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Comment: Peak Performance
Optimisation is a word likely to crop up quite frequently over the next few months in the service community. But what do we mean by it, why are we discussing it and with impending frequency?
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 Comment: Making your mark with benchmarking
There are a couple of oddities about Service Management – beyond the staff that is - that make it a bit special. Most of the people who read it are from small to medium sized organisations and they come from a very wide range of industrial sectors such as vending machines, local government, emergency services on top of a strong base in traditional IT and electromechanical industries.
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Comment: Culture shock for AFSMI?
So what are we to make of the recent moves in the service associations? My view has always been that industries benefit from strong associations. I also believe that associations should be run by their own target membership – this keeps them relevant and maintains integrity.
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Comment: Mobility to continue to drive the service business
By its very nature field service is a mobile business. So it should be no surprise that mobility technologies are increasingly important to service managers. Integrated mobile communications, computing and management systems now bring a level of command and control which managers could only previously dream about.
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Comment: Why service is upwardly mobile
The ability to manage and control mobile resources tops the agenda at this year’s Service Management Europe quite simply because it has the potential for the long dreamed of double whammy – to increase service levels AND reduce cost.
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Comment: Market muscle or brain power? What counts in systems?
In all the excitement about mobility, scheduling and all the other means of managing remote and mobile resources, it is easy to forget about the work horse of the department – the service management system. Somehow software just isn’t sexy anymore although, of course, without it the bells and whistles would be meaningless.
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Comment: Is team building back in fashion?
It has been a while since Service Management has run a story about a brand new field service team being set up. Well that is what we have with the energy utility Scottish & Southern Energy setting up a team of boiler and heating engineers (see: Utility sets up domestic service team ).
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Comment: Running and maintaining the human machine
In an episode of the eponymous comedy TV series, Father Ted once bought his housekeeper, Mrs Doyle, an automatic tea maker in a well-intentioned effort to ‘take the drudgery out of making tea’. ‘But I like the drudgery of making tea’ came the churlish response.
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Comment: Making management magic through measurement
Measuring, monitoring and ultimately managing performance is an issue that affects more all aspects of service. Our feature on scheduling and optimisation systems, [Scheduling: Planning for the future] comes to the conclusion that these clever software tools have learned the wonderful trick of being able to justify their own existence.
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Comment: Our engineers are a bunch of diamond geezers
As a writer on service matters, I often mingle with similar trades people. One of my pet hates about this group has been the habit of using their tiresome personal anecdotes to berate the modern service provider. Essentially I am not really a great fan of using one’s editorial position to extract personal revenge on (or, even worse, recompense from), an organisation under the guise of first hand reportage.
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Comment: Is service in the loop?
Service can often be regarded as a one-way street from base to customer site. When an important customer has a serious problem, resource is thrown at it: take an engineer or two off the jobs they were doing, buy and then ship spare parts by express courier (often the spare part is already in stock but no one knows it was there so now there’s added waste, but that’s another story), tie up the techies in the second line and don’t rest till the job is done. All very service conscious but is it business conscious?
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Comment: Fear of change and failure are not excuses
There is a saying about never looking gift horses in the mouth. The expression sprang to mind when considering the results of the Service Management survey – for the second part of our article click here. In particular, the low level of implementation of mobile data caught the eye.
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Comment: Back to the glory days?
At the start of the month Service Management Europe, the industry's only dedicated exhibition and conference, opened its doors for the 20th time. Leaving aside that this is a remarkable achievement for any business-to-business exhibition, it is also a great testament both to the adaptability of the show and the industry it serves.
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Comment: Learning from experience
Life is a constant learning experience. Today we have the capacity to learn so much about the world so quickly. Our transport systems mean we barely have to think twice about the ease or cost of jetting around the world. The internet gives us access to massive amounts of data deliverable at the click of a button. Some of it is passive but we can learn from others through chat rooms and bulletin boards. The internet also offers the attractive proposition of not having to move from your desk.
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Comment: Changing times, exciting times
While preparing the preview for this year’s Service Management Europe (see page 25) I was struck by the changes that have happened to the show and to the industry over the 16 years I have been writing about it.
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Comment: Sacred cow goes to pasture
In the turbulent times that service has suffered over the last 20 years or so, one thing has remained constant – customer satisfaction. Even (or perhaps especially) in the old, dark days of cost centre service, its only real purpose was to keep customers happy, usually in the form of a rescue mission after the sales people had over promised.
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Here exhibitors offer a vast array of systems to automate all areas of the service operation including management systems, scheduling, CRM and web based solutions.
Identify suppliers who can provide voice and/or data systems, portable and ruggedised computers, tracking solutions and integration services.
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