Field Service - Issue #4 by ServiceMax

ISSUE NO. 4

ServiceMax Joins Forces with GE Digital Thinking beyond products and services in the emerging digital service economyÂ

WHAT’S INSIDE

THE NEW INDUSTRIALISTS: PIONEERING THE OUTCOME-BASED SERVICE ECONOMY An exclusive conversation with GE Digital’s Bill Ruh and ServiceMax’s Dave Yarnold on why

customers don’t want products or services — they want results. By Elliott Burr

SKY ITALIA’S FIELD TECHS DISH UP SALES

radiation therapy provider.

boost service profits — and it all starts with its

By Janine Milne

dish installers’ soft skills.

STAND OUT FROM THE FIELD WITH PROACTIVE BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

By GE Reports

spot quality service.

HOW GE HEALTHCARE JAPAN CHANGED ITS SERVICE CULTURE

By Sean Lyden

By Nevin Thompson

The consumer 3D-printing dream may have

Automated dispatch gets a whole technologies.

(and earthquakes) when lives are on the line.

FIELD SERVICE STEERS TOWARD SELF-DRIVING TECH

new meaning with autonomous fleet

Staying ahead of customer expectations

GE’S NEW DIMENSION: 3D PRINTING

GE has an ambitious plan to keep The company’s Predix platform.

recognize great products, but can’t always

THE IOT LIGHTS UP CONNECTED POWER PLANTS power plants from going dark. The key?

Service firms have a problem: Customers

By Jim Baston

Preventative maintenance meets

preventative healthcare at the Swedish

The Italian satellite provider has to a plan to

By Janine Milne

IOT TRANSFORMS SERVICE AT MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY FIRM ELEKTA

fizzled, but the technology is reshaping

GE OIL & GAS: IMPROVED EFFICIENCY FLOWS THROUGH MODERN FIELD SERVICE MANAGEMENT

In the volatile energy industry, maximizing

how high-tech manufacturers build and fix

revenue with cloud- and mobile-enabled

machines. Exhibit A: Jet engines.

service and support.

By Andrew Zaleski

By ServiceMax

WHAT’S THE BIGGEST OPPORTUNITY IN SERVICE?

Six industry pros weigh in on what excites them most in field service. By Derek Korte

LETTER FROM THE CEO

Dear Reader, As you have likely heard by now, ServiceMax started an exciting new chapter earlier this year by joining GE Digital. I’m thrilled we’re now part of one of the world’s most admired and innovative companies that’s aligned with our long-held vision of transforming the world of industrial manufacturing. It’s hugely significant for our company — and for our customers. But in the broader sense, this signifies an important moment for the field service industry as a whole. Globally, industrial productivity hovered around 4 percent for 20 years, and since 2011, it’s declined to only 1 percent annually. For product and service companies, we’ve long believed that investing in technology to modernize your end-to-end service operations can be the antidote to that low-growth environment. Over the past decade, our customers have proved that point, averaging 18 percent gains in productivity, 13 percent annual growth in service revenue and 11 percent improvement in customer satisfaction. By being a part of GE Digital, there’s now so much more we’ll be able to do to help our customers achieve measurable success. Check out my conversation with GE Digital CEO Bill Ruh on page 2 about why service is so critical to giving customers what they truly want: real outcomes. As part of GE Digital, we’ll have unprecedented opportunities to bring the power of the Industrial Internet into modern service management. Medical device firms are using the Industrial IoT to keep vital cancer treatment machines running. And power plant operators, who aren’t necessarily in the business of servicing customers’ assets in the field, can use our platform to reduce unplanned downtime, improve safety and use sophisticated data to do smarter, less expensive, condition-based maintenance. Just think about hyper-intelligent systems that gather and analyze equipment condition and performance data — and automatically determine optimal paths forward. Or “digital twins,” digital replicas of physical assets that give companies a living, breathing (and predictive) model of assets in the field. Or Predix, GE Digital’s operating system for the Industrial Internet, that draws sophisticated analytics from connected devices to recommend proactive — and even predictive — maintenance services. It’s a whole new world for field service, and we look forward to bringing it to you. Dave Yarnold CEO, ServiceMax, from GE Digital @dyarnold

ELLIOTT BURR

THE NEW INDUSTRIALISTS: PIONEERING THE OUTCOME -BASED SERVICE ECONOMY GE Digital’s Bill Ruh and ServiceMax’s Dave Yarnold, on what’s in store for the manufacturing and service industries. GE manufactures much of what is considered the world’s critical infrastructure: jet engines, locomotives, power generation equipment, wind turbines, healthcare imaging machines. But for GE Digital CEO Bill Ruh, the most exciting product is not a traditional product at all. Instead, it’s a guarantee that the products and services customers buy will deliver specific results.

“In the end, the customer doesn’t want a product, nor do they want a service. They want an outcome,” Ruh says. It’s a radically different mindset that GE has embraced across its industrial divisions. And now the company is focused on providing ongoing business value — and helping other companies do the same — instead of just completing an initial sale. The first step? Connecting products with Predix, GE’s platform for the Industrial Internet. In January, GE acquired ServiceMax to fill the service gap in GE’s “industrial operating system,” as Ruh puts it. Field Service Digital spoke with Ruh and ServiceMax CEO Dave Yarnold after the acquisition to hear how, by joining forces, GE and ServiceMax are giving manufacturers and service providers alike digital capabilities for the outcome-driven digital industrial economy.

