MASTERING FIELD SERVICE IN MANUFACTURING

Transcription

1 MASTERING FIELD SERVICE IN MANUFACTURING

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION... 3 FIELD SERVICE GROWTH ENGINE... 5 PRODUCT PURCHASE... 6 SERVICE ISSUE REPORTING...7 PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE... 8 WORK ORDER CREATION AND DISPATCH... 9 REPAIR...10 INVENTORY...11 WORK ORDER CLOSURE...12 ANALYZE...13 MARKET AND SELL

3 Another product rolls off the line and is delivered to your customer. It is now a serviceable item, and its performance rests squarely in your field service team s hands. INTRODUCTION The modern manufacturer and evolving service expectations We are in a new era of the manufacturing business where profits no longer just come from a company selling its products. Service is what truly drives new levels of profitability for manufacturing organizations worldwide. On average, service contributes 10% more margin annually than products 1. Amid the rise of service as a key business driver for manufacturing companies, there are three fundamental shifts that have taken place in manufacturers service organizations that offer some insight into new ways companies must now think about field service delivery: Changing customer expectations for service Service level agreements that only stipulate response times are a thing of the past. With the evolution of predictive service in manufacturing, customers expectations have risen. It s no longer just a matter of optimizing a technician s route and calendar. Manufacturers must now tackle the entire end-to-end field service process with a sharp focus on the end game: resolution. SOURCE:: 1 Aberdeen Research 3

4 The manufacturers aging workforce Manufacturers are now faced with doing more with less. In a recent survey of more than 500 manufacturing firms, at least 40% of the current engineering and skill positions are filled by people over 40 years old 2. With an aging workforce and attrition due to retirement, manufacturers faced with maintaining their field workforce must be more efficient than ever. Servitization of the manufacturing industry Companies like GE are looking more and more like service providers than manufacturers these days. Companies are still making products, but they re selling business outcomes and their ability to help the customer achieve them through service. Whether it s passenger hours on a train or hours of maximum thrust from a jet engine, manufacturers are innovating when it comes to customer contracts, and service is at the center of it all. SOURCE:: 2 Aberdeen Research 4

5 Field Service Growth Engine PRODUCT PURCHASE SERVICE ISSUE/ PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE WORK ORDER CREATION & DISPATCH REPAIR INVENTORY CLOSE ANALYZE MARKET & SELL Tapping into your Manufacturing Field Service Engine This e-book will help you think through every part of your service delivery value chain with useful tips, data, and insights that will get your manufacturing service organization started on the road to flawless field service. The traditional models of field service delivery typically address break-fix processes that have dominated manufacturing service offerings. By taking a step back and recognizing the intricate balance of each step in the extended process of service delivery, you can start to appreciate how momentum builds for improved customer satisfaction, increased loyalty, and greater revenue opportunities. 5

6 PRODUCT PURCHASE The product is sold and your customer is putting it to good use. Do you know exactly what product arrived, when and how it got there, and in what condition? For many service organizations, knowing exactly how a customer is using their company s product is a process of discovery. When the discovery is proactive, the customer notices. They appreciate the time saved in not having to explain the configurations done at the time of installation or how long they ve been using the product. If you sell service contracts with each product, it s even more important to track what s under warranty, when those warranties expire, and when a customer s contract can be renewed. The ability to profitably manage service contracts always starts with solid product information. Take the opportunity to build detailed installed base information: Gather all installed product data upon initial sale, and track all configuration or after sale add-ons. Know every warranty and entitlement on every part of the product that was sold to minimize warranty leakage and guarantee profitable contracts. Get all installed base and entitlement information in one place for your call center agents and technicians so they can access it all easily. Make service a focus of the sale. Focusing too much on the product will help your service-minded competitor win the business. THE MOBILE TECHNICIAN Relying on technicians memories to document installed products after the repair can undermine your efforts to keep an accurate account of your customers products. Putting a mobile device in the field engineers hands for immediate capture of serialized replacement products, assemblies, subassemblies, or key components adds a whole new level of accuracy. 70% of companies do not have a data quality plan in place for installed based information. SOURCE:: ServiceSource 6

7 SERVICE ISSUE REPORTING A machine breaks, and you fix it. That is simple enough, so why do so many manufacturing service organizations struggle with fixing problems quickly? The first thing to remember is that customers often only know the symptoms; it s up to your team to provide the diagnosis, and those two things should always be documented together. If you can draw on the inconsistencies in the symptoms of the same type of failures or similar symptoms for very different failures, you ll see the impact in your mean time to repair and warranty costs. To make the sure you can analyze the service issue activity and help make your products more service friendly and useful to customers: Automate service issue reporting by enabling your machines with machine-to-machine technology, and connect them to your service system. Categorize customer problems, and review symptom codes regularly, letting your team submit new categories for review. Document all work orders and claims with detailed case information, and make sure to include the customer problem category. Archive and analyze service issues with all information from customer problem to final root cause. If a customer does need to call, a call center agent has a better chance of helping solve the issue over the phone if they have the customer s service history in front of them. Using customer and service data to guide the design-to-value process can save manufacturers 10-15% in material costs SOURCE:: McKinsey & Company 7

