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December 23, 2019 | 4 Mins Read

The Top 5 Challenges of Digital Service Transformation

December 23, 2019 | 4 Mins Read

The Top 5 Challenges of Digital Service Transformation

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

recently interviewed Hilbrand Rustema, Founder of Noventum Service Management – a consulting firm dedicated to unlocking the value of service business for organizations. Noventum has more than 75 consultants worldwide serving all major industry regions including Germany, France, Spain, Benelux, Scandinavia, UK, North America and China. The firm has led successful transformations for more than 200 clients, giving Hilbrand a unique collective look at the state of service. Stay tuned for his podcast episode coming in early January, but leading up to I wanted to share his opinion of the top five challenges service organizations face today:

1: Alignment among senior management within a company. “The first critical step to successful transformation is that there has to be alignment on what the service vision is and what the strategy should be. That is a top challenge — alignment not just among service leadership but all the way up to the to the C-suite. This is imperative to transformation but quite a challenge to achieve,” says Hilbrand.

This is representative of many discussions I’ve had about the fact that for companies to bring to fruition the opportunity of service, service can no longer be a siloed function of the company. For organizations that have operated in a siloed manner historically, getting on the same page about the role service can play and the growth opportunity it provides is an essential first step – then comes digging into how to evolve the company to get to that end goal.

2: Harmonizing and digitizing the service operating model. “For a company operating across all different countries, creating a platform for profitable growth and of course to be able to provide superior customer experience is a foundational but challenging starting point. It’s also important to consider, simultaneously, providing a good people experience for those that work in your service organization.”

Only once alignment is achieved should the work begin on harmonizing and digitizing the service operating model, and this shouldn’t be done in a vacuum – but as a strategic part of the company’s overall strategy. As you harmonize, a lot of change management comes into play as you’re asking regions and business units to do things different than they’ve always done. As you digitize, you must do so pragmatically and in a way that builds the trust and respect – and therefore cooperation – of your frontline employees.

3: To design and implement new digital service propositions. “This is the future for the industry. Through digital services, companies can answer real customer needs in a way that represents let's say double-digit growth opportunity. But to be successful, there are challenges in think about what the offering is, what the sales model for it is, what the delivery model would be, and so on.”

Companies that see the wealth of opportunity service provides are tapping into the world of digital services. Looking for adjacent services to provide is one thing but thinking about how you can turn insights and experiences into value your customers are willing to pay for is the future.

4: Building the right IT infrastructure. “When you get into the enabling aspects of digital service, it’s imperative to get the right IT solution architecture in place for the company at large and then particularly to enable service.”

We’ve talked a lot on Future of Field Service about setting a solid foundation for your service growth. Having the right systems in place to serve your customers seamlessly is essential before you begin looking at how to diversify, grow, and expand.

5: Fostering and nurturing the right talent. “When you really get into implementation mode, you often come across the needs for different competencies of people. It becomes increasingly important – and challenging – to attract, train, and develop your talent.”

Talent is a major topic among service leaders, and that is because it is a major pain point. Not only are many companies having trouble finding enough talent interested in service, but at the same time the skills and characteristics companies need of their field workforce are evolving. It’s important to both review your recruiting, hiring, and retention practices to see where you can improve while also putting a lot of thinking and planning into how it’s all changing for the future.

I think Hilbrand’s summary of the top challenges is spot on, what do you think? To hear more from him on these points as well as his thoughts on how to tackle these challenges and set yourself up for success, stay tuned for his podcast episode coming soon.

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December 19, 2019 | 3 Mins Read

Last-Mile Customer Communication is Ready for Prime Time

December 19, 2019 | 3 Mins Read

Last-Mile Customer Communication is Ready for Prime Time

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By Tom Paquin

Around this time two years ago, I wrote an article about the frustration associated with consumer location tracking for field operations, as organizations were, at the time, tinkering with Uber-style city overlays with real-time vehicle tracking.

I stressed how important it was to be thoughtful about what—and how—you’re sharing information with your customer. Vehicle tracking may seem initially like a good idea, but as a technician takes turns moving them away from a customer site, trips through drive-throughs, and the occasional potty break, research showed that too much last-mile information actually had the effect of lowering customer satisfaction rates. Yikes!

This isn’t any less true than it was in 2017, but the good news is that the tools allowing for a much more informed customer communication strategy are here, and it goes way beyond location tracking.

Let’s start with location tracking, though. While the technology remains fairly static from two years ago, the ways that it’s presented to customers have changed, owing to the fact that more organizations are wielding the same tools, but doing so in different ways. So, when once a technician’s location lived within an avatar on a map, now an individual will get a notification that a technician is three stops away. Those with more sophisticated field service management utilities who can more accurately estimate job time are able to use that queue data to shrink the size of an arrival window as the technician makes their way through that queue.

