We are fast approaching a time in service applications where we will have to consider and eventually accept a new paradigm of operation that is as different from current operations as the iPod is to the CD walkman.  How might that future paradigm might be experienced and the impact of new ways of working on service operations and the total business?
 
Running a service organisation has not changed much over the last 15 years – customers still want service, engineers want freedom, companies want control of their costs. What has changed is that customers want more, cheaper, faster service - and they want it now. Companies considering improving their service operation have thought to use service application systems to achieve these goals.  So, for example, businesses have looked to increase the number of engineer visits per day or out-sourced an area of their business to take advantage of scale or cheaper labour. It has been the rare business indeed that has decided to re-engineer its way of working and empower the engineer to be more effective.

Leading edge players today are beginning to think differently; beginning to think about what they do, not just the way they do it.  An illustration of difference is the way the telephone is used now compared to 10 years ago.  Many homes had one phone in the entrance hall because the caller was treated as a visitor.  Today the mobile phone is with us 24 hours a day.  The concept of the video phone was almost science fiction 10 years ago, yet today it is possible to call friends in almost any country of the world for the cost of a local call and see them live on your PC with a web-cam and Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) such as Skype, BT Broadband Talk, Google Talk, and so on.  Text messages were a technical ‘by product’ for the network operators and never designed for public use.  17 year olds select their mobile phone as a fashion accessory and demonstrate their ability to adapt, taking advantage of every aspect, to include: text messaging, group chats, movie clips, photos, sport results and even, occasionally, a call to parents.

In a business context, many sophisticated scheduling solutions that are part of the service management solution are never switched on, or are used to a limited extent, because of the impact on old ways of working.  I am not saying that we should take the 17 year old as our mentor, but it might be interesting to understand their approach to the device that they have made their own.  Imagining different ways of working and embracing new technology can be quite difficult, may be provocative and may challenge the status quo.

Another example is satellite navigation - once the “yuppie” car accessory just like mobile phones 10 years earlier.  Downloading a map and reading while driving is still an option, but “sat nav” will not only calculate the duration of the journey, but can update on accidents or traffic jams and warn of speed trap cameras.   I can’t manage without it, but most tellingly I have changed the way I drive, the way I plan my journeys, and most significantly I save time - though there are pitfalls for the unwary and unquestioning (like being directed up unsuitable mountain roads or through farm yards).  

In the business context, satellite navigation first emerged as a vehicle tracking and location system which has had many detractors, for a vast array of reasons.  Where it has been embraced, engineers have found it effective and time saving, and the engineers who have a real problem if the business knows where they are, probably need to recognise that their ability to adjust their schedules to their advantage has been reduced.  For the committed and motivated engineer, the new technology will be a real boon, reducing travel time and wasted trips.

When engineers are asked what it is about their jobs that they like most, the usual answers are: the freedom, the independence, the ability to get on with the job in their own way.  This produces performances that vary from excellent to poor depending on the character of the individual.  It is the practice that determines the performance for a given process improving the process may not improve performance.  Tighter management will initially result in pressure coming to bear on the poor performers so that the attrition level will rise.  If the environment is one where recruitment is difficult or there is an extended training requirement, the trend might be to refrain from applying pressure, on the premise that more engineers doing a few calls per day is better than fewer engineers coping with increasing demands.

The inescapable fact is that the new technology brings with it a demand for new working practices.  Scheduling or mobile phones/GPS systems including “sat nav” are not necessarily disruptive technology, but they do need to find their place which requires some new thinking and processes to embrace the value they can add.

New ways of working can be derived in many ways, and can be as simple as asking the engineer what works for them and what doesn’t.  In many cases engineers and/or their managers and supervisors do things today because in the past they had to create an ad-hoc process which has become permanent, to deal with aspects that the technology of the time was not able to address. Engineers re-thinking ways of working is the first step, the second step is then to support engineers in these new ways of working.  Many service organisations look to use service applications of all types to improve performance, and performance is normally thought of in terms of visits per day.  There is a real danger, however, of looking at averages across a region and not looking at individual performances.

Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE (US) talks about the different performance levels of a team, ranging from the very best to the worst.  He makes the point that every team is composed of a range of skills and capability and application, no matter how good or how bad the team.  The position of the total team is very difficult to judge from the inside and trying to raise the performance beyond that of the best performers is very difficult if not impossible, very much like expecting a Third Division soccer team to be able to play like a Premiership team.  When introducing a new application, it is important to understand the targets that the solution can address and not just what it does.

When I review a company I use a series of metrics which highlight performance levels and examines how far a company can expect to improve and ultimately what their short medium and long term targets might be.

When considering the newest technology, it is worth weighing up how able the team is and how receptive to change, and the level of support the business has given, to improve their performance.  A good analogy is the modern motor car.  Two tests were done on cars that were 10 years apart in age.  Racing drivers took the best rally cars from 10 years ago and found that they could not beat ordinary drivers in brand new state of the art technology road cars available on the forecourt today.  In addition they put average drivers in 10 year old cars, and most of them ended up skidding or running off the road when they drove them in the same way as they drove their modern cars.  The reality is that most of us do not realise the level of improvement in handling that is available in the modern road cars of today, or the safety features in cars and road surfaces - with the result that there are approximately 100 times more cars on the roads today and 1,000 times less the number of accidents causing injuries than 30 years ago. 

Potentially then, applications will allow us to raise the standards of our team in much the same way as the applications on cars (as opposed to the football team analogy which does not involve the element of technology and is limited by the skills available – improvement will only come by buying an expensive array of talent, changing the whole team – not normally an option).

Translating analogies into the work place, we are seeing engineers and schedulers ready to adapt much more quickly to leading edge technology and ready to use the tools that can help them be more effective.  What we have witnessed in the last 10 years is a desire for ‘centralism and control’ in the service organisation and a move away from ‘traditional – one dispatcher for every 10 engineers’ to the concept of a central scheduling system making all the decisions. This has undoubtedly driven some improvements in efficiencies but, arguably, at the cost of the morale and motivation of the engineering teams because their independence has been eroded. Additionally, not all technologies are best utilised in the ‘centralist’ paradigm: for example, street level routing (SLR).   SLR requires the planning of engineers’ routes on a turn by turn basis, however it ignores the engineer’s local knowledge and current traffic conditions. The addition of GPS into the ‘centralist’ service organization has further exacerbated the resentment of “Big Brother”.

The new breed of technology embraces the very latest developments of GPS, satellite navigation and scheduling and takes advantage of the collective intelligence of engineers and the service organisation to enable the field engineers to be empowered, not overly-controlled.  When an engineer completes a customer call ahead of time, it is now possible for them to request the next job closest to them (GPS provides their location); when they need a tool, spare part, or colleague these new technology solutions can locate the best option based on knowledge of van-stock and proximity.  If an engineer is at a customer site, depot, or other facility and needs, for whatever reason, to wait for two hours, the system can check what else can be done in that time, or if the engineer needs more time to complete a task than originally calculated, they can assign their next job to an appropriate colleague, and do this from the field.
 
These developments were all operations once performed by efficient despatchers working as a team with their engineers, and complementing each others strengths.  Centralism has its advantages, but if the pervading ethos is that the centre knows best, then the hearts and minds of the engineers could be lost.  These new systems provide centralised control with field empowerment - the best of both worlds making it possible to develop and attract the skills required to continue improvement.