Tag: #capacitymanagement

Post-Crisis Handbook – Managing the Backlog

We’ve been talking about disruption for quite a while, but many could not fathom out its consequences or that it would even hit us. Nations, organisations and individuals have discovered that their business continuity plans could not mitigate the impact.

Now we’re past the initial shock, what is business-as-usual going to look like? How do we pick-up and how do we process the backlog created by three months of lock-down?

In the previous chapter of our post-crisis handbook @Daniel Brabec provided four handles that are top of mind when navigating the service world in the New Normal. In this chapter we will focus on managing the backlog.

Perpetual Backlogs

Right now, all focus is on Covid-19 and its impacts. But if you look deeper, you will see that many COVID-related themes have pre-existed in varying degrees; its only now that we look at them through a magnifying glass.

  • Remote service procedures have been around for more than 30 years. Rethinking business continuity plans will likely expedite their adoption.
  • Digital tools allow you to remodel your business processes and simulate the amount and mode of touch points. Social distancing guidelines add an additional ingredient to that business process (re)engineering.
  • Balancing the availability of technician capacity and contracted workload is an ongoing exercise for each service-focused executive. Disruptions and imbalance exist at all times. Only Covid-19 is a major shock, illustrating that business-as-usual balancing mechanisms can’t cope.

Balancing Supply & Demand

For about three months many businesses have seen huge fluctuations in both the volume of work and the availability of resources.

The existing workforce has been confined to work from home, has been furloughed or has taken sick/ care leave. In addition, those that are available have to spend more time on a job for extra precautionary activities. In all, you have less capacity to execute work.

From a workload perspective we see that many jobs have been pushed out. We see some equipment being ‘sweated’ to maximum usage (e.g. medical diagnostic equipment) and others going into hibernation (e.g. aircraft engines). This will have a huge impact on the life cycle of the asset warranting a more asset centric approach.

The Impact of the Backlog

Just try to imagine all the impacts a work-related backlog might have on the business:

  • Compliance: For three months Preventive Maintenance (PM) and Inspection jobs have been pushed out. All time-based schedules and counters will see non-conformity. To what degree can you apply flexibility to compliance dates and how do you manage those shifts?
  • Service Level Agreement attainment: There are many relevant questions that need to be answered in the measurement of SLA performance. How does one measure uptime for e.g. medical diagnostic equipment that has been running 24/7? How do you measure uptime of equipment for furloughed organisations? And How do penalty clauses apply; or is the pandemic considered an act-of-god? And finally, how do you filter/ clean metrics that are impacted by Covid-19?
  • Contract renewal: This possible renewal scenario might play out between organizations and customers. Procurement at the customer may say “We’ve not had the benefit of contracted services for three months, so we will only renew in three months” or “We’ll only renew after completion of the pushed-out PM jobs”. Try to imagine and forecast the impact on your contract revenue streams.
  • Dispatching priorities: How does contract renewal drive the priorities for rescheduling the PM backlog? If you have more jobs than capacity, what jobs get priority and what will be the impact to the above three bullets?
  • Workforce capacity planning: Now we have more jobs than capacity, how long will it take us to process the backlog? Will we strike the backlog, or will we contract additional/ temporary capacity? What jobs will we assign to 3rd party technicians and what jobs will our own people do?

To reiterate, the above impacts are not only related to Covid-19, they are universal and timeless. You might recognise yourself in the synthesis of pre-Covid-19 quotes made by various companies: “At present we can only deliver on 85% of the contracted work due to unavailability of skilled resources. In the execution of work, we take calculated business risks balancing compliance, cost and revenue streams”.

Running Scenarios

Ultimately, the challenge for any organisation is the balancing of supply of resources and the demand of (contracted) work. And as we know by now, we have to be able to handle disruption in various degrees of intensity. This brings us to the requirement of being able to run scenarios.

Some examples:

  • What is the revenue & compliance risk of executing 85% of the jobs versus adding resources to get to 95% execution?
  • What happens to my contract renewals, SLA attainment and penalty clauses when I prioritise pushed-out jobs of gold-contracts over bronze-contracts?
  • Can I use knowledge on capacity availability in my service-sales process when making commitments on execution dates?

In its most generic form, running scenarios will help you making informed decisions on both capacity/ resource management and prioritising (contracted) workload.

The New Normal is Business-as-Usual

So, what is so new about this New Normal? Is it new? Or is it business-as-usual under a magnifying glass? I believe it is the latter. I believe backlog management in the past has focused a lot on the transactional aspects. Now the disruption is visible to all, I believe the time is right to make backlog management a strategic decision-making function.

This article is published in Field Technologies Online on June 22nd, 2020.

Technicians wanted: how to attract, retain and deploy the right man for the right job

Getting all the work done is more and more becoming a juggle in finding both quantity and quality of skilled resources. Forrester, IDC, TSIA, Aberdeen and The Service Council are all in unison about the technician gap. And the gap is growing.

The existing technician workforce is getting older. At the same time, the influx of new resources is not keeping up with retirement pace. A new generation prefers STEM-education and expects digital in their work-life. Though new assets are likely to have a digital twin, a lot of equipment out there pre-dates the digital age and requires legacy knowledge to keep it running for one or two more decades.

<Quote>1 in 2 UK engineering and tech firms are concerned that a shortage of engineers is a business threat – PoliticsHome – Nov 18th, 2019 </Quote>

More vocal customers and focus on customer experience is changing the characteristics of a service job. It’s not enough to only fix the product, you need to “fix” the customer too. Customers want transparency and they want you to be proactive. Above all, they want you to transform from “fixing what breaks to knowing what works”.

