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January 27, 2020 | 6 Mins Read

Cubic Transportation’s Outcomes-Based Service Success

January 27, 2020 | 6 Mins Read

Cubic Transportation’s Outcomes-Based Service Success

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Service organizations across the globe are painstakingly aware that the historical break/fix service model is no longer satisfying customers. Rather, customers are demanding outcomes – uptime, peace of mind, and results. The adaptation necessary to meet these ever-increasing demands is no small feat, which is why we see plenty of companies struggling to evolve. There are those, though, which have tackled this transformation with steely resolve and are leading the charge in delivering what today’s customers want. Cubic Transportation Systems is one such example.

Cubic Transportation Systems (CTS) produces and markets public transport fare reading and payment systems for the transportation industry around the world. If you can’t envision what this means, think about the Oyster card used within London. From the moment you purchase the Oyster card, to using the ticket vending machines to add credit, use the card to go through the gates, have the right fare taken from your account, and the smart calculations done in the back office so you are capped the right amount – all of that physical technology and software processing is done through the CTS system. . “Our history of creating and implementing payment and information technologies for the world’s most renowned transportation authorities and operators has taught us that to promote progress, you must create collaboratively – with your technology partners and your customers – and foster a culture of innovation within your company,” says Matt Cole, President of CTS and Sr. Vice President of Cubic Corporation. “We are committed to not only helping shape the transportation landscape, but are prepared to lead, envision and enable industry disruptors. Our technology platforms are designed to factor in the unknown, allowing our systems today to be relevant years down the road.”

This type of company mission and culture promotes the type of transformation service organizations are faced with conquering today. But while company-wide buy-in on this philosophy is a great head start, it still doesn’t make the journey easy. When you look at the practical illustration of what it takes for CTS to deliver this sort of innovation to its customers, it takes a significant amount of strategy, enablement, and execution to bring that commitment to life. Mike Gosling, IT Service Platforms Manager at CTS has been instrumental in the company’s journey to outcomes-based service.

Before Migration Comes Mindset

Success with outcomes-based service starts with mindset. CTS recognized that its customers were committed to improving the experiences of their customers, which put pressure on CTS to find ways to deliver even higher levels of service – or outcomes. Rather than the historical “call when it breaks and we’ll come fix it,” it becomes a matter of almost-constant uptime. Rather than push back on this demand or remain blissfully ignorant to the shift in customer expectations, CTS adopted a positive mindset and set out to determine what needed to evolve within the organization to be able to meet these needs.

This meant letting go of legacy thinking, and legacy processes. “It’s fairly straightforward to examine your processes and uncover what needs to change, but you also have to consider that you need to examine the legacy thinking that exists within the company as well – that is harder to identify and also harder to change,” says Gosling. “It’s just human nature to want to stay within your comfort zone, and it takes effort to take your entire workforce along on this journey and help them understand why and how things are changing and get them to buy into the mission.”

Gosling points out that while the process of weeding out legacy mindset can be challenging, it’s imperative to success. “Take the time to get to the root of what they’re thinking and saying – overcome their concerns rather than dismissing them,” he says. “It takes bravery to overcome this legacy thinking, but you have to be brave and work through it or it will hold you back from your future.”

Setting and Sticking to Success Criteria

Once you feel the right mindset is shared among the entire workforce, the next step is to create very clear success criteria so that you can gauge your success or failure in providing the outcomes you’ve promised your customers. “If you don’t have clarity on what success looks like, you’ll never get there,” says Gosling. “The criteria need to be very specific, and realistic but challenging.”

When CTS embarked on the outcomes-based service journey with its customer Transport for London (TfL), the local government body responsible for the transport system in Greater London, the process for setting these success criteria was to carefully examine the service contracts, top to bottom, and set the criteria for hitting those requirements. In this case, the number one criteria is system uptime, followed by three others.

“Once your criteria are set, it is imperative to stick to it – use it as your why,” says Gosling. “There will be plenty of scenarios in which you’ll be tempted to veer off course and make decisions that aren’t tied to the success criteria, but you have to remember that if you set your success criteria well, anything that deviates is a distraction from what matters most.”

Selecting the Right Toolset

CTS knew it couldn’t deliver the outcomes customers like TfL expect without relying on technology. “Technology is the path to delivering outcomes-based service,” says Gosling. “Adding field engineers to meet the demands of outcomes is not reasonable – technology is critical in today’s service landscape.”

To achieve its success criteria, CTS relies on IFS Field Service Management (FSM) which manages work orders, parts and assets to contracts, warranty, invoicing and billing. FSM gives CTS much needed visibility of what’s being done in the field. CTS also uses IFS Planning & Scheduling Optimization (PSO), a real-time scheduling and optimization software that uses AI and advanced algorithms to deliver the optimum schedule. “PSO is a phenomenally powerful tool,” says Gosling. “It is key to use delivering the outcomes our customers want in the most efficient way possible.”

CTS is also working to integrate Dexda, a machine learning-based event management tool, with FSM and PSO to incorporate IoT data from its equipment and move to more predictive service. “This will allow PSO to respond to events we think are going to happen based on empirical learning,” says Gosling. “Beyond enabling predictive service, however, it will also provide a wealth of valuable business insight on our products that can be fed back to engineering.”

3 Tips for Your Journey to Outcomes

On the journey to outcomes-based service, Gosling has learned three lessons that serve as valuable advice for those on this path. First, remember the importance of change management. This comes at the beginning of an initiative, but all along as well. With PSO, for instance, it was important for CTS to providing ongoing coaching and change management. “With a tool like PSO that self-learns and adjusts, there are times that are gut instinct for a scheduler that’s not accustomed to the technology to want to intervene,” says Gosling. “You have to manage this change and fight off those urges when they aren’t necessary. When manual intervention is necessary, you need to handle exceptions with consistency and document the outcome so that it can be factored into the workflow.”

