Redback WMS
I was having a chat with friends recently, talking about what I do. None of them work in the area of field service management and so to explain it, I had to check all my biases and assumed knowledge at the door. Somewhere in my spiel were some words about “helping field service organisations…”
“Why do they need help?” one friend asked. “Isn’t it just about getting a call, jumping in a van and driving off to get something fixed? Why do they need a system to help them for that?”
I took a deep breath and thought about it for a bit.
Going back to basics, I explained what I thought were some of the core industry challenges: things that even with the best of intentions are hard to do without a modern system that can help with automation and monitoring.
The next day, I thought it would be good to check myself and did a quick meta-analysis of what others in the industry thought were the core problems field service organisations typically tackle.
A lot of it boiled down to the same 5 things. Sometimes worded differently, sometimes sliced another way, but it almost always comes back to the following 5 points.
Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is about reputation and working relationships, but it is also directly linked to revenue. A dissatisfied customer will either not use the service again or not recommend the service to others. If this is a large contractually retained customer, the end of the contract or a missed renewal can be a dramatic consequence of customer dissatisfaction. So, this one naturally comes in first most of the time.
Some of the service failures that can drive down customer satisfaction are:
High Operating Costs
Field service is a notoriously low margin industry. So, it comes naturally that one of the biggest challenges for service organisations is the relatively high cost of running the operations.
The cost challenge can be divided into two major groups: costs that can be eliminated and necessary costs from which more productivity should be extracted.
The most obvious target of the first group (costs that can be eliminated) is the number of back office personnel that are engaged to carry out the planning, administration and reconciliation part of the work.
The largest part of back office cost can be attributed to:
The second group (costs that should be optimised) is mostly related to resource or field agent costs that are necessary to carry out the work and cannot simply be “automated”. Through changes in behaviour and more precise/granular controls, more output can be squeezed out of these.
These are very often attributed to:
Revenue Leakage
Sometimes, the consequence of cutting back too much on back-office administration without having proper processes or systems to automate these is that downstream processes suffer. In field service management, this means difficulty in claiming to the customer for the work that was done and effectively leaving money on the table that could otherwise have been invoiced.
Expertise Retention
As the younger, more mobile workforce takes over, it is becoming harder for field service organisations to retain the expertise that allows them to have the edge in their industry. So, the challenge here is about finding ways to keep the best agents on the books and, where not enough of them can be attracted, doing more with the expertise that is already in-house.
These challenges can be summarised as:
Situational Proactivity
Situational proactivity is a fancy term that effectively describes the ability of an organisation to adapt to the changing situation on the field or in their business. This is often done by having access to up to date data from the field, being able to properly and insightfully visualise this data and then being able to compare the current situation to what was originally planned or demanded.
The challenges here are about the difficulty in accessing this data and making informed decision based on it:
But what about…
From my experience working with field service organisations and trying to resolve these issues, I feel there is another challenge that is not often talked about but that is certainly a recurring story.
Dealing with sub-contractors is often a way organisations will use to reduce high operating costs and bring in missing expertise, but it brings with it its own challenges which are certainly not trivial.
Field service management is not an easy business, which is why, especially in this industry, choosing the right system to help solve all these issues is fundamental to the bottom line of service organisations.