Barriers Faced When Scaling Digital Transformation in Field Service Organizations

Read the the most common barriers to digital transformation

During LiveWorx we asked a number of attendees to describe the barriers field service organization face when scaling their digital transformation projects. We were concerned with issues like security, aging workforce and more. Hear the perspectives from Chris Wolff when she sits with Anthony Moffa and more importantly how our LiveWorx attendees answered.

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Welcome to Speaking of Service, the podcast that uncovers practical ways to grow service, revenue control costs and improve customer satisfaction. If you're looking to innovate, gain a competitive edge, or just learn about the latest service trends, you've come to the right place. Welcome to Speaking of Service on the Road Part two. Chris Wolffe is back with Anthony. Moffa discussing barriers field service organizations face when scaling their digital transformation projects. They discuss issues like security, aging, workforce and hear opinions from live works. Guests. This is our second of our special editions of Speaking of Service on the Road. We took our show to live works and had a conversation, an earlier episode with Patrick from bioMérieux with Haroon from Bell and Howell and then with Alexander from Harpak.-ULMA talking about the ways they're receiving value now and expect to receive value from their investment in Smart connected products for service in the next one to year. I'm here again with my counterpart. Welcome, Anthony Moffa to Speaking of Service, thank you, Chris. Good to be here again. You had a ton of conversations. I don't think you had a spare moment at live works. We talked about all the value customers were getting, but as you said, there's no free lunch. Yeah, we certainly know that, you know, implementing an IoT program can save them money, can enhance their business, but it doesn't come. As an old boss said to me, there's no such thing as a free lunch. That connectivity comes with a price. It comes with a dedication to the service and the reasons and the things that you see behind that are, for example, I'm going to now expose your infrastructure to the outside world, right? I'm connecting maybe a medical device to the Internet. Of course, there's concerns about security there, but the drivers behind that we're seeing are there's the silver tsunami, as they're calling it, where a large number of the field service technicians are retiring and they're taking a ton of information with them. They're leaving the facilities there and they're going in. And now these newer technicians don't have that experience. They don't have the knowledge and you have this gap in in that environment. The interesting thing is that Remote Services is now providing these senior technicians the opportunity to work 20 hours a week as part time to augment the services and provide, you know, basically phone or friends support to their newer technicians. So this combination of these changes and you're really kind of you're going to morph your business, you're going to change the way you do business. But it's it's going to overall be very efficient and effective for you to do this. So we have these I call them machine whisperers who are ready to phase out of that phase of their working life, these incoming new young whisperers trying to kind of catch a clue. There's also bad actors that these folks need to be concerned about. There's a cyber concern. Any time you're connecting something that was previously unconnected, how often did that come up in your conversations? That is, if not number one, it's number zero. It's a you know, we give a number and sequence, right one through. And then if we realize there's something that precedes wanted zero, while security is probably number one, two and three, everybody has that security concern, and rightfully so, because there are bad actors, there are a number of people out there who want to gain access to information and leverage that information against you. So it is by far the biggest concern that we have. I think we take for granted, having come and grown up in the IT world, that securing and monitoring for intrusion detection, prevention, response is something that it folks have been doing for decades. And yet Alexander talked about the challenges of of helping IT And people come together. Why is it that the world is sort of so late to the game on the cyber front? I think the world is so slow because for a period of time they were in a disconnect world. They were only internal to their organization. Their equipment was not connected to the corporate network. It was not connected to the outside world. It was maintained on its own. But as they're evolving and they're realizing that the measurement of those systems and the sharing of that data and really pulling that information together into a larger pool of data becomes valuable to them. They are now opening that door, so they are now connecting those systems and that's why they're all of a sudden thrust from the dark ages, quite literally, of security into the current day of everything's a cyber threat. We've spoken at length about, you know, initially connecting things so you could react to a service event promptly. Perhaps you could predict when a service event was going to be required and schedule that ideally preventing that event