Rather, these organizations have worked to centralize access to information and resources but empower the local units to react in the ways that best fit their individual conditions. Certain best practices are created and communicated at the global level, but each region feels empowered to react to their own changing circumstances in the way they see fit. Part of what makes this possible is a move toward more real-time data analysis and far faster decision making. This enables communication between central and regional functions and helps everyone to stay in lock step on the approach.

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December 4, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

What Can We Learn About Service from a 1,400-Year-Old Company?

December 4, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

What Can We Learn About Service from a 1,400-Year-Old Company?

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By Tom Paquin

If you look at the Fortune 500 list as a barometer of business success, you’ll see some truly behemoth mainstays, many of which have endured on the list for at least the last five years. And sure, evaluating these businesses on the sliding curve of assets and liabilities, this can provide some insight into the health of a company, and excellence is great, but what about endurance? What can we say about a business that has stood through crises, recessions, wars, governments, and natural disasters?

If you look at a list of the oldest businesses in the world, you’ll discover that the top of the list is monopolized by Japanese companies. And while many of the years are impressive—705 for the oldest hotel in the world, 862 for the oldest winery—one business stands a head (and nearly 150 years) above all the others, and that is Kongō Gumi.

What compelled me about Kongō Gumi specifically was that in a list dominated by hotels, restaurants, alcohol producers, and state-owned properties, Kongō Gumi was something different—they were a service provider. Specifically, they’re a construction company, specializing in elaborate Buddhist temples.

There is however a twist to this story: Kongō Gumi was liquidated in 2006 and sold off to Takamatsu Construction Group. It seemed incredible to me that a company that has survived for as long as Kongō Gumi could so flippantly and abruptly go the way of the dodo, but it’s yet another reminder that, in the age of empowered customers, legacy is meaningless. It’s fascinating, though, to look at what toppled a service mainstay that was incorporated more than 1200 years before the country that I am currently sitting in. The obvious answer is that pedigree is a meaningless function in the face of industrial growth, but nevertheless, when a company of unrivaled pedigree collapses in an industry about which you study, there are certain to be some lessons to take away.

To consider those lessons, let’s look at some of the main reasons why Kongō Gumi was driven to acquisition.

Insolvency
If you look at the available evidence regarding the collapse of the business, this, in its simples terms, is what dealt the final blow. Unregulated lending derived from the Japanese economic bubble of the 1980s weighed down companies like Kongō Gumi with excess debt. Exacerbated by a lagging economy in the early 21st century, the business was no longer capable of standing on its own.

There are of course many positive and valuable reasons for businesses to take on debt—personnel attraction, research and development, or expansion—but this can serve as a reminder that debt needs to be justified and leveraged across a broader business plan, rather than be a means to keep a business afloat. This is a bigger challenge in construction and real estate than in other businesses, which is well-known for solvency issues and corrupt practices. This doesn’t mean that other service industries are immune from the challenges of debt, obviously. Let’s take it a step further and think about what led to this degree of insolvency.

Product Rigidity
Kongō Gumi has a broad and detailed history of building Buddhist temples and shrines. It was the stability and consistent needs of this industry that permitted their success through the centuries. This rigidity of vision turned detailed, elaborate architecture almost into a widget factory, though each of their constructions endures as a unique and beautiful symbol in its own right. Nevertheless, the other side of that rigidity meant that when the market reached a point of saturation, there was nowhere to pivot to.

For manufacturers, product-oriented organizations, or service companies, it’s a short path to see how some product diversity could have helped to mitigate some of the fiscal problems that the business ultimately faced. We frequently talk about building new service offerings that stem out of the primary offerings of a business, and that remains a way to evolve with a changing market. Service, on a whole, can be extremely nimble when given the tools to do so.

Knowledge Hoarding
The complexity of the work that Kongō Gumi meant that apprentices needed ten years’ worth of training in order to reach a level of mastery necessary to produce work that met the expectations of the customers. While I personally admire and respect the cultural practice of rewarding expertise and excellence at a craft, it is easy to see how such a business model would struggle to scale in a modern corporate environment.

Service businesses have an opportunity to take heed of this, and consider how their skills are disseminated across their business. Most businesses don’t require the expertise that is needed to construct elaborate pagodas, so making sure that new staff have the skills they need as soon as possible is an imperative, and a comparatively easy one to manage.

In spite of it now being a totally-owned subsidiary, Takamatsu Construction Group respects and maintains the name and reputation of Kongō Gumi. In some ways, by joining the larger organization, Kongō Gumi has, in short order, been given the tools to be more nimble. Let’s hope that the beautiful structures that they create even now will endure for many more years.