Second, don’t try to avoid mistakes; they propel you forward. “When you’re innovating, mistakes will naturally occur,” says Gosling. “Making decisions means making mistakes. Mistakes are a learning opportunity that all too often are avoided when they shouldn’t be. As a leader, it’s important to set the example by owning your own mistakes and communicating clearly with your team about what happened, what was learned, and what will be different next time.”

Finally, avoid “that’ll do” thinking at all costs. “This journey is one of continual improvement,” says Gosling. “If you pop the champagne and put your feet up as soon as you hit your success criteria, you’ll fall back below quickly [or you need more challenging success criteria]. When you master one area, you keep watch of it and move on to another. You constantly assess where you are and where you’re going next, and out of this process is where the new innovative ideas are born. But you have to be in a constant state of assessing and looking ahead.”

Since CTS started its journey to delivering outcomes, and with its focus on mindset, metrics, change management, utilizing technology, and continual improvement, the company has improved uptime by 20 percent. Delivering outcomes is the future of field service and it’s inspiring to see a company that has successfully tackled such a major transformation.

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January 24, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

The Road to Servitization in Product-Oriented Businesses

January 24, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

The Road to Servitization in Product-Oriented Businesses

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By Tom Paquin

Recently I was hit by a peculiar targeted advertisement: A major automaker’s car subscription service. My interest being piqued, I clicked on the ad. From where I was standing car subscription services have always existed, and were called leased vehicles, and after some puttering around their very snazzy new website, I inferred that at its heart, this “subscription” was a millennial-oriented rebranding of that concept.

As I dug deeper, though, it became increasingly clear that that was only partially the case. In addition to the car and registration that typically comprises the totality of a lease agreement, this car company’s plan included:

  • Guaranteed pricing
  • Insurance
  • Vehicle maintenance
  • Annual upgrades

Feeling aspirational, I selected a luxury vehicle, and was given a monthly payment that, when taking into consideration the fact that you’re getting insurance and service included, with the option to upgrade after 12 months, seemed like a perfectly reasonable price.

We can discuss the environmental ramifications of this all another day but from an economical sense, this seems like a win-win. Customers who want it get a virtually worry-free car, no negotiations, no tire replacements, no insurance wrangling, and annual new car smell. The automaker gets an engine for customer loyalty, service control over their own vehicles to ensure consistency of parts and labor, and the ability to provide services like insurance through a third-party at bulk pricing, thus forming a key partnership.

This, at its heart, is true servitization. Sure, the car company is packaging and delivering a commodity, but the value is in the feeling of security that accompanies the sale. Car buying tops every list of most stressful purchase processes. Alleviating that stress is a service with minimal overhead and maximum value. It is servitization at its most effective, and if executed as well as it looks, could keep customers coming back for a long time.

If we can make servitization work with cars, we can make it work with virtually any industry, but it’s not without its caveats. There are a lot of places along the value chain where things can go wrong. Any industry that combines a product with service needs to think very carefully about how it manages every aspect of its brand. Here are some very important questions to ask as you start to consider servitization.

Are products delivered through dealer networks?

Let’s use an iPhone as an example, here. iPhones are sold through Apple retail, where the entirety of the sales and service process can be curated. iPhones are also sold through cellular providers, big box, and electronic retailers. When rolling out its servitized plan for iPhones, Apple had to decide whether to offer the iPhone upgrade program exclusively at its own retail stores, or externally, and chose to keep the entirety of the process in-house. This was a safe, if unambitious move.

Some product companies don’t have the luxury of a direct-to-consumer presence, though, so they have to work with dealer networks not just for sales, but also for service. Because of that, standardization of the parameters of service contracts, parts management, and service delivery are imperative to getting servitizaton right. Does this mean making all of your dealers adopt the same service management platform that you have? If it’s an automaker, then possibly, but if it’s Best Buy, then you’ll need to think about how to approach that in order to centralize data. Work with your implementation partners on the appropriate plan.

Is the service managed centrally, is it franchised, or is it done independently?

Just like the products themselves, it’s important to consider how the actual service system with which you work is handled. If you have a service infrastructure in place, is it self-sufficient, or is it bolstered by independent contractors? Do you want independent contractors involved in service delivery? If not, how can you incentivize consumers to go to first-party service centers?

Alternatively, if you have nothing but independents, do you have the means of managing them internally? What utilities are you using to facilitate that process? Do customers manage service and assets internally, and are assigned external service workers, or does information live in dozens of separate systems? There’s obviously a right and a wrong way to do this, and the tools are out there to centralize all of these processes. You owe it to your brand to get it right.

What does the long-tail service lifecycle look like?

This is where you make the business case for servitization. Perhaps you have an extremely long product lifecycle. We see businesses with products from 1955 in their clients’ possession, which completely changes the meaning of an upgrade cycle. In an instance like that—what are the service touchpoints, and how do you appropriately monetize those touchpoints?

In businesses with shorter product lifecycles—one to ten years—are there opportunities to keep customers tied to your ecosystem in the long-term? Many businesses have rightly concluded that service contracts represent a swift, easy, and cheap way to do just that, but you can’t just deliver service, of course. The service needs to be good.

It’s unclear whether this automaker will succeed with its all-inclusive approach to car buying, but it represents a pretty interesting test case in the way that businesses are thinking about products for their consumers. Especially in low-margin industries, service bundles provide the sort of profit cushion that could really make a difference. And when executed well, servitization can be what sets your business apart.

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January 20, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

The Hurdles To Achieving AR ROI In Field Service

January 20, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

The Hurdles To Achieving AR ROI In Field Service

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

According to ABI Research, the total augmented reality market is estimated to reach over $100 billion by 2024, at an average CAGR of 75 percent. The research firm says, “The mainstay early adoption verticals like Manufacturing, Logistics, and Energy are still showing impressive growth, while newer verticals like healthcare, media & entertainment, and retail/commerce/marketing are the fastest growing.”

