Much to my chagrin I am a week late with my post about the Field Service 2009 Conference. As noted in part one I had grand designs to get to work on this last week upon my return from Palm Springs but in setting this objective I seem to have forgotten about my need to do all the work that had piled up in my week and a half absence. In any event, after a week of late nights I am back on track and ready to give you my belated update.

Field Service was a conference geared toward larger operations. Attendees came from a number of large service providers in the utility, telephone, energy, and medical equipment industries among others. Many providers were the service arms of manufacturers that built the equipment that they then serviced. These were very large service operations with hundreds or thousands of techs in the field. Spending time hearing about the challenges faced by these operations was a great opportunity to see what was coming down the road for the slightly smaller service operations that Jonas deals with in the HVACR, plumbing, electrical and other construction niches. As a nice added bonus the conference also gave me a bunch of great ideas to improve Jonas’s service and support operation.

Over two and half days of pretty solid sessions I have come away pretty much flooded with information but in the name of brevity I felt that I would hit on three key items.

Location Awareness (GPS)
Though relatively new in the construction service space GPS is starting to become very mainstream. For this reason it was really not that high on my list of things to see during this conference. That changed after spending some time with the folks from Trimble. To demonstrate their new solutions Trimble brought a fully stocked van complete with the latest and greatest from their R&D department. In addition to the standard GPS location products they showed two new pieces of technology that I found intriguing:

WIFI:
To implement GPS Trimble customes install a device in their vehicles that transmits the vehicles position back to the central office. Trimble has expanded this connection to also bring information back to truck and have expanded it to surround the vehicle with a WIFI network. This will enable the technician to connect to the internet to obtain information such as plans and assemblies but will also allow mobile providers like Jonas to move away from cellular network connections and to cheaper WIFI connections. The move from cellular to WIFI will take many years and will likely never be fully complete so we will certainly have to give contractors the flexbility to connect with either or depending on what is available.

Inventory Tracking:
Trimble has recently developed a solution to allow their customers to track inventory and equipment on a technician's truck. To do this they have created device that emits a very low intensity magnetic field around the truck and then tagged all the inventory and equipment within the truck with a small magnetic identifyer. The system captures materials as they are moved on or off the truck allowing the back office to see when and where (via the GPS location) materials are added or removed from truck inventory. While intriguing this technolgoy (at $2.00 per tag) is fairly expensive and it may be tricky to integrate this into warehouse operations (which may be harder to get a magnetic field around) and back end inventory tracking. In our space this is probably overkill unless you have a lot of portable high value stock that has a habit of disappearing. Over time the cost will come down and technology like this will become more prevalent.

Remote Diagnostics
From part 1 of this entry you will remember that one of the things I was most interested in at the conference was remote diagnostics. The remote diagnostic solutions that we saw were all presented by equipment manufacturers that service their own equipment. One such example was GE Aviation. GE has technicians in the field wherever their engines are in use on a plane. The engines have a vast network of sensors tracking performance against standard metrics to look for variances that indicate a potential problem. The GE service team typically knows about any problem long before the ground crew (and thankfully the pilots and passengers) see any signs of trouble allowing them to proactively resolve the problem. This is incredibly powerful technology but I think it will be some time before we see it take off in the construction service space.

I see two issues that will slow us down. The first is that service contractors in our space are not typically the manufacturer of the equipment they service. GE Aviation and the medical equipment manufacturers I spoke to at the conference had R&D departments that were thinking about how to service the equipment during the design phase because they were incented to drive more value from the service chain. Though the likes of Carrier do have this same incentive it is definitely not as strong and as a result they have not provided the same level of support for remote diagnostics. I think the other factor is the cost of downtime. If a piece of medical equipment goes down or an airplane blows an engine it is often a serious problem. The lost of AC, refrigeration, heat, water, electricity while a problem is not quite as severe and I suspect that the owners of the equipment are not going to pay as big a premium as would be required to have the technology in place and have a service company monitor it.

I have not seen remote diagnostic systems for plumbing or electrical systems quite yet but there are a few solutions out there in the HVAC and other mechanical spaces. The equipment in these spaces already have diagnostic programs that can be accessed by a tech on site and there are even a few isolated solutions that will allow a company to access it remotely. I believe the technology is starting to get there for this but we as an industry have not yet figured out how to build the business case around it. I suspect that over the next 5 or so years service software providers like Jonas will start to find ways to integrated this into service contract and dispatch solutions which will drive it more into the mainstream. Hopefully I will have more to write on this over the next year or two.

The Next Generation of Mobile
One area where our space seems to be at the same level as these big service operators (at least in availability of technology) is in the mobile space. The solutions that they are implementing do not look all that different from those on offer in the construction service space. They are typically thick client (in that the technicians are using software that is installed on the device rather than just accessing a webpage) and are struggling with the decision between smaller light weight handhelds or the bigger lap tops. Where I did seem some interesting new technologies was on the tradeshow floor. Probably the most interesting thing I saw was a demonstration of 4G mobile networks from Lucent and Verizon.

The change from 3G to 4G is about the speed of transferring data. The big benefit is going to be the ability to stream live video from our mobile devices. On 3G we are able to download video relatively easily but uploading video is pretty much a non-starter. With 4G that all changes and it is going to open up a whole variety of new mobile tools. One example that comes to the top of my mind is that ability for techs in the field to record video from the site and request direction or advice from their colleagues in the office or out at another site. The very shallow technical labor pool is a major problem in pretty much every geography. If contractors are able to leverage their top technical people to improve the performance of a team of more junior resources it will be a major win. Another idea is recording exactly what gets done to a piece of equipment and storing it in a document management library for reference on future visits or if there is some disagreement with the customer about what was or was not done.

Like any conference Field Service 2009 had its ups and downs. I would have liked to have seen more on the promised knowledge management area but the sessions on the above topics and many others certainly made up for the gap. While I took all kinds of new ideas away I think that I gained even greater value from the new questions it opened up in my mind. Over the coming months I expect to return back to some of these questions with further posts about service operations.