It’s a simple change that while not explicitly providing location information, provides an arguably more valuable service to the customer. To get an accurate estimate, though, as we often discuss, you need to understand your people, parts, and processes thoroughly.

That estimate, however, is a distillation of several different potentially relevant pieces of information that could benefit a customer, and organizations looking to set themselves apart have used their data as a means of differentiation.

While there are a number of salient examples of this, my favorite is what Rudy Goedhart told Sarah back in May about how Spencer Technologies is making data dashboards available to customers. Because Spencer has a sophisticated infrastructure of devices, they can provide live updates on turnaround times, uptime, and technician performance. They even use these lobbies on screens in the actual physical lobbies of their office, a tantalizing window into the inner workings of their service systems.

In order to do this, you need to be pretty confident about the data that you’re collecting. There are a few important further considerations about that data, as well, that will be the subject of an upcoming article. Frankly, it’s easy to build data collection in a way that provides a favorable view of your service performance…that is totally inaccurate. This is a disservice to both you, and your customer, and requires a real, thoughtful understanding of your business process. You need to get your house in order before you open the curtains and show your customers what you’re up to But if you do, you can really set yourself apart.

But are people actually doing this? How many people are, realistically, putting location, performance, and parts information in front of customers? According to a recent study that IFS completed in partnership with Strategies for Growth, about 13% of organizations are funneling operational data into customer-facing utilities. That might not seem like a lot, but when I look at similar data that I’ve put together on these topics, that’s double where we were just three years ago.

Given that growth, but thinking about it relative to today’s comparatively meager percentage, it seems like customer-facing functionality could be a powerful—and unique—tool in your efforts towards differentiation. You just have to make sure not only that you have the data behind it to provide accurate—not just favorable—information, but also that you’re articulating that information in a way that is actually constructive for the customer.

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December 16, 2019 | 5 Mins Read

Field Service Europe 2019 Key Themes & Takeaways

December 16, 2019 | 5 Mins Read

Field Service Europe 2019 Key Themes & Takeaways

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

While I could be considered a mainstay of the US WBR event circuit, last week was my first time not only attending but also speaking at WBR Field Service Europe in Amsterdam. It was exciting to experience a Field Service event through a slightly different lens but also reassuring that — regardless of geography — the challenges, changes, and demands that are facing service leaders remain consistent. While there are of course variations on objectives and strategy from industry to industry and business to business, the key themes among service organizations are shared. Here are some thoughts on how three of those key themes were presented this past week at Field Service Europe.

1: CX Focus Leads to An Outcomes-Based Service Journey

If you visit Future of Field Service, you’ll see that an increased focus on CX as well as the journey to outcomes-based service are both topics that are very well represented. This is because they are arguably two of the most important topics in field service today, and they are really quite interconnected. The increase in focus on CX that we saw begin about three or four years ago has led us to the point of clarity that outcomes-based service is our future. This is because once we began really listening to what our customers want, we learned that they don’t simply want a better experience – they want a different one. They will no longer settle for good service, they want seamlessness and peace of mind that can only be delivered when guaranteeing outcomes.

Miguel Ángel Hernanz, VP, Head of Global Service Delivery Transformation at Philips led a presentation on Tuesday during which he provided insight into how Philips has worked to master CX. He discussed the importance of a “seamlessly orchestrated” CX and described how the company set criteria to guide its evolution from transaction to relationship, fragmented information to a connected customer view, generic experiences to personalized journeys, scattered self-help to end-to-end self-help, and a reactive model to a preventative and proactive approach.

It was apparent that the majority of attendees at the event have come to understand that their focus on CX is forcing the need to migrate to an outcomes-based service model. What is less clear, it seems, is how to smoothly pave the path from a traditional service model to an outcomes-based model. It’s not a quick or easy transition, of course, and I observed that, while resigned to the need to embrace outcomes, there’s a fairly universal struggle with the “how.” Jan Van Dijk, Regional Connected Services Sales Leader for Benelux at Honeywell BV offered some words of wisdom in his session on Tuesday afternoon, which was that siloes within the organization and disparate systems are two major issues that create a lack of measurable KPIs that will inhibit your ability to transform.

Another outcomes-based-related theme that came up in multiple sessions over the course of the event is the recognition that as service organizations progress on the path to delivering outcomes, it will become increasingly important to partner with other companies and create an ecosystem that delivers a truly seamless experience/outcome to the customer. It was mentioned that aligning strategically with partners and determining the right fit and competitive mix of that ecosystem are realities that will inevitably need to be grappled with and worked through.

