ThinkTank Reflections: In a time of cross-industry mass disruption, how do we plan for a future, whose direction is still undecided?
ThinkTank Reflections: In a time of cross-industry mass disruption, how do we plan for a future, whose direction is still undecided?
So much has changed in such a short time since the pandemic. Indeed, we were already on a path towards significant industry change, although our progression was undoubtedly accelerated by the events of the last three years.
With so much disruption and change often feeling like the only constant, do we need to redefine the time frames we are developing plans for future success?
In the November 2022 iteration of the FSN Think Tank sessions the group was tasked with identifying key trends that may redefine field service as we know it completely, but as they worked through various permutations, the question of how far ahead can we realistically plan came to the fore.
“In business, we always look at the roadmap of where we’re going and usually plot out where we want to be in three years and in five years,” began Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News as he teased this train of thought out into the discussion.
“The question I am wondering is if this is accelerated, or perhaps this thinking is now somewhat in flux?” he asked.
“Are we at a point where there are so many essential things changing simultaneously that we need to be a bit more fluid as we map out our service strategies? Do we need to make the time to understand better what all these things mean – what do we want from our techs in the future? What do our customers want from us as service providers?
“There’s just been so much disruption, so much seismic change in such a short amount of time that every aspect of service delivery seems to be going through a sea change. What I am trying to better understand is how does this impact future planning? Does the current scenario make it harder to plan for the future as the future is still somewhat uncertain?” he asked the group.
“For me, it is not so much reducing timeframe, but instead expanding my scope of what else?” replied Holland Winfield, UKI Service Lead, Lenovo.
“I think if we have to start with a broader field and not find techs, but people who are trainable. If you can change the focus from one to the other, that will be key. It was like somebody mentioned earlier in the call with the moms working for the water filtration companies. Those moms didn’t wake up one day and say I want to work for a water filtration company. They woke up and said I have these hours, and I can work. What can I do? Then a water company said I could meet that brief,” he continued.
“During today’s discussion even, it occurred to me that if I can go into the contractor peer-to-peer market and find engineers that are trainable into work specific hours or set hours, I don’t need an eight-hour headcount, especially on my peak times, and coming out of this conversation that is something that I just realised I need to be more fluid in my thinking, is I’ve been looking for an eight headcount, and I don’t need an eight headcount, I might need a forty headcount that can do two hours a day.
“If I can scale I don’t need the workforce to,” he concluded.
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"I realised I need to be more fluid in my thinking, is I’ve been looking for an eight headcount, and I don’t need an eight headcount, I might need a forty headcount that can do two hours a day. If I can scale I don’t need the workforce to.” Holland Winfield, Lenovo
“During today’s discussion even, it occurred to me that if I can go into the contractor peer-to-peer market and find engineers that are trainable into work specific hours or set hours, I don’t need an eight-hour headcount, especially on my peak times, and coming out of this conversation that is something that I just realised I need to be more fluid in my thinking, is I’ve been looking for an eight headcount, and I don’t need an eight headcount, I might need a forty headcount that can do two hours a day.
“If I can scale I don’t need the workforce to,” he concluded.
“I definitely think there need to be multiple conversations for some customers,” added Kevin Herring, Senior Advisory Consultant – Field Service Management, ServiceNow.
“I’m sure everybody here is what is sometimes called the W6 – who, what, where, when, why and then finally how. I remember being introduced to this over twenty years ago, but I think it’s still very relevant.
“So for some customers, I use it to help them think about the maturity of where they are today and use this as a tool to help them better understand their situation. Earlier in the discussion, I was talking about field services being a journey and how the first step in that journey is understanding where your field service people are – adding visibility and control,” Herring continued.
“Once you know where they are, you can start to make more intelligent decisions about whether they are in the right place. Do they have the right skills? The right parts? You can begin to use that visibility as a decision-making tool, and it is then that you can then optimise and do remote and all of the sort of things that we’ve talked about today.
“When I’m talking to a customer first for the first time, I will show them a slide that visualises this journey and ask them where they think they are at the moment on that journey. You’d be surprised by the number of customers saying we’re still at the start of that journey. Now, this can be for many different reasons. It’s not necessarily that they’re doing anything wrong; it could be they’ve grown very quickly, perhaps where they’ve gone from five engineers to fifty engineers and at some point, they’ve realised they need to do something about this because they no longer have a firm grasp of where their engineers are,” he explained.
“I think for those guys, the basics of who, where, is still very relevant. However, equally, you’ve got some customers, for example, such as Ged at Konica Minolta, who, if I started from that position, then he’d politely kick me out the door very quickly saying thank you, but we were doing that twenty years ago!
“So I think the conversation needs to be tailored to the maturity of the customer, and that is the same whether you are providing a software-based solution, such as myself or manufacturing based, such as Tom, for example,” Herring added referring to Thomas Bean, Service Manager, AB Graphic International, who was also part of this Think Tank session.
"There are still a lot of companies, regardless almost of vertical, who still just don’t have a good grip on their field service" - Kevin Herring, ServiceNow
“You have to adapt very quickly based on your first few sentences almost in the conversation with a prospective customer to understand what their maturity is because otherwise, you risk losing someone very quickly if you don’t adapt to their maturity and their level of knowledge and begin the discovery process of where they will see value in your solution from the appropriate starting point,” added Herring.
“There are still surprising numbers of companies I find, who have a lot of resources out in the field, yet still, if you said, Do you know, where all of your people are at any given time? They’ll say, ‘well, kind of, but I’d have to go and ask so and so and, and she’d ask someone else who would have to check in with someone else etc.
“So there are still a lot of companies, regardless almost of vertical, who still just don’t have a good grip on their field service,” he concluded.
“That’s precisely what I’ve seen many times – having worked in service organisations on three different continents,” agreed Winfield.
“Yes, everybody thinks they have a good understanding of how their field service works until they’re asked the question, how does your field service work?” he added.
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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