Dave Hart, Managing Partner of Field Service Associates, takes us on a journey down memory lane in this exclusive article for Field Service News.

OK, come with me on a journey down memory lane here…

In 1983, legendary singer Lionel Ritchie (yes, he of Commodores fame) released his new solo album Can’t Slow Down. The following year he released a single from that album entitled Hello (is it me you’re looking for) and it reached number one on three Billboard music charts: the pop chart (for two weeks), the R&B chart (for three weeks) and the adult contemporary chart (for six weeks). The song also went to number one in the UK Singles Chart for six weeks.

Whilst driving along in the car a few weeks ago, I was thinking through my consultancy write up following my conversation with a CIO of a very large company. “Hello, came on the radio” at exactly the right moment; it was one of those moments, almost fate where in seven words Lionel had managed to summarise the root of the issues this particular company was having.

Whilst discussing with my CIO client her particular hot topics (which was the subject of the call) we discussed her companies service business which was fairly sizeable and when digging a little deeper into the topic with her she proclaimed, “I don’t actually know the name of the guy who runs our service business!”

I know from my own experience running a large service business, our quarterly business reviews with the CEO were two hours long. One hour and fifty minutes discussing how much product we had sold and ten minutes discussing the service business. The service business contributed significantly to the overall EBIT of the company; it’s like it was a given, that service would just perform and achieve the numbers.

During a budgeting cycle in the same company, the regional CFO exclaimed, “I have no real idea how service works, I just assume revenues will go up with the annual price increase, you will keep contract losses below 3% and your budget EBIT number is a given”

So, my question. Should service be taken for granted?

Unfortunately, in so many businesses, it is and my call to action here is that for service to thrive It needs focus from the whole ‘c suite’ to ensure it grows, that it constantly invents itself to cater for customers ever changing needs, market forces and transformational factors.

“Service leaders need to grasp what dominates their business leaders’ areas of focus

and then capitalise on that.”

Service is the powerhouse, the profit driver; dare I say, the future of sustainable revenues for product companies. Don’t take my word for it look at the evidence. In the recent TSIA publication ‘The State of Service Revenue Generation 2020’ the report states that 62% of companies polled said equipment revenues were declining and 70% stated service revenues were increasing.

So, ask yourself this question. How many true CSO’s are out there within companies, CSO’s that sit on the ‘C suite’ and influence the business direction, develop strategies for growth, that influence product design to be more service centric and ultimately transition the company to adopt a service mindset?

I bet not many.

I remember a conference from the days when we could travel, data attributed to PwC was presented, PwC had surveyed 2,500 companies in 2018 and found that 83% of those companies promoted the CEO from within. There is a startling similarity to service leaders who are promoted from within (that number is actually 84%), but does this necessarily mean that the potential myopic view of service is maintained?

The challenge for service leaders is to become apparent and top of mind to their CEO/CFO/CIO’s which is by no means easy. Service leaders need to grasp what dominates their business leaders’ areas of focus and then capitalise on that. I suggest service leaders find an approach that works with each persona. Here are some suggestions which are generic but may help the reader understand some areas of potential focus for them…

• CFO’s – Half of CFO’s are fast tracking digital initiatives and 52% are re assessing business strategies. What an opportunity to put service front and centre introducing new approaches and digital transformation to pull organisations out of the COVID slump and back into revenue growth.
• CIO’s – Of course will be concerned with cyber security, data governance and automation but in creating IT products, CIOs will be interested in the emotional value that makes their customers purchase the product or service. CIOs and IT leaders realize that customers buy from companies they feel care about them. Another wonderful opportunity to get on the agenda of the CIO and talk about your service strategy.
• CEO’s – Their top concern is global recession and maybe it’s time to enlighten them about how service can become the engine of growth for their business.

Service leaders need to be able to understand each of the drivers of the people listed above and then ensure they tailor a message to that persona that will resonate. To do that they must be thoroughly prepared to be top of mind with their proposed solution, as each one of the ‘C suite’ will have many pressing priorities, all vying for their and their teams time as well as those precious financial resources.

Benjamin Disraeli once said ‘There is no education like adversity’ and COVID has delivered adversity in spades but I can’t help but feel the time has never been better to influence above, to build a sustainable plan that will resonate with your leadership team, to re-educate them about just how powerful their service businesses are. I then suggest you then pick up the phone and dare I say, start by saying….

Hello, is it me you’re looking for?