2: Technology Is a Critical Enabler

There was a more simpler time in field service when technology was an impressive tool to use from a competitive standpoint and enabled significant productivity improvements and cost savings for companies – but arguably wasn’t an essential. That time has come and gone, and in today’s landscape while technology is still just an enabler, it has become a critical one. Perhaps 10 years ago it wasn’t impossible to deliver a strong CX without the latest tech at work, but for todays’ customers that are demanding outcomes it is most certainly impossible. Companies now must rely on technology to help meet the growing needs and increasing demands of their customers – you can’t simply work harder to keep up, you have to leverage technology to work smarter.

I interviewed IFS customer Mike Gosling, IT Service Platforms manager at Cubic Transportation Systems for a keynote session on Wednesday morning. Cubic has moved to outcomes-based service and relies in part on IFS Field Service Management and AI-based Planning & Scheduling Optimization to deliver those outcomes. When preparing for our session, Mike pointed out that in an outcomes-based model it become impossible to just work harder than you have before to meet those demands – his experience has illustrated firsthand that you have to rely heavier on technology. “Technology is the path to outcomes-based service,” says Mike. “Adding field engineers to meet the demands of outcomes is not reasonable – technology is critical in today’s service landscape.”

3: Changes to The Technician Role Are Inevitable, Although Unclear

I moderated a panel Wednesday morning on AI and ML that included Henrietta Haavisto, Head of Service Transformation Change Management, Global Maintenance at KONE, Rajat Kakar, VP Services Business at Fujitsu, Norbert Kamberg, Director, Global Operations - Field Services & Tools at Siemens Power & Gas, as well as Mike of Cubic. We discussed where each of these organizations stands in leveraging AI and ML, which was interesting. But where the debate heated up is not if these tools are important (they are) or whether they’ll be used (they are, and they will be further) but how the use will impact the role of the field technician. Some panelists held firm that field techs remain the company’s most valuable resource. This camp maintained that while the technicians’ roles may shift to be more centered on relationship building and nurturing, a consultative approach, and the need to deliver a positive human experience as the face of the brand; they will never be, in any way, replaced by AI.

Other panelists felt less certain of this truth, pointing to examples where advanced AI and robotics could actually eliminate technicians’ roles. This made for a lively conversation that ultimately concluded with the point that while it is impossible to predict the future, what is certain is that changes to the field technician role are inevitable. This is due to the evolution of how service is delivered as we move to outcomes, because of the increased reliance on technology moving forward and the possibility of automating (at least some) tasks, and even related to the differences in skill sets among newer technicians that will be joining the workforce as all of these changes unfold.

There was plenty more food for thought at Field Service Europe that I plan to share in the coming weeks! Stay tuned.

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December 13, 2019 | 4 Mins Read

In Service, the Death of the App Has Been (Somewhat) Exaggerated

December 13, 2019 | 4 Mins Read

In Service, the Death of the App Has Been (Somewhat) Exaggerated

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By Tom Paquin

Take a look at your phone. Specifically, take a look at the apps on your phone. Go ahead and minimize this for a second. I’ll wait.

Are they a mess?

The average phone is inundated with a minimum of five apps that are so old and unused that they aren’t even compatible with the current device that they're on. What do you think is the longest you’ve gone without opening an app? I admit that I’m a bit of an app drawer neat freak, but my wife has pages upon pages of shovelware games, decade-old event utilities, (I think it’s okay to delete the Coachella 2011 event portal) and assorted novelties from the early iPhone era that trying to find something actually important for her is an emotional journey.

I feel like all of that app clutter contributes to a true fact about apps—People don’t take advantage of apps from brands that they interact with in the real world. They might download the app, sure, but it’s rare that they’ll interact with it in a practical way. Because of this, corporate entities have grown cynical of mobile apps, emphasizing them less than they did in their heyday and marginalizing their usefulness.

There are, however, a ton of opportunities to leverage apps for service, especially home service, in ways that provide value to your customer as well as your organization. The hard part is getting people to care. The next hardest part is figuring out what to do with the app.

Getting People to Care

What corporate apps do you actually use on a regular basis? For me, it’s the Dunkin’ Donuts app, credit card apps, and airline apps. These apps serve a fundamental purpose better supported not just by a mobile form factor but also explicitly by what the app infrastructure is capable of (because if you’re delivering functionality that isn’t app-optimized, people will just go to your mobile site).

