WHITE PAPER 3 WAYS YOUR FIELD SERVICE MANAGEMENT PROJECT CAN GO HORRIBLY WRONG

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WHITE P

APER

3 WAYS YOUR FIELD

SERVICE MANAGEMENT

PROJECT CAN GO

HORRIBLY WRONG

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DON’T UNDERESTIMATE THE ROLE OF THE TEAM ... 1

DON’T REPLICATE YOUR CURRENT ENVIRONMENT ... 3

DON’T SET IT AND FORGET IT ... 4

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1 3 WAYS YOUR FIELD SERVICE MANAGEMENT PROJECT CAN GO HORRIBLY WRONG

3 WAYS YOUR FIELD SERVICE

MANAGEMENT PROJECT CAN GO

HORRIBLY WRONG

BY STEWART HILL

GLOBAL INDUSTRY DIRECTOR, ENTERPRISE SERVICE MANAGEMENT IFS

So you are doing your due diligence, preparing to select and implement software to help you profitably and efficiently manage a growing field service operation. You may not be 100 percent confident in your success-and this may be a realistic concern to have at this juncture—because there are wrong turns you can take in this process, mistakes you can make, that will lead to suboptimal results or even project failure. At IFS, we know the software you select has a significant role in ensuring your success, but let’s set that aside. Instead, let’s take a look at some of the pitfalls inherent in a selection and implementation process gone wrong, and how you can avoid them.

DON’T UNDERESTIMATE THE ROLE OF THE TEAM

Field service management software changes the way your business operates. So that means a number of key people need to be involved in selecting and implementing your new solution. Too often, we see companies limit involvement in their field ser-vice management software project to the IT department or a single business analyst. These individuals research the capabilities of various software products and make a recommendation. Their recommended software is implemented and the implementa-tion fails. These may be very capable individuals running the selecimplementa-tion and imple-mentation process, but they are doomed to failure because, given the broad impact of the software on the organization, a more inclusive selection and implementation team is required. A successful project must involve, early on, the dispatchers, field engineers and field supervisors—the people whose day-to-day lives will be affected by the new processes the software will facilitate. The team must include or have executive sponsors who can ensure that those affected by the project are properly motivated and understand the strategic value of, and business benefits inherent in, implementing the new software.

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Lack of team involvement can lead to three specific types of shortfall:

1. REQUIREMENT MISMATCH. During selection, the requirements document used to select and guide implementation of the software doesn’t match the needs of the business. How could it? The selection process did not include a full audit of the problems being confronted and the needs of engineers, dispatchers and technicians who will be using the software were not taken into consider-ation.

2. THE POWER WITHIN. During implementation and go-live, dispatchers and the engineers inside the organization have a lot of power to make this fail. We need them to buy into and accept this software because we are asking them to change the way they do their jobs at a very basic level. If they don’t feel their needs have been taken into consideration and cannot see the business benefits of the project, they can simply disengage and not use the software as it was intended, leading to erosion of the expected ROI and, ultimately, a failed project. A field technician, if issued a mobile device that feeds him work orders and service calls to complete, can simply reject calls that are assigned to him, negating the effectiveness of all of the streamlined activities that take place leading up to that communication. The company may have invested in a dynamic scheduling engine—like IFS Mobile Workforce Management—that plans an optimal route for the field technicians based on a number of configurable optimization dimensions, but lacking proper buy-in or education as to the reasoning the given route was created, the technician may not follow that route. In some cases, this may be a deliberate attempt to ensure that the implementation fails. There are many reasons why a techni-cian (or a team of technitechni-cians) may behave this way which may stem from a simple lack of understanding of the benefits that the new software provides. But this obstructionism may also have something to do with the fact that, in many cases, prior to implementing the new software, the technicians them-selves may have determined their schedule, picked their jobs, assigned priori-ties, and felt they were the captains of their own ship. There is a vast differ-ence between this state of independdiffer-ence and an environment where an auto-mated system is, in essence, telling you what to do and when to do it. 3. JOB INSECURITY. Users may feel the software’s capabilities could make their

jobs less secure. If scheduling automation software—which automates much of the work historically performed by dispatchers— is implemented, then the dispatchers may naturally feel they are being threatened. In fact, in a reason-ably high-volume scheduling environment, there is no way any human being could perform the calculations necessary to assign the ideal technician to each and every service call, given the technicians’ skill sets and certifications, their current locations, inventory in their vehicles and any service level