Personally, AR is one of the technologies I find most exciting and compelling for service organizations because I can so easily visualize the problems it can solve. In other words, its value proposition is clear to me (and countless others). Take the talent gap, for instance, and think about how AR can help organizations to more quickly and efficiently train and support limited resources. Consider the value of remote resolution, and how AR can be used either internally or with customers to reduce the need for truck rolls in many cases or, at minimum, ensure better preparation when a tech arrives on site. Even knowledge management – being able to capture the information exchange in the AR sessions and catalog that as shared knowledge is incredibly valuable.

While I’ve talked with numerous service leaders having success with AR within their respective organizations, what has surfaced is the reality that there are a few shared hurdles that need to be overcome in order to attain ROI and reap the full rewards of AR. Here are four common hurdles that those I’ve interviewed have experienced and would caution you to expect and preparer for as you implement AR:

Older workforce resistance. The reality is, any new tool can be met with skepticism and hesitance by those workers set in their way. But I’d say a tool like AR has a buzz about it that can emphasize these emotions in some of your older workers. Those I’ve interviewed have reported some significant challenges with getting older workers on board with using AR. Overcoming this hurdle comes down to three things – having a proactive change management strategy in place, encouraging an open dialogue with these workers as they become familiar with the tool, and ensuring you have measures in place to hold your workers accountable for using the technology.

Connectivity issues. This is a hurdle I am sure is being addressed by those providing AR technology, but a recurring issue among the folks that have adopted the technology is experiencing connectivity problems. This ranges from not being able to initiate sessions to sessions being interrupted, but the end result is that it can be a very frustrating experience for the employees (and customers, if you are using this technology with your customers) and contributes to the adoption issues discussed above. I’d recommend you test, retest, and keep testing connectivity during your trial and pilot to ensure that the solution works to your expectations.

Battery life issues. Some of the folks I’ve talked with are using AR for very short trouble-shooting chats (three to five minutes) and others for longer support calls (20 to 25 minutes). Those that are using AR for longer durations have reported that the sessions kill the battery life of their mobile devices. This will present varying degrees of issue depending on how many opportunities your technicians have to charge their device throughout the day, but again is something you should test and bring up to your AR provider if you’re researching or evaluating this technology.

Wearables need work. Most of the companies I’ve spoken with about AR are using a smartphone or tablet for sessions, while many are interested in or considering moving to wearable devices. One of the service leaders I interviewed had tested different wearables and explained that while the AR solution works quite seamlessly on a smartphone, it isn’t as smooth on the wearables – that there’s still some work that needs done for the application to have the same impact on a wearable as it does a smartphone. I am certain progress is being made with this daily, but it’s important to identify the preferred device for your use case is and test it thoroughly.

Despite these hurdles, the value of AR in field service is clear, and that is echoed by those I’ve discussed challenges with.  All the people I’ve spoken to about AR use feel it is worthwhile despite some of the stumbling blocks. It is always worthwhile, though, to discuss both sides of the coin when it comes to technology – the value it will provide, but the fact that it is never a seamless journey. If you are looking to deploy AR, these issues are worth investigating and discussing during your evaluation.

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January 16, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

Avoiding Reckless Tech Adoption

January 16, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

Avoiding Reckless Tech Adoption

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By Tom Paquin

As someone who cooks a lot at home, I have been trying to improve my culinary chops for quite a while now. Between binging on cooking YouTube channels (Highly recommended: Bon Appetit) and simply getting creative with ingredients, I think that I’ve built up a strong home cook aptitude, and have proudly expanded my repertoire (and my palate) with new spices and ingredients. One thing that practice has taught me is the tenuous balance of done-ness. There’s a lot of precision that goes into the balance of overcooking and undercooking. Once something is on the skillet, the clock starts ticking. When do I flip this? When do I add the garlic? When do I take it off the heat?

The preparedness of a business for a new technology requires an intimate understanding of a similar balance. Leave your business in the oven too long without adopting the right tech, and your competitors will have surpassed you, your infrastructure will have become too rigid, and your customers will move onto someone who delivers more. We all know that, though, and talk about the dangers of resting on your laurels quite a bit. What happens, though, when you adopt a technology before your business is ready for it?

I discussed an example of this a few weeks ago with a service leader who preemptively deployed augmented reality tech without properly addressing infrastructure challenges, leading to the tech sitting uselessly on a shelf. In the inverse, though, I was talking to a service leader a few weeks ago who had yet to adopt IFS Lobby, a dashboard utility that’s part of the IFS service management platform, and asked him why he hadn’t yet.

“We need to explore every avenue before adopting any new system,” He said. That’s fine, of course, but had they explored any avenues yet? There’s ultimately no difference between technology you own sitting unused on a shelf and technology that you have the capabilities to use but refuse deploy. Both are useless. So, with any new technology, how do you know when your business is ready?

No two businesses are the same, of course, but based on what I’ve seen, when it comes to successful adoption, there are a few steps you can take to know you’re making the right move at the right time.

Hear from reference customers. We all want to be trailblazers, but the fact is that most technology advancements have been adopted in one way or another before you considered it. In service, what often happens is that technology saturation happens in sales, retail, or some adjacent industry, or in a disruptive tech play, which sets the standards that are adapted and iterated upon in a service environment. Find those customers and hear their stories. Look not just at the value, but at the best practices, at the initial legwork that goes into adoption, and, most importantly, where things went wrong. Best practices are often built upon mistakes. You can make them yourself, or you can learn from those who came before you. Save yourself the headache and learn from your neighbor.

Take stock of your digital inventory. This goes without saying, but there are a lot of digital switches at play in the modern enterprise, and the data collected from them, their functionality, or their output could be a key component that folds itself into a new technology adoption. Understand that technology mix, and whether or not any pieces are missing. Key at this step as well is looking at the software that will sit around your new tech purchase. Does everything speak a common language? How difficult will integration be? How will it impact or enhance the effectiveness of this software? Often these questions will come from your references, or from your own team, but often as well, they’ll come from the below.