Dunkin Donuts, and I assume Starbucks too, if you must (Sarah and I continue to bicker about the superior coffee) offer one-touch ordering of your favorites, allowing you to skip the line. Other restaurants are jumping on this successful trend, to varying degrees of success. For airlines, a mobile pass means one-touch access to your ticket, no paper to fiddle with, no kiosk to wait in line for. Credit card sites often have higher security, so touch or face ID access is a huge benefit, as is having your spending history and balance available if you ever have the misfortune of standing in a Louis Vuitton with a wide-eye person that you love very dearly.

And the benefits go both ways, too! These apps can tell organizations a lot more than a website about consumer behavior, peak order times, and, paired with geolocation data (creepy as it might be) can tell us a lot about how people move through a physical space. Done right, the benefit is there for both groups.

Deriving benefits for services might be a slightly more complex ask, depending on the types of business that you operate in, but there are a few things that organizations have proven work very well.

Building a Beneficial App

Right off the bat, people will be more reluctant to download an app from a straight service play. Nobody wants to think about when they’ll need service, so the key, in many instances, is to get them to do it when they need service.

Imagine this: An industrial manufacturer calls up a call center and says a piece of equipment isn’t working. The call center employee says they can ping them a link to their phone to download the app and they can register with their phone number. At this point they’ll be reconnected to the call center worker. The app’s first function is to provide that call center access to the phone camera to get a visual, and to walk the customer through diagnostics. Pop in some augmented reality with the shared view and you have an engine for remote repairs, ideally saving time for both the service team and the customer.

The other app functionality that is immensely valuable is push notifications. Push notifications are of course cheaper than SMS, and read with much higher frequency than email, so it allows the customer to have the information that you want them to have at a price more equitable tot he company. This can be things like promotional messages, though I’d advise that you have an extremely light hand with those. What’s more beneficial are appointment updates, exception alerts, and technician location information. Push can therefore save on the bottom line, provide a new channel to retain customers, and also give customers a view that helps set your firm apart.

The final important thing about your app is to ensure that it offers all the functionality of your desktop utilities and more. This includes account consistency across devices. Is there anything more infuriating than completing a task on a desktop and have it not reflected in mobile? You need to build in the same language, and consider that some customers might start a task in one location and complete them in another.

There are dozens of other topics we can cover around this, like build or buy, security, and APIs, so I’m certain that we will revisit this in the future. For now, though, I’ll leave you with this: If you’re considering creating an app, or revamping your current one, think very carefully about the value, the messaging, but above all, the function.

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December 9, 2019 | 3 Mins Read

Ensuring Your Technology Is an Asset, Not a Liability

December 9, 2019 | 3 Mins Read

Ensuring Your Technology Is an Asset, Not a Liability

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I snapped this picture a couple of weeks ago while visiting NYC – I though the mural was cool, and a good reminder that in a world where technology is rampant, it is crucial for us as humans to maintain control. The point was illustrated this past weekend when the company that makes my son’s Continuous Glucose Monitor – Dexcom – had a server outage. I’ve shared before on social media that my four-year old son, Evan, has Type 1 Diabetes. We use Dexcom to continuously monitor his blood sugar, which can be life saving for a child his age that is not yet able to recognize scary lows. Dexcom has a share feature which enables myself, my husband, and my son’s nurse to see his blood glucose level at all times – and even pairs with an app that will call us to wake us up if he goes low overnight. As you can imagine, this technology when compared with the alternative finger pricks every two hours – or even more – has changed the lives of families managing Type 1.

So, when the servers went down, many people panicked. Myself included, to a degree. But as we know, any technology can fail. And you have to be prepared for if and when it does. Yes, it is inconvenient to go back to finger pricks and to not have the comfort of seeing Evan’s numbers in real-time. But we must be able to provide him the care he needs even when the technology we love fails. We need to keep in mind the point of this picture – technology is a useful servant, but we are the masters.

This experience got me thinking about how this relates to the companies I talk with leveraging technology. For many, the phase of managing change and promoting true adoption is still in play. But at some point, in the not-so-distant future, that will not be the case. We’ll have employees that have come to depend on – even embrace – the technologies you’ve given them. And we’ll see a new generation of technicians come on board for which the days of manual work is just unfathomable. As this shift occurs, we need to be thinking about how to make technology our useful servant but not our master. How do we set contingency plans for when things go wrong? Because they inevitably will.

Another aspect of ensuring technology is an asset to your organization rather than a liability is in how you maintain control of its impact on your customer experience. There’s no better illustration to me of technology as a (maddening) master than a poorly architected chatbot experience when calling in for support on an important issue. Are you mastering the deployment of your technology so that when a customer does encounter it, the experience is a positive one? And are you maintaining control of how to define when it is a customer needs human intervention?

There’s a lot to consider here, and that’s why this image caught my eye. My experience this past weekend with Dexcom hit the point home, and I thought it was an interesting question to pose to you all – how are you ensuring within your organizations (and even your personal lives) that technology is your useful servant, and not your master? Food for thought!