IS SERVICE FINALLY GETTING THE ATTENTION AND RESPECT THAT IT DESERVES? Dave Yarnold: Service is a source of profit and growth that’s been hiding in plain sight — and companies are absolutely realizing that. Margins on service are higher, and service revenue is outpacing product revenue. And as we saw during the recent economic crisis, service revenue is largely recession-proof. The benefits go beyond the bottom line, too — it gets companies closer to their customers. In the past, companies would sell a product and then disappear until it broke or it was time to sell the latest version of the same product. But thanks to technologies like the IoT, that transactional relationship is being replaced by more of a partnership. Companies can monitor customers’ product usage and performance and offer personalized services to help them better serve their own customers. That’s powerful.

SOME PEOPLE MIGHT BE SURPRISED BY HOW INGRAINED SERVICE IS IN GE’S BUSINESS. WHAT ROLE HAVE SERVICES PLAYED IN EXPANDING GE’S SOFTWARE STRATEGY? Bill Ruh: You have to understand that we didn’t have a services business before the mid-90s. Now, our sizable service business is a critical element of GE’s value. If you were to go back 20 years and talk to people who were there, they would tell you that the product guys were questioning the company’s service efforts. They would say, ‘We sell products to people. Services will just confuse the customer.’ The point is that every generation has to rethink the future.

“The next generation of services will be completely digitally enabled. Nobody knows the final outcome of that shift, but we know that ServiceMax and its vision is central to the final outcome.“

HOW IS GE DIGITAL FIGURING OUT HOW TO USE SOFTWARE TO MAKE THAT SIZABLE SERVICE BUSINESS PROFITABLE? Ruh: When we got started, GE CEO Jeff Immelt realized that our customers were applying sophisticated analytics in ways that meant they were becoming more knowledgeable about our products than we were. We encouraged our customers’ analytics efforts, of course, but the reality is that if you’re not the most knowledgeable about your products, another vendor will be. Something had to change. Services are important, they’re a big part of our business, and we could see others creeping in. We started with our strength: making sure that our services businesses had the best analytical tools in the world to know absolutely everything about our products. Once we applied analytics to our services that no other vendor could match, we had the deepest knowledge about our services and products and established a deeper relationship with our customers, it allowed us to give our customers those same tools. Now we want to enable every company in the industrial world to do the same. We started out by not wanting any other company to know more about our products than we did. That has morphed into providing the leading service technologies to industrial companies around the world.

TRADITIONALLY, COMPANIES HAVE EITHER BEEN A SERVICE OR A PRODUCT COMPANY. IS THAT DISTINCTION NO LONGER RELEVANT WITHIN GE? Ruh: I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition. People started product companies because that’s where the innovation was 50 or 100 years ago when these industries were nascent. As they matured, people began wanting capabilities to operate their products more efficiently. Services were a natural extension for most industrial OEMs.

Now, digital is challenging the business models and opening up new ways for people to rethink products and services. People are still going to make products, but now you can package those products with services in a way that’s more attractive to a customer.

“In the end, the customer doesn’t want a product, nor do they want a service. They want an outcome.” At GE, we learned that if you can deliver the outcome, customers don’t care about the product or service. They don’t want a jet engine — they want power by the hour. They ask, ‘How much power can I have to run my business? How much do I need?’ And they’ll pay for what they need. That doesn’t mean people will stop buying jet engines, but I do think there will be pieces of the product and service that will be augmented. What customers will really want from their strategic partners is an outcome guarantee. These are sophisticated outcomes that will require digital innovation to deliver, but that’s where the world is moving. You don’t get to an outcome guarantee without a complete digital capability for your company and customers that allow you to measure, manage and optimize everything around a product or service.

WHAT WILL SERVICEMAX AND GE DIGITAL BE ABLE TO ACCOMPLISH TOGETHER THAT THEY COULDN’T AS EASILY HAVE ACCOMPLISHED ALONE? Yarnold: Well, first off, I’ll say that there’s no question that we now have the wherewithal to fulfill our biggest dreams as a company. We have the backing of one of the world’s most recognized and well-respected companies and we are accelerating our investments in all areas of the business including product, engineering, sales and marketing. More than ever, we are defining and leading the field service management software market. That’s exciting.

We now have access to the GE Digital product and technology portfolio. That is a tremendous opportunity for our customers. We will be able to couple field service management with additional capabilities such as asset performance management (APM), to enable companies to derive even more throughput from their capital assets. An edge computing platform like Predix that feeds data into our service management platform is huge in terms of getting extremely granular and precise about the best time and way to service industrial equipment. Field service management becomes something so much more when you integrate it with the other GE Digital technologies. One of the things that has differentiated ServiceMax has been our passion for the service domain. We’ve hired experts from field service organizations and leveraged their expertise to develop the best field service tools in the industry. Now we’ll have access to an incredibly profitable field service organization with tens of thousands of service professionals. Imagine what we’ll learn and how we’ll be able to take that to our customers! And finally, together we’re going to appeal to more and bigger customers than ever before. As GE had been a customer and partner of ours for many years before this acquisition, we’re now showcasing to everyone the amazing results GE has been generating through their use of ServiceMax. We can apply those same learnings to more customers to generate similar results. This deal will be a real game-changer for industrial manufacturers and operators across all industries and geographies. Ruh: What I’m really excited about — and what makes a great acquisition — is when the capability you bought is able to execute at the same speed they were working at, while leveraging the scale that allows them to grow larger. ServiceMax brought us speed in service automation, and now we’re working together to scale it. Customers seem genuinely excited about the acquisition, too. Even our competitors who ServiceMax is selling into, after discussions with GE’s leadership team, they feel confident

in working with the GE Digital ServiceMax division. They know they will be treated with a sense of integrity and honesty. They know their intellectual property and data will be protected.

LET’S TALK ABOUT PREDIX. WHAT ROLE DO YOU SEE FOR SERVICEMAX IN THE PLATFORM? Ruh: Predix is central to GE’s software strategy. The platform is not one product, but rather an industrial operating system complete with applications. It’s security. It’s mobile. It’s machine learning, AI and developer APIs. It’s also an ecosystem where any partner can add value.

