“Interestingly, with some of the relatively complex but manual activities, we tried to automate them with AI initially, and that was successful to a certain extent, but that also forced us to reflect that some of this can be done a lot more simply than we had initially approached it. For example, we’ve been able to automate using people with Python skills rather than having full-on AI specialists. That’s been quite a steep learning curve in that over the last year, we were expecting a very skilled part of the organisation to help us, we didn’t get the help we needed, and we realised we could do a considerable amount ourselves.

“We’ve become good at fail, fail fast, and then try something different,” Kingham continued.

“Also, we’ve done exactly as a business what Mark [Wilding, ServiceMax] described earlier. We’ve now put in somebody who’s accountable for data governance, and their primary remit isn’t really the day-to-day go-to person for data governance; instead, they are the person that you take the continuous problems to, and they help find the root cause.

“However, that’s been missing across the organisation on the broad level, whereas my team have been the people that determine what data they want from something and how they will use it. So they’re both the consumer and the designer, and that’s unique, really unique in our organisation.

“We are allegedly a pleasure to work with, with our BI teams, for example, because we know the constructs of everything that we’re touching. We know the foibles, and we know all of the ways the data is formed. Whereas in other parts of our organisation, we’ve got people that want the answers and when they find the data is inconsistent, they give up and walk away.

“That’s the challenge that we’ve had in my team, we’ve had to actually establish ourselves as part of the data strategy and help drive it rather than being somebody that just wants the outsider view.”

Reflecting on Kingham’s description of the journey Elekta had undertaken, Dave Hart, Managing Partner, Field Service Associates, commented:

“Data for the sake of data is no good to anybody. But the data that gives you insights and insights that are valuable to your customer is where the rubber meets the road for me.

“That, for me is what makes you [Elekta] really sticky as a solution, because I know you’re in a very highly regulated but highly competitive marketplace and anything that adds additional value like that is really gold.”

It certainly seems that the approach of understanding what it is you are trying to achieve through the application of digital transformation and the use of asset data, whether that be improving a specific aspect of service operations or even a customer-specific solution, is likely to yield better results than broader all-encompassing projects, where we often find ourselves collecting data for the sake of it.

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)