Tag: #servicetransformation

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

Back to the Future with Design-for-Service

“Yes, it’s really happening!”. That was my feeling when a customer of ServiceMax contacted me to enlighten them on the Design-for-Service concept. Six years ago, they started their service transformation journey to get Visibility and Control. Now they are moving the needle towards Excellence and Growth. What makes this ask even more ‘special’, is that it is the engineering department that wants to know what service needs to deliver value.

Black swan

Most of us will have plenty of examples where engineering asks technicians to record all kind of diagnostics, reason and fault codes during the service execution. What happens with that data? Will the technician feel taken seriously when servicing yet another piece of equipment that is engineered for manufacturing?

Thus, you can imagine my positive surprise when engineering wants to ‘learn’ what service needs and what modern service execution tools are capable of. It is a true win-win when both service and engineering are seeking the joint benefit of their siloed effort. 

  1. Technicians will get a return on their administrative effort when they see that it results in easier-to-maintain products.
  2. Engineering will get the justification to fund their design-for-service effort when they see that service can improve the margin and drive new revenue streams.

Attach Rates

The concept of design-for-service is not new. Still many organisations only apply design-for-manufacturing. The latter concept drives for cost optimisation in the manufacturing process of a product at the expense of a potential higher maintenance cost over the life cycle of the product. Design-for-service optimises both the manufacturing and the maintenance aspects of a product. Yes, I hear you. What about TCO, total cost of ownership? TCO is great, but TCO only works when capital expenditures (Capex) and operating expenses (Opex) are evaluated by a single entity.

Cutting a few corners and dialling it down into a single metric, have a look at your Attach Rates. You can imagine that when engineering puts more effort/ cost into the design of the product, the selling price of the product goes up. Balancing the effort equation, you have the maintenance cost going down due to better quality and more efficient maintenance delivery. On top of that, the engineering effort may also result in the creation of new types of service offerings like availability services and data-monetisation. To reap the benefits post point of sales, you need to have or get your customer ‘attached’.

Attach Rate: the percentage of your installed base that has an associated service contract with your organisation

Getting ‘attached’ customers might be easier when you sell your product via your own direct sales channel versus units sold via your indirect channel, read dealers and resellers. That all changes when engineering starts including concepts like ‘digital activation’ of the product.

Serviceability

When engineering defines the Product, the result is captured in a BOM (Bill of Material). So far, nothing new, this is design-for-manufacturing 101. When we start designing-for-service, we need to make a number of explicit decisions. Amongst those I’m highlighting two of them:

  1. What components from the BOM are serviceable?
  2. What service delivery model is applicable for that component?

First, is the product serviceable at all? If it remains a single unit, you have made the implicit choice to exchange the whole unit with the option to have the defect unit repaired or scrapped at a depot. This model may be a fit for some products but the larger, expensive and critical the product, the more you’ll need to ‘open the box’.

Second, in the BOM you’ll have to identify those components that are serviceable. For each component in the Service-BOM or SPL (Spare Parts List) you’ll have to classify the part.

  1. FRU: Field Replaceable Unit – the repair/ replace of the component requires specialised skills of a technician
  2. CRU: Customer Replaceable Unit – the repair/ replace of the component can be done by any customer (no explicit skills required)
  3. DRU: Depot Repairable Unit – the repair cannot be done in the field, but requires the asset to come to a depot where dedicated skills, tooling and components are available

Old-school textbook?

I’ve come to learn the above two service design considerations when I stumbled into my first service job at IBM in 1993. Though I did not grasp the full impact at first, the more I talk to today’s customers, the more I am convinced we need to re-establish the handshake with engineering to deliver above and beyond the service value promise. 

Handshake

In my session with this customer, I had conversation with a very adept, eager and forward-looking engineer. He understood the consequences of engineering choices for the service delivery … and ultimately the impact to cost, revenue and customer expectation.

Next, he wanted to know how service delivery constraints and possibilities would impact his engineering process. It was clear to him that state-of-the-art service execution tooling, with a high degree of asset centricity would enable him to create a positive ROI for his design-for-service efforts.

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on December 10th, 2020

Why Asset Centricity Matters

When you communicate with your garage to service your car, what is the first question they ask? Do they ask your name, or do they ask your license plate number? This is at the core of asset centricity. The asset is tracked throughout its life cycle to drive cost efficiency, revenue generation and customer satisfaction.

Know thy Installed Base

One of the first questions we ask to any organisation is what level of visibility they have on their installed base. Do you track your products/ equipment assets beyond point-of-sale?

The rationale is simple. If you want to be efficient in service delivery, you need to know where the asset are and in what state. If you want to drive revenue and satisfaction, you need to know how your customers are using the assets and why those assets are important to them in their operations.

If you don’t know your installed base, your actions will be ad hoc and be at the mercy of tribal knowledge of the people serving that customer.

Schneider Electric transformed their business model from ‘sell and forget” to “sell and service” growing their installed base visibility from 10% to 35% driving service revenue by 11% YoY.

<Insert link to Schneider customer reference>

Recognise the asset

You may know the customer, but if you don’t know the asset you may make the wrong decision. This is illustrated in the entitlement process. Entitlement is the gateway to cost control, revenue increase and customer satisfaction.

