Tag: #fieldservicetechnician

Standardization vs Flexibility: How to Shape Your Service Transformation

Last month I celebrated my five year anniversary working for a field service software company. Having had a prior history of 25 years in service delivery and service sales, many service transformation engagements have been a trip down memory lane. As former business leader I too sought for modern tools to replace my legacy business processes. When software vendors showed me their capabilties, they showed the happy path. As service-firefighter I knew that real life needed contingencies for not-so-happy.

You are special

When you’ve run a service organisation for multiple years, you’ve built a routine of tools and processes to get the job done. If, like me, you had limited access to budget, your business processes will be a hodgepodge of makeshift tools.

And then, either by design or by the turn of events, your company is in a digital and service transformation process evaluating standard software. The happy path looks great. It’s easy and it’s efficient. But something doesn’t feel right. Your business is more complex. You have many variants and exceptions. You are special.

Of course you can ask the software vendor to demo all those exceptions, but do you really want to re-create your legacy business processes with modern tools? Or, do you want to make use of the new tool capabilities to challenge your legacy processes?

Common global process

One of the big drivers for new tooling is standardisation. Not only can you rationalise your current IT-stack, you can also ‘clean-up’ the sprawl of business process exceptions. In transformation journeys I often hear verbage like ‘common global process’. When I do hear this, I try to understand how will employees and customers will benefit from a common global process.

Do customers want a standard one-size-fits-all process, or do they want a contextual transaction? Do employees want a business process that is cast in iron, or do they need a level of flexibility to address the unforeseen? This brings me to the theme of this blog: is the happy path really so happy or do we essentially need something different?

Contextual processes

At the Copperberg Power of 50 event we talked about “managing the hybrid service paradigm”. If on the one end of the scale we have forces driving a common global process, then hyper-personalisation is pulling towards the other end. The good news is that technology can help us find the middle ground. One does not have to go at the expense of the other.

If we picture the blend of interests:

  • Business and IT leaders want to exercise control over the execution of business processes. 
  • Employees need a level of autonomy in how they deliver their work to cater to expecting and vocal customers.
  • Customer expect services to be delivered situational to their business impact … and those tend to fluctuate.

The above three actors operate in shifting contexts. Because priorities tend to change over time, we advise business leaders to enable and empower employees deploying contextual workflow beyond the happy path. Because it is beyond the happy path where friction, inefficiencies and dissastisfaction manisfests itself.

80% Global, 15% local and 5% situational

At the Copperberg Power of 50 event, we saw a video of service technicians Amy and Jake from DormaKaba. They talked about how every day is different, how they need trust and empowerment to get the work done. What this means? If we want happy customers and technicians, we need to abandon the belief in a happy path and move towards contextual business process behaviour.

Guiding many transformation journeys for our customers, we’ve seen we can strike a balance between business process standardisation and situational flexibility using modern workflow techniques. We call this 80% global, 15% local and 5% situational.

  • Global: Despite the uniqueness of service businesses there is a core of commonality in business processes. This core will ensure that global leaders are able to roll-up the data for decision making purposes.
  • Local: Instead of standardising everything, we have to be mindful that localisations exist for a reason. It’s often the commercial reality that a local product-market combination that dictates how we need to do business with those customers. Without localisations a company may not be able to do business.
  • Situational: Echoing the words of Amy “every day is different”, we may have agreed upon a process, but in day-to-day operations we encounter unforeseen situations. Instead of responding with a freeze we need enable and empower employees to make informed decisions to maintain a flow, to keep the world running.

Adoption drives Value   

The happy path is what any software tool can support. Implementing the happy path may even seem to be the preferred transformation path. The value-proof is in eating the pudding. When you deploy the happy path it is very likely you will encounter the adoption hurdles assosciated with local and situational variants. Needless to say: no adoption, no value.Thus, the way forward is to account for local, contextual and situational workflows. When you ask for your next demo, do ask to deviate from the happy path. Ask how the software facilitates the excpetions. What insights and visibility will be available to the users, such they can make informed decisions? Decisions that align with your overall company objectives.

This article is published on Field Service Digital.

Field service works better when supply chain and service execution work together

An effective supply chain for parts is a crucial part of a successful field service operation. How much time does your technician spend on finding and receiving the correct spare parts? What is the impact to your customers when those parts are not available? What should you do with the defective, left-over and unused parts after the job?

These questions are a compound of conversations I have with customers when doing ride-alongs on service call-outs. They may sound pretty operational, but the implications are significant. Think about higher costs, loss of productivity, unnecessary capital tied up in inventory, repeat visits impacting uptime and customer satisfaction, lost residual material value and negative impact on your circularity goals. There is a lot to be gained from effectively managing your parts. To do this, you need to integrate your supply chain and service execution functions.

Not sold yet? Let’s dig further Into why you should integrate these functions and how it can benefit the business.

Why connect service and supply chain?

In many transformation journeys the initial focus is often on optimising labour to increase the productivity of both the technicians in the field as well as the supporting roles in the front and back office.

But optimisation does not end with labour. There are two very good reasons to accelerate supply chain integration into your service execution:

  1. You need a combination of consumables, spare parts and labour to maintain and fix non-digital products-equipment and assets.
  2. Your CFO will tell you that parts are the second largest cost component after labour.
  3. Having the right parts at the right time and place also optimizes labour productivity.

Though consumables and spare parts are intertwined with the labour component, supply chain integration and optimisation are habitually postponed until phase two of a digital transformation. But even if spare parts costs are second to labour, the implications of not having supply chain integrated into your service execution process are substantial for multiple personas and justify inclusion in phase one.

