Service CollABorative June 2024 - Meet the Member with Ged Cranny of Konica Minolta

IFS Service CollABorative: Think Tank – Meet the Member Session with Ged Cranny of Konica Minolta

Date of Meeting: 18 June 2024 10:00 AM US Eastern Standard Time

Ged Cranny’s Presentation:

Slide: About Ged

• I'm 62 years old going on towards my 63rd. I'm married to a lady called Dee. I have one son, 2 grandchildren. I've worked in the print since about 45 to 47 years, with little bits of time off. I came from a training photocopy engineer and I only give up my tool case in 2004 when we merged Konica and Minolta. And I was already a director of Konica, but went out with the engineers on a Friday when I was in my local area and they would actually ring me up and say you're in the area, come out. We want to tell you what's wrong. We have brilliant ideas in the management we come up with great processes. We're not with the customer. So, sit with the engineers, they'll tell you why everything's wrong or everything's right. What's good, what's bad. So, I tried to follow that sort of ethos in my life. I got a certain set of skills from a company called Danker, which was to merge companies together and Konica were going from a branch centric way of working to a hub in the UK, and they asked me to come and work for them to break this branch centric way of working and turn to a hub. We were losing about half a million a year and within four years, we turned that into the business, making £4 million profit in the UK just before the merger. Not just by reducing headcount because actually we grew but by the logistics feeds. Putting the logistics feeds right, removing stock. So, when I first came there was over £5 million worth of stock and a 40,000 write off every single month of stock. So, we took things like that out. So, I got the love for change at that point. I've also got two grandchildren so we've got to change.

Slide: Beu International Service – For our Subsidiaries in FY23 (Our “Behind the Curtain” Services)

• A little bit about Konica Minolta. The screen in front of you just gives a flash of what service looks like in Europe. We are 150 years old. We started off as a chemical company. We've got diverse from print to medical to visualisation and tools that as you walk towards a building, it can actually open the doors for you because it knows you're coming. We've already got a picture of you from security and all of the software that goes behind that. We are in all areas of print. We've got medical, as I said, and we need to bring all these together because they're all away from each other. But as you can see, we started in the 2000s, as everybody else would have with somebody coming through and talking about shift left.

Slide: Field Service Strategy

• Shift left if we're all truthful in service came from the accountants and it was, let's do everything cheaper because if you go to the left it costs you a lot less to do the instance. The engineers didn't buy into it. The sales people didn't buy it. The customers definitely weren't buying into it, because we weren't talking a story that made them happy because we were talking a story of cuts and cheapness. In around about 2019, the management team in Europe got together. They put a proposal across the table and it was called remote by default. The structure around remote by default talked very simply. Enable and centralised specialists to support local FSEs, so again we were talking things like smart hands, enable fields to be more agile, not just direct by default. As soon as the call came in a clock starts in our business we send an engineer. He may not have the right parts, he may not have the right thing to fix the job, but we got there because our contracts were all written for the customers to have an engineer still in front of them within 4 hours. And by the way, we're good at it. But the world moves on. Somebody invented this thing called the iPad. It became with apps. So instead of business leading what customers learnt and got five years after, suddenly the business was getting told by people. I can Google that I can get this answer why I why aren't these things available? So you've got to start looking at making the opportunities for customers to come in. So, we set some really simple targets. Reducing field service visits to 20% of our traditional business. At that point when we made that bold statement, we were probably sat at about 90% went to fail and 10% fixed. And for our IT side of the business, we want to state that 5% because in the IT side of the world and where we started to support software, we were finding that people were much happier to come to the desks. The products were set in the right way. One of the things we had to do, was we had to look at the way our systems worked. So, when you start talking about remote by default, you find that your products aren't designed to be remote by default. Then we actually designed for your engineers to go in and take the machine to pieces. To add value because we all talk about the engineers going on and being trusted advisor to the customer. But ask yourself a question, have you ever gone to your local electrical store, bought a brand new TV or a brand new electrical piece of equipment for your kitchen, for your car or anything like that and thought, boy, I can't wait to see an engineer taking this to pieces. I asked myself that question all the time and the answer is no. I've never bought anything to do that. So for me, the answer is the customer wants uptime. The customer buys up time, so the quickest way to improve that uptime is to be able to give solutions to the desk area. We set things like 3 reasons for a call, so we have 80 different reasons why an engineer can go to the field and as a customer talks to us on the phone, we decide which one of them 80 numbers will give them, because each one of them comes with a little bit more urgency. Fitting of the parts, that are not done by the customer because the machines aren't designed that way. And chargeable contract work where a customer turns around and says, actually I don't want to put the toner in my machine, so we can say well actually if you don’t want to put the toner machine we can sell you a resource that will do that for you and come every day between 11 and 12.