Consult the experts early. Whether it’s a third party integrator or a branch of the company whose tech you’re buying, start asking—and getting answers to—"into the weeds” questions very early on in the process. This is pretty standard practice, of course, but this is frequently saved for the point when organizations are ready to adopt a technology, rather than when they’re evaluating if they should adopt a technology. At both stages, it’s easy to get handed a laundry list of performance gains, when really, you should be equally as interested in understanding how something actually works, and what the change management processes will actually be. If the people you’re working with can’t get you those answers, then it might be too early, or you should find a company that does.

Unlike business, there’s one thing that you can do to get the perfect meal, and that’s practice a lot, knowing that you might end up with the odd turkey with pink in the middle (apologies to my poor wife, who was a great sport during my trial attempts to modernize Thanksgiving). Of course with service, you can’t practice the adoption of a new technology, because each new technology is its own dish. For that reason, it needs to be more like reading a recipe. Keep a close eye on the directions, and make sure that you have all the ingredients before the food hits the pan.

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January 13, 2020 | 6 Mins Read

A Look at Field Service in 2020

January 13, 2020 | 6 Mins Read

A Look at Field Service in 2020

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Field service is evolving enormously in recent years and technology and customer expectations will continue to advance just as quickly. Twenty years ago, field service may have been centered on break-fix repair, but the velocity now is towards long-term, contractual arrangements that are more satisfying for the customer and more lucrative for the service provider. Transformational technologies can enable whole new revenue models that make field service organizations stickier and more intimate with their customer even while generating more value. Here are four ways leading service organizations are adapting.

Prediction 1: Outcomes-based service takes hold

We will see more companies selling annual maintenance contracts. These contracts are attractive because they give a field service organization predictable revenue and demand and can deliver high margins.

For decades, product-centric businesses have been transitioning towards servitizing what they sell. First it was the addition of a warranty and the availability of after-market parts. Then it was reactive field service or depot repair. As early as 2018, IFS data suggests that 62 percent of manufacturers were already pursuing some form of aftermarket revenue. But manufacturers are now adopting more advanced forms of aftermarket service, with 16 percent of respondents offering maintenance contracts with specific service-level agreements (SLAs).

It is notable that modern customers not only demand a better service experience, but a holistic outcome. They expect to be left feeling positive as well as have their specific issue remedied. Technology is a mechanism whereby this change can be implemented, but nobody should overlook the people element as well.

I predict that that while 16 percent of manufacturers were involved in service contracting in 2018, that number will reach 25 to 30 percent in 2020.

Complete Servitization

The move towards servitization in most cases will deliver value-added revenue on top of product sales. In some cases, where it is attractive to the consumer, a product may be completely servitized, and the end user pays for metered usage or other metric captured in real time. In the 2018 IFS data, only 4 percent of manufacturers were fully servitized, including companies from the medical device, metal fabrication and oil and gas industries.

For customers who want to push enterprise risk off on their vendors, servitization will be an attractive way to buy. But actually realizing a profit on these contracts poses some significant management and enterprise software problems. When the service agreement is sold, a company will be committing to deliver against a contract that they could make or lose money on for years. Executives will need to make sure they have adequate what-if-scenario planning capabilities to enable them to deliver quotes that are competitive with minimal risk.

Companies can turn their data into a strategic tool that facilitates service sales while improving the customer experience. For this shift to be successful for companies, they’ve had to put some foundational technologies in place. Research IFS and Future of Field Service recently conducted with Bill Pollock of Strategies for Growth shows that outcomes-based service operations rely on the foundation of the service management platform, ERP, predictive maintenance, and IoT in particular.

More than half of respondents were running some type of enterprise system of record that handled the core service transactional business

54 percent are running their service business on a “Dedicated Service Management platform” like field service management (FSM) or enterprise asset management, just ahead of enterprise resource planning (ERP) at 50.8 percent

6 percent said they were using software for predictive maintenance and 42.8 percent were leveraging data from the internet of things (IoT)

With these tools in place, I forecast that an increasing emphasis on complete servitization, and that in 2020 we will see the percentage of manufacturers selling products by subscription or metered use will surpass 10 percent (from 4 percent in 2018).

Prediction 2: Digital Transformation Gets Harder Before It Gets Easier

People use the term “digital transformation” to sell any number of technologies, but we are dealing here not with a technology that can be bought but a fundamentally different way of looking at and doing business. The truth is that, to do it properly, it is a complex journey for service organizations and one that involves a departure from siloed operations, legacy tools, and outdated business processes. The change management obstacles that surround this are many, as individuals can find the old ways comforting even as the competition is overtaking a business.

What we have seen so far is rollout of transformational technologies at the edge. We track our field technicians’ location through IoT. We schedule them using AI. We may have an AI chatbot fielding inquiries online. Maybe we have some AI functionality in our inventory management processes. We’ll continue to see point solutions using AI and IoT. Where we are going next, though, is the introduction of AI in particular to the front office and administrative processes.

In its “Top Predictions for 2020” report, Gartner said: “Through 2021, digital transformation initiatives will take large traditional enterprises, on average, twice as long and cost twice as much as anticipated. Large organizations will struggle with digital innovation as they recognize the challenges of technology modernization and the costs of simplifying operational interdependence. Smaller, more agile organizations, by contrast, will have an opportunity to be first to market as larger organizations exhibit lackluster immediate benefits.”

History is littered with companies that couldn’t change as they needed to: Kodak in the face of digital photography, Blockbuster Video in the face of servitized and downloadable media. Today, we are at a point where disruptive technologies are embedded at the tip of the spear of forward-thinking service organizations. IoT sensors capture condition-based maintenance information, or an AI algorithm adjusts the field service schedule in real time based on constantly changing conditions.

In 2020, we will see more companies adopt these disruptive technologies in customer and service-facing settings. But I believe we will also see enterprise software vendors move further towards AI-driven automation of the front office in areas like service finance, inventory management, what-if scenario planning and customer interaction. And those who adopt AI as part of a commercial-off-the-shelf solution will win the race against those who take a go-it-alone approach.