from happening in the first place and providing proactive maintenance to improve scheduling, customer and employee and user experiences and ultimately getting prescriptive. We also heard from, I think it was Bell and Howell and now excuse me, it was bioMérieux talking about providing testing as a service and these new business models, it's no longer just about enabling service for its own sake, but it's about enabling that metering and billing of utilization. Yeah, absolutely. It's almost a leasing program for equipment in some respects. You know, we experienced that in our own personal lives. There are printer companies out there today who will sell you ink programs, right, to automatically supply ink to you because they're currently monitoring the usage that your device has. So they know it's ink. You absolutely, positively need the ink in order to print. And that is really their moneymaker, right? It's the same thing in the medieval world, in the medical devices world, the piece of equipment is really enabling a process of testing, maybe your blood or testing some other fluid out of your body. So they they really want to make sure that tests are run because the assays, as they call them, that they sell, are the that's their razor blade. If I looked at it as a razor razor blade analogy, that's the thing that continually goes through the process of being sold. So it's very valuable for for them and for their customers because quite frankly, if a customer, the hospital wants to run a test and they can't run the test because they're out of assays, that means a patient is going without that test and that doctor can't make a diagnosis. So we had a chance to ask our three guests the same question What are the barriers you have encountered when scaling your digital transformation in your field services organization? I will get started first with Patrick from bioMérieux as we told you last time, they are leaders in vitro diagnosis. They've got tens of thousands of pieces of equipment out there. And to your point, a really mission critical type of a test. I think one of the main barriers somewhat is, as we just mentioned, we are in the medical device environment. So we have to be compliant with EPA, GDPR in Europe, in the US, but also the cybersecurity standards. So we are our main customers are hospitals labs, and we are extremely vigilant about the cybersecurity and of our solutions. So we need to be able to convince that our solution of fully cyber secure and compliance with those standards. So this is a main kind of a barrier. But as soon as you get rid of those customers and you explain our solution and the architect and we get the technical folks together, we are able to overcome those type of kind of barriers, but they still exist. We are still education and the level of maturity of our field engineers in the various countries that we need to educate to overcome those barriers. That's interesting. Anthony. One word that really stood out to me was the word vigilant. The connected machine makers and their users need to be vigilant. It's not that you can prevent cyber events happening, but you've got to be vigilant and be able to respond to those things that stand out to you. It did. And the other item that stood out to me was that there are looking at this as a conversation with their customer, as opposed to a demand. It's that it's really more informative. Let's talk about how we do this. Let's talk about why we do this, which is really important because you're you're partnering with that customer of yours to say, we'd like to connect this. This is about what's good for you. It's about what's good for me. It's a win win situation, and this is how we're going to keep you safe. You know, it's interesting that while this does expose an organization to another piece of equipment that is connected, a large number of the cyber issues literally come from employees internal to the organization, clicking on a piece of information that they shouldn't have. They got a phishing email. They thought it looked legit and they clicked on it. And that's why now you're seeing a number of organizations that are really pressing hard on training people and literally testing their employees for these types of events. So we also got to ask that same question to our guests from Bell and Howell. Haroon spoke a little bit about the value they were getting. Let's hear what he has to say about the threats and the the hurdles that he's overcoming. As we always start the digital transformation efforts, especially remote monitoring, very small. And then we include our early adopters and then top management support is important. So they need to cover they need to provide cover to do these bite sized projects and succeed in them, and then make sure that it's ingrained in the company culture and do the promotion, walk the talk. So leadership involvement is very important, but also start Project Small and get some buy in from early adopters. So that's very important. So when we were talking about barriers, we asked about executive buy in about the silver tsunami, as you put it, and about cyber threats. Haroon really talks about driving an executive by and by starting small and scaling. And he's saying that to even in the context of working with his customer. So, for example, some things that are very different from a ruins business world that maybe from the you world, the memory you is working primarily with