“There are really two killer apps for the industrial world: asset performance management (APM) and field service management (FSM).” The goal is to get more out of your assets, your people and your manufacturing processes. We had a gap in our portfolio on the services side and needed to find the company that could become the Predix service automation company — that is, create the category, put it on top of the Predix cloud, and then integrate service automation capabilities with our customers’ manufacturing and analytics capabilities. The goal is an Industrial Internet operating system with all the capabilities companies need to run their business.

WE’VE HEARD A LOT ABOUT THE PROMISE OF ZERO UNPLANNED DOWNTIME. CAN YOU HELP US SEPARATE FACT FROM FICTION? Ruh: Zero unscheduled downtime — the three sexiest words to an industrialist! Consider the airline industry: about 40 percent of all delays and cancellations are caused by mechanical problems. Forty percent is a huge number. If an airline could trim that number, it would be a boon to its bottom line because of the costs associated with lost revenues and passenger compensation. Eliminating downtime can have a tremendous bottom-line impact. The first outcome digital industrial companies want is zero unscheduled downtime — from catastrophic events and from minor annoyances. That step alone could easily deliver up to 10 percent back into a company’s bottom line. That would have a multiplier effect on the bottom line. There’s not much else that can deliver that kind of return.

HOW CLOSE ARE INDUSTRIAL COMPANIES TO ACTUALLY DELIVERING ON THAT PROMISE? Ruh: We’re doing it today. The question is when will companies get to where that outcome — zero unplanned downtime — is built into all of its processes. I’d expect we will see zero unplanned downtime as a product feature, delivered through a digital capability, within ten years. n

ServiceMax represents owning field service management as a market category and integrating with asset performance management (APM) capabilities to automatically schedule a technician if a product has a problem.

SKY ITALIA’S FIELD TECHS DISH UP SALES JANINE MILNE

Sky Italia aims to boost its satellite dish installers’ skills to transform the company’s service arm from a cost center to a revenue generator.

Sky Italia, the Italian digital satellite television firm, isn’t worried about squeezing money out of the installation side of the business.

outsources most of its actual dish installation and maintenance to 400 small providers, which in turn manage roughly 2,000 field technicians.

“Putting a dish on the roof is not only a question of installation, and therefore of mere costs, but is also a chance to establish a closer relationship with customers,” says Lucio Golinelli, senior director of service and delivery at Sky Italia. The company’s technicians handle thousands of installations every year, and Golinelli is eager to turn each home visit into a sales opportunity.

These installers already sell extra products and services to customers while on site, but Sky Italia believes there is a huge opportunity for them to sell even more.

The company has an unusual structure. Instead of handling field service internally, Sky Italia 6

“The trust between customer and installer is very high, and we feel this is a big opportunity,” Golinelli says, “because they can spend some time talking about home cinema, or whether they need additional boxes and services.”

That requires an installer with different skills. From a technical point of view, it means not only mastering mechanical hardware skills but software skills as well. It also requires having the people skills to communicate with customers.

“Field workers must now become advisors more than installers, and we must provide the tools and process and training for installers to do this. This means that they have to move from the roof fixing the satellite dishes into the living room,” Golinelli says.

To achieve this long-term goal, Sky Italia’s first step has been to replace its heavily customized Siebel IT platform with a cloud-based Salesforce platform, together with ServiceMax. With the new systems in place, Sky Italia is working to create a seamless, digital customer experience from an initial customer call through sales and service. Sky Italia will use its new CRM and field service management systems to make more informed field service decisions. For example, Golinelli says being able to send the best upseller to a specific customer is a better opportunity than allocating a job based purely on location and proximity to the customer. Golinelli expects the ability to plan its service delivery to maximize profits will create huge opportunities for the company. “Customers will ask for more and more services in the future,” he says. “We visit thousands of customers at home per year,” noting that the company’s technicians will probably have the opportunity to visit each customer in the next few years. That means more chances to install cable boxes and advise customers about home cinema upgrades and other new services. Alongside upselling opportunities, Golinelli says Sky Italia’s service technology investments will help manage costs by reducing problem resolution times, cutting administrative fees and above all, improving customer service. n

STAND OUT FROM THE FIELD WITH PROACTIVE BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT JIM BASTON Adapted from Field Service Digital

The service business is competitive and getting more so with every passing day. Customers are better informed and increasingly demanding, competitors are quick to match or exceed any competitive advantage we might gain, and great customer service has become a cost of entry. As a result, customers have difficulty seeing any substantial difference between most service companies. They all tend to look more or less the same from the customer perspective. So how do we as a service company stand out? How do we win in such a competitive environment? 8

We stand out when we help our customers recognize that they are better off for having engaged us. When our customers realize that not only is their equipment running well, but they are actually operating more effectively than ever before, service organizations stand out from competitors whose sole focus is maintaining equipment under contract. The key to success is the ability of our field service firms to look for and recognize opportunities to help the customer succeed and willingly communicate about those opportunities when they arise. In this way, technicians are able to provide a level of service

beyond simply maintaining and fixing things — and we can measurably help our customers achieve their business goals. Here’s how:

TIP #1: ASK FOR PERMISSION I have found that most, if not all, service firms that engage their technicians in proactive business development activities never tell their customers what they are up to. This begs the question: If the field service team’s efforts help the customer to be better off, why not tell the customer what we are doing? A simple way to do this is to ask the customer for permission to provide this level of service. The conversation might go something like this:

Mr. Jones, we have provided direction and training for our technicians to encourage them to look for opportunities to help you operate your facilities/processes/ equipment more effectively whenever they visit your facility. When they find something that will help you achieve your business goals, would you have any objection if they brought the opportunity to your attention?