Prediction 3: IoT Grows Up and We’re Left With All The Data

With more and more organizations saying they have some degree of remote connectivity for their assets, their drivers, and their parts, IoT is now mainstream. We are collecting large amounts of data and can now develop and apply analytics.

In our study conducted with Strategies for Growth, the biggest area of implementation interest across all industries is in predictive and prescriptive maintenance. Connected assets are the start of the story rather than the destination and customers are starting to realize that the old adage of “garbage in, garbage out” applies if data collection and hoarding becomes an end in itself.

A good example is multinational telecom company Telefonica, a provider of smart technology to collect data from assets (such as vending machines). The data is then fed into their existing analytics for decision support. The power of analytics is significant enough that it will also be important to assure customers that you respect their privacy and data rights. Google faced controversy after its 2019 purchase of Fitbit due to concern over how Google would use and monetize end user data.

During 2020, my forecast is that businesses will focus less attention on methods by which to collect additional data and more on making valuable use of the data they are already collecting.

Prediction 4: Companies Work to Balance AI vs. Human Experience

As advanced AI becomes more widely adopted among service organizations, companies will seek an equilibrium between the efficiencies of AI and contact with humans that customers and other stakeholders crave. On one hand, greater AI use not only reduces costs but also enables organizations to make better use of resources in sectors facing labor shortages. AI will do a better job meeting certain deliverables and should automate many repetitive tasks. Will this free up staff for more customer-facing work?

In various service settings, this is exactly what AI has already done. AI-driven schedule optimization for instance enables a single dispatcher to support a larger number of field service technicians, enabling them to manage by exception, perhaps spending more time with customers when they need a human touchpoint.

Service intelligence vendor Aquant in this Field Services Online article, while acknowledging Fortune had in 2016 warned that 48 percent of jobs would be lost to artificial intelligence and robotics, says the true future lies in a hybrid between people and AI. As noted by Deloitte in its report Smart Field Service: Connecting Customers, Assets and Employees, “In a digital world, it’s emotional connections that make the difference between satisfying experiences and those that delight the customers and build strong long-term customer relationships.”

Our job now is to use AI to engineer seamless, satisfying automated processes into our business without engineering the human contact out.

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Avoiding Bias in your Technical Criteria

January 9, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

Avoiding Bias in your Technical Criteria

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By Tom Paquin

In the mid-1990’s, organizations began building software designed to track different metrics for their employees. About an hour after any one of those systems were implemented, at least one employee would have figured out a way to game the system.

I was not one of those employees. I was, by contrast, a vehement rule-follower who was aghast that a fellow employee (We’ll call him Jeremy) would return and re-sell warranties at the end of a shift. Jeremy noted that the system was designed to count every new sale towards our quota, and didn’t discount returns from that number, so he had found a way to meet our excessive sales metrics without putting in the work—or, in some cases, putting in more work.

This particular example requires some human interference, but nevertheless represents a truth in the way that we collect data, one that becomes of even greater importance if you want to use that data to benchmark outcomes-based service: You need to plan against bias when you’re developing your technical criteria. It’s very easy to lean your reporting in a bit to make it more favorable towards a specific sales-level agreement, for instance, but there are, in fact, major consequences to doing that.

Let’s think about the repercussions of the example above. Sure—Jeremy hit his number, but there’s now a misrepresentation in the system of the total number of warranties sold. Research has shown that increased warranty usage has a direct tie to customer loyalty, so that means that any piece of forecasting is now inaccurate. And, of course, now there’s an inflated percentage of warranties sold on that date last year, so when next year came around, and we weren’t able to beat last year’s number, it actually makes us look worse.

This is something that Mike Gosling from Cubic mentioned in this week’s excellent episode of the podcast (rate, comment, and subscribe). In it, he talks about setting up systems because, politically, they’re favorable for your company. While that can often be a good consideration, especially when developing SLAs, he warned privately around setting up data collection systems that were engineered in a way to produce a politically-favorable result. In the example above, the employee figured out how to rig the system. In many cases, the bug is actually a feature of the software.

Here’s a simple example of how this could happen in practice even without a Jeremy: Imagine you have two facilities that you manage, one that requires 50 repairs a year, and one that requires 10. The larger facility has an 80% SLA compliance rate. The smaller one has a 50% rate. Organizationally, you’re shooting for 75%. How will you calculate the performance of these two locations?

If you take the numbers in aggregate (45 of 60 jobs met SLA requirements), then horray, you’ve hit your quota. Enjoy your bonus. Measuring that specific way, though favorable, ignores the fact that there may be serious regional, logistical, or workforce challenges that you’re ignoring at one specific jobsite. You’re not getting an accurate picture of your business, and you’re doing your business and your customer a disservice.

This oversight is easy to see with less than a hundred jobs and only two job sites, but for an actual business, who then has to layer in additional layers of complexity, and hundreds, if not thousands of jobs a year, it’s easy to see how biased thinking and aligning numbers to meet your narrative can be so easy.

So what do you do? Here are a few things that we’ve seen businesses find success with.

From many data sources, build one source of truth. I rarely stop talking about the importance of having a single source of truth for your business that runs through service, sales, operations, and so on. That truth, though, is only as powerful as the data powering it. Garbage-in-garbage-out is even an oversimplification in this case. The data needs to come from good sources, yes, but it needs to come from diverse sources, and, importantly, if some of your customers aren’t as sophisticated as others, perhaps your business has a blind spot.

Audit your processes on a rolling basis. Take any one technician, account, site, or day, and see how it anecdotally matches up to your numbers. Is it way off? Are technicians logging their appointments properly? I spoke to a guy not too long ago who discovered that an entire branch was logging appointments at the end of the day, rather than starting and ending them in real-time. Any time you turn over a rock it’s incredible to see what sort of worms wriggle out.