  • Leakage: provide service on an asset without warranty and/or contract
  • SLA attainment & CX: over/ underdeliver on customer expectation
  • Attach rates & revenue: miss an opportunity to cross and upsell
The role of Entitlement in Service Execution

Often, we hear organisations say that their knowledge about their assets is not yet at a level to perform a reliable entitlement process, resulting in a lot of corrective actions post work order debrief. Have a look at the Schneider electric video, collecting and validating asset data is a journey.

Tip: if by improving technician productivity the ‘saved’ time does not constitute an extra job per day, you can use the time to take inventory of the installed assets, its state and its surroundings.   

Know the asset

You might know the technical details of the assets you produce. Your maintenance manuals may prescribe what to do under nominal operating parameters. But what do you about how your customers are using the assets? Some may be ‘sweated’ and run at 99% of capacity. Others may be used occasionally only.

Having knowledge about how your assets are being used by your customers is an essential piece of information to define the right action. It will put the service request in context, help in the entitlement decision and support the triage process. It will give your customer the feeling that you’re providing contextual solutions.

Manage the asset

In the car example of the opening paragraph, the dealer focusses on the asset. The asset has a life cycle. In each phase of the life cycle different service and maintenance activities need to be executed … in combination with the usage profile of the asset.

The car may be purchased/ leased by owner A. After a number of years, the asset may transfer to owner B. If the maintenance history would be tied to the customer record, the data would be lost under ownership B. Thus, the reason why more and more organisations adopt asset centricity for life cycle continuity.

This continuity is extremely important in regulated industries. If any time in the life cycle a quality or compliance defect is detected in a series of assets, then you would like to have the opportunity to search an asset centric installed based, instead of sending messages to the owner who did the initial purchase of the asset.

Asset centricity allow you to manage your field change orders effectively. Asset centricity allows you to manage mid-life upgrades. Asset centricity is an equally powerful paradigm as customer centricity. Try to merge them into your business operations.

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on April 14th, 2020

Field Service Asia – Is Asia willing to pay for Service?

Sentosa Island was the backdrop for the first Field Service event in Asia. More than 120 delegates came to Singapore to participate in discussions and get a feel of the field service buzz. Many had heard their European or American colleagues talking about the US & EU editions and were encouraged to join the debate.

On the tip of the tongue was this one question: “Is the Asian customer willing to pay for Service?” Closely followed by “on a maturity scale, how do we compare?”

AsiaServiceMaturity

The two questions are interlinked. In the same country and sometimes with the same customer it makes a significant difference how you both define and position service. If service is more focused on the Product, the Asian customer is less inclined to pay for service. This is most visible in the Japanese culture where Product related service is pinned to Quality: if the product breaks, something is wrong with quality … and the supplier must fix it … at his cost.

FSAsiaAttendence

Despite all the cultural differences, most delegates agree that the basic field service business processes are more universal. A product breaks, the customer has an expectation and calls, the supplier fixes the product resulting in a customer satisfaction/ experience. For these service basics there is a lot of transformation going on. 

The transformation specifics unfold in building a business case. Three country specific attributes impact both the cost and the return:

  • Labor cost
  • Geographical spread and logistics capabilities/ cost
  • Local legislation, trade & sector barriers
ServicesScale

At the first Field Service event in Asia delegates have engaged with each other, thought leaders and field service tool providers. There is an overwhelming consensus on the value field service is providing to the organization and its customers. Going home, the promise of service transformation towards the future is even bigger. 

Adding the core message on “ownership” from the TEDx speaker Andrew Bryant, maybe we should rephrase the opening question: “When are we willing to pay for Service”. Make the question personal and dive into your own deliberations. If you can frame your service message more on the Customer side than on the Product side, I believe any customer will pay for Service.

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on November 21st, 2017

After:Market 2017 – Unleasing Service 4.0

Last week 250 service leaders attended the 11th edition of After:Market in Hamburg, Germany. For a number of years, I’ve chaired this event and presented keynotes. Over the years I’ve seen a change in dynamics both in attendants and topics covered. Not only is aftermarket reiterating its value contribution, aftermarket is also positioning itself at the core of business transformation.

To my great pleasure a growing number of attendees is having job titles like business development and sales & marketing. This year even procurement was present. The sheer observation that other functions are having an interest in service is the equivalent of “likes” on social media. The buzz is out. Service people knew that they mattered, now other functions are recognizing it.

Amongst the participants I detect a drive to unleash service on two levels:

  1. Doing things right – Daily many service people keep our assets afloat and take a pride in helping customers. To keep up with the pace of technology advancement and customer expectations, many service executives are shopping for state-of-the-art tooling.
  2. Doing the right things – Having all the data and touch points in grip, there is a realization that service is sitting on top of a gold mine to adapt/ change the business model. These service executives are shopping for how-to-get-buy-in handles. 

In my presentation “what service manager should know about sales” I mentioned a window of opportunity to initiate business transformation. If your it is the goal of your organization to grow your business rather than increasing sales, then service can lead the discussion by role playing a product-focus-scenario versus an outcome-based-scenario.

During the networking breaks and social activities, you can feel a common sense of direction. Service is working hard to get its act together on the basics. At the same time service is preparing for that opportunity to contribute to and drive the new business model.

At After:Market many speakers have shared their take on servitization, service design, product-as-a-service, digital, IoE and event procurement-psychology. Great and inspiring stuff. Especially when you tie it all together to create momentum to start your own transformation journey.

I’m looking forward to next year’s edition … and to hear from you how you have applied the insights in your organization.

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on November 1st, 2017