How the #IoT Will Force Service Providers to Measure Work They Didn't Do
For the past 100 years field service technicians have put in their 8 hours, hopefully recording each minute as billable time, billed against a customer's account, to provide revenues for their enterprise. With computerization, this business process has maybe become a bit more accurate and perhaps a bit faster, but essentially the process has remained unchanged. Charge the time. Collect the money.
Along comes the Internet of Things (IoT). The goal: to replace people services with automated machine services, reducing labour costs throughout the operational and business process improvement. These savings have to be measured.
Thankfully for service providers, the need for service will not go away with the IoT. Things, and the assets they monitor, will still require human service intervention. Instead of a panic phone call, you will see predictive maintenance notices and alarms. But, with Things now part of the process, it's no longer good enough to account for just people's time in the field. Leading service providers will be asked to take on responsibilities for monitoring these automated processes, and that means service providers will be asked to measure what they didn't do.
In an IoT world, the value provided by the service provider will be the work they didn't do in the field. Service providers should be adjusting their business model now to provide services that manage IoT business processes rather than field services.
rick@builtspace. com
Results driven buildings & facilities professional supporting clients leverage value in their buildings
8yInteresting piece, Rick. When I was managing building service contracts 15+ years ago in the UK, the service business was highly competitive and, to a certain extent, commoditized by many clients. In other words, they would often select the lowest cost. So we switched from a cost based exercise to a value based offering and reporting this value to the client regularly was the key to the relationship...but it was often a long arduous process to write these reports and always based on manual calculations of costs avoided, energy conserved and reductions in assets' life cycle costs. Sounds like it's more automated now but how many service providers are thinking this way or are they still using the old-school process?