Live From Field Service 2007: Day One

Greetings from sunny Las Vegas! Best I could tell, more than 150 people attended the Pre-Day of Field Service 2007 - themed The Future of Service. I opened the day with some remarks on what the future might indeed hold for service professionals in a product world. I suggested that improving service chain performance is only the beginning, and in order to build a quorum of service champions from engineering, marketing, sales, and the executive suite, we must clearly tie service performance to product quality and performance, quantifiable customer value, sustainable competitive advantage, and of course, tangible finanical performance (see illustration).

For those of you who were not among the throng, here are some highlights from the day's discussions:

1. Still no Chief Service Officers. As I usually do, I asked if anyone in the room boasted the lofty CSO title, and as usual, I got mostly smirks and shrugs. But as we forged through the day's sessions, it became clear that the prevelance of this title is really not an indicator of how readily manufacturers view post-sales service as critical contributors and sustainers of their financial and operational health. In fact, the emergence of a CSO is more likely to be the effect of the burgeoning service chain business and process changes we talked about today, versus the cause.
   


2. "Profit-center" does not equal "business unit." As appropriately noted by Michelle Griffin, VP of Customer Experience at Oce North America, even if senior executives dub service as a profit-center, they are still likely to lean hard on cost-cutting when the going gets tough. Once service becomes its own business unit, with presidential oversight of profit & loss, then service is genuinely "strategic," and the business can more freely invest in customers and programs to optimize profit and revenue performance.
   
   
3. The choir gets it. Preachers needed at NMW. Throughout the day, there were plenty of nods and even a few "amens," but I wonder if the response would be the same at a show like National Manufacturing Week, where the product still rules. The reality is we still have quite a ways to go before our counterparts in design, engineering, manufacturing, and quality put their shoulders behind concepts like design-for-serviceability.
   
   
4. Labor shortage necessitates smarter services. Robert Apelgren of the Institute of Electrical Motor Diagnostics reminded us that today's career-minded students are opting out of the skilled trades en masse. With the baby-boomer generation approaching retirement, the job of recruiting competent field engineers will become increasingly difficult. The good news is - as Dick Frishkorn of GE Aviation illustrated in his presentation - companies can offset some manpower requirements by systematically capturing and analyzing probabilistic, diagnostic, and prognostic data about their serviceable assets. Will the need for field techs ever go away entirely? I highly doubt it. But smarter, data-driven service models can maximize the contribution each individual technician can make to the enterprise.