---

Further Reading:

• Read more about Leadership and Strategy @ www.fieldservicenews.com/leadership-and-strategy
• Read more exclusive FSN articles from Dave Hart @ www.fieldservicenews.com/dave-hart
• Learn more about Field Service Associates @ fieldserviceassociates.com
• Connect with Dave Hart on LinkedIn @ linkedin.com/david-hart
• Follow Dave Hart on Twitter @ twitter.com/DaveHartProfit

Dave Hart is a hugely respected and incredibly well-known figure in the global field service community, in his debut article for Field Service News he offers an excellent moment of reflection field service managers would be wise to consider... 

Not being an avid blogger, I did what my two kids say to me with every question I pose to them these days. ‘Hey kids my internet is down any ideas?’ ‘Google it’ comes the reply. ‘Hey kids how do you change the background colour on a PowerPoint slide?’ ‘Err have you Googled it’ comes the now all too often response.

Ahh the joys of the internet and thinking for oneself, anyway back to my blogging prowess (or lack of it). I googled ‘how to make a blog interesting’ and one suggestion was put a picture of a supercar on your blog as that will draw the attention of men, but also women. Really, who could have guessed that?

Siri is not much better, ask Siri ‘what’s the height of the Eiffel tower’ and it will respond 324 metres to the top. Ask it a more open question such as ‘why is there social unrest in Belarus’ and you get the stock answer ‘OK, here are some websites you may find useful’. Really, I might find useful??

Thus my point here, information is literally everywhere, yet its nowhere. Searching for information can take you hours and get you nowhere.

Knowing what information is trustworthy is an art form and in life it could be argued that the more experience you have the more valuable that experience would become to any potential employer. A recent HBR article suggested that by 2025 a quarter of all employees in the US and UK would be over 55 years old and this demographic is the fastest growing in almost every country. 25% of all your employees over 55 with a wealth of experience that are contributing in ways we have little understanding of, as more often than not as they get older, we honour tradition by buying them a gold clock and wish them on their way to a long and happy retirement.

 

INFORMATION IS LITERALLY EVERYWHERE, YET IT'S NOWHERE

After I finished college, I worked in a TV repair shop (yes in the days where TV’s were repaired and not thrown away) and a customer brought in a TV he had for 12 years. It was a Sony portable that was quite expensive when he bought it, when he returned it to the shop, he had bought it from for repair, they had kept the TV for 2 weeks and told him it was irreparable. As a last resort he had brought it into our little TV repair shop. Jim (who ran the shop) had 40 years electronics experience asked him to wait, walked into the back of the shop and started to troubleshoot the issue; it was magical watching him. He instinctively knew where to look and within 10 minutes he had soldered a new transistor into the circuit board and the TV sprung into life. He turned to me and said, “now do I charge for the 10 minutes it took me to repair this TV or should I charge for the 40 that allowed me to fix it in 10 minutes.” That day has stuck in my memory as if it were yesterday - It was nearly 40 years ago.

In the field service industry these trends are increasingly worrying as we watch valuable resources with 30,40 years of experience with skills in abundance leave companies and with it their abundance of knowledge just walking out of the door with them.

I suggest four approaches:

1. Ask them to consider a part time role working from home and ask them to work the triage desk or indeed on technical support. This flexible approach means they can still keep their grey matter working, they can help customers and other engineers (which all engineers love to do)
2. Offer part time mentoring roles where older employees can take new engineers and show them the ropes thus increasing the rate of their learning curve exponentially
3. Consider a learning enablement platform where you can capture their experience in blogs, videos, articles and sketches so you capture all that goodness in one place. Searchable content that’s enriched with real life ‘how ’ can be a much richer experience than just knowledge articles.
4. Try and convince them that the next President of the United States will either be 74 or 77 years old and they are still working, why don’t they consider staying (not sure this will be a compelling argument but hey you have to try right?)

A few years ago, Mark Zuckerberg stated that ‘younger people are smarter’ but the science shows that this is just not the case. For most people, raw mental horsepower declines after the age of 30, but knowledge and expertise — the main predictors of job performance — keep increasing even beyond the age of 80.

Employers will do well to remember that fact and act now to save all of that experience goodness whilst they still can…

(PS if you read this far, the picture of the supercar worked!)

---

Further Reading:

• Read more about Leadership and Strategy @ www.fieldservicenews.com/leadership-and-strategy
• Connect to Dave Hart @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-hart-049009b
• Read more exclusive Field Service News articles from Dave Hart @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/author/dave-hart
• Find out more about Field Service Associates @ https://fieldserviceassociates.com/
• Follow Dave Hart on Twitter @ https://twitter.com/DaveHartProfit

 

Disruption has become a phrase so widely used it is in danger of becoming hackneyed, but in terms of asset maintenance, the IoT is bringing true, genuine disruption writes Servicemax’s Dave Hart...