8 PREVENTATIVE MAINTENANCE PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE Whether you re gathering product and service data directly from connected devices or from your technicians in the field (or both!), don t just hand over information to your engineering team use it to predict what else could go wrong. This may sound wildly idealistic, but if you are a part of a failure review board to improve product quality and reliability, you already understand part of the process. With the right data and insights, you can also add more focus to your preventative maintenance programs that customers will appreciate. Instead of a calendar-based schedule, preventive maintenance occurs in a more efficient as-needed basis, which will free up your technicians. To kickstart your predictive maintenance program Shift your service contracts from break/fix and numbers of preventive maintenance visits to contracts that guarantee business outcomes such as hours of peak performance per day or uptime. Move toward preventive maintenance schedules that are based on customer data instead of a calendar. For example, usage based activity or key counter data that prompts a preventive maintenance visit as opposed to an every 3 months visit regardless of the need for one. Build your models for prediction with the help of consultants or your internal business analyst resources. 15% of field service leaders in manufacturing are initiating predictive analytics to enable proactive service 3 SOURCE: Aberdeen Research 8

9 WORK ORDER CREATION & DISPATCH No matter the issue, you still need to ensure that someone arrives on time, prepared and able to do the repair or maintenance work. When you start to focus on fixing customer issues efficiently, the scheduling problem becomes about whom you send and if they have the right equipment and parts with them. Even for the most routine engineering change visits, sending a field service engineer with the best knowledge on a specific piece of equipment with the appropriate parts will ensure minimal disruption to your customer s operation. In order to establish scheduling best practices and align service levels to customers business imperatives: Keep technicians and service engineers qualifications, certifications, and product expertise at the fingertips of dispatchers. Create easy processes for parts orders and stock swaps, and keep stock locations visible for service administrators. Make the service process clear for engineers by giving them a step-by-step checklist for maintenance calls. Provide key equipment details for the job on a mobile device for quick and easy access. THE SOCIAL TECHNICIAN It may not be possible to send the perfect technician every time, so tools to help them reach out to someone who is the expert will get you closer to a first-time fix. Equipping technicians with social tools to help them reach out to other organizations for information while on-site will ensure more jobs are done right the first time. 9

10 REPAIR 56% of manufacturing service organizations have adopted mobile device strategies for their field personnel 4. Just like a toolkit, a mobile tablet, laptop, or phone can be a one-stop shop for everything your field engineer needs to access the information and systems to get his work orders closed right the first time. Access to this information both online and offline on one device ensures technicians won t have to make multiple trips to the customer, which adds costs for you and your customers. To empower your technicians to get the job done right on the first visit: Make it easy for technicians to access a full 360-degree view of the customer directly from a mobile device including all products purchased, work history, and contract details. Benchmark first-time fix rates and mean time to repair for your organization, and then manage across territories and product lines to gain insights into comparative performance. Use comparative data to improve processes in the field for your technicians. Create workflows that technicians can follow for each type of service, and make them accessible from a mobile device. THE MOBILE TECHNICIAN Manufacturers are starting to see a clear correlation between customer satisfaction and increasing both customer and technician visibility to all service-related information in the field. One of the best ways to promote this visibility is through mobile devices and apps. Among mobility initiatives started at companies, customer-facing priorities clearly stand out with 61% of c-level executives citing improved field service and customer service delivery as most important. SOURCE: Accenture 10 SOURCE:: 4 Aberdeen Research

11 INVENTORY When you have your own service-parts supply chain to manage, you ll constantly try to find the right balance of inventory that doesn t starve your field service business or break the bank. While centralized inventory costs less for very disperse field service organizations spread over countries and continents, decentralized inventories ensure faster response and resolution times. You always have to remember how costly missed opportunities can be, and the last excuse you want to use is I didn t have the part. Likewise, if parts aren t managed properly, technician hoarding can occur, and costs can spin out of control quickly. To establish your best parts-management baseline Never schedule field work without the benefit of parts visibility either in dispatch or in the field. Quantify lost opportunities due to parts misalignment, and use them to justify stocking quantities. Set up automatic reordering triggers for certain high-volume parts. Track technicians trunk stock automatically, if you have the right software, or through improved physical inventory processes. 61% of leading field service organizations use parts management solutions/systems to aid the service delivery process. However Only 10% leverage parts availability as a key scheduling factor. SOURCE: Aberdeen Research 11