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November 30, 2020 | 5 Mins Read

5 Steps to Future-Proof Your Field Service Workforce

November 30, 2020 | 5 Mins Read

5 Steps to Future-Proof Your Field Service Workforce

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Finding, attracting, obtaining, and retaining talent is one of the most complex challenges that field service organizations face today. There are a variety of factors at play – changes in the demands of the role, an increasingly small pool of talent to compete for, differing desires from the new generation of worker, and now COVID complexities. Not to mention, the service landscape is evolving rather significantly as organizations adopt digital tools and embrace the move to outcomes-based service – which means the traits, skills, and characteristics sought today are vastly different than they were just five years ago and will be even different yet in another five years. So, with all of this said, is it even possible to future-proof the field service workforce? Not entirely, but we need to prepare. While no one can predict precisely what the future will hold, we know enough that it is important to start taking steps now to set us up for success as the future (rapidly) unfolds. As such, here are five steps you can take now to help you prepare the workforce of the future:

#1: Optimize Automation to Maximize Utilization

Step number one is to ensure that the resources you have are fully and properly utilized, and this rests largely in the hands of your digital journey. Do you have tools in place to plan and schedule your workforce in a streamlined manner or are your technicians wasting time each day on unnecessary travel? Does your workforce have access on site to all the information and inventory they need to get the job done, or are they frequently making return trips? Have you incorporated IoT or Remote Assistance to be able to diagnose and even resolve issues before going onsite? Do you have an effective knowledge management system in place to capture the insights of your most experienced workers and make them accessible to others? It only makes sense that before you work to future-proof, you are making the most of what you have today.

#2: Think (Ahead) About Field Service Responsibilities

We know that the role of the field technician is changing, but what will that look like for your business? Have you thought about what your frontline workers will be doing in five years, once some of the more monotonous and administrative tasks have been fully automated? Have you considered the ways in which your company’s progression toward Servitization will impact what you need your technicians to do differently? This can be an area that is difficult to fully predict, but there are some general points to consider such as how soft skills or even selling behaviors may become more important or how the ability to consume and present data may be more relevant. We recently had Bonnie Anderson, Global Manager of Talent Acquisition and Future Talent at Tetra Pak on the Future of Field Service podcast to discuss how Tetra Pak tackles field service recruiting. One of the pieces of advice she offered is to use an outcomes-based approach to hiring – in other words, to consider what outcomes you need to deliver to your customers and then translate those outcomes into the skills you’re seeking. This practice can apply to the future state, too. How do you think the outcomes you’re delivering for customers will be different in twelve months than they are today, and how do you prepare to hire skills needed to deliver those outcomes? You can future-proof in part by thinking ahead to where the business is going rather than “doing what you’ve always done” when it comes to hiring.

#3: Consider the Role of The Gig Economy

I was listening to an HBR IdeaCast podcast recently on Why Companies and Skilled Workers Are Turning to On-Demand Work that featured Joseph Fuller, professor at Harvard Business School, and Allison Bailey, senior partner at Boston Consulting Group. It was an interesting episode because it looked at the intersection of several trends, including digital transformation and COVID-19, that are leading to a major uptick in the use of on-demand workforces. I’ve spoken with service leaders who are successfully leveraging third-party workers, but thus far those conversations have been the exception versus the rule – often, it is a concept being considered but not yet incorporated into strategy. I think it is inevitable this will change in many cases, so it is worth investigating further and thinking about how a gig approach could help to fill certain gaps or needs.

#4: Adopt a Skills-Based Approach to Hiring

For the talent you do need to bring on board, Anderson of Tetra Pak suggests evolving from an experience-based approach to hiring to a skills-based approach. “When we look at a skills-based approach, it’s shifting that mindset that a candidate needs to have a certain background to be able to fill a position. Having an experience-based assumption has limited talent pools for employers particularly for in demand and niche skills, that are hard to find,” she explains. “So, by flipping that a little bit and saying, ‘Okay, well, actually, a candidate might get a skill from somewhere else other than from their qualification or from their experience;’ you can find a whole talent population that might be untapped, or that you’ve never considered before.” In my words, this means that companies who have traditionally hired based on experience need to understand that the experienced pool is diminishing and that means you need to work harder than you may have before to hired based on skills and then build the experience. While this means more training time and development programs, it is a critical part of the answer to the talent problem many companies have. In addition to considering skills-based hiring, you also need to be thinking about how you can upskill and reskill your existing workers as certain parts of their jobs are automated and/or as new facets of the role are introduced.