Slide: From Field First to Remote First

• So you built your strategy, you build what you want to do, and then you start looking at your actual processes. So, from field first which is our way, to remote by default which is our target, we started to look and then you look at what the business demands are. Not just the financial demands, but the logistical supply demands. Then you start looking at, will our customers accept this? How do we tell the story to our customers? How do we get that into the right way? Then you really start looking under the bonnet. And you look at the IT systems and review and you find out all your IT systems, everything is designed to send an engineer to site. You've got to completely rewrite your processes. You've got to review all of your tools, and you've almost got to turn your IT system up on its head. You can't do that in a year. You've got to have a four or five year plan.  
• Then you hit culture. Culture will eat strategy for breakfast. And then you review your processes again, against the culture. So, you've looked at your process, review your process, change your processes, then you've got to go back in and you've got to do your training and development. Looking back at your culture, how do you need to change? How do you tell a story to the people that actually you don't want to rid of them? You actually want them on the desk. So for instance, automated scheduling comes into this, because as you review your tools, we invested in automated scheduling. And people say, well, you gone to remote by default. Why are you automatically scheduling your field engineers? Because when we've spent time in the desks with our people, it's more important that we get everything right. The engineer has the right part. He has the right skill set. He's got the secondary skill that you need. You're going to an airport, you need your security passes. You need your passport. So, all these things can be stored within the automated planning tool. So, these things have got to be set, but then you've got to tell that story to the engineers because the engineers need to understand, well wait a minute, I used to speak to somebody. You tell that to your planners and the planners say, well, you're getting rid of me and you're saying no, no, no. You've become an exception handler. But you also now become part of our knowledge base. So, when a customer comes through our knowledge base, and we fail to see a fix, the customer will look at the loop and we find out why there's a problem. Is it something we can fix? Who can I send that to when you control improving the knowledge base by sending it to first line, second line, and who can write a new report that can go in the knowledge base and the customer gets help as we all do, I'll Google it. I'll look it up looking up on duckduck. So again, don't just look at the training as being my engineers and my planners. It's your sales force because your sales force have got to resell and the way to think and also to your customers. AND I know it sounds a bit bad to say you've got to train your customers, but actually talk to your customers because they've got the same problems and they've got the same needs with their customers and you might actually add them in the story they're going.
• And then set yourself some targets, really simple targets and things about when the remote by design comes in, what will that actually do to your business? What will that do to your response times? What will that do to your customer contracts? How do you rewrite your custom contracts? When does that come back in? What is your sales process? So, if your sales process is 5 years and you've got 1000 customers, then we break it down into 200 customers a year on average should change. So, you're going to meet and bump into them customers with the new products and the last one's going to arrive in five years time. So how do you look after the early adopters? How do you look after the, the people who are going to get them remote by design within five years time. So these are the things you need to take in monitor measure. Keep feeding back to the factory the feedback to the factory loop is super important. Don't just do it as a as a local thing and then review. Adapt your plan and then go all the way back to the start and keep doing round here.

Slide: Review

• So again, just to quickly review what I just said.
• Business needs, the changing customer needs. Look at your business. It'll be different from mine. You'll have different demographics. You'll have different age groups within there.
• Look at your IT systems because your IT systems are designed at the target that you've been aiming at. In our case for 40 odd years. Adapt your processes, as you adapt your IT systems, look at your support tool sets. I can't say it enough.
• Go to your culture. Talk to the people. Sit down if you're at different level, you're not face to face with your engineers, and your sales force. Take the time. Go sit with them. Take them out for lunch. Find out what the fears are. The biggest fears at the present moment time is, do I have a job in three weeks time?
• Training and development and then look at your reporting. You're reporting again, is all geared towards your field, so bring your reporting to start looking.