Rethink your workflow. Sometimes it’s hard to see that we’re doing things simply because that’s the way that we’ve always done them. Oftentimes, it takes a head-cracker to come in and shake things up. Don’t be afraid to look outside your division—or your business—for the talent to think about the data you’re collecting in new and different ways.

Even if you do all of this, there’s still going to be the potential of drift, and there may always be a Jeremy skulking about to step on the scales. Because of them, improvement is never done. The company eventually patched out his exploit, but it took nearly a year for them to address it. We are all tasked with making our businesses a little better today than it was yesterday, and that’ll never change, but it’s a lot easier to do if you start out on the right foot.

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January 6, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

The 4 Resolutions You Need for Service Success in 2020

January 6, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

The 4 Resolutions You Need for Service Success in 2020

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

There’s much debate on whether New Year’s resolutions are worthwhile, but in my opinion, it can never hurt to pause and set some intentions. Service has made strides in the past couple of years when it comes to being seen for its competitive worth and being prioritized within businesses, so there is more focus than ever on how to succeed in service. This comes at the perfect time, because there is also more pressure from customers to deliver not only better service, but new and unique experiences. As we kick off 2020, here are four areas of focus that will help you capitalize on the opportunity of service this year.

1: Become More Agile

Agility is a key theme for 2020 and is important in numerous areas of the business. Today’s fast-paced world is demanding a more nimble response from those looking to remain competitive. Focusing on the ability to more quickly respond to your customers’ needs is important. Adopting the mentality of being more agile in course correcting your objectives and strategy is necessary. And migrating to more agile technology methodology is important to leverage today’s latest advancements. Agility isn’t a word that would historically be associated with service organizations – many have been doing things the same way for a long time and have been pretty slow to make changes. That means of operating is a thing of the past – if you want to survive, let alone succeed, in today’s environment you must work on becoming more agile.

2: Improve Your Company Culture

A focus on company culture has become increasingly important for service organizations and will continue to need to be prioritized. Why? Well, for a few reasons. First, for your vision of service success to be achieved, you are relying on your frontline employees to be on board and carry it out. You can’t do this without employees that are engaged, feel valued, and feel heard. Second, with all the changes taking place in service today as company’s redefine themselves and their offerings, you are asking more of your employees – you are asking them to step outside of their comfort zones, and they won’t be willing to do that in a poor culture. Finally, as companies struggle to recruit, hire, and retain new talent, creating a culture that people want to be a part of becomes an important part of your value proposition. So, in 2020, take stock of your company culture (what it really is – not what you’d like to think it is). Determine where you can make some improvements and prioritize doing so. This could be more methods of making employees feel appreciated, it could be better defining career paths, it could be more ample training, more effective onboarding, gathering and implementing more feedback. It could be mentorship programs, revisiting incentives, or thinking of new perks. The answer will be different for every company, but the point is – as you go into 2020 expecting more of your employees, make sure you prioritize giving more back to them as well.

3: Up Your Tech Game

To progress your business in the ways you would like to, you must embrace technology as your key enabler. While a solid technology strategy was once in its own right a competitive advantage, it has become table stakes for effectively doing business today. Digital transformation isn’t a finish line that you will cross, but a forever journey of continuous improvement and ongoing advancements. Tying back to the resolution of becoming more agile, you have to become comfortable iterating technology advancements regularly. What this looks like for your organization depends on what your current state is – but the opportunities are endless. From AI-powered scheduling and IoT-enabled predictive maintenance to AR-based remote service and ML-powered knowledge management, the tools you have at your disposal to take your service to the next level are powerful and attainable. What new technology will you use in 2020 to better equip your employees and delight your customers?

4: Chart Your Path to Outcomes-Based Service

If your main objective for 2020 is reducing your service windows to less than four hours, you are drastically missing the mark. Service success is no longer measured by incremental improvements, but by the ability to provide outcomes and experiences to your customers. Outcomes-based service is the end game, and you need to figure out how you’re going to get there. This is an easier adjustment for some industries and some organizations than others, but it is the reality for everyone. Customers no longer want a good service visit – they want peace of mind, a seamlessness meeting of their needs, an exceptional experience. I’ve witnessed powerful examples of companies getting this right, like Cubic Transportation Systems, Tetra Pak, and KONE. I’ve also talked with service leaders struggling to determine what this looks like for their organizations. In 2020, you need to prioritize charting your path to outcomes-based service – your future relies on it.

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January 3, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

It’s 2020, So We Can Start Talking About 5G

January 3, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

It’s 2020, So We Can Start Talking About 5G

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By Tom Paquin

As we all shamble, bleary-eyed back to our desks, I know what your first thought is: We can officially start unwrapping some of those technologies that have been a little too cutting-edge to be worth considering in 2019.

There’s certainly no shortage of digital ink that’s already been spilled about 5G, something that’s existed more as a marketing gimmick up until this point (I don’t remember such self-congratulatory fanfare for LTE). But now that it’s actually being rolled out (though most hardware isn’t yet compatible) we have a better idea of what the capabilities deliver in practice, and what it might actually mean for service. The short answer? A lot.

I should probably start by saying what 5G is. At its core, it’s really, really, really fast internet. What does that actually mean? Here’s a comparison: 4G LTE at maximum speed caps at 50 megabytes per second. The average cable internet connection caps somewhere between 20 and 150, depending on where you live and how much you pay. 5G is said to max out at 20 Gigabytes per second (It’s notable that current builds cap at about 5gbps but 20 is the potential built into the radio bands).

All those megas and gigas mean a lot to those of us who were excited to add 16 megabytes of RAM into our PCs in 1996 but for those of you who actually had friends, here’s some super basic computer math: 1 Gigabyte is equal to 1,000 megabytes, which means 5G has the potential of reaching speeds that are 400 times faster than what we have today. Imagine if your next car didn’t top out at 160 or whatever, but instead could get you from New York to London in 45 minutes.

