WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: Field Service Models for Asset Intensive Businesses

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:
Field Service Models for Asset Intensive Businesses

At this year’s ServiceMax Maximize event in Las Vegas, ForeFront Managing Partner, Anne Marie Berger presented a leadership track on how to address service leadership challenges in field asset-intensive businesses. Utilizing use cases and success stories, Anne Marie revealed the importance of evaluating your business needs to optimize your asset use in the field and achieve a 360° view into the lifecycle of your company’s assets. Here, we have outlined some of the key takeaways from her discussion on managing field service models for asset-intensive businesses:

VIEW INFORMATION DIFFERENTLY

A hot topic at Maximize was APM, or Asset Performance Management. While we strongly believe that managing the performance of your assets is important, we believe that a continuum of care of the assets, Asset Lifecycle Management, provides an organization with the full visibility and insight they are looking for to manage their assets in the field. But first, let us shift the perception of what an asset is categorized as. Most often, organizations only classify assets as a product or tangible equipment. However, as the industry landscape is changing into a more service-driven one, it is important to also consider the Products along with People and Processes (3 P’s) as assets.

It is also important to view the different personas that are being catered to. Amongst Manufacturer, Distributor, or Consumer, an organization must have the ability to differentiate between the near real-time information, know what you are tracking and reporting against, and gauge the appropriate needs per persona.

IT IS A CONTINUOUS JOURNEY

Field Service Management is a continuous journey. As an organization moves towards their transformation, the approach of the projects should always be that the processes will be continuously improving. Utilizing SCRUM and Agile methodology enables a company to make incremental improvements to the field service model and adapt to organizational changes.

Field Service is an ever-changing landscape. As an iterative process, it is important to to be amenable to tackling only a couple of the lifecycle components at a time. Once the components that will have the most impact on the business processes have been decided, they can be incrementally added and improved for better value

IMPROVE THE FIELD SERVICE EXPERIENCE

The Field Service Industry is now rapidly expanding into different domains. Through back-end systems integration (such as ERP, CRM) data capabilities can be enhanced and improve the ability to work most efficiently across platforms. Insights can be achieved on various levels to move from reactive field management to preventive and even predictive.

Implementing Asset Lifecycle Management to provide full visibility to the company’s suite of field assets, information can be utilized to take preventive measures and enforce proactive field intervention. Furthermore, leveraging catalysts like IoT sensors and mobile to evaluate real-time performance and conditions, organizations can enable predictive decision-making capabilities (knowing the who, what, where and when of your field assets) to increase growth revenue.

Most importantly, the Field Service experience is about the journey, and not the sprint. When beginning this journey, it is important to keep in mind that identifying the business processes that are needed and integrating the right components will be the key to Field Service transformation success.

ForeFront has the expertise and success to be able to evaluate Field Service solutions to optimize your business and track key metrics to help our clients advance towards an outcome-based service organization. As a gold certified ServiceMax partner, and with 14+ years’ experience in the Salesforce ecosystem, we are uniquely positioned to innovate, build, and deliver cutting-edge solutions. We address today’s Field Service “value chain” management challenges across ERP legacy systems, cloud, mobile and IoT platforms, and are dedicated to our customers’ ongoing success.