Slide: We need to re-think: Incident route & shift left future and traditional business

• So we started to look at the way we fed. So, we took these pictures and what we said was how do we foresee our future customers coming to see us? So, self help customer, yeah, people are going to want to use the telephone. They want to text us. They want to e-mail, they want to use social media. We've got we've had monitoring tools since the 80s but we never really kicked them into gear. So, we've really worked on making sure that there's measurement of the tools and I'll show you that in a few seconds. You want to have a bot in there that's automatically helping people and can see where people are getting stuck as the search themselves and maybe offering help. Maybe the opportunity for the bot to actually speak. There's some very good ones in the marketplace. But when something gets upgraded, if it goes to second line and 1st and second line in the actually fix it, update the knowledge base so that the Autobot gets updated, the customer gets updated. Don't just keep the knowledge in this place. This is one of our problems before. These were just areas of different tool sets that we have to support. So, this is our visualisation tool that we created ourselves, so that the people on the desk can talk to somebody on their mobile, draw on the screen of the customer and be able to support them. So, all these different tools, and the idea was if we fail, and we were aiming for only 5%. It goes into a ticketing tool, which we'll talk about in a minute. We send that out to a generalist specialist, a third party person, but we only want 20% of our normal work to go at the engineers, and again going back to that three reasons for a call. I know it's a very, very simple drawing, but actually simple things sometimes work and you're not doing the technical things. Technical drawings are great for technical people. When you get to the sales people. No disrespect to anybody who sells on this on this call, they want to know what the answer is. So, the answer is we wanted to get down to 20%. We're nowhere near yet. We're not even crossed the 50% mark. We're moving in the right direction and I'll show you some tools that we're going to use.

Slide: Future Service Outline

• This was a visualisation when we started to look at the support. There's another one beyond this, which field services over at the left hand side and this is showing that service desk now is coming further and further over into our business. We want to bring our medical our ITS, ICW, so all the different areas of our business together, to be using the monitoring tools. That's a ticketing tool we have at the present moment in time. Next generation field service is our FSM tool which is the IFS tool, and how these all fit together and what we want to be able to do when we get here is the decision making in our in our FSM tool, the scheduler says not just do I send somebody who is a traditional business specialist, do I send a third party or do I send a generalist? So, I again I always use the analogy that as a photocopier engineer I could change modems. But I was once in Germany, I was flying back to the UK the next day and I saw that the IT system was down in one of our offices which I was travelling to literally the next day when I landed in Heathrow. And I said, what's the matter with that? And he said, oh, the modem's down here. We're going to send a specialist over on the plane. I said give it to me, I'll do it tomorrow for him. So, I went and I just rang back to their IT, told them that I was plugging the systems in. They could see me do it. They did all the configuration. I was a generalist. We fixed it. We left the specialist in the desk area. So this was just a really high level, how we, how we wanted to do it.

Slide: Monitor New Systems

• So, in the scheduling tool that we got, we wanted to know that actually we were automatically scheduling. So, when something goes into our PSO tool, we measure it. So, in these 18,000 incidents that went over, 92% of them our rules, our decision making said it automatically schedules. When in the manual, i.e. the rule set broke and it wasn't going to work, 7.9% of the time over this period we were looking at. I can see the total calls. And what this is, this is a balancer because what we're looking at is we're changing behaviours. So, on this side, we're looking at our processes. Did we get our processes right when the system gets the opportunity to plan, did the skill sets work? Do the addresses work do the contractual information going through and our response times is that working, yes. On this side, it's telling us that manually at that point 42% of the incidents will be manually planned. So, what we did from that we started to identify with spreadsheets who the individuals who were manually planning, asking the question and some of it was culture. I plan. Simple, so this was just a real simple thing that we did just to show you some routes, 60% auto planning. And direct PSO 92%, cost per shift has increased by 17% in the area where we've done this, so it's not just auto planning, it's improving the cost per shift and the SLA achievement is up by 20%. We're saying rule sets good. Now let's get these things away and let's get it even higher for the business.

