Tag: #hybridworkforce

Deploying Forms to Boost Your Business

Co-author: Allan Alexopulos

ServiceMax and Bolt Data recently had the opportunity to join ProntoForms in a session at EMPOWER‘21 to share how their capabilities enhance service solutions on the ServiceMax and Salesforce Field Service platforms. From contextual app building to bi-directional data flows, you can hear Mansell Nelson, SVP of Business Development at ProntoForms, Allan Alexopulos, Managing Director at Bolt Data, and Coen Jeukens, VP of Global Transformation at ServiceMax, cover all this and more in the session here.

xHere’s a sample of what you’ll learn about in the session:

  • Contextual app building
  • Bi-directional data flows
  • Custom contextual workflows

Recently, I had the opportunity to catch up with Allan Alexopulos about our experiences with ProntoForms in the field. We walked away with key learnings that we’d like to share with service leaders who are evaluating the business case of smart forms and checklists.

Why we use checklists

We use checklists to ensure our technicians work safely, to prove we are compliant, and to collect data. Checklists are everywhere and they are a powerful instrument. At the same time, they drive many technicians nuts. To realize true value from your checklists, it’s important to ask your technicians a simple question—how much tool-time do you have and how much time do you spend on admin?

The value of doing a ride-along

Last week I had the privilege of doing a technician ride along for a supplier of industrial gasses. A lot of those gasses are not healthy to humans, so safety is their first priority. The installations storing the gasses are configurable for each customer. So you can imagine the importance of updating the as-maintained and meter readings.

They had more than 50 forms. The longest form contained 223 questions. If you forgot to enter mandatory fields, you couldn’t save. It could get worse if the equipment was located in an ATEX zone. No electronic devices allowed. Would it surprise you that 30% of capacity was used on hands-on-tool-time and 70% on admin?

The business case here is obvious. So is the wish list of the technician. It is not rocket science—what you need is a forms tool that allows you to be smart.

Prepopulated forms

How much dual entry of data does your technician have to complete? During my ride along the technician had to repeat the entry of customer and work order data four times. It’s obvious that such data could easily be prepopulated.

In my previous role as service manager at Bosch, I learned from my technicians that a preventive maintenance job would start with pulling the previous PM report. In the old days that report would be an excel file.

  • Step 1: copy previous file
  • Step 2: rename to current job
  • Step 3: only change those fields that have changed

Compare these three steps with your current process and form design. Anything that will cause more work will reduce the adoption rate of new tools.

Contextual forms

Going back to the repository of the 50 forms. These forms were designed as generic forms, catering to all possible eventualities. I asked the technician how he knew what fields to fill and which ones to skip? His answer: tribal knowledge. And if he didn’t know, he would call a colleague.

As each gas installation was different and most customers would have their own work permit and safety guidelines, you can imagine the generic safety checklist is pretty long and error-prone.

High on the wish list is to have forms to be contextual. Maybe the most basic variant: when doing three jobs on a day for the same customer, please prompt safety questions in a smart way and not as a triple entry.

The value of an implementation partner

When talking to Allan about his recent implementation project, he shared some key learnings that allowed the team to tackle complex global compliance requirements.

The project’s goal was to streamline and standardize compliance reporting for a leading medical device manufacturer. With the combination of a deep and diverse product line, regional compliance reporting requirements, and a diverse worldwide workforce, this was the most challenging part of the global rollout of the company’s ServiceMax Field Service solution.

In addition to improving the accuracy of compliance information coming from the field, the Bolt Data and ProntoForms teams also aimed to improve the design and maintenance of the checklists used by field technicians. By working closely with ProntoForms’ R&D and services organization, Allan was able to architect the solution to create highly maintainable checklists that were then translated into multiple languages and integrated into the field technicians’ mobile devices.

As a highly knowledgeable implementation partner, Allan and the team at Bolt Data knew how to best solution to meet the organization’s needs. One of the most impactful changes was having checklists be centrally managed, which allowed for iterations to be easily rolled out as regulatory requirements change. Adding a question or changing the range of acceptable values for a question could now be easily updated and pushed to the field worldwide with a fraction of the effort and time previously required.

