ThinkTank Reflections: Is the inherent value a field service engineer brings to an organisation likely to change as service thinking evolves?
ThinkTank Reflections: Is the inherent value a field service engineer brings to an organisation likely to change as service thinking evolves?
There is much talk in the industry about de-skilling the field worker and centralising subject matter expertise. However, there are also compelling arguments to be made that the deep-level knowledge of an engineer could be one distinct means of differentiation between a service organisation and their competitors.
Technology is shaping this discussion significantly, as field service companies can develop new approaches to service thinking with modern systems and tools. However, while technology is an enabler, we mustn’t lose sight of the strategic goals of the service organisation.
In the November 2022 edition of the FSN Think Tank sessions, this was a critical part of a wide-ranging discussion exploring the future of field service.
“What I see as the engineer of the future is smart hands,” began Ged Cranny, Ged Cranny, Senior Consultant, Konica Minolta BEU.
“You’ve got to start with the factories, and you’ve got to think about what you want the customer to do and where you can bring value to the customer.
“Nobody buys a product so that they can see the back of your engineer taking that product apart. They buy it for the uptime; they buy it for the output. As service organisations, we tell the customers they will have downtime, and we tell them that their products won’t be available,” Cranny continued.
“Ultimately, as a sector, we sell failure because we sell the engineering side because that’s where we can drive revenue. That’s where our sales forces are designed to put doubt in the customer’s mind so that they buy service contracts from us.
“We started thinking three or four years ago about this change to remote-as-a-default. We’ve been in it what I would classify as a SaaS for years because the majority of our money came from points of pennies. Every time somebody pushed the button, we got points of a penny for those clicks, which added to a lot of annuity for the business,” he added.
“Essentially, in the late 90s and early 2000s, we decided that this was opening the door for the business; the sales didn’t open the door for the company, the service did. So we got to the point where our marketplace is suddenly shrinking because we are selling against ourselves. The answer is that we can make another ten or fifteen per cent if we put the specialist on the remote desks if we design the product to facilitate easy customer intervention. Then, what we are using our engineers for is smart hands,” Cranny explained.
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"Don’t mix up a service delivery manager with an engineer in terms of bringing value because you just won’t sell that to your finance director.” - Ged Cranny, Konica Minolta
“Then when it comes to a real technical problem, like that described earlier in today’s discussion, we can take one of our people off your desks, and he either turns smart hands with the visualisation tools into an even cleverer person or he goes to site. However, if the asset is small enough, you pull the unit; if it’s too big, you send the engineer
“But what I’m trying to say is, that’s what the smart hands should want to emulate and don’t mix up a service delivery manager with an engineer in terms of bringing value because you just won’t sell that to your finance director,” he advised.
“It is interesting because while our worlds are quite different, Ged, I suppose your machines would be mass manufactured where as we make 12 to 20 a month, large-scale assets worth between £500,000 to a million pounds per machine. I have been making a lot of notes as you were speaking,” replied Thomas Bean, Service Manager, AB Graphic International.
“We don’t have a considerable amount of diagnostic software, etc., but I think there are some excellent ideas worth exploring and discussing with our service engineers to see if they have any ideas about what can make the machines more efficient.
“It’s also interesting to explore how can bring the customer what we call a ‘sixth element’. At the moment, it’s not something we’re really doing in our organisation as a whole but it is definitely an area I want to be investigating further.”
“Predictive maintenance is something that we’ve talked about for a long time in the sector, but the challenge I always think about is that you have to have a lot of data to have a meaningful predictive model,” added Kevin Herring, Senior Advisory Consultant – Field Service Management, ServiceNow as he reflected on the discussion.
“The sort of machines you’re talking about, Tom, I’m guessing you’ve got nowhere near the volume of data required. Ged, I think you and I’ve spoken about this a little bit before, you’ve got enough where you can start to make some progress, but still, when people talk about machine learning and Google and that sort of thing, they’re looking at billions and billions and billions of records.
"We should be looking at predictive maintenance as giving trained engineers the best possible insights we can to allow them to identify the issue, rather than being able to totally diagnose the issue without human input and intelligence.” - Kevin Herring, ServiceNow
“Whereas in field service, we’re talking about thousands of data points, maybe tens of thousands of data points.
“So actually on the predictive side, while we can absolutely drive insights from the data it can be difficult to achieve and we should be looking at predictive maintenance as giving trained engineers the best possible insights we can to allow them to identify the issue, rather than being able to totally diagnose the issue without human input and intelligence,” Herring explained.
“I think that is incredibly valuable insight,” responded Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News, as he considered the point Herring had made.
“We’ve got this holy grail quest to a service nirvana where everything can be more and more predictive and where we can know precisely before the engineer teams on site what an issue is, what parts are needed and so on. Then if we follow that road to its natural conclusion, we end up with significant discussions around designing for service, de-skilling the field techs and even exploring things like courier technicians etc.
“However, from listening to what is being said today, from different sides of the table and starting to understand things in a bit more depth, it’s more a case of we can use these technologies more to narrow down the challenges. So when the engineer turns up on site, he still needs that knowledge, whether that’s his knowledge or whatever that’s supplemented remotely; however we go, it’s still required,” Oldland continued.
“In some instances, it could be providing the customer with the knowledge remotely; in others, it could be augmenting the engineer’s knowledge further with diagnostic data and a layer of AI to help make triage faster and more effective, but the knowledge itself remains critical.
“What really sticks out for me, and where I am learning today,” Oldland added, pausing for a moment to think through the key points of the conversation, “is that I’ve always of seen a fairly linear progression from break-fix to planned preventive maintenance and with fully predictive maintenance as the end goal. However, taking into account today’s discussion and on further reflection it sounds like is that fully preventive predictive maintenance is possibly unobtainable, but what we can do is we can get much better at those first two steps by using predictive tools.”
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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