Readiness and focus for IT led field service transformation

Field service operation is a very important division for the service industry. In the case of the utility industry, it becomes more important as it deals with the basic needs of consumers – electricity, water, wastewater, and gas. Most of the organizations are crazily driving towards digital transformation of field service to keep up with the competition and consumer demand. But unfortunately, the success rate of those transformation programmes is less than 30%. Now the question is – what is going wrong?

There are several areas which contribute to this failure. Several items of the journey bring blockers to the implementation. But before going into those blockers, let us see a typical example of the state of a utility organization before it decides to embark on field service transformation journey. We can describe the state of operation as “Complex”, and this is the initiation state in the maturity curve of field force transformation.

In “complex” and “manual” state the field service operation works in siloed mode, with very minimal automation. Most important consideration for any utility is to deliver safe, reliable, and cheap energy, water and gas. This kind of service is the key differentiator in a competitive market. Hence operational efficiency is utmost important for organizations. Transforming the management of operations from a chaotic complex state offers significant opportunities for cost reduction and service efficiency. On the supply side typical utilities must manage multiple resource types including assets (physical and consumables) and human, each with different capabilities and varying availability, spread across multiple locations. Effectively managing such resources can meet demand every single day. To bridge the gap is a monumental challenge for field service operation.

From our experience with different organizations having different states of maturity in field operation, we can distinguish areas which directly or indirectly touch field operations. For a vertically integrated utility organization, these areas are – asset management, power operation and field delivery. Let us get into the next level to understand individual areas and what could be the bare minimum levers for transformation.

For asset management following are basic requirements which will support the vision of transformation – (a) standard work order construction and automatic creation for typical recurrent work (b) long term asset management plan (inspection of fault and defects, maintenance, large projects) and risk assessment (c) capture asset data and advance analytics of the data to create investment strategy.

For power operation, IT OT convergence is taking the center stage. The system should build a solution for remote inspection mechanism, real time network visibility and automated work order creation based on the identified faults. Field delivery should handle work package optimization, provision for visibility of stock and non-stock items and its smooth consumption, crew capacity view and dynamic scheduling of work and digital work execution. There are several external factors which act as motivation towards change to the field service operation. These factors are – adaptability, cost containment, challenging capital markets, controls, and competitive advantage. But it has been proven time and again that organizations need to realize, plan, and undergo fundamental changes first, both in order to adapt to the new business environment and to become ecologically sustainable.

As mentioned, the journey of the organizations starts from a “complex” current state where most of the operations and supporting applications are siloed and manual. There is manual communication and coordination among different divisions. It has been observed that in this kind of situation organizations take a decision of transformation. But the fault line starts from here only as most of the IT transformation takes a mechanistic approach which focuses predominantly on realizing quick wins. And we all know that any quick win is short lived if there is no strong correlation with business and human (society, community, consumer, employee, partner vendor) dimension. Though a top-down approach puts the transformation journey on the roll, not winning the hearts and minds of the stakeholders leads the projects failing to deliver intended outcomes. Hence for field transformation initiative, “voice of the field” is a very important factor. Some of the best ideas come from the field operation delivery team. When these ideas do not reach the business operation’s leaders in a timely fashion over a sustained period, the field loses the trust in leadership’s ability to execute. This is a very tricky area where business leadership should step in very tactically to steer the course.

Quite early research from “Times Higher Education Supplement” emphasized this point stating – “about 80 % of IT projects fail to deliver stated business benefits because the “human dimension” has not been managed”. This is a very significant observation and if we dive a little bit more into this, we can refer to the frameworks of change or transformation that have already been established. For example, Noel Tichy proposed TPC framework which includes T: technical, P: political, C: cultural dynamics about desired change of the organization. It infers that cultural and political orientation is the foremost driving factor for success, then comes the technical part. We have another less theoretical model from Kotter and Kotter and Cohen which listed eight steps to transform an organization (in our context key organization function like field service). The steps are –

1. Sense of urgency
2. A guiding coalition
3. Vision
4. Communication of the vision
5. Empowerment to act on vision.
6. Planning and creation short-term wins
7. Consolidation of improvements and produce more change opportunities incrementally.
8. Institutionalize the change so it sticks to the operation.