If you had to pick a moniker for this decade, then “disruption” is a pretty good one. It’s now so pervasive that it’s almost become a cliché of itself.

Everywhere you look, from banking to music to taxis and hotels, traditional business models and markets are being disrupted. All driven by technology being applied in innovative new ways. Now it seems it’s the turn of capital equipment assets and the machines themselves to be disrupted – or at least the way we manage, use and maintain them.

Industrial downtime is no joke. Unplanned downtime in just about every industry has a significant impact. The Aberdeen Group last year reported that the cost of downtime across industries went up to $260,000 per hour on average between 2014 and 2016. That’s a huge jump with a considerable hit on any business.

Time typically isn’t kind to equipment and machines.

As assets get older, parts need maintaining or replacing and more can go wrong. And when it does go wrong, service technicians are typically sent out on site with very little insight other than something isn’t working. On top of that, most companies don’t know how best to optimise uptime availability in different conditions, such as managing volatility, meeting peak demand or managing performance in extreme conditions. It’s an area of business that’s historically been very inefficient, and had very little intelligence or investment applied to it.

 

As a tech-enabled society, we are better than that. And it was only a matter of time before the wave of technology innovation and disruption made its way to changing how we optimise equipment and capital assets, and predict their maintenance and service requirements. By harvesting and applying intelligence that previously would have been impossible to obtain, companies are seeing a major step change this area.

And it’s more than just a ‘nice to have’ scenario. For most industries, margins are too thin and competition is too fierce to simply guesstimate how much capacity a piece of equipment can cope with, and it seems positively archaic to run a reactive break/fix service mentality in today’s connected age.

The reality is that the Industrial Internet offers an opportunity to intelligently manage resources and manage performance. Machines with sensors feeding back performance data provide a raw pipe of potential intelligence that needs to be woven into the business. With the right tools, organisations can use this data to develop strategies that alleviate risk.

Asset-intensive companies always strive to reduce operating risk while improving efficiency, at the same as coping with regulatory demands and workforce development.

These are key challenges that are difficult to achieve without an intelligent asset performance management (APM) approach. The more forward thinking companies also have field service management (FSM) strategies in place in an effort to streamline and automate their service departments. They are wise investments as both APM and FSM each deliver significant value in their own right.

But here’s the real disruptor: By combing these two disciplines, businesses have, for the first time, a complete suite of intelligence at their fingertips to understand potential equipment issues, and pre-empt them or act upon them quickly and efficiently with the correct tools and parts, should machinery need fixing for example.

No second guessing, no wasted investigative journeys and much lower risk of downtime.

Now take this one step further and think of a digital twin that mirrors of all your physical assets globally, giving you a dashboard that reports back to you on the status, health and performance of how each piece of equipment in each location is working. One that proactively alerts you, through intelligent APM, when action is required, and automatically takes preventative measures, through FSM, when an issue arises. Suddenly downtime looks much less of a threat.

That’s because predictive analytics and work management through APM enable businesses to plan, schedule, execute and feedback on problems and solutions. Which equipment is failing or about to fail and why? What parts are needed to fix the problem, where and by whom? And FSM then automatically triggers scheduling, ordering and dispatch of a service technician if required, to ensure everything is up and running and downtime is minimised.

 

It’s interesting that service businesses represent around seventy per cent of the world’s economy, yet to date, only about a third of the world’s large service businesses use just FSM solutions. They are missing a trick.

A combined APM and FSM approach optimises the equipment strategy for a company, analyses the risk and cost of how often equipment should be inspected, saving money, increasing productivity and reducing risk of downtime.

So what does all this mean in real terms? By proactively optimising and managing equipment assets, business can expect, on average, a 10 percent inventory cost reduction, 40 percent reduction in reactive maintenance, 25 percent gain in employee productivity and a 25 percent reduction in total cost of ownership.

Likewise, field service management can generate an average 13 percent boost in revenues and an 11 percent increase in customer satisfaction.

Why wouldn’t you want to join the dots on metrics like those? Throw in the potential savings from reduced transport and failure rates, less downtime, plus the sustainability benefits, and you have a recipe for future growth.

Now that is compelling, not to mention disruptive.

 

---

 

Be social and share