individual hospitals and laboratories. Now there are some conglomerates, some hospitals are joined together, but in his case he's working, say, with a large buck, a big box company, and then going to that big box company and saying, listen, we're going to partner with you to do this and we're going to start with a pilot. And by the way, you're going to be our partner in this process. And then once we've got that pilot working, then we can expand to your whole organization so it doesn't have to deal with HIPAA. He doesn't have to deal with the UMDR and other requirements. He's purely dealing with security construct. So he does have a different model. But but it is interesting because his approach is since he can get buy in from that big box store, he can start small and then expand to the whole organization. Whereas unfortunately, bioMérieux use case, they have to go hospital by hospital by hospital. And very in many cases makes me think about Shark Tank, ask in the entrepreneurs, how many stores have you got to take a shipment of your equipment. So interesting that you're here. You're not just bringing new technology to the front, but you're consulting with your client on an entirely new route to market through these essentially automated locker systems. Exactly. We also talked with Harpak-ULMA Let's listen to challenges Alexander had to raise around connecting his equipment. I will say that kind of the largest barriers that we see on our customers are siloed workforces. So in a plant where you have OT or IT, IT would manage like the Internet and all the computers and OT manages anything that's actually on the production floor. So a lot of times there's either a tribal mindset, a kind of tribal knowledge, where there's a very confrontational type of relationship there. And the way that we've overcome that is by helping people realize that their shared value, their right, if we can use IoT to, like my earlier example, improve the efficiency of the machine and ultimately everyone makes more money. Both groups look after their bosses, they get more money and they get promoted and ultimately they look better. So a lot of it is just helping them see the value in it and the vision and taking incremental steps to get there. So, Anthony, you were right there speaking with our clients, including these. Put a cap on it for me. We talked about the value that our customers are receiving through smart, connected products and operations, as well as some of the the barriers. What's your summation of this? We have different differing levels of adoption and even visualization of where they want to be. You see this fact the recent studies are showing about half of the customer base that we have in our world don't even have IoT in place today. Yeah, right. So we are really still for as a 20 year program, 25, 30 years that I've been around, it's still an emerging market. They're still going forward with this. And so you have these different workspaces, these different views of the world, like like we said with Patrick. Patrick's got a very difficult time because he's selling too many small locations. When we get into the Bell and Howell we're selling to a single location, so we have a different sell process to that when we get into hard pack on a they're more a combination of the two. They have a lot of locations, but they may have a number of machines at those locations, but they're all faced at the same problems. They're all chained. They're all adjusting those problems and answering those problems the way their organization can do it. And and they are all learning. They're at different levels of that. We said with Patrick, Patrick's definitely way down the learning path. So they're changing the way they want to sell their product and it will probably become that way for Bell and Howell probably become that way for Harpak-ULMA as well. So the one thing I tell everybody is when you connect an asset, it is not the end. It is literally the beginning. You are starting to gain information about how your customer uses your product, how your product works, and what you can do to change them and you moving forward. So it's a beginning point. It is. This is not the end. I think that's a great place for us to end. Anthony, thank you so much. You've been with us here at Speaking of Service since the beginning. And I love that conversation that Anthony just led us through, that Once you get a piece of technology in place, that's just the beginning. And I encourage you to look at the ways that PTC and our partner community are helping our clients create that business strategy for adopting smart, connected products or operations, helping deploy that technology, get it up and running in the organization, learning to use it safely, then getting a new lease on life over time. Thanks so much for joining us here. Speaking of Service, if you enjoyed our on the road edition, I invite you to tweet to us. Our hashtag #SpeakingofService. Thanks for being with us. Thanks for listening to the Speaking of Service podcast brought to you by PTC. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave a rating or review and be sure to check out other episodes to hear new perspectives on improving life for Aftermarket professionals. Service teams, and the customers they support. If you have a topic of interest or want to provide feedback, email us at speakingofservice@ptc.com or visit us at ptc.com/ speakingofservice.