TIP #2: CONDUCT INITIAL MEETINGS ON NEW CONTRACTS When a new contract is signed, it is common for the service firm and their customer to review the contract terms and discuss any specific requirements and expectations. Whenever possible, it is valuable to include a discussion of our technicians’ proactive efforts. We can reinforce their value, discuss specifics about the customer’s goals and challenges, and determine how and when the customer would like our technician to approach them when they recognize an opportunity to help.

simple review of how well we’re maintaining the equipment and evaluate how well we have helped the customer to be better off. We can review outstanding recommendations, discuss how well the customer feels the technician is looking out for them and identify areas for improvement. Informal sessions can be held more frequently than formal sessions and similar discussions can take place over a cup of coffee.

TIP #4: MEASURE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION WITH YOUR EFFORTS If you promote the fact that your field service team’s proactive recommendations are of value to your customers, why not measure it to see if they agree? You can do this by simply including a question on your customer satisfaction questionnaire. One example: On a scale of 1 to 5 (with 5 being highest), how effective have our technicians been in bringing to your attention improvements we have made to your business?

When the promotion of products and services by our field service team is conducted for the purpose of finding ways to help our customers achieve their business goals, then it becomes a valuable service that can differentiate us from our competitors. The goal is to support it like we would any other service and use the benefit this creates as a valuable differentiator. n

TIP #3: HOLD BOTH FORMAL AND INFORMAL REVIEW SESSIONS On large contracts, we can arrange to meet on an annual basis to review our performance. The focus of these meetings can go beyond

“Sometimes I just like to come out here, open up my service apps, and watch the data stream in.”

HOW GE HEALTHCARE JAPAN CHANGED ITS SERVICE CULTURE NEVIN THOMPSON

Staying ahead of customer demands (and earthquakes) with the cloud. Adapted from Field Service Digital

Service in the healthcare industry is tricky business, requiring organizations to meet regulatory and compliance standards while ensuring lifesaving medical equipment is in working order. But for GE Healthcare Japan, these weren’t the only reasons to improve how it manages field service delivery. “Japanese regulations require us to maintain paper-based service records for seven years, but in the aftermath of major natural disasters, such as a 1995 earthquake that flattened Kobe or the earthquake and massive tsunami that struck much of northeastern Japan in March 2011, we found it difficult to ensure the protection of these physical files,” says Kyoko Fujiya, who oversees service delivery for GE Healthcare Japan. Part of the solution, Fujiya says, has been the company’s shift to the cloud. Fujiya joined other field service leaders in October at the annual ServiceMax conference in Tokyo, Maximize, to discuss how industry leaders are devel-oping 10

new strategies, revenue streams and, ultimately, a new way to interact with customers.

REVISITING THE SERVICE DELIVERY MODEL GE Healthcare Japan employs a service team of about 500 people in Japan and services more than 106,000 medical equipment and devices across the country. The company’s choice to embrace the cloud was about more than shifting away from a paper-based service records management process. The move, Fujiya says, was also about responding to the expectation that expensive medical devices and equipment must always be available, no matter what. “There’s a strong desire on the part of our customers to ensure their equipment is kept running 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Fujiya says. “If we can’t get the equipment fixed on time, it’s going to affect the lives of the patients who depend on the equipment.” GE Healthcare Japan has developed more efficient service delivery by shifting

to an iPad-based mobile solution for field engineers over the past five years. This shift has been made possible thanks to WiFi ubiquity in Japan and other technology advancements, which enabled seamless service record delivery to customers with speed by leveraging off-line debriefing capability and e-signature, Fujiya says. “As the IT technology revolution became a part of everyday life, the kinds of services customers asked for also changed. We started to wonder if our own service model was still valid, and this is one of the reasons we changed our approach,” says Fujiya. “We needed data to make decisions efficiently, and obviously technology can help with data collection and decision-making.” Their success, Fujiya says, depends on how much more quickly the organization can collect and analyze data. “Thanks to the widespread adoption of broadband, we can collect vast amounts of data from medical equipment,” says Fujiya. “While we’re able to analyze that data relatively quickly, our customers’ needs and the world of medical devices still evolve rapidly, and we have to keep up.” Fujiya also identified another powerful trend that is helping transform GE Healthcare Japan’s service delivery: IoT-enabled devices’ ability to send a constant stream of information that allows service technicians to identify new opportunities for customers and to proactively prevent problems.

PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE CALLS FOR A CULTURAL SHIFT Preventative and predictive maintenance makes it possible to remotely repair equipment and devices before a failure occurs. “GE Healthcare Japan is trying to move to a mindset of warning or notifying our customers about situations before they arise,” Fujiya says. “There’s never a time when we’re out of touch with a customer, and we’re still helping our teams learn to think and act in these terms.” But Fujiya admits that rolling out this cultural shift has not been easy.

“You have to define what you want to change first, and then define how you will change it,” Fujiya says. To make the switch to IoT-enabled service delivery, GE Healthcare Japan worked with ServiceMax, in large part thanks to the company’s focus on bringing field service management to the cloud. “Continuously searching for and then implementing new technologies, such as ServiceMax’s cloud-based IoT service delivery platform, is a critical part of GE Healthcare’s business in Japan,” says Fujiya, especially as society continues to age and growing healthcare costs demand innovative new ways to reduce costs. n

“While we

always want to be in the position of giving the customers exactly what they need, when they want it, once they purchase equipment, in another five or ten years their needs are going to change. Anticipating what those future needs will be is very important.” – Kyoko Fujiya Operating Officer, General Manager, Japan Service - GE Healthcare

Illustration by Leigh Wells 12

ANDREW ZALESKI

GE’S NEW DIMENSION: 3D PRINTING

By embracing 3D printing, General Electric is disrupting not only manufacturing, but also paving way for major changes in the service industry.

