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Month: January 2020

January 8, 2020 | 1 Mins Read

Live From Field Service Europe: Cubic's 3 Pillars of Successful Service Transformation

January 8, 2020 | 1 Mins Read

Live From Field Service Europe: Cubic's 3 Pillars of Successful Service Transformation

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Sarah shared the main stage at Field Service Europe with Mike Gosling, IT Service Platforms Manager at Cubic Transportation Systems. Mike shared how he helped shape Cubic's service business to overcome today's challenges and deliver exceptional outcomes to their customers.

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January 6, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

The 4 Resolutions You Need for Service Success in 2020

January 6, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

The 4 Resolutions You Need for Service Success in 2020

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

There’s much debate on whether New Year’s resolutions are worthwhile, but in my opinion, it can never hurt to pause and set some intentions. Service has made strides in the past couple of years when it comes to being seen for its competitive worth and being prioritized within businesses, so there is more focus than ever on how to succeed in service. This comes at the perfect time, because there is also more pressure from customers to deliver not only better service, but new and unique experiences. As we kick off 2020, here are four areas of focus that will help you capitalize on the opportunity of service this year.

1: Become More Agile

Agility is a key theme for 2020 and is important in numerous areas of the business. Today’s fast-paced world is demanding a more nimble response from those looking to remain competitive. Focusing on the ability to more quickly respond to your customers’ needs is important. Adopting the mentality of being more agile in course correcting your objectives and strategy is necessary. And migrating to more agile technology methodology is important to leverage today’s latest advancements. Agility isn’t a word that would historically be associated with service organizations – many have been doing things the same way for a long time and have been pretty slow to make changes. That means of operating is a thing of the past – if you want to survive, let alone succeed, in today’s environment you must work on becoming more agile.

2: Improve Your Company Culture

A focus on company culture has become increasingly important for service organizations and will continue to need to be prioritized. Why? Well, for a few reasons. First, for your vision of service success to be achieved, you are relying on your frontline employees to be on board and carry it out. You can’t do this without employees that are engaged, feel valued, and feel heard. Second, with all the changes taking place in service today as company’s redefine themselves and their offerings, you are asking more of your employees – you are asking them to step outside of their comfort zones, and they won’t be willing to do that in a poor culture. Finally, as companies struggle to recruit, hire, and retain new talent, creating a culture that people want to be a part of becomes an important part of your value proposition. So, in 2020, take stock of your company culture (what it really is – not what you’d like to think it is). Determine where you can make some improvements and prioritize doing so. This could be more methods of making employees feel appreciated, it could be better defining career paths, it could be more ample training, more effective onboarding, gathering and implementing more feedback. It could be mentorship programs, revisiting incentives, or thinking of new perks. The answer will be different for every company, but the point is – as you go into 2020 expecting more of your employees, make sure you prioritize giving more back to them as well.

3: Up Your Tech Game

To progress your business in the ways you would like to, you must embrace technology as your key enabler. While a solid technology strategy was once in its own right a competitive advantage, it has become table stakes for effectively doing business today. Digital transformation isn’t a finish line that you will cross, but a forever journey of continuous improvement and ongoing advancements. Tying back to the resolution of becoming more agile, you have to become comfortable iterating technology advancements regularly. What this looks like for your organization depends on what your current state is – but the opportunities are endless. From AI-powered scheduling and IoT-enabled predictive maintenance to AR-based remote service and ML-powered knowledge management, the tools you have at your disposal to take your service to the next level are powerful and attainable. What new technology will you use in 2020 to better equip your employees and delight your customers?

4: Chart Your Path to Outcomes-Based Service

If your main objective for 2020 is reducing your service windows to less than four hours, you are drastically missing the mark. Service success is no longer measured by incremental improvements, but by the ability to provide outcomes and experiences to your customers. Outcomes-based service is the end game, and you need to figure out how you’re going to get there. This is an easier adjustment for some industries and some organizations than others, but it is the reality for everyone. Customers no longer want a good service visit – they want peace of mind, a seamlessness meeting of their needs, an exceptional experience. I’ve witnessed powerful examples of companies getting this right, like Cubic Transportation Systems, Tetra Pak, and KONE. I’ve also talked with service leaders struggling to determine what this looks like for their organizations. In 2020, you need to prioritize charting your path to outcomes-based service – your future relies on it.