Reflecting on his time on the project, Allan noted, “The effort to manage compliance checklists is a fraction of what it used to be and the quality of the information coming from the field is dramatically improved, resulting in higher quality and faster compliance reporting. ProntoForms leadership and collaboration with the project team were instrumental in the success of the project.”

To learn more about deploying forms to boost your business, make sure to watch our EMPOWER’21 session on-demand here.

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on October 5th, 2021

Field Service Circle Recap: Accelerating Your Digital Transformation

Digital service transformation does not start and end with implementing innovative technologies. It starts with a vision. Service Leaders rethink how to generate new service revenue streams and ensure long-term success. And at the end, when companies find the right path, customers benefit from the new services tailored to their needs.

During our EMEA Virtual Field Service Circles in 2020, we offered inspiration, expert knowledge and practical experience to those striving for improvement and progress on their digital journey. And it seems that with the change from on-site to virtual sessions we could translate this imperative into its very own form and take the huge number of attendees, who are looking to make a difference, along for the ride.

Inspired by the findings in the Forrester research report we commissioned in 2019, we created our 2020 season of Field Service Circle events. During these sessions, we looked at the three key pillars that are accelerating the pace of digital service transformation as well as future field service strategies. This article will recap each of our four sessions.

Future-Proofing Your Workforce

Recent changes as a result of the global pandemic have drastically changed the way some technicians conduct their work; however, the role of the field technician has been evolving at an increasing pace for a number of years now. What does a happy, versatile, future-proofed workforce look like? Together with Kris Oldland, Chief Editor of Field Service News, Coen Jeukens and Sumair Dutta from our GCT team not only talked about these questions but also discussed the value of field service tools for technicians, the importance of human intelligence, and the move towards a “remote first” model for service. Watch the on-demand recording here.

Keeping Customers at the Forefront

While technology has raised customer expectations, it can also help field service providers meet those expectations. But how well do we understand the expectations of our customer base and how is the customer’s voice a driving force in the service transformation? How will customers see value in new service offerings and how can we future-proof the supply of the same? All of these questions, and more, formed the focus of this session with Rob Merkus, EMEA Service Director at Hitachi Medical Systems, and Jan van Veen, Founder & General Manager at moreMomentum, as we examined the service delivery chain from the customer perspective, the best ways to adapt to evolving customer expectations, and the business opportunities therein. Watch the on-demand recording here.

strategy & vision

Using Asset Data as a Transformation Consultant

Customers expect their assets to work, and service providers want to know where the assets are, in what condition they are, and how they are being used. The focus on digital transformation has placed companies’ attention on harnessing equipment data for insights, exploring new business models, and implementing digital technologies. Sven Gehrmann, Senior Manager of BearingPoint, Thomas Heckmann, Solution Consultant of ServiceMax and Co-Founder of the German Chapter of the Institute of Asset Management, and Coen Jeukens particularly emphasized the message that equipment will become the transformation consultant of the future driving future business value. Watch the on-demand recording here.

3 pillars of digital transformation are your workforce, your customers, and you assets

Field Service Strategies for the Future

Field service management is evolving and adapting to the “new normal” that we must all embrace as a result of the pandemic. According to an IDC survey spotlight by analyst Aly Pinder, Jr., “The service experience can be THE differentiator for manufacturers in a time shrinking margins and heightened customer expectations.”1

Additionally, Susan Tonkin, who leads Analyst Relations at ServiceMax, presented some of the predictions recently published by Gartner, such as “By 2025, proactive (outbound) customer engagement interactions will outnumber reactive (inbound) customer engagement interactions.”2

Together with Professor Shaun West of the University Lucerne, Susan Tonkin and Coen Jeukens discussed Forrester’s three pillars of digital transformation and ServiceMax’s predictions for 2021 based on our CSO Summit series. Among various points, Shaun highlighted that the so-called “smart services” that are data-driven and geared to individual customer needs are gaining importance. Watch the on-demand recording here.