In solutioning the technician gap digital technology is both an enabler and driver. The availability of new capabilities is allowing us to rethink how we deliver services and even augment our business model. Having seen a lot of different technologies emerge, the big question is when to jump on the bandwagon. And when you do, don’t try to boil the ocean. As with any product, tool or software, it’s not about buying or owning it, it’s about adoption and using it.

Before you spring into action, do consider the following four questions:

  1. What is the work of the future?
  2. Who will do the work? Own resources, (sub) contractors or the customer?
  3. How do you prepare people for the work they need to do?
  4. With what tools will you equip those resources?

This paper will provide you with insights and handles to attract, retain and deploy resources in a smart and cost-effective way. Imagine what you can do today to boost your brand value.

Why Service Leaders can’t overlook Contractor Management

When building and transforming a service delivery organization, inevitably the topic of dealing with contractors and partners will come up. Whether the goal is to scale, to be more flexible or to reduce cost, we find most discussions revolve around the how. How do we manage a plethora of potential partners while maintaining control of customers and their experiences?

Our customers often say that in today’s competitive environment it is not a matter if they should work with partners, but how to go about it. Dealing with partners is a commercial reality whereby those partners can represent both an opportunity as well as a threat. What do we do to maximize the opportunity and to minimize the threat?

Configurable Ecosystem

In order to strike the right balance, we typically start by defining terms like outsourcing/insourcing, and (sub)contractor/partners. There are different implications depending on whether you are an original equipment manufacturer (OEM), a third-party maintainer (TPM), an asset operator or a facility manager (FM).

So, if you want to add contracted partners to your ecosystem you have to clearly set the engagement rules and solidify them with supporting tools and processes. Above all, our customers tell us these rules are conditional. They may differ per geography, per product group, per job type, etc.

Tier your Partners

Similar to the relationship you have with your suppliers, you will likely maintain diverse levels of “closeness” with third-party partners. This is defined by the availability of partners and their competitive position in relation to your end customer.

 In the past we’ve seen that once you’ve found a partner that also might work for other organizations, you’ve entered into the “battle” of whose tools and processes to use. Today, we see that our customers are asking for tools and processes flexible enough to cater to various models:

  • Contractors use tools and processes from an OEM
  • Contractors bring their own devices and hooks into the OEM’s processes
  • Contractors use their own tools and processes, and jobs are dispatched as black box
  • Contractors use their own tools and processes, and jobs are dispatched with full visibility

Having this flexibility at your fingertips allows you to tier your partners and leverage your ability to serve more customers better.

Controlling the customer experience

With the increased capability to leverage contractors in various configurations, how do you manage the customer experience? Some of our customers want a consistent service delivery where the end-customer is oblivious to whom the delivering entity is: your internal organization, or a contractor or subcontractor. Other customers want to emphasize the differences between delivery entities, using it as a competitive advantage.

 One key to managing the customer experience is creating visibility, measuring performance and managing KPIs across all delivery entities. Sharing data points without having to “negotiate” on their interpretation will allow you to align your business objectives with your contractors’ business objectives. As a result, you win, your contractor wins and your end-customer wins.

Controlling contractors

Apart from strategic, commercial and technical aspects, controlling a contractor is like controlling service delivery. To a certain degree, you should measure work performed by external resources in a similar fashion as jobs done by your own internal employees. You want to ensure your end-customer gets what he or she is entitled to while you make a decent margin.

As contractors operate at arm’s length, consider focussing on the following three metrics as they have the most direct impact on customer experience, service delivery and contractor performance:

  • First-Time Fix: Is the quality of service good, has the problem been solved right away?
  • Mean Time to Repair: Is the delivery done in a cost efficient way?
  • Net Promoter Score: Is the end-customer happy with the service delivery?

Living apart together

Working with contractors is a bit like living apart, together. You have both overlapping and differing interests. By bringing the conversation to the “how to” level you can remove a lot of threats and weaknesses and focus on the strengths and opportunities. In the end, we all want to serve more customers, better.

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on September 4th, 2020

Hybrid Workforce in Field Service

In its latest report[1] Gartner predicts that “by 2020, more than 40% of field service work will be performed by technicians who are not employees of the organization that has direct contact with the customer.” Whether this development is one of choice or industry dynamics, the ultimate questions are: 

What impact does this have on my ability to deliver consistent service?

How to maintain a unified face to the customer?

Insourcing/ outsourcing issues are not new, though the drivers to do so have varied wildly over the last three decades:

  • Cost and head count targets
  • Business process outsourcing
  • Flexibility
  • Scalability

Acceleration

As of late we see an acceleration in the shift driven by three trends:

  1. Customers are more aware and have multiple service providers to choose from.
  2. Increased ICT and Field Service Management (FSM) capabilities create a greater number of more capable service providers.
  3. Healthy profit margins on services attract existing and new entrepreneurs to get a piece of the cake.

The consequence of this shift is that a legacy 1:1 relationship between customer and supplier turns into a many-to-many relationship. Customers have a greater selection of suppliers, and suppliers can reach out into new markets.

Scaling your service delivery capabilities

The threat of existing customers going to the competition and the opportunity to win customers in competitors’ markets drives the scaling of your service delivery capabilities. You’ll not only need to be able to vary the volume of your workforce, you’ll also need to be able to modify your business processes and workflow on the fly, based on real-time metrics. In this regard Gartner’s prediction is multi-angled and serves as a good compelling reason to act.

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on April 25th, 2018

[1] Gartner “Critical Capabilities for Field Service Management”, March 27, 2018, G00348436