ARCHIVE FOR THE ‘management-2’ CATEGORY

Our sector is one that continues to breed innovation and ingenuity; where ideas are stretched, tested and then stretched some more. Coupled with new technology these ideas are disrupting what has gone before and turning traditional service on its head.

To celebrate this, Field Service News is proud to announce 2019’s #FSN20, our annual list of the individuals at the coal face of the sector, the practitioners who are all pushing for the same goal: service excellence. We whittled down over one hundred nominations, submitted from academia, industry influencers and field service practitioners, to a short list of 20. It was tough - given the vast amount of excellent work taking place - but we think the final names represent a fine snapshot of service innovation taking place across the global service arena.

So in no particular order, ladies and gentlemen, we our proud to present to you this year’s #FSN20...

As our roads become increasingly congested, driven by several factors including the increasing urbanisation of our populations and the mega-trend of click to order replacing the bricks and mortar high street, field service engineers can face significant challenges just to get to the job on time. Is last-mile facing a cross-roads and if so, which technological route does it need to take? Mark Glover finds out more...

The topic of last mile service delivery can be a complex nut to crack. However, one company who has been at the vanguard of doing so for more than 20 years is ByBox. The company provides overnight delivery of spares to a network of smart lockers, making the last mile both cost-efficient and effective. To find out more Kris Oldland spoke with Richard Agostinelli, their newly appointed CEO...

Service has been revolutionised within the last decade particularly by the introduction of smart devices both in the home and at work. This offers an opportunity to help guide your customers along the customer journey, building deeper relationships as you do writes Bill Pollock...

There is a delicate balance between leveraging the trusted advisor status of field service engineers to generate revenue and going too far so that the trust they rightfully earn with your customers eventually is broken. But that doesn’t have to be the case writes Jim Baston...

Study from SCALA reveals third-party logistic companies (3PLs) are falling behind in innovation and productivity.

In this series, which features a number of features based around an exclusive white paper published by Field Service News in partnership with HSO we are looking at three core arguments service directors when trying to secure investment from their board in new field service management systems. Having taken a look at two of the more traditional arguments so far in Return on Investment and Health and Safety we now turn our attention to a newer facet of the argument, can your organisation afford not to invest if it means you are going to be at a competitive disadvantage...

Is investing in service execution solutions enough to improve first-time fix rates and achieve high levels of equipment uptime? Chris Mitchell from PTC explains more...

Improved asset uptime, first time fix rates, repeat visit avoidance; all are undoubtedly some of today’s OEM’s most relevant metrics and challenges: revenues from service offerings, whether it be PBL contracts or more traditional service models, are too significant to be ignored.

Not least through industrial applications of the IoT we see an abundance of applications and use cases relating to operating and servicing equipment, whether in the field or in the factory. The way we can now easily connect to assets and operate, monitor and diagnose them remotely is simply fantastic.

Many also focus on applications of augmented reality to not only improve the way equipment is maintained in established markets, but also how it can be maintained in emerging markets, where experience and training is simply lacking.

The trap many OEMs fall into, however, is the notion that investing into the improvement of such service execution challenges is sufficient.

Improving asset uptime in this way has certainly never been easier to accomplish -  all the enabling technology is here today! Adopting these new technologies to improve the service experience are essential. However, there is a huge aspect to servicing assets, which is still widely ignored: Spare parts inventories are not optimised – so the right part is too often not available at the right time, place and cost: Companies’ investment in their spare parts inventories are simply too high.

Balance sheets are laden with huge amounts of cash that are tied up in incorrect inventories and need to be freed up to be spent in other areas of the business or to simply improve operating margins. Bills for expediting shipments and cannibalising production inventory are largely too high.

The challenge is that unlike production inventory planning, spare parts demand, and therefore inventory, is much more difficult to predict. Too often historical demand is used to forecast but, in most cases with low levels of accuracy.

Not often enough is spare part demand forecasted by employing causal factors, where forecasts are calculated based on your equipment usage rates and average values for casuals, such as meantime between failure rates. OEMs would now able to use real-time usage data and predicted failures of the asset to further improve forecasts and therefore optimising parts availability further.


"Too often historical demand is used to forecast but, in most cases with low levels of accuracy..."


Regrettably the required information is often not provided by other parts of the organisation, the negative consequences of which are not addressed in the organisation. Levels of equipment uptime and part availability are far lower than they should be. Brand loyalty suffers, customers buy parts (and equipment) elsewhere and revenues are impacted.

So how do we solve the conundrum of keeping inventories low whilst exceeding customer expectations in terms of equipment uptime and part availability?

The approach needs to be all encompassing if you really want to offer first class service to your customers at the lowest possible cost and should incorporate the following:

1. Improve parts availability by improving forecasting, inventory optimisation and supply planning - this will drive immense value within a few months of implementing and will drastically reduce inventories, equipment downtime and improve first time fix rates. You now have a parts supply chain, which perfectly supports an optimised service and repair network.

2. Automate field service operations by ways of a connected optimisation solution wherever possible, by leveraging exception monitoring and failure prediction from connected assets - let the asset tell you it’s failing rather than the customer when it’s too late - this will further reduce downtime and speed up repair time frames.

3. Enable the field technician (or customer) in the most effective way, by leveraging digital service content delivery through phones, tablets or VR, AR or MR headsets, leveraging augmented and virtual reality technologies. This will speed up repair or maintenance steps and ensures technicians operate effectively and based on the most up to date information available, information that is delivered from downstream CAD and PLM solutions.

4. Ensure service contracts and parts are priced correctly. This way you ensure sales are profitable and customers return to you time and time again for repeat business. This is also the ultimate way to combat the threat from copy pars.

There are many more applications of the above technologies, not least training and enablement, but hopefully it becomes clear that implementing one technology without the other will only unlock some of the value.

So in summary: the key to an optimised field service operation is not just the use of best of breed execution tools such as AR, Field Service Management and Service Parts information. The technician visit can only be successful first time if the correct spare part is made available, i.e. if the demand for the spare part has been predicted as accurately as possible and has been made available to the technician!

Chris Mitchell is Director Business Transformation - Servigistics Business Unit at PTC.

In this series, which is based around an exclusive white paper published by Field Service News in partnership with HSO, we are exploring three core arguments service directors can make to the board to secure investment in implementing or upgrading their field service management systems. In the second part of the series we look at how you can build a case based around health and safety...