What’s Next?

Digital Service Transformation is no longer a choice but an imperative. Having visibility and control on Assets, Workforce and Customers allows service providers to drive excellence and growth. Technology plays a decisive role in this journey. It has profoundly changed the business landscape and its impact will continue growing as long as more businesses continue adopting technologies that add value to customers’ lives.

The EMEA Field Service Circles presented a fantastic opportunity to stay connected with ServiceMax and industry peers remotely as we all work to keep the world running and understand how to respond to field service changes.

Take the next opportunity to accelerate your digital transformation with Maximize!Click here to register for Maximize 2021, ServiceMax’s Global Field Service Conference on March 16-18, to learn what you can do today to support your business goals and how you can prepare your service team for the challenges of the future.

1. Source: IDC, COVID-19 IMPACT ON IT SPENDING, 09/2020)
2. Source: Gartner, Predicts 2021: CRM Customer Service and Support, 1 December 2020

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on February 16th, 2021

How to Maintain and Protect Your Brand as an OEM

You make great products. You have a strong brand. But how do you maintain those products and protect your brand beyond the point of sale? What do you do when customers demand more through CX or regulators demand more through compliance or channels partners struggle to deliver consistent service? The good news is modern field service management systems provide you with the tools to manage and overcome these challenges.

Trending in 2021

At the close of each year, a lot of people ask me to make some predictions for the new year. Honestly, with some extreme disruptions in 2020, it is hard to single out a theme for 2021. Though I do see a consistent trend over the last decade. A trend that will very much drive the OEM transformation agenda: how do we extend our value proposition beyond the revenue of the product sales? Margin contribution on product sales is dwindling. Thus, it is logical that your CFO is eying service margins and tasking you with service revenue growth. So, let’s focus on two 2021 topics to achieve those goals.

  1. Improve your installed base visibility across all your sales channels
  2. Support your product throughout its life cycle

And by focussing on these two, you’ll get a lot of adjacent benefits too.

Step 1: Invest in Installed Base Visibility and Effective Channel Partners

To exert a maximum level of control over the value an OEM can provide to its customers, an OEM may have the ambition to own each step of the value chain. The commercial reality is that a network of partners and competitors is involved in the value creation. This may result in a battle over the ownership of the customer relationship. Especially when we consider the underlying paradigm: the one who owns the relationship owns the levers to CX and sustainable revenue.

The key enabler to value creation is your Installed Base Visibility. It is pretty straight forward. If you want to create value from the products you sell, you need to know where they are and how they are being used. Without visibility, your service delivery will be in the blind. Without a relationship, your revenue streams will be unpredictable.

We see more and more OEMs investing in installed base visibility. This starts with shifting from margin contribution through product sales to margin contribution through using the product.  The increased margin contribution pays for the investment and buy-in from the channel partners.

Are you curious about what installed base visibility brings to the bottom line? See what Schneider Electric was able to achieve here.

Step 2: Support Your Product Throughout Its Life Cycle

Who knows your product best? You, the OEM. You designed it and built it, so it seems you are best qualified to support its use during its life cycle. Hence the previous paragraph, you need to know where your installed base is and in what condition.

For each product, we know that the true test comes when it is used by real customers. No matter how well designed and built it is, actual customers seem to use products in more different ways than you have anticipated. Whether the feedback is coming to you via the quality department, service interactions, or through an autonomous engineering department, your products do get revisions and engineering changes.

Some of these changes are for liability and compliance. Others may enhance the function of the product, potentially driving more value. Thus, you have multiple reasons to reach out to your installed base. And when you do so, you want to track what portion of that base you have reached.

Two to Tango

The combination of installed base visibility and product life cycle support form an ideal tango to strengthen your brand. Though the commercial reality of your channel strategy may impact your ability to reach out to your installed base, asset-centric field service management tools make it much easier to visualize and manage your assets. Extending those tools to your channel partners will make it easier to share and grow the value creation for your customers.

