What are the barriers for designing for serviceability?

In this edition of the Field Service News Think Tank Sessions, our focus was on digging deeper into a finding within a recent FSN Research study that revealed that 57% of field service companies surveyed stated that while they were able to access asset data, they felt they were not leveraging that data effectively.

As always in our Think Tank sessions, this initial starting point for the discussion led down many interesting avenues of debate, all of which are summarised in the executive briefing report currently available for a limited time on our forever-free FSN FREE subscription tier.

In this final article, based on that eighteen-page report, we tackle a contentious issue unearthed in the FSN Research project that we were discussing: Why aren’t all organisations using connectivity in their new product development?

Indeed, perhaps one of the most significant discussion points in our industry’s embryonic conversations around harnessing data and the power of IoT was that we would be designing assets ready for predictive analytics and maintenance. However, this has yet failed to materialise anywhere near the anticipated scale. So the question remains – why aren’t we designing assets to be easily serviceable?

As Sumair Dutta, Senior Director, Product Marketing – Customer and Market Insight, ServiceMax highlighted during the conversation.

“There are a lot of fascinating statistics in the research; I think the one that stood out to me was that 57% of companies have access to data but cannot use it effectively,” Dutta explained.

“A second one that I picked up on quite heavily during our conversations was centred around organisations building new assets, only 40% of those assets were going to have connectivity or telemetry built into them. That to me seems like a very, very wasted opportunity.”

It was a point that Dave Hart, Managing Partner, Field Service Associates, also agreed with.

“I found the data point of only 40% of new products being connected quite startling because you would imagine these days that companies would have got to have a handle on that point quickly,” Hart added.

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"Even if the revenue from service life is bigger than the product it is still the product sale that is the primary driver for everything." Daniel Kingham, Elekta

“The insight from equipment can be astounding if you get your data management right and you have a strategy about what you’re going to do with the data.

“I am just intrigued why more products aren’t connected, and more products aren’t designed for service, I’ve always find that quite strange in organisations,” Hart added.

“Certainly, our battle is always time to market,” replied Daniel Kingham, Vice President and Head of Service Innovation and Design, Elekta

“You have got to get new functionality and new features out and for us certainly clinical focus is more important than what happens after the clinicians got their hands on it. Even if the revenue from service life is bigger than the product it is still the product sale that is the primary driver for everything.”

Meanwhile, for other organisations and industries, it is customer demands and regulatory challenges that prove to be the barrier.

“For us, it is the customer demands for specific requirements within our products,” explained Clinten van der Merwe, EMEA Service Director, Smiths Detection

“In a high-security environment like airports, it’s all about the detectability, i.e. what threats you can detect in the back-end of the asset. This is the critical question in our sector – what are the threats? You design your equipment around that instead of looking at the serviceability. Once you have a designed unit so it can pick up a threat, the development and design team will put the machine together. Afterwards, service has to come in and then see what we can do with the system to maintain it,” he added.

“Our industry is very regulated, so when a unit does go through ECAC or TSA approval you need to make sure that that unit has the required detectability and unfortunately, the regulators don’t care about the serviceability of the unit – they just care about the detection capabilities of the unit.”

"At the moment it does seem that the messaging is still a little bit further ahead than the actual execution when it comes to design for service..." Sumair Dutta, ServiceMax

For Dutta, the challenge perhaps lies in the fact that the messaging has so far at least outpaced the reality.

“It’s a slightly cynical view, but design for service has now become designed for circularity, but there’s very little being changed on the background,” Dutta commented.

“I’m hopeful that maybe some of the things from a regulatory point of view, perhaps the right to repair movement, might change that perspective.

“Equally, some of the things around sustainability if these goals are actual and not just ‘greenwashing’ as people like to call it, might change some of this because I do see all of these linking together. However, at the moment it does seem that the messaging is still a little bit further ahead than the actual execution when it comes to design for service.”

While perhaps slightly cynical, Dutta’s observation is very prescient. The marketers and communicators have probably got ahead of us in the world of operations. However, as Dutta also points out, there are several potential catalysts to propel us towards a place where the investment is required in terms of time and resources to make designing for serviceability a more tangible reality.

Perhaps they weren’t wrong, just early?

If you wish to read more from the group on how the challenges, benefits and barriers to effective use of asset data, then download the full executive briefing now (available for a limited period on our forever free subscription tier FSN FREE)

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Many thanks to our Think Tank members present during this session.

Sumair Dutta, Senior Director, Product Marketing – Customer and Market Insight, ServiceMax
Mark Homer, Managing Partner, Field Service Associates
Rajat Kakar, Managing Director, QuickWork EMEA
Chris Hird, Editor, Field Service News
Dave Hart, Managing Partner, Field Service Associates
Daniel Kingham, Vice President and Head of Service Innovation and Design, Elekta
Mark Homer, Managing Partner, Field Service Associates
Mark Wilding, VP Global Customer Transformation, ServiceMax
Terence Horsman, COO, Orca Service Technologies/MCFT
Clinten van der Merwe, EMEA Service Director, Smiths Detection

All members of the Field Service Think Tanks are speaking from their own personal opinions which are not necessarily reflective of the organisations they work for.

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