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January 3, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

It’s 2020, So We Can Start Talking About 5G

January 3, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

It’s 2020, So We Can Start Talking About 5G

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By Tom Paquin

As we all shamble, bleary-eyed back to our desks, I know what your first thought is: We can officially start unwrapping some of those technologies that have been a little too cutting-edge to be worth considering in 2019.

There’s certainly no shortage of digital ink that’s already been spilled about 5G, something that’s existed more as a marketing gimmick up until this point (I don’t remember such self-congratulatory fanfare for LTE). But now that it’s actually being rolled out (though most hardware isn’t yet compatible) we have a better idea of what the capabilities deliver in practice, and what it might actually mean for service. The short answer? A lot.

I should probably start by saying what 5G is. At its core, it’s really, really, really fast internet. What does that actually mean? Here’s a comparison: 4G LTE at maximum speed caps at 50 megabytes per second. The average cable internet connection caps somewhere between 20 and 150, depending on where you live and how much you pay. 5G is said to max out at 20 Gigabytes per second (It’s notable that current builds cap at about 5gbps but 20 is the potential built into the radio bands).

All those megas and gigas mean a lot to those of us who were excited to add 16 megabytes of RAM into our PCs in 1996 but for those of you who actually had friends, here’s some super basic computer math: 1 Gigabyte is equal to 1,000 megabytes, which means 5G has the potential of reaching speeds that are 400 times faster than what we have today. Imagine if your next car didn’t top out at 160 or whatever, but instead could get you from New York to London in 45 minutes.

So—what can we do with really, really, really fast internet? I’ll start with a very basic example:

While attending Field Service USA back in April, I had a chance to speak to a gentleman who worked for a component manufacturer. They had recently deployed an augmented reality solution but were seeing dismal utilization rates in the field. What the business hadn’t taken into consideration was that many of the plants that they service are in fairly remote areas, often with middling cellular service, so the technicians couldn’t effectively use the streaming services of their AR devices in an effective way, thus rendering them useless.

There’s obviously a few teachable elements at play here but the most fundamental is that, as I’ve said many times before, technology adoption needs to progress in a logical sequence. Artificial Intelligence needs strong data sources, connected devices need the right sensors, and so on. At the very core of that, the floor that your technologies are built on, is solid internet connectivity. Misunderstanding the scope of that or having a blind spot to some of its failings will undermine any attempts at technology superiority.

Theoretically, 5G could be the silver bullet that resolves some of these connectivity issues, assuming that it offers lower latency and improved coverage in the areas in which these technicians are working. Of course, to compensate for that, all of this businesses’ handsets need to be updated to 5G, and we’re still, I’d expect, about eighteen months out from that being a reasonable standard. This example is a pretty obvious use case for 5G—Things move faster, you can therefore do more with streaming services. There’s a less explicitly obvious change coming, though.

Today, your main computing power sits on your desk or in your pocket. The internal CPUs of these devices, even if enhanced through connectivity, do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to complex processes. Sure, your CRM is cloud-based, great, but if you’re running any sort of complex infrastructure management, the whole of the picture needs to be hybrid-ized in some way. The interconnectivity of 5G hopes to upend that, allowing for much more complexity to be managed directly over networks. More networked computing means faster, more accurate to-the-second data collecting, and it means faster responses to exceptions that might not require a technician dispatch. At its core, (when partnered with the right software) it means centralizing more data collected from more sources and creating a single source of truth from which not just service, but all areas of the business, can work in the same langauge.

Is that a bit optimistic? Yes, and it requires a lot of work to put the right utilities inside your serviceable assets, in the hands, and on the vehicles of your technicians. 5G is coming, will dramatically impact service’s effectiveness in likely hundreds of small ways, and only those companies taking stock of what they have today will be ready when it’s time.

Infrastructure, security, and hardware challenges still remain (and warrant a future discussion when we understand the repercussions better), which means that the full promise of 5G is probably still a few years away. But if you’re thinking about the sequence of technology adoption that your business needs to be ready, you know that you’ll need to start moving soon.

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January 1, 2020 | 1 Mins Read

Podcast Roundup: Top Ten from 2019

January 1, 2020 | 1 Mins Read

Podcast Roundup: Top Ten from 2019

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Let's kick off 2020 with a look back at some of the best conversations, advice, and stories from the previous year. Happy New Year!

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