So, introduction of field service transformation journey of any organization impacts both the integrators and the recipient of the transformation. This clearly gives rise to different forms of resistance within the stakeholders. Commitment of the stakeholders towards the transformation plays a major role in success. The resistance to change can also be viewed as commitment to the current state, though it is complex and manual. But there is an established informal, regular, and timely communication and operational mechanism in which the field force is accustomed with. Hence more time should be devoted from business leadership to create the vision of transformation, communicating the vision, and empowering them to act accordingly. It is not always essentially top-down approach, rather a bottom-up approach is also required.

Another observed fact in transformation initiatives is an illusion of speed at the expense of producing a satisfying result, which is to change behaviour. Often there is no room for delays or feedback loops. Organizations must carefully understand that change management is more important than technology selection and implementation. Speed and success can only be achieved when the foundation is strong. Somers and Nelson have given a list of ranked critical success factors, where change management takes precedence over technology. The list of ranked critical success factors as described by Somers and Nelson is given below –

The above table shows emphasis should be given on management of change that transformation will bring to the end users. The key recipients of the change will be asset planner and managers, work planners, work schedulers and dispatchers, field service crew and contractors, inventory managers and finance personnel. So, the transformation should bring ease to the daily operation of these stakeholders by reducing manual work. But in most cases organizations fail to reconcile the technological imperatives of the enterprise system with the business needs of the enterprise itself. Enterprise systems, by its very nature, imposes its own logic on organization’s strategy and culture.

Complex organization operation characterizes a highly manual approach towards operation with ad hoc practices adopted across different business units, each responding in a suboptimal reactive way to incoming demand. Considering the aforementioned issues, 4’C maturity framework can be adopted to de-risk technology driven transformation. Every stage characterizes different levels of sophistication in managing and forecasting demand, collaborating across value chains, proactivity in planning resources and agility when faced with perturbations in normal operations.

The 4’C framework

IT systems of the transformation introduce a mechanism to codify domain knowledge and processes and practices. The significant competitive advantage lies with multiple IT systems, both from upstream ERP system and downstream field service system. Established off-the-shelf IT products invariably have an embedded view of organizational design, business processes, data structures and user needs, all of which may require customization if they are misaligned with the requirements for a particular implementation. Furthermore, customizing generic off-the-shelf products being leveraged for upstream and downstream, sometimes referred to as ‘vanilla implementations’ oversimplifies and avoids the key challenges in realizing targeted benefits. But it has been observed that a vanilla implementation could not demonstrate desired result, rather the solution takes resort on significant customizations within the off-the-self products. This results in failures to deliver the value originally anticipated. This highlights the danger of vendor lock-in, where an organization’s processes and principles are locked into a specific software solution and a specific vendor roadmap.

In most cases the notion of standard templates of off-the-self products are in some sense incoherent. Every organization and its processes are unique in some sense. Hence best practices are contextualized to each organization, and we must recognize that such practices will be interpreted or reinterpreted when they become part of and are enacted in that organization. The situations in which the practices exist or should come to exist are considered to be unique and that makes simply imitating them rather impossible. Further, once instantiated off-the-self product, be it upstream ERP or downstream field service management, best practices are not necessarily “best” for a particular organization.

IT transformation programmes are repeatedly faced with questions of how to ensure that such transformation programmes are successful and how to best align the intended organizational structure with the deployed IT system with planned processes resulting in the envisaged service. The starting point for us to address this challenge requires that we understand the mechanisms for transforming service and intricacies of field operations. We also must understand the extend of automation that is permissible for the organization. From there the roadmap of transformation should be drawn and followed diligently.