Slide: Monitoring

• As you notice, I'm big on scales. So, what we want to do is, we want to be able to monitor what's happening in our service desks. Is that actually going in the performance of our field service, and does it have an impact on the financials? And the base and the weight our investment in use of tools. So our investment in the IFS tool, our investment in the RSP and the service desk tools. What we wanted to be able to do was drill down from head office in Europe down to country, down to product area. So, is it production print? Is it office? Is it a 3A, A4? We could be able to look at that by date range. We want to be able to look at dashboards. We want to look at benchmarking. So, what we did was we created this.

Slide: Maturity Matrix

• And from this, it lets us know our maturity level. So, we can see that the maturity level and scores 4.1. The top score is 5. Financials 2.2. Remember in that we get great targets. So, you'll see in a minute it is actually improving. Your overall maturity level, but also we started to pick out certain tools that come from the factory. That means we get more IoT, we're able to work bidirectional. So RSP, not just delivery, RSP connected, RSP usage per call. So, we can start to see that growth. The direction then we can drill down to different knocks and talk to them.
• Our every link tool that we built ourselves, the usage, but also the actual hit rate. So, having that visualisation, one in two, it works. But we're only using it 1% at the time because guess what, the engineers on the 1st and second line say well, I know what I'm looking at. So, it's talking to them about actually you're promoting the company and you're doing different things.

Slide: Maturity Score 2022 V 2023

• So just to give you a quick brief overview year on year. The service desk went from a maturity of 3.4 to 4.1. So, we had a 21% up lift.
• Remote by default went up from 1.5 to 2.8%, so that's getting tool sets in place so we can actually start to automatically monitor, even save the customer making a call because we can actually make adjustments in the background if our contracts allow us to.
• Field service, remembering that we're looking for reduction in field service which would then improve the maturity. So that's gone up. So still even a 10% there.
• In the financials we've got 22% improvement.
• And overall the maturity matrix is 27%. So, we've built tools in to monitor it. We've built tools into try and develop that. Where are we? The journey gets longer as we go, if that makes any sense. So, as we get further down the line, we decide, oh, wait a minute. We could do a little bit more or we could do a bit less, we need to change direction.
• Remote by default is not a destination, it's a continual journey. I think it's the journey to the end of the universe if you get there, there's a cafe and the food talks to you. If anybody knows the hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy, you know what I'm talking about.

Questions / Answers / Feedback / Responses:

• Q: Yeah, Ged, thanks very much. I really appreciate your candid view on this as well and very nice insights on the culture and on the transformation. So, I think we're all going for the same through the same or very similar journeys at least. When you talked about your resourcing and then planning, you talked about these generalist specialist and third party. Do you mind sharing approximately what percentage is that for your company. Like what percentage of each cohort is there? Generally specialist and the third party because we're also trying to figure out the flex zone and third party type of service. So what percentage is that for you if you can share that?
• A: I'm too early to give you figures to say we're mature enough to say, yeah, 30% is going to 3rd party store contractor. 50% is staying in field and the specialist will be the desk. So, one of the selling points to our engineers in the field who've got a long service with us. Our average age is mid 50s for our engineers, so we've also got the issue of people leaving to retire. One of them sat in front of you. But the target is to get to where it's optimal, so for example, the reason we've invested in the IFS tool is when the scheduling tool gets the opportunity to send an incident by geography, it looks and it says, OK, what's the best resource to meet our contractual targets, to do the job in the best possible time, and to do it at the best financial cost. So, for instance, if I'm in northern Scotland, it's stupid for me to send one of my engineers, so I would put that out to the to the partner. The way I currently the way I currently do that is I give the partner all of my machines in that that post code. So, they will give me a price that they will take that for. Now they might take that for a minimum of €45 per month. I might be getting €40 a month. Now, one of the things we're working with our partners, we're working with third parties at the moment is to say, right, OK, we're going to triage because we're going to do a lot more triage on our desks. We're going to do a lot more monitoring. So why am I going to give you all my machines, take a loss and I'm going to do all your triage for you, because they're actually on contract to me. So, we're going to change it so that we do the triage when the incident comes, the system will choose, is one of my resources that I've got we're sending all the way from Edinburgh to this call or is it better to use the third party for this? And will we meet the response times and maybe long term something I've asked for the product is to be able to offer it in a sort of uber type way. For instance, I don't really want to retire 100% of the year. I would like to work certain parts of the year. Wouldn't it be great if I could login in the busy times of the year, see that I'm accredited Konica Minolta engineer. I keep my accreditation up so as a business we can sell that accreditation and the extra training and extra years accreditation and then like Uber, I bid for the job. Now for instance, you could have Sarah and me and Sarah is a five star. I'm only a three star. So, in the 1st 20 minutes, Sarah sees it, but I don't. In the next half an hour we both get to see it, but if Sarah bid for that job at the price that was up on the screen, they would take Sarah even if I'd already bid it. They might wait 10 minutes in the system, and this is something we're trying to work out now. How and what that looks like because in the old days we always went and we took the machines in rural areas and we give them to the third parties at a fixed price. We're trying to make it on that flex because we're going to do all the remote service.

