When maintaining an installed base of equipment in operational order, either for the company or for customers, the organization and the control of the field service activity play a role in respecting the terms of the service contract (operational availability of the installed base, time taken to restore to operational condition, etc.) and in controlling costs (payroll and subcontracting, spare parts, customer penalties, etc.).

The main levers used to achieve excellence of service and to control costs are:

• the organizational model of the field service teams:
  • level of technical specialization: by supported customer technology and by type of intervention (corrective, preventive), with impacts in terms of load factor of the staff and productivity of maintenance operations,
  • team zoning: the size of the zones impacts respect for contractual deadlines for the refurbishment of equipment, the load factor of the teams and sensitivity to periods on-call at night and weekends,
  • degree of centralization of the planning and scheduling teams (global vision vs. proximity of the teams),
• processes and IS for the scheduling, control and tracking of operations:
  • from the S&OP and the geographical balance between maintenance capacity and changes in workload (new contracts, trends and seasonality of technical incidents, changes in the maintenance policy) by trading off respect for service levels and the load factor of resources, …
  • … to the scheduling of maintenance operations (prioritization of orders by customer impact, optimization of staff itineraries, etc.),
  • these processes rely on CMMS-type tools, plus modules for the planning or scheduling of the field service activity, and on technologies for the real-time communication, localization and tracking of technicians (PDA, GPS, etc.),
• organization, processes and IS used to supervise the installed base:
  • the capacity to monitor the network of equipment, to detect incidents and understand their impact on the service delivered, to focus on analyses of root causes and to take remote action on the equipment all contribute to the service and the drastic reduction in the number of interventions in the field. To achieve this end, choosing the right supervision tool that matches the capacity of the equipment to be remotely operated is crucial,
  • the organization and composition of the teams (first level non-specialists for filtering and analysis purposes, second or even third level specialists) help to optimize the balance between the skills mobilized and the reactivity of operations launched in the field,
  • finally, the end-to-end incident management system (from its appearance to the final solution) allows ongoing operations to be supervised in line with the customer service offers,
• performance methods and control:
  • finding the right balance between systematic preventive, conditional, corrective and curative maintenance, and revising the maintenance policies and procedures accordingly,
  • making the standard times more reliable, usually through Lean / 6 sigma initiatives,
  • controlling performance: service level, efficiency and effectiveness of the resources used.

Argon Consulting helps its customers to improve the performance of their field service activity:

• the diagnostic: cost-service performance, maturity of the processes and support IS (supervision, planning, scheduling and tracking, maintenance policy, performance controls), suitability of the organization of the field teams and support functions,
• definition of the paths of progress (organization, process, IS, control of performance) and quantification of the service and economic challenges,
• mobilization of the teams around a road map for change,
• change implementation support.