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December 5, 2019 | 4 Mins Read

Nobody Cares About Your Legacy

December 5, 2019 | 4 Mins Read

Nobody Cares About Your Legacy

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By Tom Paquin

In the 1930’s, Clark Gable was the face of Americana, having appeared in seminal film classics like Gone with the Wind and Mutiny on the Bounty. Because of this, he was widely known as the “King of Hollywood”.

Today, if you ask the average person about Clark Gable, they’ll have no idea who you’re talking about.

You may chalk it up to ignorance, or the passage of time, but Gable, and his ilk (The Bogarts and Garlands of the world) represented a pre-revolution version of Hollywood—A stiff and somewhat (I’ll say it) unpleasant-to-revisit type of filmmaking that was decimated in the 1960s by French New Wave cinema, which sent shockwaves around the world. With its quick cuts, naturalistic dialogue, and intimate camera, New Wave filmmakers made old Hollywood feel like an antique.

Inspired by the ambitious and experimental French filmmakers, American directors changed the language of cinema in Hollywood as well, and a new age of classic films came with it. Movies like Easy Rider, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Jaws and Star Wars are just as thrilling and watchable today as they were when they were released, imbibed with the same energy and innovation championed by New Wave films.

This is all because the language of cinema changed. The ways that people wrote, filmed, and edited their movies were upgraded, and the old days of cinema began to seem antiquated in comparison. With it, the legends of the past began to fade away. The same thing had happened in cinema years before that, too, with the advent of sound recording, which rendered an entire legacy of early films irrelevant in much the same way.

So, through this revolution, the “King of Hollywood” was dethroned and forgotten. The legacy of greatness of the old actors, and the old film studios, were not enough for them to survive the new expectations of their audience.

“So,” you might be saying, “This is all some sort of strained analogy for service?” and to that I say yes, it is. But stay with me.

It’s impossible not to see the incredible business and technological changes taking place in service and not draw a comparison to the artistic and technological changes that rocked the world of cinema. In Hollywood, industry behemoths went down, hard, and while it may lack the glamor, legacy service companies that think business-as-usual will always be enough are already feeling the floor drop out from underneath them, as new entrants and ideas challenge what service excellence even means.

The service revolution is well underway. Organizations are building contracts around outcomes, whether it be output, uptime, or time-to-resolve, and these customer-first contracts are changing customer expectations. And servitization of legacy businesses as well means more competition, easier switching, and a wealth of new ideas. Firms resting on their laurels will find that there will be less and less to rest on.

So—your firm has 200 years of history manufacturing industrial kitchen supplies? Up until yesterday, your products alone were enough to carry you in the eyes of your customer, but when a fryolator breaks down, and kids are screaming because they can’t get their chicken nuggets, your customer is going to want a service solution engineered to eliminate downtime completely. If you don’t find a way to guarantee that, your 200 years of history will be worth about as much as those nuggets, since your competition is thinking about the technology and business strategy to steal that customer away. And that customer isn’t going to stick around because they like looking at your logo.

This is the reality of Service 2.0—Connected assets, mobile devices, and powerful software have reached a point of inflection. Your brand might have clout, but if you’re not at least entertaining new business models for service, you run the risk of losing control of that brand image in a flash.

The concept of well-loved legacy properties being abandoned because of a failure to innovate is not new by any means, but for service, the confluence of technology and the move towards outcomes-based service represents a true revolution, and an existential threat to those that balk in the face of innovation.

Every time I walk into an office and see a wall dedicated to the history of a brand, I can’t help but think, “Yeah, sure, but what have you done for me lately?” Nostalgia will not be enough to carry your service brand to success in 2020. If, like Clark Gable, you consider yourself one of the “Kings of Service”, be sure that you’re doing everything that you can to hold onto your crown.

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December 2, 2019 | 4 Mins Read

5 Practical Ways to Become a More Innovative Leader

December 2, 2019 | 4 Mins Read

5 Practical Ways to Become a More Innovative Leader

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I read this article a few days ago, In a Distracted World, Solitude Is a Competitive Advantage. It was written in 2017, which had me thinking about how much more distracted our world has become even in two years. I’m personally a big fan of solitude, so the words here resonated with me – I’m just someone that needs space. Regardless of whether or not solitude is something you naturally need on a personal level, I think that in today’s always-on world, where pressure to meet expectations and accomplish goals is relentless, solitude is imperative to maintain strong leadership.