#5: Take the Reigns on Developing Future Talent

Step number five is to do what you can to take the future into your own hands, in the form of creating a program to develop future talent. Anderson of Tetra Pak spoke about the company’s Future Talent program, “Future Talent is our graduate development program designed brand new graduates coming out of university, for us to build our long-term strategy in developing that new talent,” she says. “We have a technical track to close the skills gap between industry and the skills that we require in the organization. We don’t really expect graduates to have the skills that they might need, that we might look for in somebody that does have experience. But we do look for potential, how willing they are to learn, how quick they are to learn. And the program is to expedite that learning so they can pick up those skills very, very quickly. If you pride yourself of being at the forefront, you really have to invest your time to get the talent that you need to have that competitive advantage.”

Anderson says, “It’s not necessarily about future-proofing, because I think that’s impossible, but perhaps future preparing.” I like that – prepare today so you are not behind tomorrow.

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November 27, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

Is it Time to Servitize Black Friday?

November 27, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

Is it Time to Servitize Black Friday?

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By Tom Paquin

Starting in High School, I worked a cascading series of retail jobs. While the day-to-day operations of sales and service were actually something that I quite enjoyed, I’d always have to to shut off all higher brain function from the end of November through January 3rd. The numbing din of massive crowds, low, low prices, and verbally abusive parents chiseled me down into a fine paste by the time the ball dropped in Times Square. This slog of exhaustion and inescapable noise always kicked off with the darkest of dark days: Black Friday.

While Black Friday is typically honored by charging a $300 laptop to a credit card at 4AM and parking lot fistfights over Tickle-Me Elmo, this year will likely look more like Black Friday’s little sister, Cyber Monday. Perhaps this year is an opportunity to reset people’s expectations about Black Friday, and retail in general. Perhaps now is the time to look beyond brute forcing predatory pricing, towards a more holistic reimagining of what makes compelling retail. Is it time to servitize Black Friday?

This was literally the first topic I wrote about after joining Future of Field Service two years ago, and given my personal background, both as a rank-and-file retail person, and then working for two analyst firms with a large swath of retail customers, it’s definitely something that I feel compelled by. 2020 has exacerbated retail’s challenges by advancing digital adoption and channel disruption, accelerating our natural progression away from traditional retail by five years or so, according to some estimates. This time last year, your mom wouldn’t know an Instacart if it bit her on the face, but now she’s getting two deliveries a week and hasn’t seen the inside of a Tesco since February. Unsurprisingly, this is also something that I wrote about within the context of service. But Black Friday itself is a slightly different animal.

Black Friday has the unique and bizarre dichotomy of offering deals while enticing people to spend exuberant amounts of money. It if frequently and inaccurately referred to as “The busiest shopping day of the year,” which, again, means that the average shopping mall usually smells like the inside of the average High School locker room by 3PM or so. This year, though, a large quantity of those sales have either been stretched over the course of several weeks or will take place in large part online.

For businesses ready for the ecommerce boom, that’s great. For smaller shops that don’t have the infrastructure or tools in place, things are a little more complicated. Since we’ve long since cleared the Black Friday Event Horizon, we’ll have to think about most of this in the hypothetical, but it’s useful to think about this in the longer-term as well. Here are some thoughts:

Making Retail a Service Operation

This in many ways is the Instacart-ization of service. While it’s certainly fun to browse aisles and look for the perfect tchotchke for Auntie Roxanne, as a crowd-averse person, I appreciate the idea of getting access to Black Friday deals with a quick drop-in rather than a lengthy stroll through the store. By creating a buy-ahead system, you get a little bit of crowd control, you get a new spate of emails with which to market to, and you get some new customer loyalty. Some of my local bookshops are doing that, and it’s fantastic. I’d much rather give them my money and go pick up a book than feed it to the website equivalent of Smaug that Amazon has become.

The Service Upsell

The other benefit of a digital storefront, and moving more commerce onto it, is that it makes upsells to service products much easier. I used to work for a company wherein we had a service bundle that we wanted to sell the customer. We also had self-checkout machines. When tabulating the metrics of who sold more service bundles, the self-checkout machines beat the honest-to-goodness humans every week. Why? Because the self-checkout machines asked every customer, and presented a lot more information on the screen than their meaty colleagues behind the counter bothered to. Selling online already requires a certain amount of information be surrendered. Therefore, a service sell is that much easier. They’re already locked in! For that reason, if your looking to servitize your business, your online portal is an ideal way to reach customers.

Thinking About Next Year

Thinking ahead, we now have a more empowered consumer who is much more amenable to doing the bulk of their shopping through digital channels. How do you get them back in the store? For businesses balancing the cost and benefits of a physical presence, the answer should include a service appointment. Do you create a personal shopper-type service appointment that matches clothes to people? Is there a technical support hub that you can build for customers? Is the answer gift wrapping? Is it an experience that allows parents to entertain their kids for a few short minutes during an incredibly stressful day? No matter what—service can be the conduit back into the store.

Listen, here’s the deal—Retail is in a weird spot right now. The demand is there, for businesses looking to capitalize on it Perhaps this fake holiday is an opportunity for us to reset our expectations.