Whether you decide to take tango lessons in 2021 or not, at least put some thought into the beauty and joy of the dance. I promise you; your customers will like it.

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on December 17th, 2020

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.

5 Ways to Improve New Technician Time to Value

Over the last few years, the topic of technician/talent shortage has been getting more and more traction at service industry events. Analyst firms Forrester, IDC, TSIA, Aberdeen and The Service Council are too in unison about the technician gap. And not only are service organizations struggling to find enough candidates, but they are also struggling to find ones with the right skills—especially as the nature of service jobs evolves beyond simply fixing a piece of equipment. Candidates must also be able to:

  • Adapt to and learn about new technology tools attached to service work
  • Learn about new service procedures tied to more complex service assets
  • Work in a group or team environment
  • Be able to work and engage with the customer

Once you overcome these obstacles and hire new technicians, how can you quickly get them onboarded and delivering value? In a 2017 survey from the Aeronautical Repair Station Association, the average time for a technician to become fully profitable lies between 9 and 24 months. This represents an onboarding investment of between $132,750 and $354,000. Per industry, the values may differ, but the onboarding time is pretty much consistent across organizations. As you can see, being able to improve new technician time to value can make a big difference on the bottom line.

The changing demographics of the workforce adds another layer of complexity. For Millennials, on the job learning is done a bit differently than previous generations. Rather than relying on cumbersome textbooks, they can search the web for the exact info they need or ask their peers. This has implications on the tools you provide to millennials. Having digital business tools with a consumer look and feel and ease of use can go a long way in training, as well as attracting younger talent. Modern service execution tools and millennial learning habits may be your ticket to faster time to value.

Five Ways to Improve New Technician Time to Value

1. Make jobs simpler

Different service jobs have different characteristics and skill requirements. Through slicing and dicing of the jobs and smart dispatching, you can assign simpler tasks to junior resources. Based on their track record and development they can move up the ladder.

2. Facilitate access to information

As much information you want to provide to a technician when dispatching the job, the reality onsite may be different. Proving access to relevant and adjacent information in an on-demand mode will allow your technician to become self-sufficient.

3. Deploy contingent workflows

An installation, break-fix, inspection and preventive maintenance job probably will have different workflows. A workflow may even differ per customer. Instead of requiring your technicians to learn and remember all variants, use a field service management tool to assist and even prescribe workflows.

4. Assist humans with machine learning

Throughout the lifecycle of a product, the product itself and all human interactions generate a lot of data. Mining that data and creating insights allows humans to make better decisions. Simple tasks can be automated creating more meaningful work for technicians.

5. Interweave social interaction into the job

Even when automating many aspects of service, it is the people-component that cements it all together. Call it assisted service with a human touch. Using voice-calls or messaging is an integral part of the job. Interweaving those social interactions into the job creates context and makes the communication more efficient. Try to facilitate connected conversations and conversational workflow for your employees, and make sure it is on an enterprise-grade platform to protect your intellectual property.

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on February 11th, 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.

7 Tips for HVAC – Service Execution Excellence

Through sweltering heat and fierce blizzards, HVAC technicians are there to keep equipment running at peak performance. But how do you make sure you get peak performance out of your HVAC service organization year-round, year-after-year?

Here is a list of 7 tips to help you achieve excellence in your HVAC service organization.

  1. Manage resources through all seasons
  2. Maximize uptime of HVAC equipment
  3. Improve margin of service operations
  4. Drive cross & upsell
  5. Deploying (sub)contractors
  6. Dealing with increased HSE requirements
  7. Sustainability, dealing with HazMat

Manage resources through all seasons

A customer requirement for heating and cooling is seasonal, resulting in an equally seasonal pattern in technician demand. Typically, a service organisation will try to balance resource capacity by doing installations, retro-fit and preventive maintenance during low season and dedicate capacity in peak season to break-fix. 

Over the years HVAC organizations have acquired a lot of tribal knowledge to mitigate the daily resource juggle. Modern service execution systems will facilitate you to formalize this tribal knowledge and to upgrade your capacity planning process applying dynamic scheduling. As a result your customers will get the service they expect and your technicians will feel in control instead of being dragged from job to job.