About 10 years ago, GE’s aviation division set out to create a new, one-of-a-kind engine, one that incorporated an advanced fuel nozzle. The fuel nozzle is a critical component for fuel burn and emissions, but GE had a problem: Manufacturing the nozzle from the planned design was going to be difficult and time-consuming using traditional methods. So GE embarked on a partnership with Greg Morris, co-founder of Cincinnati-based Morris Technologies, to “print” the nozzle. By 2012, each of the 19 fuel nozzles in every LEAP aircraft engine was produced using 3D printing, an additive manufacturing process that layers and sinters composite materials to make a three-dimensional object. Today the LEAP engine, made by a company jointly owned by GE and France’s

Safran Aircraft Engines, is GE’s best-selling jet engine, with more than 11,500 engines valued at $80 billion on back order, and hundreds more going into service this year on Boeing 737 airplanes. Manufacturing is already being disrupted by 3D printing. Next up? The service industry. With newer materials and faster 3D printers, it’s not far-fetched to envision technicians at various work sites printing parts on demand for wind turbines, oil-drilling equipment or even replacement parts for jet engines.

GOING ALL IN ON 3D PRINTING In 2012, GE acquired Morris Technologies to help prepare for a 3D-printed future. Three years later, in 2015, GE opened the Additive Development Center, a $140 million project based in Cincinnati, where GE Aviation is also headquartered. That same year, GE spent $50 million to upgrade its plant in Auburn, Ala., with industrial-sized 3D printers to mass produce the LEAP engine fuel nozzles.

“This technology is just fundamentally disruptive. It’s changing the way we think about how a product gets designed. Why stop at the fuel nozzle? Why not make more parts?”

people involved in how to work with the technology in all the GE businesses,” Morris says. For GE, the advantages are twofold: cost savings and manufacturing innovation. By the end of this decade, GE Aviation expects to manufacture more than 100,000 parts for the LEAP and other engines using additive manufacturing, and the company overall is on a kick to become a leader in the additive sector.

INVESTING IN A 3D-PRINTED TOMORROW “This technology is just fundamentally disruptive. It’s changing the way we think about how a product gets designed,” says Morris, now business development manager of additive technologies at GE Aviation. “Why stop at the fuel nozzle? Why not make more parts?” GE’s push into additive technologies is rapidly expanding beyond fuel nozzles. In April 2016, GE opened its $40 million Center for Additive Technology Advancement outside Pittsburgh, Penn., where 50 workers are teaching and training employees across company divisions how to use industrial 3D printers and incorporate 3D-printing technology into their own projects. GE’s Oil & Gas division is already using 3D printing to make valves. GE Power could one day use industrial printers to make parts for wind turbines. There’s a push to train designers and engineers across the company to approach product design with 3D printing in mind, Morris says. “How do you design with this technology? What are the pros and cons? We’ve certainly been trying to get other

So far since 2010, GE has invested $1.5 billion in 3D printing by acquiring companies like Morris Technologies, establishing new manufacturing facilities and training employees. The company took another big step last September when it

spent $1.4 billion to acquire two European firms: Sweden’s Arcam AB and Germany’s SLM Solutions Group, both of which have experience in the aerospace and healthcare industries. GE expects that both companies will improve the service side of its business by cutting customer costs on maintenance. The 3D-printing process enables the rapid creation of new and spare parts, which in turn drops costs for GE and the customer. The latest round of acquisitions also foreshadows where GE expects to be in the additive manufacturing sector 10 years from now.

Next up? The service industry. With newer materials and faster 3D printers, it’s not far-fetched to envision technicians at various work sites printing parts on demand...

By 2026, Morris says GE wants to be “the largest player” in the additive manufacturing sector, both in terms of selling machinesand equipment and providing third-party companies new to 3D printing the engineering and design talent to get them off the ground. In other words, small and midsize businesses interested in using 3D printing can head to GE Additive to buy industrial 3D printers and the necessary materials, as well as hire GE-trained, specialized technicians to demonstrate how to integrate and use 3D printers for their own business needs. That’s the future for GE, and it’s one that will only accelerate, according to Morris, as new materials and faster 3D printers allow for the printing of larger, more durable parts. With GE Additive, the company hopes to lead the charge. “We even want to sell to the competitors. We want to sell to Rolls-Royce, Philips, Honeywell and more,” Morris says. “As GE Additive, we plan to sell to the world.” n

“Press the red button! THE RED BUTTON!”

JANINE MILNE

IOT TRANSFORMS SERVICE AT MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY FIRM ELEKTA

How the IoT and centralized field service are helping radiation therapy company Elekta slash downtime for vital cancer treatment systems. Medical device manufacturer Elekta is bringing its state-of-the-art machines online to treat the world’s biggest killer — cancer.

Service, Elekta is using IoT-connected devices to deliver more proactive and predictive maintenance to its customers.

In the process, Elekta is changing from a technology-focused company to a more service-oriented firm. Product R&D, customer relationships and sales are now increasingly viewed through the lens of service.

INTERVENING BEFORE A MACHINE FAILS

Elekta’s highly complex machines for treating cancer and brain disorders are used in more than 5,000 hospitals worldwide. As an early adopter of ServiceMax’s Connected Field

A number of failure “use cases” are now regularly used for predictive maintenance. When a possible problem is signaled, Elekta, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, is able to step in and schedule system time with the customer before a failure occurs.