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affects how dispatchers spend their time. Rather than having hands on every job, they will transition to a pattern of managing the exceptional situations flagged by the software. This represents, as it does for the technician, a sea change in the professional life of the dispatcher. This suggests that not only is the success of a field service management software project dependent on early involvement and education of stakeholders, but also on adequate atten-tion to change management and a high level of emoatten-tional intelligence.

DON’T REPLICATE YOUR CURRENT ENVIRONMENT

If your current manually-based field service management processes are so fantastic, why go through the exercise of selecting or implementing software at all? Why not continue doing what you are doing?

From the standpoint of senior management, the investment in software is typically designed to bring new and optimized processes to the organization that help achieve higher goals such as reducing operating costs and improving customer satisfaction. But when software is implemented, those with hands on the project choose to con-figure it so that it conforms to the way they have historically done things, which is almost certainly suboptimal.

As outlined above, field service management software—including dynamic scheduling—are technologies designed to change the way you do business for the better. If you make the investment in these solutions and then continue to operate as you have in the past, you are not going to realize the return on investment you other-wise would if you adopted the best practices the software is designed to deliver.

Dynamic scheduling engines like IFS Mobile Workforce Management optimize and automate the process of assigning technicians to calls by determining the order in which calls are assigned and the routes between them. This means that dispatchers and field technicians both need to buy into the changes the software will bring to their respective roles.

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DON’T SET IT AND FORGET IT

Consider an optimal implementation where stakeholders throughout the organization were involved early. Their roles in delivering new efficiencies and benefits to the company were made clear. Each department and employee bought in and committed to the success of the project. The company effectively re-engineered itself to adopt the optimized processes the software is designed to facilitate.

Once they are live on the software, there is a marked improvement in the key performance indicators (KPIs) the project was designed to address.

But in the months and years that follow, management notices that the KPIs in question begin to slip. They are at a loss as to why their field service management software is not working as well for them as it had in the past. Has their software stopped functioning properly? Have their employees stopped using it optimally?

No. The chances are, the enterprise software is operating and being used just as it did when they went live, which is a big problem because since that go live date, the business has changed. Perhaps new locations have been added. Perhaps new products are being serviced that place new and different needs on the software and the people using it. Maybe the mobile technician workforce has grown, and techni-cian territories are intersecting and overlapping in new ways. Has the price of fuel increased, reducing return on each service call? Or perhaps a new, large customer has started requesting more aggressive SLAs than has typically been the case and the organization must adapt.

Trip duration by geography, technician and activity is just one of the metrics a management team should review regularly to ensure their field service management software is delivering the intended efficiencies.

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Go-live is not an end point in and of itself. It is one of the first steps of a new and continuous field service management journey. This means that periodically—perhaps quarterly—the business should be reviewed and appropriate adjustments made to the field service management software. Particularly when the software implemented includes an automated real-time scheduling engine, that scheduling engine may be making decisions that are no longer in line with the interests or goals of the busi-ness. Productivity, average travel time, and number of jobs completed today are all data points a modern field service management software tool ought to capture.

Ideally, the software itself will facilitate this kind of review, and will contain and track metrics that can not only identify these changes as they happen, but help management look forward to predict the impact of future changes in the business. An advanced solution in this area, like the IFS What If Scenario Explorer (WISE), will offer up insight on:

• What resources will I need to service a new contract? • How many staff are required, with which skills, and where?

• How can I improve my SLA performance and satisfy more customers?

