Redback WMS
Until recently, in my career, I mostly worked with large field service or heavy industry organisations. Businesses with more than a few thousand employees, sometimes up to 15,000, and in general an equally large contingent of contractors. Most of my involvement with these companies was in the context of large transformational projects, the type where the top men comes down to the operational folk and tell them that the business is changing and that “they better get on board”.
Since starting up Redback Software and offering RedbackWMS, I’ve mostly been involved with smaller organisations. On average, they have between 20 to a few hundred field employees/contractors and deliver on much shorter contract lifespans.
It’s been interesting for me to observe and experiment this change and it’s brought me a completely different point of view. Field service is field service, but how big corporations approach it is in fact quite different from how their smaller counterparts do.
Benefits
In both cases, I spent and still spend a lot of my time talking to the top level, owners or C-suite. Of course, they are the ones watching the bottom line, and as for any IT systems, the expectation is that their field service management system will yield benefits that will make an impact on the bottom line. But how these discussions play out and which benefits is discussed, varies greatly from the small to the big.
In big organisations, the leadership is often very interested in the sexy stuff, like AI, optimisation and real-time connectivity to the field force. The first question is often whether the system can do these things. Then, after a few demos and hand shakes, we start discussing the impacts to the bottom line. Of course these “sexy” things can – and do – have clear and measurable benefits, but they are often less direct. For example, AI is often used to find patterns in the data that can then serve to help the leadership make behavioural change decisions that, in turn, may yield benefits. It’s harder and longer to measure and prove.
In small organisations, the leadership will often stop you very quickly if they feel you are trying to sell that “sexy” stuff too much. What they want is first degree benefits: “It costs me 2 days of 2 people to run payroll every second week, I need to bring this down to 4 hours for 1 person, can you do it?”
Or: “my guys have trucks full of material, they never have to stop for lack of parts and they’re alone on their territory – so I’m not sure the route optimisation will help me much – but they often have to turn around because the customer is not available. Can you send an SMS and tell me in advance if the customer hasn’t responded?”
Automation versus Data
What small companies want is immediate solutions to their direct operational issues. And this very often takes the form of automation. They want to automate manual processes like copying data from here to there, interpreting time sheets, creating work from templates, filling out regulatory PDF forms, etc. Anything that saves hours of repetitive work for back office staff or hours of paperwork for the field staff.
On the other hand, what large organisations want is the data that will allow them to run analyses and eventually make business decisions. They also like to impose constraints on the users to “ensure they do the right thing”, even if it means lower operational efficiency.
I’ve heard many times, in large organisations: “Don’t worry, we have plenty of ‘bums on seats’ that can help process this data”. I’ve even come across, a few times, the preference for paper time-sheets so that “we can have a manual step to re-type them in to ensure quality”.
It’s not to say large corporations don’t have any operational issues to deal with, they definitely do and could get large “first degree” operational benefits by better automating some of their processes, but what “paper pushers” do in the lower echelons of the pyramid often gets lost in the fog of boardroom management reporting.
And it’s not to say small companies shouldn’t think of second degree, longer term benefits, they should, but the leadership – oftentimes the owner him/herself – is so stuck in the operational day-to-day issues that automation is the only way to get a bit of breathing space for a minute or two.
So the trick for me, and a system like RedbackWMS, is to be able to help small business owners automate their first degree issues, but without loosing sight of the best practices that they will want (and need) to adopt as they grow into their industry. Help now, and provide direction for later.