• Q: I saw in your flow that you're presenting things to your third parties and I you just mentioned it a little bit as well. We're presenting it to them seeing when they can take it. Do you have that process automated or is that something that's manually managed? The presentation, the crowdsourcing, if you will?
• A: So that's what we're building. We're in year 2. We've done rollouts to 770 of our engineers across Europe at the present moment time. We've still got double that to go, but now we're starting to get the system in place, the system delivering calls as we deliver them at the present moment in time. The desk starting to become more efficient, so all of the IoT gaining more and more. We don't sell a machine now without the IoT connected. If the customer for security reasons or whatever decide that they don't want the IoT working, then we're happy to do that, but there is 2 tier pricing because obviously we it costs us more to service if they don't. So, we're bringing all that together and we're working with IFS to see in the road map that we can automate it completely, because we just put the engineers skill sets for the people who agreed to do this or the people who are accredited within our system. We give them a points value and when you build the points value into the IFS PSO tool. It would automatically, for instance, let's say you want to be able to flex in a big city like for instance Paris or Berlin for the really busy times of your year. Then you can turn around and you can actually put in a value for each period. So, for instance in the quiet period when everybody's on holiday, you really don't think one thing's going out with third party, use your current staff, unless you're going to send them to Marseille or something. So that algorithm will get built. At this moment in time we are doing what we've always done, reviewing it, manually talking to our people because we haven't built the app. But our aim is to build the app.
• F: OK, So we are building that app, I'll just put that out there. The contractor crowdsourcing where we identify which technicians, because we have a pretty large augmented workforce as well, on top of our W2 technicians and we're working on that. I've got my workshop set for July 15th. If anybody wants to compare notes after that, I'd love to share that.
• R: It's not an easy one because again, it's cultures, its understanding, I find one of our biggest problems is, because we're 150 years old because we're a Japanese company, because we do things traditionally and everybody bows to each other and we're all polite, that changes the “Why would you do that?” Yeah, right. OK. The world changed around us. We need to change now. We don't want to be the last tree standing in the middle of the carpark.
• F: It's interesting you say that because I had a conversation recently with a friend of mine who is in a senior leadership position at Schneider Electric and we hadn't caught up in a while and we were just talking about a lot of different things that are happening in the space and we started talking about the volume and the pace of change. And when we talk about change, a lot of times within our groups, whether it's groups like this, podcast content, events, et cetera, we talk about it through the lens of managing change with the frontline workforce. And that's always the perspective we're looking at it from, which obviously is relevant, it's important, but the conversation he and I ended up having is, how much of the resistance of change is actually at the top levels? I mean, I think it's interesting and obviously it varies tremendously from company to company, it has so much to do with who's in those positions and what their mindset is and those sorts of things, but it just dawned on me that we talk a lot about how to manage change down. I think it would be helpful to continue having conversations and creating content about how to influence change up. We just had a future of field service event last week in in Cologne and there was a gentleman there asking how do I know if it's worth my energy to try to influence up? Or if it's just kind of a lost cause? And obviously there was no way for me to answer that question for him without understanding more about his specific case, but I've talked to a lot of leaders over the years who have this mindset like a lot of you have, which is realising what's possible, driving toward innovation and in some organisations it's ultimately embraced, it's ultimately incorporated, et cetera. But there are situations where unfortunately they're really fighting an uphill battle that is nearly impossible to win. And I just think it's a really interesting conversation.