Advanced field service management tools like IFS’s What If Scenario Explorer (WISE) can analyze the current state of the field service management operation along with future states given hypothetical changes to the business.

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Future developments in field service management will make adjustments to key operational dynamics on the fly, without human interaction. But for the time being, predictive analytics of a tool like WISE perhaps represent the leading edge of the industry.

Some field service management functionality, like IFS Mobile Workforce Management’s Dynamic Scheduling Engine, are designed to make automatic sched-uling decisions based on business rules that are configured by the management team. This level of decision-making goes beyond an automated process flow chart that, for instance, determines whether a piece of equipment being serviced is under warranty or not, triggering a chain of events, including generation of an invoice. We are talking more about software that analyzes multiple data points and makes suggestions accordingly regarding route, the optimal technician, the order service calls should be handled and more.

In this automated environment, reviews of the business probably need to be performed more frequently than if the business has implemented a less dynamic software configuration. Because the scheduling engine can be configured to prioritize certain factors over others by product, customer, location, etc., as the priorities of the business change, the business rules configured inside the scheduling engine must also change. If the strategic needs of the business dictate that margin is a critical priority, the schedule can be optimized for first-time fix and reduced driving distance. If customer satisfaction is a top concern, response times can be prioritized. If a new product is being serviced in the field, what skills or certifications are required of technicians sent on these service calls? If a handful of key accounts are coming to represent a sizable share of revenue, their needs can be prioritized. But this requires a regular review of business needs and alterations to the business rules running the scheduling engine.

CONCLUSION

It is therefore apparent that selecting and implementing field service management software ought to bring significant and ongoing change to a business operation. This means that those affected by these changes need to be involved early on—not just as warm bodies sitting in the software demos, but as active participants. They must share insights as to the challenges they face in their job and be free to express concerns about the project so those concerns can be addressed.

The organization—from top management down—must be clear on why new and optimized field service business processes are necessary. The status quo is not the ideal, and this means that change is in the offing. Change can be scary and threaten-ing, while the status quo seems comforting and safe. Building enthusiasm for a shared vision for the field service management process is an essential step.

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And once the software is in production, and is being used to facilitate and optimize field service management processes, management must periodically review the needs of the business to determine what changes must be made to the software configura-tion given shifts in the needs of the business.

Much of these steps to success are really dependent on you, the customer, selecting and implementing the software. But a leading software vendor like IFS will bring value to the equation as well. A vendor ought to offer a more consultative approach during selection, perhaps helping develop your RFI or RFP. Their experience can help you identify needs or requirements you may not have thought about, and clearly state what you are looking for. As different parts of the organization express their requirements and vision for what they want the software to do, a vendor can also serve as an honest broker when some or all of these requirements may conflict with each other. Keep in mind that some vendors may opt to remain silent in this situation, allowing a prospective customer to think they can magically solve all of these prob-lems once a contract is signed. But a more forthright vendor, who is just as committed to helping a customer to a successful outcome as they are in securing a new sale, will highlight these problems early on.

After go-live, a vendor consulting organization will also be invaluable during the periodic reviews of the installed software. But a more cost-effective resource may be a user-group community or online forums dedicated to your solution. While each business is unique, there is almost always another executive you can talk to who has been where you are now and can share their experience and insights.

You can achieve your field service management goals with the right software. Just keep the above three tips in mind.

Stewart Hill is the Global Industry Director for IFS’s Enterprise Service Management team, focusing on field service management, mobile workforce management, and service and asset management software. He has more than 20 years experience in service management technology, and has written and been published widely on best business and technology practices in the field. Hill holds an MBA with Distinction from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.

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management (EAM), and enterprise service management (ESM). Founded in 1983, IFS is a public company (XSTO: IFS) with over 2,600 employees. IFS supports more than 2,200 customers worldwide from local offices and through partners in more than 60 countries.

For more information about IFS, visit www.IFSWORLD.com

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