Maximize uptime of HVAC equipment

The majority of today’s service level agreements are still stated in terms of Effort. “We will commence the fix of the malfunction in x hours”. Some contracts up the value promise to a Result. “We will deliver a fix within y hours”. To offset the risk of penalties, the latter contracts often have a section of fine print watering down the Result. What owners of HVAC equipment want is Uptime. 

Combining IoT connectivity and Service Execution Management allows a service organisation to both deliver the Uptime a customer expects and to deliver that service in a cost-effective way.

Improve margin of service operations

Competition in the HVAC industry is fierce. Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM), Third Party Maintainers (TPM) and Facility Management Companies (FCM) all operate in the same space to make a margin. A quick search on the internet tells us that a typical HVAC nett profit margin ranges from 1.4% for TPM/ FCM to 12% for OEMs. These numbers indicate that cost control is a constant driver in decision making.

To control cost you need visibility. To create visibility you need tools and processes. Though HVAC equipment may comprise of generic components, both the infinite number of configurations and wide range of commercial conditions agreed with customers define your requirements for agile service execution tools. Tools minimizing the dependency on IT support and maximizing flexibility for your markets & channels.

Link: https://www1.eere.energy.gov/buildings/betterbuildings/neighborhoods/pdfs/hvac_contractor_business_model.pdf

Drive cross & upsell

Although we see cost control having the primary focus in HVAC, we see maturing organizations driving for revenue increase. The service agreements with low margins won via a tender process, often only contain the basics. The basics being periodical maintenance, a response promise topped with contracted rates and material discounts. To make a customer account (more) profitable, service organisations depend on their ability to cross and upsell beyond the basic contract.

Technicians being trusted advisors to your customers can act as eyes and ears to detect revenue enhancing opportunities. Capturing leads, enabling technicians to quote on-site and ultimately being able to convert a quote into a work order will attribute to your revenue growth targets. In parallel you will see that both customer experience and technician empowerment will get a boost.

Deploying (sub)contractors

According to The Service Council approximately 32% all field service work is completed by partners/ subcontractors. Though this percentage may vary per market and product segment, subcontractors play an important role in getting all the work done. Subcontractors come in all shapes. Sometimes they will compete with you, in other markets they may complement your route-to-market.

Prioritizing and assigning jobs are most probably the two most important aspects of dispatching affecting both cost and service level attainment. Make sure your dispatching console supports you in decision making while simultaneously maintaining visibility of the job progress once handed off to a subcontractor. Modern tools can alleviate the need for complex subcontractor integrations by means of allowing the subcontractor using your processes on a device of their own choosing.

Link: TSCReport-F-2016 -FSOutsourcing-04.pdf

Dealing with increased HSE requirements

“Heating, ventilation and air conditioning company, HLA Services, has been prosecuted by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and fined for safety failings after an employee suffered serious injuries in a fall whilst repairing an extraction unit in Newcastle.”

A headline like this is the dread for any company. Of course, you will tell your technicians how to adhere to all regulations at hiring, during onboarding and probably you will have periodical health & safety briefings throughout their tenures. Ultimately you want to create a safety culture in your organisation.

Life gets complicated when the regulations change, when procedures are different per customer location. Somehow you need to embed health and safety handles into daily operations. What if you could make those part of the work order and track compliance through a configurable set of check lists.

Link: http://www.heatingandventilating.net/hvac-company-fined-by-hse-for-safety-failings

Sustainability and dealing with HazMat

Beyond safety for technicians governed by measures of HSE and OSHA we see that HVAC organisations also have a responsibility to take proper care of hazardous material like refrigerants. The increasing attention for the sustainability theme is raising the bar to reduce the use of materials in general and reclaim reuse.

To achieve these goals, you need a service execution system that embeds a supply chain function. To be able to track the use of material and to instruct technicians what to do with defect, used and waste materials.

Links: https://www.refrigerationschool.com/blog/hvacr/osha-affect-hvac-industry/

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