It all changed when Elekta established a “global service delivery model,” including centralized support, as part of the new global service function. The move had a profound effect, according to Gilday. “Prior to that change, customers would contact an engineer directly to register they had a problem and request assistance. But we switched to a centralized support model with a customer help desk (the Elekta Care Support Center), and customers now call into the support center for all service requests.” Having a centralized support model meant that Elekta was able to accelerate its utilization of remote services. Today, about a quarter of customer incidents can be solved remotely without an onsite visit. The key? Data from connected devices. This pre-emptive intervention has cut customer downtime, associated with complex vacuum system problems, by as much as 80 percent. Spare part costs are reduced by 50 percent and labor hours by 60 percent. Although the machine would still be out of action for corrective maintenance, it could be scheduled at a convenient time rather than the customer experiencing an unscheduled interruption during clinical hours. “Today we’ve got technicians who are monitoring the machines through our remote services application, identifying potential problems and initiating technician visits through ServiceMax,” says Martin Gilday, senior vice president of global service at Elekta. “With Connected Field Service, we will be able to automate the full process such that the machines themselves will detect the potential problem, and raise a case in ServiceMax for engineer intervention.”

THE SHIFT TO A SERVICE-CENTRIC MODEL When Elekta first adopted the ServiceMax platform about four years ago, it did not have a centrally managed global service function. Instead, service was delivered regionally and the service management system was configured in different ways. “That resulted in a somewhat over-engineered solution,” acknowledges Gilday.

A PROACTIVE STRATEGY

Over the last three years, the number of connected radiation machines has risen from just below 50 percent to 80 percent, a “significant milestone,” according to Gilday. “Prior to that, we would have been more focused on getting an engineer to site and response times,” he says. “Once you’ve got a majority connected installed base, your service strategy can be more proactive and predictive.” Creating additional use cases for predictive maintenance requires a close relationship with R&D, as service becomes part of the product creation process and market performance data can be fed back into R&D to enhance future designs. There are currently about 20 use cases being developed with R&D, all of which will advance the development of predictive maintenance. “This smart maintenance approach is now really beginning to deliver some significant benefits both for our customers, with regard to increased system availability, and for Elekta in terms of more efficient and cost effective service delivery,” Gilday says. n Learn more about Elekta’s story here: http://bit.ly/smaxelekta

GE REPORTS

THE IOT LIGHTS UP CONNECTED POWER PLANTS

GE Power is tapping connected technologies and Predix, the company’s platform for the Industrial Internet of Things, to keep power plants from going dark. Adapted from GE Reports If a bearing starts to wobble in Korea, will it be felt in Kuala Lumpur? The answer, increasingly, is yes. GE has been using software to monitor big machines remotely, detecting bad vibrations, pesky bearings and other potentially dangerous anomalies in jet engines, oil rigs and other equipment before they can spell trouble. The latest application of the technology is keeping its digital eyes on power plants in Asia and Australia. GE’s Power Services business recently opened a Remote Monitoring and Diagnostics Center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to help utilities prevent unplanned downtime and keep electricity flowing. The center uses hundreds of proprietary algorithms to analyze data supplied by sensors deployed on some 200 turbines, boilers, generators and other technology working across 10 countries in Asia. When the system spots a problem, it starts ingesting data every millisecond for two minutes before and after the incident to troubleshoot the concern and suggest preventive maintenance. GE says the software can provide more than 150 different ways of early warning and reduce maintenance costs by up to 30 percent. It services power plants from South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Australia. “We can zoom in on the problem’s root cause, as well as help eliminate areas that didn’t cause the issue,” says Partha Sarathy, engin-eering leader for Asia Pacific GE Power Services. Alstom, which GE acquired last year, first opened the center in November 2013 to monitor and service combined-cycle power plants. (They harness gas and waste heat to generate electricity.) GE has expanded it to include the monitoring of heavy-duty gas and steam turbines and fast and flexible power plants with jet engine technology at their core — GE calls them aeroderivatives.

GE said the center has already sent out more than 300 early warnings globally and prevented 28 forced outages in 2016. Most recently, the center helped identify and resolve a gas-valve operability challenge at an Australian utility and limit the resulting power-plant shutdown to one day, Sarathy says. The software can also oversee machines built by other manufacturers. “We believe strongly in the Industrial Internet,” Sarathy says. “We are using data to push the frontiers of thermodynamics instead of merely identifying inefficiencies and problems.” n

GE REPORTS is a daily news, video and social media hub covering GE’s transformation into the world’s largest digital industrial company. The site covers nearly all aspects of GE’s business, innovation and digital transformation, which is using software and data analytics to connect, control and improve machines and entire industries. GE Digital acquired ServiceMax in January 2017.

SEAN LYDEN

FIELD SERVICE STEERS TOWARD SELF-DRIVING TECH Letting go of the wheel to turn ‘drive time’ into ‘get stuff done time.’

mass-market traction, but recent developments signal that the productivity boon of self-driving fleets might be around the next bend.

The digital service revolution isn’t just visible in the mobile tools technicians use, or the IoTenabled machines they service. Soon, it will also affect techs in the driver’s seat where they spend considerable time every day shuttling between job sites.

DEVELOPMENT: WAYMO-DRIVEN CHRYSLER PACIFICA MINIVAN

By freeing technicians from the wheel, self-driving technologies could convert all of that wasted drive time into work time, with huge implications for productivity — and your company’s bottom line. “We often hear about service organizations shaving a few minutes off their technicians’ administrative duties and saving the company millions of dollars,” says Patrice Eberline, VP of global customer transformation at ServiceMax. “Imagine if techs could spend all of their drivetime hours productively. The efficiency gains and cost savings would be huge.” The automotive industry still needs to overcome three barriers before fully autonomous vehicles gain

BARRIER NO. 1: COST

In December, Waymo (formerly Google’s selfdriving car project) and Fiat Chrysler announced that 100 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans, equipped with Waymo’s fully self-driving technology, would be ready for testing early this year. The big news here is that Waymo brought design and production of all self-driving hardware and software in-house. “We can build a hardware suite where each sensor complements the strength of all others. Like a person’s five senses, our sensors are more useful and more powerful when we put them all together,” Waymo CEO John Krafcik said in a speech at the Detroit Auto Show in January. And he said that by designing its own LIDAR, which uses lasers to create 360-degree 3D maps of the vehicle’s surroundings, Waymo has been able to improve performance, while taking 90 percent out of the cost — from about $75,000 a few years ago to around $7,500 today.