I had a chat this morning with Dave Willetts, Commercial Director and UK Head of Innovation at Baxi Heating, and was curious to ask him his thoughts on this concept and opinion on what it takes to be a leader of innovation (figured given his title, he’d have some thoughts!). As he replied, he essentially wrote this article for me – so thank you, Dave! Here are five practical ways to be a more innovative leader.

1: Adjust Your Mindset

Dave first pointed out that to be a better leader of innovation, you have to embrace the right mindset and get away from feeling the need to put out the day-to-day fires of the business. “My job as a leader is not a caretaker of our current value, but a builder of our future – and I have to maintain that mindset,” says Dave. “Of course I’m here to manage my team, but my job really is to be creating a vision for our future, a strategy to help us achieve that vision, and develop the resource and KPIs to carry out that strategy. That’s innovation, and as a leader it is my responsibility.”

2: Box Yourself In

Without being unreasonable, of course, Dave’s next piece of advice is to create some pressure for yourself to force innovation – in other words, box yourself in. “Having a vision that stretches you helps fuel an innovative culture,” says Dave. “Committing yourself to this vision gives you natural motivation and accountability to lead innovation in order to accomplish your objectives.” In an effort to support a culture of innovation at Baxi, one of the changes Dave has introduced is the idea of running experiments rather than projects. Reframing around experiments gives the connotation of learning versus perceived failing and allows the team to react quickly to what’s working (and what’s not).

3: Change Your Scenery

Going back to the article I linked above and the idea of solitude, not only do you need periods of whitespace to think but oftentimes a change of scenery during that whitespace can be beneficial. Dave agrees, and says that he encourages himself and his team to move. “It can be helpful to simply get up and get out of your chair, and even more so to get out of the building,” he says. “Go spend some time with customers, or with other companies – immerse yourself in the environment. Learning and networking is so important to innovation.” Oftentimes, ideas can be sparked when you take some space that would never surface while sitting still. For some leaders this practice may come naturally; for others, it will be important to schedule time in to take these breaks to ensure you actually do.

4: Build Your Network

As we know at Future of Field Service, there’s immense value in learning from your peers. Perhaps no one has things all figured out, but everyone has a slightly different take and angle and oftentimes just taking the time to hear someone else’s viewpoints and methods of attack can spark the tiniest light in you that grows into the flame of innovation. This is why networking with peers in and beyond your industry is so important, whether that’s at industry events, through LinkedIn, or otherwise. “Build as big of an external network as you can, and learn from that network,” says Dave. “But be sure that as you’re learning, you are also being conscious of giving back – it’s important to add value back into your network as well.”

5: Consider Your “Don’ts” As Well As Your “Do’s”

Going back to Dave’s first point, it’s important for you as a leader to start thinking about what your responsibilities are – and what they aren’t. As the article points out, it can be a good idea to use some solitude to reflect on what you’re spending your time on that is not proving worthwhile and begin making a “don’t” list. This list can include things that simply aren’t serving your business or your team and no longer need to be done, or it can include tasks that do need to be accomplished but should be delegated to someone on your team in order to free up your time. “Innovation is most certainly about creating new value, but it’s just as much about getting rid of what’s not working,” says Dave.

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November 25, 2019 | 3 Mins Read

What Does Optimization Even Mean Any More?

November 25, 2019 | 3 Mins Read

What Does Optimization Even Mean Any More?

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By Tom Paquin

I don’t think there’s a less controversial position than admitting that you’re “pro-optimization”. Everyone wants to be optimized, but the word “optimization” has become so muddled by tech-speak over the last two decades that it now barely carries any meaning at all. “Optimization” is now some sort of vague efficiency improvement that is as shallow a statement as saying that you’ve “streamlined operations,” or “maximized efficiency”.

The term “optimization” has become a big bucket to throw empty promises into, and organizations selling you tools for service have taken advantage of that by tagging whatever they want with the phrase. If you want to see how and flagrant this is, just do a Google search for “field service optimization” and look at the vague, meaningless improvement promises that come along with the snake oil being peddled.

It’s a shame, really, because optimization should mean something, especially in service. At the Future of Field service, we believe service optimization should, by this point, be the baseline of successful service delivery. But in order for optimization to do anything, it has to actually mean something.

So let’s make optimization real.

Broad strokes here—we can break field service lifecycle into a few big buckets: Asset management, planning, scheduling, routing, delivery, parts management, invoicing, and customer retention. If we do that, it’s pretty easy to begin to apply “optimization” in a way that’s far less vague.

A good parts optimization system would, for instance, give inventory visibility across every possible channel, and offer some predictions into what parts are needed for a job, either though IoT diagnostics, or information capture from the customer (preferably both).

As you can see, that’s a lot more than a piece of software.