How does this impact technicians?

In many organisations, supply chain is a separate function with Its own business processes and tooling, resulting in a disconnect with service execution. I’ve seen technicians using email, whatsapp and Excel to order parts and to keep track of forward and reverse logistics. I’ve seen duplicate entry, swivel chair processes and multi-disconnected-tooling. In those situations, the technician works for the tool instead of the tool working for the technician.

If it were up to technicians, having an integration between service execution and supply chain would be high on their wish list. It would make their life easier and would help them in becoming the hero on site.

Can service and supply chain resolve conflicting goals?

From a supply chain perspective there is an ambiguity regarding the necessity for holding inventory. Financially, inventory is tied-up capital, and you want to reduce that. On the other hand, you need inventory to meet contractual response times and uptime commitments.

In contrast, service leaders can easily articulate the need for spare parts. But those same leaders find it difficult to determine how much. Supply chain leaders typically have a year-over-year target to reduce inventory. Sounds conflicting? Maybe not with modern and integrated tooling.

Here’s what have we learnt from the ride-along — if supply chain has access to the ‘raw’ requisitioning, consumption and return data from the technicians, supply chain can do better inventory planning as well as optimise the forward and reverse logistics flows.

In the end you’ll have multiple winners when labour and parts work in unison:

  • Customer — higher first time fix and less downtime.
  • Technician — less admin, track & trace visibility of parts, guidance for returns.
  • Service leader — less parts leakage, higher parts accountability, higher CSAT.
  • Supply chain — insight in true consumption, more leadtime visibility (less expediting).
  • CFO — less purchase of non-consumed parts, lower inventory, less scrap, less logistics cost.

Supply chain and service have many different projects and priorities, but it is in the best interest of your engineers, customers and CFO to integrate your supply chain and service function in the first phase of your digital transformation.

For more on the benefits of connecting service and supply chain, check out What Value Does Asset Data Hold for the Supply Chain?

This article is published on Diginomica.

The mouse and the cheese

Who hasn’t ever played the game of drawing a line from the mouse to the cheese though a seemingly impossible maze? Do you still remember the trick? Spoiler, don’t start at the mouse but begin at the cheese. Start with the end result in mind.

Running a transformation journey in business isn’t any different. True, the end point may be a moving target, but still to a major extent your journey is defined by a business objective.

Why am I bringing up this topic? At the Field Service News Live Symposium in Birmingham, UK we had a lot of conversations on AI. If AI is the cheese, then the technician is the mouse. We know that no matter how much technology we deploy, as long as we live in a world of physical objects, ultimately somebody will need to hold the ‘wrench’.

Technician of the year

That ‘somebody’ who is holding the wrench is Jack Ogden. Jack works for Beckman Coulter. Jack was awarded technician-of-the-year by Field Service News. For me Jack and all the other Jacks are the true heroes in the service domain. They keep the world running. They are the heroes on site. To be successful they need the right tools, correct information and empowerment to perform their ‘magic’ in the face of ever more demanding asset owners. What do we give them? State-of-the-art field service management tooling? AI?

A different planet

Now picture yourself having toasted to Jack yesterday evening and today you are engaged in an AI conversation with a group of service executives. Have we landed on a different planet? I can’t shed the feeling there is a gulf of space between day-to-day service operations and the AI discussion. Echoing the words from Rajat Kakar, it feels like a maze separating the mouse from the cheese.

Paradigm shift

Don’t get me wrong. As much as I comprehend the world of Jack, the cheese is real too. I do believe AI has a substantial potential in the service domain. Though I may not have a comprehensive understanding of what AI means, the fact that during the service lifecycle massive amounts of data are generated, I can imagine that deep learning and mining tools can lead to better and optmised decision making. 

And when I focus on decision making, service executives and Jack are not so different. In a recent ride along I did, the focus was on having reliable asset data. To be more efficient and proactive. The sheer amount of assets and the long lifecycle makes it practically impossible for humans to consume the data and to prepare for each eventuality. Tribal knowledge and experience drove historical service execution. Todays ambition for this company is to empower every service employee make informed decisions.

We want to move from ‘assumed’ to ‘informed’

Navigating the maze

When we were children we found joy in navigating[1] the maze. Through trial and error we ultimately found a strategy. In business the stakes are a little higher. Still, there is a lot of trail and error with new technology adoption. But we can be smart at it when we have the cheese in mind.

With AI we don’t want to repeat the same ‘mistake’ a lot of companies made with big data. Big investments resulting in unused[2]data lakes. An example of starting at the mouse and uncertain where the cheese is. If forementioned ride along is exemplary, we can define the cheese as the business desire to facilitate informed decision making over assumed decision making. Thus the path through the maze become much clearer. 

Making an impact with asset data

AI has the capability to convert huge amounts of data into ‘intelligence’. The quality of intelligence is based on what you feed into the algorythm. Simple rule: garbage in, garbage out (GiGo). Before you start you have to be very conscious about your data. Illustrated by a failed AI implementation at Amazon. When you use historical data to teach the algorithm, beware that the decisions made by AI will be a compound of all bias and mistakes made in the past.This brings me back to Jack. If Jack wants to make an impact, he needs asset data. If the volume of asset data is big, it would be a great help to Jack if AI could make suggestions. Not decisions, but suggestions … because ultimately it is Jack who is holding the wrench.

[1] For the mathmeticians amongst us, have a look at Trémaux’s algorithm.

[2] According to Forrester “between 60% and 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics”. InsideBIGDATA asks the proverbial question “are data lakes just dumping grounds?”