So—what can we do with really, really, really fast internet? I’ll start with a very basic example:

While attending Field Service USA back in April, I had a chance to speak to a gentleman who worked for a component manufacturer. They had recently deployed an augmented reality solution but were seeing dismal utilization rates in the field. What the business hadn’t taken into consideration was that many of the plants that they service are in fairly remote areas, often with middling cellular service, so the technicians couldn’t effectively use the streaming services of their AR devices in an effective way, thus rendering them useless.

There’s obviously a few teachable elements at play here but the most fundamental is that, as I’ve said many times before, technology adoption needs to progress in a logical sequence. Artificial Intelligence needs strong data sources, connected devices need the right sensors, and so on. At the very core of that, the floor that your technologies are built on, is solid internet connectivity. Misunderstanding the scope of that or having a blind spot to some of its failings will undermine any attempts at technology superiority.

Theoretically, 5G could be the silver bullet that resolves some of these connectivity issues, assuming that it offers lower latency and improved coverage in the areas in which these technicians are working. Of course, to compensate for that, all of this businesses’ handsets need to be updated to 5G, and we’re still, I’d expect, about eighteen months out from that being a reasonable standard. This example is a pretty obvious use case for 5G—Things move faster, you can therefore do more with streaming services. There’s a less explicitly obvious change coming, though.

Today, your main computing power sits on your desk or in your pocket. The internal CPUs of these devices, even if enhanced through connectivity, do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to complex processes. Sure, your CRM is cloud-based, great, but if you’re running any sort of complex infrastructure management, the whole of the picture needs to be hybrid-ized in some way. The interconnectivity of 5G hopes to upend that, allowing for much more complexity to be managed directly over networks. More networked computing means faster, more accurate to-the-second data collecting, and it means faster responses to exceptions that might not require a technician dispatch. At its core, (when partnered with the right software) it means centralizing more data collected from more sources and creating a single source of truth from which not just service, but all areas of the business, can work in the same langauge.

Is that a bit optimistic? Yes, and it requires a lot of work to put the right utilities inside your serviceable assets, in the hands, and on the vehicles of your technicians. 5G is coming, will dramatically impact service’s effectiveness in likely hundreds of small ways, and only those companies taking stock of what they have today will be ready when it’s time.

Infrastructure, security, and hardware challenges still remain (and warrant a future discussion when we understand the repercussions better), which means that the full promise of 5G is probably still a few years away. But if you’re thinking about the sequence of technology adoption that your business needs to be ready, you know that you’ll need to start moving soon.

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December 30, 2019 | 3 Mins Read

My Favorite Future of Field Service Moments of 2019

December 30, 2019 | 3 Mins Read

My Favorite Future of Field Service Moments of 2019

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

It’s been an honor to be at the helm of Future of Field Service in 2019, and a pleasure to watch it grow. Since it’s inception at the very end of 2018, we’ve had immense support and interest from the industry – so thank you for that! I’m very passionate about giving the service community a platform to share, learn, and grow and I’m thankful for the opportunity Future of Field Service gives to do just that. Looking back on 2019 I’ve been thinking about how much we’ve accomplished this year and wanted to share with you all my personal favorite Future of Field Service moments of 2019.

First is the Future of Field Service Podcast launch! Since April 3rd, we’ve released a new podcast each Wednesday (with a few bonus episodes thrown in). I’ve wanted to launch a podcast for a very long time – I’ve long felt that the conversations I get to have with folks within the service community are just awesome, easily my favorite part of my job. Being able to share those conversations with our audience and enable all of you to feel a part of them is a lot of fun. We’ve been fortunate to have some amazing guests on to share their own journeys, their wins and struggles, and their valuable insights. I absolutely love the podcast platform and look forward to keeping the momentum going.

Next is our Women in Field Service series – a series we began in March in honor of International Women’s Day but decided to keep going all year long because of how interesting it has been to hear women’s journeys. I hope we all get to a point where there doesn’t need to be a “women in” callout, but particularly in field service I don’t think we’re there yet – there is work to be done to make the service industries a more equal ground, and a strong desire from many to work diligently to foster greater diversity. Until we accomplish those objectives, I think the practice of hearing and telling women’s journeys – what brought them to service, what their challenges have been, how they see the opportunity for women in this industry, and what they’ve learned – is important, and enjoyable. I’ve loved each of these interviews – you can find them all by searching “Women in Field Service” at www.futureoffieldservice.com. I especially loved this podcast episode, recorded live at Field Service Amelia Island. Check it out!

Third, I was honored to be invited to the grand opening of DHL’s Americas Innovation Center in Chicago to keynote the company’s The Future of The Services Supply Chain event. It was a gathering of a number of companies leading innovation within the service industries. It was interesting to hear what is on their minds, and it was also a pleasure to share with the audience some of what I’ve learned while interviewing service leaders throughout this year. DHL extended this invitation after finding value in Future of Field Service content, and this to me was a testament of how well the platform has taken off.

Finally, I was thrilled to attend my first Field Service Europe event. I’ve been attending Field Service Palm Springs for a decade, but had never before been to the European event. I was happy to represent Future of Field Service on the mainstage, first interviewing IFS customer Cubic Transportation and then moderating a great panel on AI and ML. Future of Field Service was well-received by the attendees of the event and we look forward to expanding further in the New Year.

There are many more moments I could list, but these four came to mind first. I owe a big thank you to IFS for trusting me to lead this resource and for working collaboratively to bring a valuable platform to the service community. I also owe a big thank you to contributor/podcast producer/jack-of-all-trades Tom Paquin for keeping this ship afloat. Finally, I owe each of YOU a big thank you for being a part of this journey. We have some wonderful plans for 2020 and I look forward to what’s in store.

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December 26, 2019 | 6 Mins Read

Servitizing Star Wars

December 26, 2019 | 6 Mins Read

Servitizing Star Wars

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By Tom Paquin

It’s the end of December and that means one thing: There’s probably a new Star Wars movie coming out. Rapt as I am about the many technologies disrupting the world of service, my love for Star Wars stretches back slightly further in my life, so I thought it'd be fun to take the quiet time between Christmas and New Years to mash them together.