If Waymo can spread production of their selfdriving systems across multiple automakers and models, this would further reduce the cost, making autonomy more affordable for massmarket growth — and more likely that we’ll soon see autonomous vehicles in field service.

parties involved in the final construction of the truck, the greater the complexity of integrating autonomous driving sensors with the truck chassis.

BARRIER NO. 2: CONFIDENCE DEVELOPMENT: NISSAN’S SEAMLESS AUTONOMOUS MOBILITY At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Nissan introduced an interesting solution that could give human passengers greater confidence in autonomous vehicle systems. It’s called Seamless Autonomous Mobility, or S.A.M. How does it work? When the vehicle encounters an unpredictable situation — such as new road construction — it brings itself to a safe stop and requests help from the command center. There, a mobility manager uses vehicle images and sensor data to assess the situation, choose a correct action and create a safe path around the obstruction. Once the vehicle has cleared the area, it resumes fully autonomous operations. “I like the concept of SAM and think it would be a way to give customers an additional level of comfort when an autonomous fleet is first introduced,” says David Alexander, senior analyst with Navigant Research. “Like other shared technology, such as vehicle-to-vehicle systems, it will only be effective in a large-scale open system if all vehicles share the same system. Getting other OEMs on board is the challenge here.”

BARRIER NO. 3: COMPLEXITY DEVELOPMENT: UBER FREIGHT (OTTO) INTERSTATE AUTOPILOT SYSTEM It’s one thing for self-driving sensors to be installed by a single car or truck manufacturer. But what about when a third-party upfitter mounts a truck body on a chassis or there’s a trailer attached to a Class 8 tractor? The more

But Uber Freight, with its acquisition last year of self-driving truck startup Otto, is confronting this challenge head-on by building a self-driving system that integrates with the chassis. And the company put that system to the test last October, with an autonomous beer run in Colorado. One of its retrofitted Volvo tractortrailers hauled more than 50,000 cans of Budweiser 120 miles on Interstate 25, while the Otto system controlled the truck’s acceleration, braking and steering exit to exit without human intervention. “Retrofitting vehicles is a different approach to automakers that are developing [autonomous systems] from the ground up,” says Sam Barker, an analyst for Juniper Research. “This method certainly will reduce time to market and the initial cost for logistics players in the U.S. However, the safety of these systems will be paramount and are likely to be judged meticulously.”

THE BOTTOM LINE When the Google Self-Driving Car project launched in 2009, the idea of robot cars still seemed like science fiction. But today, traditional automakers, Silicon Valley tech giants and startups are racing to launch their self-driving systems by the beginning of the next decade. “Service leaders often have to choose whether to invest in cutting drive-time or administrative tasks when looking for new efficiencies,” Eberline says. “Self-driving technology will make that decision moot since drive time and admin time will be the same thing.” The time is now to start thinking about how your service organization could soon capitalize on selfdriving tech to improve employee productivity and accelerate toward greater market share. n 21

GE OIL & GAS

IMPROVED EFFICIENCY FLOWS THROUGH MODERN FIELD SERVICE MANAGEMENT GE Oil & Gas Subsea Systems’ field service personnel work in some of the harshest and most remote environments across the globe — operating everywhere from offshore in the North Sea to the hurricaneprone waters of the Gulf of Mexico and newly discovered fields off the African coast. During the past 20 years, GE Oil & Gas has emerged as a leading service provider for subsea and offshore operations. Through individual engagements and ongoing contractual service agreements (CSAs), its 45,000 employees deliver equipment, spare parts, repairs, engineering support, monitoring, diagnostics, technical services, and, in some cases, assetperformance guarantees. In 2014, GE Oil & Gas management wanted to improve the revenue capacity of its field service operation, which they were confident could be accomplished by streamlining operations and increasing the billable utilization of their 575+ field service engineers (FSEs). But there was a problem. “To optimize field efficiency, GE Oil & Gas needed more real-time visibility into its field service operation,” says GE Oil & Gas Executive Service

Director Leigh Martin. “We needed better data on the work activities of our field service engineers. And for that, we needed a field service platform.”

COMMUNICATING THE ‘WHY’ GE Oil & Gas knew it could create visibility with ServiceMax. It was already using the platform to improve efficiency in several other profit and loss centers (P&Ls), including GE Aviation, Energy Management, Healthcare, and Power & Water. But GE Oil & Gas was a special case culture-wise. Like much of the oil and gas industry, it was heavily reliant on the deep knowledge of its FSEs. Most engagements were handled using paper forms and whichever process was customary within a particular geographical region. To ensure a smooth migration to field service automation, GE Oil & Gas would have to persuade the FSEs to forsake a familiar way of working and embrace something new — something digital.

KEEPING THE PROCESS FAMILIAR Even in 2015, it was apparent that record low oil prices were putting incredible financial pressure on offshore and subsea producers. These pressures were rippling through the industry and affecting service providers such as GE Oil & Gas. To compete in this environment, it needed to become more data driven, efficient, and productive.

“No one likes to change,” says GE Oil & Gas Information Management Subsea Services Project Manager Lydie Victoire. “But to increase profitability, we needed our people to adopt this new way of doing field service.” GE Oil & Gas executives thought the transition would be more readily accepted if the new automated process looked a lot like the old paper-based process. Victoire and ServiceMax Professional Services customized a set of field service functions for the initial project rollout. These functions ultimately replaced a legacy reporting system and more than 20 Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The customization also provided an opportunity to address specific customer and legal requirements that were unique to servicing subsea operations.

