IFS Service CollABorative - Tech Talk Session with Stephen Jeffs-Watts, SVP Service Applications

Date of Meeting: 21 March 2023 09:00 AM US Eastern Time 

Stephen Jeffs-Watts Background:

• Position: SVP Service Applications
• 16 years at IFS
• 2015/2016 started work in product management in R&D
• Service Applications is the single home in R&D for all service management products.  I.e. IFS Cloud service management capability, Astea Alliance, IFS MWM (Clevest product)
• Approx 230 people in R&D
• IFS Cloud – 6 month iterations and release the product twice a year every May and November
• Planning now is for the 24R1 release which comes out a year from now
• IFS is doing strategy work now for 25R1 release (2 years from now)
• Session like these help get long term picture for 26R1 release

Slides Covered: 

• Our Mission “To power our customers moment of service, responsibly, all day, every day, at all stages of the service lifecycle”
• Vision “IFS will be the undisputed leader in Service Management, with a unique value proposition for Enterprise organizations”. 
  “We will support both Best-of-Breed and full-suite requirements, and be dominant in the 4 main service use cases:
  • Equipment-Centric
  • Outcome-Centric
  • Appointment-Centric
  • Knowledge-Centric”
• Vision – Leaders in all modalities of Service
• IFS Cloud Service Management – The journey so far
• Service Management in IFS Cloud 23R1
  • Service Lifecycle
  • Field Workers
  • Dispatchers
• Experiences that delight, Relationships that last
• Service Management in IFS Cloud 23R2
  • Unified Dispatcher Experience 2.0
  • New Scheduling Features
  • Optimization improvements
  • Adjacent Area enhancements
• Strategic investment to keep you at the top of your game
  • Insightful Service
  • Optimal Resource Allocation
  • Field Worker of the Future
  • Sustainable Service
  • Delivering Global Service
• Insightful Service for the intelligent, automated enterprise
• Insightful Service (Using Artificial Intelligence to support your business goals)
  • Travel Duration
  • Probability Assessment
  • Activity Duration
  • Intelligent Service Order
  • Service Demand
• Optimal Resource Allocation
• Field Worker of the Future
• Sustainable Service
• Delivering Global Service

Questions / Answers:

• Q: Insightful Services: Have you thought about looking at historical data looking for faults that could be a byproduct or something else, rather than directly relating to that piece of equipment? By looking at patterns and reoccurring patterns that occur, then if a trend is spotted, raise an insightful knowledge and insightful investigation task?
  A: A reasonable proportion of that type of thing will end up falling on the control systems and on some of the models that are based around those control systems, however there a couple of things IFS are doing:
  We already have the ability to have what we call the reported on equipment and then we have the actual equipment. So, we are now starting to capture every time that a faulted logged on gate 3, the technician goes out, they look at it and go, yeah, the fault was seen on Gate 3, but actually the fault occurred in the control room. And so we're starting to get that difference between “How did we see it?” Did we see the symptom rather than the cause? And how then do we handle where is the cause? And make sure we capture in both. That's the kind of information that we then need to feed back into those models and into those collection systems and analyze them alongside all the other captured data to see how we can spot those anomalies and do more anomaly detection on that kind of thing.
  And then some of that we then want to be able to feed out into a much broader closed loop, where we then start to raise engineering change requests, feed it and fix it at source.
• Q: Where can we find this roadmap?
  A: The roadmap that is produced is the feature-by-feature roadmap. They are all published in the IFS community. It'll be updated and released in line with the release of 23R1 which comes out on the 3rd Thursday of May. So somewhere around then the updated feature by feature roadmap for 23R2 and then indicative outlook for 24R1 should be published.
  Once a year, normally around the middle of the year, we update a written statement of direction document, which you know doesn't have the slides in it, but it has words against each of each of these things. And that normally comes out around the middle of the year and again gets published in the community.
• Q: You mentioned IFS cloud quite a lot, but what about the what? What about legacy IFS?
  A: So if we look at FSM alliance, those products are in support their current version. So that's 15.4 for alliance and six for FSM until the end of January 2029. So we have plenty of runway ahead of us on those products. We are not going to do what other vendors in this space have done and say boy off you go right that isn’t going to happen period.
  My team consider it their biggest obligation to make sure that all of you are able to move forward to a much better, much more sustainable, much more scalable solution in IFS cloud and not lose anything that you have today. So, I want to make that absolutely clear to all of you on this call. What we are doing is we will continue to issue quarterly updates for FSM. They will contain a combination of support updates, so defect corrections and new features. We're not stopping developing new features in the product, not for a couple of years yet. It will probably be around 2026 that we should have run out of features that we want to implement in the product. There's still three years left of development work going on the FSM product.
  And then in terms of moving you to IFS Cloud, we will provide migration tooling, things like a configuration analyzer. We've done a lot of learning from some of the early projects that have come across to try and make sure that certainly by the time that you guys move across the world will be pretty smooth and pretty seamless for you.
• Q: You talked about the road map going forward. I'm interested in along those same lines, what you're learning about implementations and how to continue to improve the implementation experience as people move to cloud.
  A: I think the first thing that we've learned is that our enablement material for our consultants, for our partners and for our customers as well needs to be improved. And there is a huge project going on internally now that will run through the whole of this year that will make a massive difference on that and certainly the observations I made from my visit when I was over there with you, I came back and asked a lot of questions of a lot of people and found a lot of interesting answers. Should we say that made me turn around and go guys. “Guys were doing the wrong thing here”.
  The second bit of learning is that a lot of our customers, especially those that have been running the portfolio products for a very long time, do not have their configurations documented, do not have their customizations documented, do not actually know the difference between the standard product that we're modelling a lot of our capability against and the end solution that they have. So, something we need to do is help with that. We need to put in place a kind of configuration and customization analyzer that can run against the portfolio product and say right, these are all the areas that you've messed around with. These need to be a focus in your implementation because we need to make sure that whatever configuration work was done there, you either need to do or you can replace with core functionality in IFS cloud.
  The other is more around the technicalities of how, like an upgrade factory so we can get people in IFS cloud baseline much quicker than you manage to get one with your real data in it.
  And also things around the kind of success offerings and say how can we tailor our success offering to say yes you're happy and you run today on FSM6, you will be as happy if not happier on IFS cloud. How do we tailor that offering to focus on those customers that are moving across from one to the other.
• Q: And then more, big picture kind of in line with some of the themes you talked about earlier, this explosion in artificial intelligence, how are you thinking about it and what impact do you see that having on the product?
  A: We've had a project internally called Minerva for a long time and that is the internal project that is feeding into a lot of the stuff I talked about with the kind of contextual awareness side. It's like an intelligent knowledge base type solution that we've been looking at.
  And the downside of what we've been finding thus far is that we still have to do a huge amount of tagging of material and identification on a lot of that material. And there's a massive amount of effort involved in doing that and getting it right.
  We've run the same kind of base knowledge without any tagging in ChatGPT recently and that provided to me credibly interesting results with a lot less effort.
  So it's one of those things that we have been looking at for a while.
  And then all of a sudden, a piece of technology comes along and changes the game in terms of making a lot more accessible. I think that's one of the good things with IFS cloud is because we don't write our own AI solution. What we'll do is we'll work out how to expose AI in our product. So we embed it a platform level and then we expose it in the use cases. Now, what that means is that we can switch technology in and out very easily.
  So, you know, we've already kind of half done that in Minerva. Well, what would happen if instead of using that technology that we were using, we just popped ChatGPT in there instead to do it for us?
  What would the end result be? And so we've actually got an investigation at the moment in labs with basis team where we're doing comparative results between something we've been working on for the best by 18 months and something we've been working on for the best part of 18 weeks.
  That that automation slide might be a lot longer if they're carry on at the space and at the pace that they're going at the moment.
  But as fast as the technology is available to us, we have an intention to consume.
• Q: Can we get a copy of the Slides?
  A: Yes, as soon as I put the disclaimers on the front of them, yes of course you can.
• Q: Have you looked at building out anything regarding tech scorecards? We've built one of our own that tracks service score, first time fix rates utilization and it also brings in our fleet scores and how they're driving and behaving. I’m always trying to get the Tech’s to have a sense of urgency to do one more call a day because today they aren’t really motivated.
  A: What we're doing is we've got a lot of the metrics that are needed for KPI reporting.
  One of the next phases of development that will be not the next release, but the one after will be the expansion of all the underlying data models for BI that are sat within IFS cloud and there we will look at which metrics we can provide out the box and actually have defined KPI measures for which things we want as aggregated data, aggregated data sources. So that you can create your dashboard but you've got all the data in a denormalized manner for you and we'll make all of those things available.
  Over the course of the next year, we might provide a few metrics out-of-the-box just to give the kind of starter pack idea.
  But at the same time, we'll make sure that we focus on making sure that the right amount of data in the right scope of data is available.

Feedback / Responses: 

• F: Data recently seen from Service Council indicates that 80% of service engineers hate administrative tasks and a very high amount of them also outsourcing various tasks through digital tools.  I.e. engineer now has a lot of digital tools, but they are asking me to do more such as sales, collecting data, etc. Please don’t forget about the human side.  It needs to be super easy when someone arrives to the site.  The phone has GPS to tell them where what data is. Make it easy please!
  R: IFS has hired 4 UX designers that are focusing on 2 specific roles. Dispatcher and Field Technician. 
• F: Release notes and product road maps that are published from IFS are very technical which is fine for the IT audience, but I think we need to have a really important discussion around adding to it for the business audience. It's not changing what we're doing, it's adding maybe an executive brief a couple of different slides, etcetera.
  R: The statement of direction documents should be more business speaker at least in some of the sections and IFS will look into this further.
• F: For our company, I would say not on a company general level but more on service operations level is still quite immature on sustainability. So, the more you could provide in terms of out-of-the-box, for example, KPI, the easier it would be to sell internally.
  R: It may be really interesting to get Caitlin to attend one of these, cause we've already started quite a lot of the kind of reporting and metrics, albeit aimed at some of our manufacturing customer base, service will be an evolution thereafter kind of in line with how far we get with the transition of the existing products into IFS cloud. And I think if you get Caitlin to show you what's been done for manufacturing, you'll start to see what is. It's not going to be the same KPIs / metrics, but at least you'll see the framework that all of our sustainability output will go into as we move forward in the development process.

Next Meeting: 18 April 2023 10:00 AM US Eastern Time
IFS Service CollABorative - Think Tank Session - Attracting and Retaining Talent

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