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November 23, 2020 | 5 Mins Read

A List of Gratitude: 7 Things I’m Extra Thankful for This Year

November 23, 2020 | 5 Mins Read

A List of Gratitude: 7 Things I’m Extra Thankful for This Year

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 By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

With the Thanksgiving holiday this week, I’ve been spending extra time reflecting on all that I am grateful for. In a year as challenging as 2020, the practice of gratitude has become even more important to me. It’s far too easy to succumb to the tough moments and dark days – putting effort into focusing on the things I’m thankful for helps me to be resilient in the trying times. So, without further ado, I am sharing with you a list of seven things I’m incredibly thankful for this year.

#1: Greater Perspective

I try hard not to take things for granted, but I think inevitably we all do to some degree. This year has given me greater perspective and a more profound appreciation for so much – for example, travel. I haven’t stepped foot in an airport since February and while many people who travel for work may be thankful to have that halted, I miss it in many ways. Meeting a friend for coffee or a beer, without second thought. Being able to take my kids to the Children’s Museum or local amusement park. Concerts. Hell, going grocery shopping without a mask. But while it can be challenging not to become frustrated or angry or sad about what’s been taken from us (which I do, sometimes), I am thankful for the perspective of looking back on so many moments with such joy and knowing that, when they happen again, I will appreciate them more than I ever have before.

#2: Deeper Connections

I love getting to know people and one of the things I’m thankful for this year is how people have been willing to engage on a deeper level. With such a major shared experience as we’re all having this year, it’s been interesting to observe how the “small talk” that often got rushed or dismissed before seems to have taken center stage in many conversations. It’s like we all want to know each other better – on a more human level – and I am loving it. I am so incredibly thankful for all of the interesting, enlightening, amazing conversations that I’ve had with service leaders this year – discussing how they’re leading through such crazy times, but more so just getting to know them for who they are.

#3: Being of Service

With in-person industry events on hold and challenges abound this year, I’ve felt that a platform like Future of Field Service is even more valuable than before in terms of keeping people connected and creating as sense of community. I’ve tried in my conversations to be a force of positivity for those I’m speaking with – whether it is offering useful information, or just lending an ear when it is most needed. I’ve tried to help folks in my network whose careers were impacted by COVID. I’ve brainstormed and worked hard to try to think of more impactful ways to serve this community, now, when we need it most. I am grateful to be of service in any way I can, small or large. And I’m grateful to IFS for the opportunity to do so through Future of Field Service.

#4: Technology

Shout out to today’s technologies for making this all possible, am I right? This is an area that, again, we can take for granted – but when you think about how COVID would have impacted us even more deeply without all of the tools we have access to today, you realize just how big of a deal it is. From fueling the ability to stay connected to friends and family that I can’t see in person right now to ensuring I haven’t missed a beat in my career, the virtual world we have created is quite impressive. Don’t get me wrong – I will jump at the first chance to have a conversation in-person over coffee versus on Zoom, but I am incredibly thankful to have the option.

#5: My Family

Can I tell you how absolutely insane it is to work from home with four and five-year-old boys? There are no words (and those of you that know, know). Yes, I have help – but there’s no replacement for mama. As crazy as it has been, and as close as I’ve been to losing my mind, it has also been sweet. I realize that all too soon, these boys will be off to school and no longer my “babies” and so I’m grateful for every extra lunch break I can squeeze in with them. In a year of isolation, it is really comforting to realize how much happiness and joy exists inside your own little bubble (plenty of screaming, fighting, whining and crying too – but, hey, this is a list of gratitude!).

#6: My (and my family’s) Health

My five-year-old son has Type 1 Diabetes which has given us some practice coping with scary health situations – but also put me extra on-edge when COVID began wondering how much more at risk he is due to his condition. I had COVID in October and overall, my symptoms were mild and thankfully my husband and sons were spared. While I do worry about the indications of potential long-term impacts, I’m very thankful that thus far my experience has been manageable. I feel immense gratitude to the healthcare workers on the front lines caring for those in dire need.

#7: Hope

I’m a skeptic with a healthy dose of anxiety mixed in, so hope doesn’t always naturally rise to the forefront of my mind. For me it is more of a muscle that needs strengthened and flexed and I’ve found this year has given me ample opportunity to do just that. On the days I feel most disheartened, I dig deep to find hope. It can be in the form of a prayer, a few deep breaths, looking around for examples of how people are coming together despite being apart, or the commitment to exert more mental energy on the positive “what-ifs” than the negative ones. I’ve learned I often find what I’m looking for, so I try to look for hope.

Thank you all for reading – I am grateful for each and every one of you as well. What are you most thankful for this year? I’d love to hear.

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