For as technologically advanced a society as we see in the Star Wars films, there are certain modern luxuries that they lack. There is, for instance, no internet in a galaxy far, far away, though I doubt the films would carry as much cultural cachet as they have if Harrison Ford kept pulling over the Millennium Falcon to check his Instagram likes. Imagine, then, how woefully undermanaged their field service systems must be.

Don’t worry—I’ve done the imagining for you! I've thought up a few scenarios from the original Star Wars trilogy and how they might be improved with a service-oriented overhaul (a sentence I honestly never expected to write). And hey, just like Luke’s journey through those films mirrors myths and stories passed down from generation to generation, perhaps you’ll see some of your own business in these scenarios.

Moisture Farming

Before Luke goes on his adventure and becomes a Jedi Knight, he’s just a regular schlub like you and me, working for a living. Luke lives on Tatooine, a desert planet, and unsurprisingly, the crop of choice in this arid wasteland is water, which is what he and his aunt and uncle harvest (In a galaxy of infinite planets, it’s often seemed bizarre to me that anyone would move to a dust ball like Tatooine, but hey, people move to Nevada all the time).

When it comes to managing the farm, Luke’s uncle Owen has some serious labor issues. He relies exclusively on “automation” (literal robots) for non-Luke headcount, as far as we can tell. Their primary job is traveling out to the various moisture vaporators—large tower-like structures used to harvest water—and servicing them. For that purpose, he’s purchased C-3PO, a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.

Here’s the problem—C-3PO can diagnose issues with the vaporators, but he’s not actually equipped with the utilities to service them. His counterpart, R2-D2, has the toolset to resolve issues as they arise. But because of the lack of connectivity inherent in the vaporator infrastructure, both droids need to physically visit each location, C-3PO needs to talk to the moisture vaporator, and then R2-D2 will attach his multi-tool and spin it around if necessary, which apparently fixes things.

There are a few obvious efficiency fixes available off the bat. Remote connectivity is the one we’ve already mentioned, and would arguably be the most useful. We can assume that moisture vaporators are already smart devices, as they apparently are capable of speech. It would behoove Luke’s family to figure out a way to connect these systems to an internal hub, where they can be more effectively managed.

C-3PO’s field readiness is questionable at best, what with his lack of repair knowledge and his inability to flex his arms more than 45 degrees. Imagine how much more effective their job could be with 3PO in a call center environment. It would be an excellent use of his fluency of more than 6 million forms of communication. Couple that with a shared view with R2-D2, and C-3PO could spend his day running operations from the comfort of the Lars homestead.

Tibanna Gas Mining

In The Empire Strikes Back, our heroes take refuge in Cloud City, a structure floating in the atmosphere of a gas giant planet called Bespin. Cloud City itself is a Tibanna gas mine, run by Han Solo’s old friend, Lando Calrissian.

Lando spends several of his first minutes onscreen griping about labor, supply, and trade issues on Cloud City. This is the inherent issue with packaging and selling a commodity, especially one requiring the scale of trade operations that intergalactic travel requires—and trade disputes are actually a huge problem in the Star Wars universe.

The regulatory challenges are another issue. As a self-proclaimed “small operation”, Lando has run into growing pains as Cloud City’s success catches the eye of the Imperial Alliance, the tyrannical empire that Darth Vader operates from.

Lando strikes a dangerous bargain with Vader—He betrays his friends to win the empire’s favor, a plan which almost immediately backfires as Vader continually rearranges the conditions of the deal, which, frankly, should be expected when you’re dealing with space fascists who practice a religion that they call “The Dark Side”.

This is an instance where smart contract management could really make a difference. A conditional SLA that is triggered in the event of an exception, like an imperial Star Destroyer orbiting Bespin, could help the entire organization understand the threat level, and agreed-upon conditions thought which to handle this.

With respect to the trade issues, this is a great opportunity for servitization. Lando could practically step away from offering a bare commodity, and, with solid planning, scheduling, parts management, and optimization services build a service platform around delivery and implementation of tibanna for whatever it is the gas is used for. By diversifying their business portfolio, not only can they bypass trade route restrictions by building their own fleet, but also offer a more viable, scalable product in the long run. It’s new revenue, new opportunities, and precipitously low overhead, no need to hand over his friend to a bounty hunter.

Death Star Construction

Switching to the bad guys, we actually see them building Death Stars or Death Star-adjacent things in at least four films over the course of series history, so you could argue that for Star Wars, Death Stars are as ubiquitous as trade disputes. We’re going to talk about the second Death Star, still in construction in 1983’s Return of the Jedi.

In the first scene of the film, Darth Vader checks on progress of the construction, only to learn that they’re behind schedule. In response, commander Jerjerrod, who is in charge of the opration, indicates that he needs more men.

Legal scholars have actually weighed in on some of the labor challenges with this Death Star, and it’s important to remember that in addition to being a planet-destroying weapon wielded by a totalitarian regime, it’s also an active construction site.

Labor constrictions are not in any way new to service operations, and while Vader promises “New ways to motivate” the crew, his strategy will likely boil down to a lot of force choking, which I feel doesn’t promote a positive culture.

Proper project management software can help organizations like the empire do more with less, which will help support maintaining the sort of tight schedules that military contracts require. There’s also a huge opportunity here to leverage a contingent labor force. With the right utilities, organizations can dispatch skilled labor effectively, track their productivity, and also keep an eye on whether or not they’re blown up when the rebels destroy the base after deactivating the shield generator with the help of the Ewoks.

Incredibly, there are dozens of other Star Wars related topics that could be discussed here (2002’s Attack of the Clones has three lengthy sequences in factories) but for now, I’ll leave you with this: There’s plenty to be learned from the poorly-managed service practices in the Star Wars universe. From mismanaged labor to developing servitized products, the contrasts abound to businesses in our own galaxy. Make sure your own service operation isn’t stuck in the mindset of “A long time ago.”

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