News: Articles:
Creating a winning Team!!
By
Michael Blumberg CMC
Chief Operating Officer
D.F. Blumberg Associates, Inc.
Are your Field Service Engineers isolated road warriors? Time to
turn them into team players!
It was management guru Peter Drucker who proclaimed that our economy
has evolved from the “industrial age” into an “information
era” — an era in which workers rely on technical and
professional skills, rather than on mindless assembly-line motions.
Field engineers, Drucker says, are now “knowledge-based”
workers, for knowledge is what's needed to perform technical work.
And the best way to motivate knowledge workers, he postulates, is
to provide them with tools and technologies that enable them to
improve the productivity and efficiency of their work.
This may explain why vendors of the productivity-enhancing
products commonly used in field service (tools and technologies
such as remote diagnostics, mobile communication devices, and scheduling
systems, etc.) often promote their products as knowledge tools.
Our industry, in fact, continuously devises new tactics and deploys
new technologies to make field engineers more productive and efficient.
Then, too, leading-edge field service providers are now committed
to creating work environments populated with advanced tools and
technology. The promise and hope is that new technologies (such
as mobile communications, parts optimization tools, internet-enabled
platforms, optimized scheduling systems, geographic positioning
systems, and remote diagnostics) will result in better-skilled,
more effective field engineers.
The Team Approach
But Drucker's theories aren't just about tools and
technology. The information era has shown us that only process
— not people — can be managed, and so another
of Drucker's conclusions is that knowledge workers are most efficient
and productive when empowered to manage their work processes via
the use of knowledge tools and technology. The best way to achieve
this outcome is not by organizing workers according to the functions
they perform, but by organizing knowledge workers into groups or
teams that can provide tight controls over process and by ensuring
that information is effectively exchanged among team members vis-à-vis
technology. In essence, small teams of knowledge workers provide
more opportunities for productivity gains, greater efficiency, and
breakthrough-thinking than traditional, functional hierarchies found
within traditional, industrial-age firms.
Indeed, countless case studies have shown how companies
in the retail, banking, and healthcare industries (among others)
have re-engineered their processes and re-structured their organizations
into cross-functional teams of knowledge workers. This has resulted
in improvements to product and service quality, higher levels of
customer satisfaction, and better financial performance. Yet, curiously,
the high-tech service industry (field service and logistics in particular)
has been slow to adopt and implement these principles.
The Road Warrior Approach Persists
Yes, the “Road Warrior” approach (wherein
field service organizations employ elaborate systems and procedures
for troubleshooting and diagnosing problems and then dispatch individual
FEs to customer sites to fix them) has certainly helped both end
users and suppliers achieve enormous efficiency and productivity
gains. And yes, this approach endorses Peter Drucker's call to empower
knowledge workers through the use of advanced technology. The problem
is that many field service organizations are still managed under
a “command and control” hierarchy typical of the post-industrial
age. FEs, technical support specialists, and spare parts personnel
are brought in as needed to perform their requisite tasks on demand.
Only occasionally do these individuals work as a team, and then
only in reactive, emergency, or highly complex situations. How often
do we see FEs and related support personnel operate as a team for
the good of the process? At most, there are periodic team
planning/brainstorming sessions, sometimes resulting in long lists
of action items (which are rarely implemented). However, these team
efforts are ad-hoc at best. They do not result in any continuous
process-based improvements.
The Way it Could Be
Imagine, for a moment, a team representing all the
key elements of a service enterprise, including field service, logistics,
finance, marketing, and sales. Now imagine that this team has access
to data regarding service calls, installed base, parts usage, schematics,
billing cycles, credit status, competitive purchases, etc. —
all of which could be cross-referenced. Now suppose that the team
met on a frequent, periodic basis to review and analyze the data.
What would be the result? The team would be able to identify
trends and relationships in the data — something the
individual FEs might not be able to otherwise do so easily or quickly
(or perhaps even at all). Team members could discuss findings, observe
trends, predict/forecast future events, find root-source explanations,
consider options, and implement appropriate changes on a real-time
basis. In short, such a team could really push the envelope in terms
of creative problem solving, business re-engineering, and even business
re-invention!
I have no doubt that identifying and implementing
strategic, tactical, and operational-level improvements in this
way would lead to higher levels of productivity, efficiency, and
quality. This, in turn, would result in additional benefits: higher
customer satisfaction, expanded service portfolios, increased revenue
and market share, shorter turnaround times, higher levels of service
quality, lower DOA (parts Dead-on-Arrival) and NTF (No Trouble Found)
rates, improved cash flow, lower inventory expenses, etc. Such improvements
would occur not merely because new processes are identified, but
also because team members have a vested interest in making the changes
work.
Is Time of the Essence?
Perhaps because field service is such a time-sensitive
activity, the team approach to managing field service organizations
is usually viewed as too time-consuming to be practical. Thought-based
processes are generally reserved for special projects, performed
only by an experienced manager, executive, or outside expert, and
only when a problem becomes too severe to allow it to continue —
or when other options have been exhausted. Service professionals
often feel that processes must be automatic for results to occur;
they're hesitant to rely on human insight and innovating —
afraid that such approaches will actually prevent FEs and
other support personnel from going about their routine jobs.
Yet while time is always a factor in service (there's
a continual demand to perform service faster, and some market segments
and customers are willing to pay a premium for speed) time could
be even more valuable if it were used in a more strategic and tactical
way. Just think of the different role time plays in the medical
or financial worlds: practitioners in those fields realize it takes
time for wounds to heal or for interest to compound. Likewise, we
in the field service industry need to recognize that it takes time
for teams to find answers to technical questions, and to work through
the process, if we want to create performance breakthroughs that
will truly delight and astound our customers.
We Need to Do More
By using technology to empower field service personnel,
we are practicing only part of Drucker's theory. And while there
are a lot of gurus out there preaching the importance of team-building
skills, they are not providing enough practical examples of how
teams, process, and technology can work in tandem to provide
exceptional performance in the areas of service quality, productivity,
and efficiency. It's clear that we, as an industry, need to do much
more than simply pay lip service to the importance of knowledge
workers and team building. We need to utilize technology, processes,
and teams (i.e., people) in tandem, on a consistent basis, in developing
and implementing a Six Sigma or service-quality management program.
This is not a new concept, but it's one that the field service industry
needs to embrace more strongly, and that will only happen if we
build Six Sigma programs, which incorporate the trinity
of people, process, and technology, into our standard operating
procedures. We certainly have access to a vast array of advanced
tools and technology that can enhance our ability to implement Six
Sigma processes and enable us to capitalize on the latest tends
in business management such as CRM and SCM in the manner envisioned
by management gurus like Peter Drucker.
Michael R. Blumberg, CMC, an authority on
marketing research/strategy formulation in the high-technology service
market, is COO of D.F. Blumberg & Associates, Inc, a Fort Washington,
PA based management consulting firm that provides client services
in strategic planning, market research, productivity improvement,
and management systems design and implementation. You may reach
him at michaelb@dfba.com
or (215) 643-9060.
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