And that’s the real trick, here. Software alone can’t optimize your service practice. In the above example, vendors have to work with OEMs, who may have to work with dealers, who may have to work with contractors, who again may have to work with OEMs, in order to even begin to think about a piece of software. That’s not an accomplishable goal. That’s an ongoing process.

The “optimization” example that gets bandied around with the most excitement, but sometimes with the least substance, is routing optimization. What’s so infuriating about this is that routing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You can’t just throw an optimization engine at your technicians, have it auto-route the day’s work orders, and actually expect anything to be improved.

Just like the above example, you’re dealing with a complex network of autonomous systems that need to be catalogued, categorized, and ranked by importance. This is why the best systems don’t just do routing; They making it a component of planning and scheduling, taking into consideration workers’ expertise, inventory, territory, as well as service history. For an accurate, repeatable, and verifiably improved workflow, this approach is a necessity.A holistic view means that a real optimization system can give you an actual, tangible, numerical business improvement number to stand by. This could be a decrease in overall time from ticket to invoice, increased first visit resolutions, or an increase in tickets closed per day. A truly optimized system will tell you what it did for you, and what it means to you.

Be wary the next time you hear someone talking about optimizing service in the abstract; There is, far too often, very little substance behind those words. But if you think about each area of your business, you can see how smart management can come together with the right technology tools to make optimization mean something again.

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November 21, 2019 | 4 Mins Read

Sorting Through The Digital Noise

November 21, 2019 | 4 Mins Read

Sorting Through The Digital Noise

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By Greg Lush

As I was entering the workplace in 1981, computers were not so popular for a guy in the commercial/industrial service business. Memory, and I am talking about hard-drive space, was nothing like it is today. Remember that unconfirmed quote from Bill Gates in 1981, when the IBM personal computer was introduced? Mr. Gates supposedly said that 640Kb of memory "ought to be enough for anybody.” Heck, Apple just a few years later released a cute little all in one computer (1984) named Macintosh 128k, yes signifying the amount of hard-drive space. Now, it is not uncommon to see a handheld phone with 64Gb of memory, a jump from 128,000 bytes to 67,108,864 bytes. Interestingly, a solid-state drive today, at 64Gb is a fraction of the cost of a spinning hard-drive in 1981 with only 128Kb. The point is, memory is CHEAP; forget about your past practices and assumptions regarding what to save and what to get rid of, save it all! Your biggest challenge will be to sort through the noise; a digital exhaust of sorts.

Start by establishing what you will do with the data gathered. No different than other business decisions, you need to align your input, the collection of data, with your desired output, commonly visibility and/or action. Please do not be surprised if after this exercise you discover that over 90% of your information does not translate to an action, or any value, today. To illustrate let's take an air conditioning (AC) unit, just like the one that you have at your home or office. Not too long ago I was in a meeting with an AC unit manufacturer bragging about all of the data that they could obtain, over 120 different points of information. At first pass you may think, wow, that is impressive. Yet, as you peel back the business scenarios to keep the unit running trouble-free for as long as possible, a service person would tell you that only a handful of data points are required. Where does that leave us? Acquiring that information does have a connected cost, regardless of how commoditized the hard-drive storage market has become. We need to ask, transfer, process, store, and use the data in a meaningful and relevant manner. So, now you’re confused — gather the data or don't gather the data?

Yes, is the correct response to both questions. A flood of information will hit your environments and I encourage you to save each last byte. However, during the ingestion process tease out the data needed for the handful of relevant data points. Allow the remaining data to travel directly to a data lake, or some other inexpensive mass data storage tool. One of the many features of a data lake is we can store a TON of data for hardly any cost (seen in organizing, tagging and storage space). In order to perform this "in flight" routing of data you will need a system sophisticated enough to perform analysis while the data is in motion. The top tier software companies will all have some degree of functionality in this arena, Microsoft refers to this process as Stream Analytics. It is hard to verbalize the significance of this next step. Bear in mind that all your AI algorithms feeding machine learning and other tools will use the data set that you deliver. Sure, many AI tools can take the whole lot, yet getting the most efficient package creates tremendous processing and financial benefits. Cloud platforms charge based on several variables, including yet not limited to; processor horsepower, memory (hard), memory (computer). Design for the objective and outcome. When you follow this path, you will also put the business need ahead of the technology requirement, which leads to greater adoption and overall user satisfaction.