BETTER REPORTING, LESS OVERHEAD, HIGHER PROFITS GE Oil & Gas Subsea Systems’ employees are able to monitor field service in real-time and compare performance by region and FSE. Customer history provides accurate information on installed products and ensures that FSEs arrive with everything they need to complete engagements.

similarly allowing analysis of first-time x-rates, mean time between failures, performance by region, service contract end dates, preventive maintenance, and other critical data points. Additionally, FSEs are using ServiceMax on laptops and smartphones to become more productive. Mobile access allows them to complete work order information and capture customer signatures even when offline. Before ServiceMax, it might have taken weeks or months for FSEs to return signed paperwork for processing. Automating field service has greatly compressed this billing cycle and even prompted the finance department to look for ways to streamline its own workflow. n

Visit servicemax.com to learn more about GE Oil & Gas’ story.

Dashboards are also helping executives better understand their installed base, levels of service contract participation, work-order allocation, and failure patterns. Simple drag-and- drop reports are

DEREK KORTE

EXPERT ROUNDTABLE: WHAT’S THE BIGGEST OPPORTUNITY IN SERVICE?

Field service is having a moment of sorts, leaving service leaders with plenty of reasons to be optimistic. Field Service Digital asked six longtime industry insiders to pinpoint the opportunity they’re most excited for this year. Their answers run the gamut from technologies like augmented reality living up to the hype to connected machines’ data-generating potential and the blurring line between manufacturing and service.

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“The opportunity for deploying augmented reality is enormous, and the potential benefits are even greater. For example, AR has a dramatic impact on improving mean time to repair, first-time fix, and mean time between failure. While AR solutions can be complex from a feature and functionality perspective, I am excited about the opportunity for service organizations to implement low-cost, basic solutions that can be deployed rapidly to support an existing installed base. They can result in quick wins in terms of ROI and improved service levels.” — Michael Blumberg, president, Blumberg Advisory Group

“The landscape of competition is changing, especially in the context of manufacturing, with the advent of servitization and digital manufacturing. The most exciting opportunities lie in creating value through cross-industry collaborations. Understanding what your immediate customer wants or how your direct supplier and partner operates is not sufficient anymore. Leading organizations have started to recognize that they need to assess how to collaborate with a range of stakeholders, including those operating in different industries.” — Dr. Ali Bigdeli, senior research fellow in servitization, Advanced Services Group

“There are two opportunities that will drive the field service conversation in 2017: those that make the biggest splash in the media, and those that will truly transform the service industry. But one covers both ends of the spectrum: augmented reality. Whether deployed alone, or in conjunction with virtual reality, AR is not only a new technology, but also a means for service organizations to improve data gathering, business analytics and, ultimately, service delivery performance.” — Bill Pollock, president, Strategies for Growth

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“Although it has taken longer than I expected, there is growing recognition that for companies to exploit the capabilities that digitization can offer, the challenge is not so much technology, but really understanding how to use data to make a real difference to their customers’ business or disrupt the industry value chain. I am excited that this message is gaining traction, as it is key to rethinking how we view service in industry.” — Nick Frank, co-founder, Si2 Partners

“This year, I am really excited to track innovation within service — and not just innovation regarding technology deployments. I think this year will be headlined by manufacturers and service organizations finding new, innovative ways to connect with their customers, build stronger partnerships through new offerings, and drive value well beyond the service contract. This is an inflection point for service as customers and competition put pressure on service leaders to deliver well above the expected metrics and the service contract.” — Aly Pinder, director of member research & communities, The Service Council “Creating opportunities to integrate the service perspective into product development, or even using it to drive product development, is critical for service success. More and more organizations are realizing that a successful and profitable service proposition is not an afterthought but a direct contributor to thoughtful product development. They take “design for service” seriously in their product development, which creates exciting prospects for future service success and new service-based business models.” — Dr. Andreas Schroeder, senior lecturer in Information Systems, Advanced Services Group

CONTRIBUTORS

JIM BASTON

JANINE MILNE

Jim Baston is president of BBA Consulting Group Inc., a consulting and training firm in Ontario, Canada.

Janine Milne has been writing about technology and business for more than 20 years, both as a freelancer and an in-house editor.

ELLIOTT BURR

MOLLY SOCHA

Elliott Burr (@ElliottJBurr) is the senior manager of public relations and social media at ServiceMax, evangelizing the disruptive nature of modern field service management for enterprises big and small.

Molly Socha (@Molly_Socha) is a contributor at Field Service Digital and a senior editor for Original9 Media.

DEREK KORTE

NEVIN THOMPSON

Derek Korte (@derekkorte) is the editor at Field Service Digital and a senior editor at Original9 Media.

Nevin Thompson (@Nevin_ Thompson) is a journalist, copywriter and a content strategist who works in a variety of verticals.

TERRY LABAN

LEIGH WELLS

Terry LaBan (@tlaban) is a cartoonist and illustrator whose work has appeared in Mad Magazine, Nickelodeon Magazine and Details.

Leigh Wells has created images and lettering for advertising and editorial clients for more than 20 years for clients such as Time Magazine, Harperâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s and The New York Times.

SEAN LYDEN

ANDREW ZALESKI

Sean Lyden is CEO of Lyden Communications, a content strategy and editorial consulting firm. He also serves as editor for Utility Fleet Professional magazine.

Andrew Zaleski (@ajzaleski) lives in Maryland and is a regular contributor to Fortune and CNBC. He has also written for The Atlantic, Popular Science, Politico Magazine, Backchannel and elsewhere.

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