Just came back from a talk organised by the BCS on Field Service Technology where Steve Burrows, group IT director of Vanilla group gave us some insight on how JLA, the UK market leader in commercial laundry equipment rental, have used technology to streamline their Field Service Operations and integrated them with their ERP, CRM and billing systems.
Here are some key takeaways I picked up at the session:
- Service is the differenciator that transforms organisations from “Box Shifters” to “Business Partners”
- Getting real data immediately in the field improves accuracy and reliability that has knock on benefits on the whole of the supply chain
- Don’t assume that scaling doesn’t requires re-tuning
- The more you analyse your data, the more effective you can be in making your services attractive to your customer (example excessive break-down rates per year should prompt a service review to keep customer sweet)
- What is simple and elementry in one industry may be “rocket science” in another
Was a great talk, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