12 CLOSE No one wants to move mountains to get a product working again just to have the customer turn around and dispute all the hard work that was done. It defeats morale, damages your customer relationship, and stops cash flow. Sometimes these issues have more to do with customer confusion than anything. Customers want to know exactly what work was done, especially in cases where you ve contacted them about a potential issue. No matter what a technician s relationship is with the customer, he should always have a documented service report ready with estimated time for repairs and parts needed. Upon completion, a customer s signature is all that s needed to ensure there are no hurt feelings or delays in cash flow from the customer. Get your customer s consent and have them sign off on all of your work while a technician is on-site by: Documenting all tests performed and making it a part of your customer s job history. Enabling service reporting on mobile devices and allowing summaries of service reports to be sent while on-site via . Collect electronic signatures on-site for attachment to or integration with a service report. Providing certifications and maintenance history updates on demand if the customer needs them to meet government regulations or to pass an audit. Ensure digital signature capture and finalized work performed documentation is sent immediately to the customer, preferably while the tech is still on-site THE MOBILE TECHNICIAN Leading field service teams are 46% more likely to provide variable compensation to their technicians for positive customer feedback. Technicians equipped with mobile devices that give them the right data they need to get the job done and close a work order with a customer signature while on-site goes a long way to ensuring each of your customers is delighted. SOURCE: Aberdeen Research 12

13 ANALYZE Now that your technicians are gathering data into a service system, you have a gold mine of information to help your company s service managers and executives gain visibility that will help them make better business decisions. But just because a company has data doesn t mean they have insights. Make sure you are able to consume this data in a real-time and intuitive way, focusing on what s really important. That report from three months ago isn t going to help take your business to the next level. To generate real, actionable insights from service data: Choose a service system with proven analytics and reporting. The largest ROI impact will come from this data s insights. Don t measure everything at once drill into the most important key performance metrics, and manage them until you see results. Keep reporting simple summarize data by no more than two or three criteria, such as territory and technician team, so you can deliver information quickly. Drive incentives for technicians performance by giving them a service dashboard of their own at the individual or team level. Only However 21% of field technicians in manufacturing organizations have access to personal dashboards that reflect their performance. 61% of leading service organizations incentivizes technicians based on the service team s profitability. SOURCE: Aberdeen Research 13

14 MARKET AND SELL Offer more value to your customers Just because you have to run a cost-effective field service operation doesn t mean you can t contribute to the topline. Field service is one of the manufacturing industry s biggest hidden revenue secrets. More and more field service organizations in manufacturing companies are leading with service products as manufacturers concede that there are better ways to keep customers longer and earn more of their lifetime value through service. Some offer managed packages where equipment is leased and maintained by the original equipment manufacturer. Some look to repurpose consumed resources and add waste disposal and recycling services. No matter what new service you provide, you ll need a new way to start, manage, and market these services effectively. Create data sheets, video, and a webpage about the great services you offer. Start a customer reference program. Ask your top 5 happiest, friendliest, most well-spoken customers if they will serve as a reference for your company in the sales process. Incentivize your technicians to sell while onsite. Whether it s replacement parts, consumables, or more service, give them the motivation to sell, and they will. Have your technicians report all competitor equipment at customer sites, and your marketing team will love you THE SOCIAL TECHNICIAN More than half (56%) of manufacturing organizations are incentivizing technicians and field engineers to identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. If technicians can make recommendations based on what customers need in the moment, the greater the opportunity is to make those sales happen. Link your service team with the sales team via social collaboration to speed up the time to close new deals and drive real service generated revenue. SOURCE: Aberdeen Research 14

15 PARTS SOCIAL SCHEDULING COMMUNITIES CONTRACTS ServiceMax Powers Flawless Field Service in the Manufacturing Industry Mobile, Social and Cloud-based Complete Field Service MOBILE ANALYTICS What does flawless field service look like? 1. Complete Visibility: For the first time, service teams are gaining deep visibility into the entire service delivery operation, and it s changing the way they do business. 2. A Full Suite: Not only contract entitlements, scheduling & optimization, parts & reverse logistics, but also cuttingedge mobility, social collaboration, and real-time customer & partner communities. 3. Cloud-Based: Built on the proven Salesforce1 platform, customers get up and running fast in a low cost subscription model. 4. Access Everywhere: Mobile, anywhere access to ALL the pertinent information. CONTRACTS Increase revenue by increasing contract renewals and preventing warranty leakage SCHEDULING Minimize total cost of schedule without impacting customer satisfaction PARTS Reduce inventory costs by minimizing parts leakage and write-offs SOCIAL Ensure customer delight on every call and increase first time fix rates COMMUNITIES Ensure transparency and control to build loyalty and drive service revenue ANALYTICS Meet your profitability goals with insights on key operations metrics that drive the right decisions MOBILE Anytime, anywhere access to critical information reduces errors and decreases repair time