Now, for one of the most misunderstood topics — predictive analytics and tools. It all starts with listening and understanding your client’s business. Once you understand the customer's objective(s), you need to combine that with your own business objectives. Is the reason that you are using predictive modeling is to give you an edge in the market? If that is the case than the models that you choose should be single models, possibly only looking at one element and having the right to claim, rightly so, that you are predicting an outcome. However, if you are trying to turn around or mitigate risk within your organization, you may need to look at multiple pieces of equipment and their predictive models to see how, when combined with one another, create different perspectives which may alter your course of action. These are very different approaches, they all need predictive models and data, certainly investment, but their level of sophistication is vastly different. Both are valuable, the bottom line will be how well aligned the model is to your business conditions and environment.

Learning models, and the algorithms contained within, can drive incredible value to your business. It is key that you understand how the outputs of these data science-based objects influence action within your current operating environments. Keep in mind that IIoT, data sciences, and even workforce sciences, are as much about the tools as they are about the cultural and market-based changes required to truly evolve your operation.

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November 18, 2019 | 4 Mins Read

Preparing to Develop the Field Technicians of the Future

November 18, 2019 | 4 Mins Read

Preparing to Develop the Field Technicians of the Future

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I was asked to be interviewed recently on a podcast titled Preparing Technicians for the Future of Work, which is a podcast intended for those responsible for educating and preparing the next wave of field technicians. It was a lot of fun to participate, and when the episode goes live I will share on social as well as Future of Field Service. In the meantime, I wanted to share a snippet of a question asked of me on what I see happening from a technician standpoint over the next three to five years. Check it out below and I’d love for you to share your thoughts with me! You can email me at sarah@futureoffieldservice.com.

Q: I want you to take out your crystal ball. What are you seeing as the main drivers or challenges in the upcoming years? Think "three to five years out." I mean, are Field Service Technicians going away and being replaced by apps? Or what do you see out there? Say three to five years. What do you think?

A few things come to mind. The first is, I think we will continue to see a real emphasis on the customer experience, customer centricity, and really expanding on that. And I say that because I think that we're at a point in this industry where companies have recognized — and even embraced — the fact that they HAVE to become truly customer-centric to succeed. But I think we're still at a point where some companies kind of know the steps they want to take to do that, and others are still wondering exactly what that looks like for them. So, I think that's going to be a continued focus.

We talk a lot about servitization or the outcomes-based economy. And that ties back to looking at the customer journey and really understanding, from a field technician perspective: when you send someone in with some sort of technical skill to fix a point-specific problem, that used to be acceptable. But the reality is that needs to be tied in with the whole customer journey. And there are other aspects of that journey that that technician can address. And so, shifting from delivering a service, a break-fix type service, to delivering more of an experience and more outcomes is something that I think companies will continue to embrace.

Along with that, we see companies, service organizations, really looking at how to take that customer journey and find ways to leverage it to create additional revenue streams. So, that, maybe—I could use for example Dish Network. Dish Network historically has been a company that provides, and installs, and services satellite TV equipment. And they've branched out now to where their technicians are also installing equipment from Samsung and different companies. So, they're really taking their traditional service model and sort of "turning it on its head." And with that comes the need for a significant amount of flexibility among the workforce. Because that workforce is going to be asked to do different tasks than they have before. And wear more hats than they had before. And so that's something that I think will continue.

Another is, I think, we will certainly see increased use of AI and augmented reality. Augmented reality, I think, has some significant value propositions for service organizations in a couple areas. One, related specifically to the aging workforce. So, as you have workers that are nearing retirement age, that maybe don't want to be out in the field day to day to day servicing equipment, or what have you. Using augmented reality, you can have an incredibly knowledgeable worker sitting in the back office that may use AR to interact with three, four, five newer technicians in the field, and really provide that hands-on training and support without actually being with them. And I think that that's hugely valuable for companies. Particularly when you can capture those interactions in most augmented reality solutions and sort of build a knowledge library from them. So, at the same time as you're training newer technicians, you're also capturing the tribal knowledge of some of those older workers.

I certainly don't see technicians being replaced by AI, or robots, or an app, or anything else. But I do think, as I alluded to earlier, we will continue to see the automation of non-value-added tasks. So, some of the things that can be automated, will. And that will free up bandwidth from those technicians to focus more on some of the aspects of the job that are going to become more important.

So, as I said, the higher technology used, the higher touch things need to be with the customer—to sort of balance that out. And so, I see AI as a way to give the technicians time back to do more value-added service tasks.

And finally, also related to those tasks becoming automated, I think as that happens, we will also see some re-skilling and up-skilling of the technician workforce. And that could be in a lot of different ways. It could be in more consultative positions, as I mentioned earlier. It could be training. It could be related to making use of that data. It could be related to product development. Or really just back to how the role will evolve, and just focusing more on the human experience, and being more people centric. But I think that there is no denying the fact that the role is going to evolve as we head into the next three to five years. And I think it'll be very, very interesting to see exactly what that looks like.

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