• R: One of my old leaders, he came in from the outside Konica and Minolta like I did and he watched my first presentation. I went in with my slides quite happy. I walked out with my name left on the page. And I said to him, what did I do wrong? And him and I used to talk to each other on a noble board. We literally made a whole wall of his office with the noble board. And we just literally walked round and we talked to each other on it. So, one day he turned around to me and said I want to give 95% of our customers 4 hour service. And I said that's fantastic, but you sell an average 4 hour service. So, I said you need 60% in 4 hours and 5% going over 8 hours. And he said yeah, but I'm getting killed by the board. I said the board don't understand. So, we built a presentation for each member of the board. So, the presentation was about this. Why would you go to 95% and what we sell as a business. So, what we sell was to the Salesforce. The how much it was going to cost us to make each step was to the finance director and the MD. And we built little things in that to each person and little questions. Did we win on the first day? No. Still, the sales director, because he wanted the easiest path to his door to go through, to sell, to be able to send 95% of our customers, get 4 hour service. Well, if you want some fun with your management, if you do average response times, if your average response time is 4 hours, because I know this won't easy for me, get a white piece of paper on a noble board and do 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10. Stop at 10. It makes it easier. And above it, say to them right, OK, put 95. You've got 100 calls. Put 95 of them before the four wherever you want to do it. But what they do is just say, spread it. And when you go over it, you go below it, and you multiply by whatever they put above it. And then you divide by the 10. And guess what? It usually comes with a 1 in front of it. And you say, right, OK, there's your 95%. Are you selling one hour service? If you're going to sell one hour service in our business, could we get extra money? Can we do this? The salesman, the sales director, will tell you no. And this is the thing. You can't knock on the door once. Because your enthusiasm and your knowledge got you to that door, and to go through that door and be excited. You can't expect everybody to be excited, right? I'm probably one of the few English people in this call. I get excited about a thing called Cricket, but baseball puts me to sleep. So, I go with my American friends and they go to baseball and everybody whoops and I say, well, nobody touched the ball in nine innings and you all think it's great. And I said, at least in cricket, I see them whack the ball. Somebody gets hit with the ball or there's something going on, and there's alcohol, which is good. So you've got to remember your enthusiasm about your knowledge and about your area of your business is not shared by different people. Take that, teach them. Knock on the door once. Get refused. Find out what you did wrong. Go back again, sell to the people. It's our job as leaders to sell the ideas that will improve the life of our customers and our engineers. And that's my ethos is to do that. The engineers are brilliant. They go out and fix things that I'm useless at fixing. My job is to protect them, to put the tools there to help them do the jobs right. To help us deliver the services to our customers, to help them excel, for our customers to be happy and to do that with a profit.

• Q: At the beginning of your presentation, you were talking about the initial concept of shift left, and from a customer's perspective, all that means is Konica Minolta wanting to do things cheaper, to do less work. Now ultimately, the way to get that right, and you said this is to focus on the up time. But how did you successfully shift that narrative? Because I think that's something that companies struggle with as well, particularly when we're talking about adopting that remote by default or remote first approach is, how to shift the conversation from the transactional model to a value-based model where it's about the up time. It's about the outcome. It's not about the method of achieving that.
• A: We have some really large customers linked to our government, and I used to have to go and see them on a quarterly basis. And generally these things started off with the sales people when they tried to sell new things and they took the token engineer up there so that somebody could crucify the engineer. So, all of the wrongs of the business, that's the person you speak to, everything is right. The six of us are all here to help you. And there was an innovation section. This guy in one of the particular places I went to, if there was 200 items on the contract list, he started at one. He finished at 200, 5 hours later and it was the worst meeting I ever went to. There was no value to it for him. He was ticking boxes to his bosses above. We got to the innovation bit, and we just took NPS score on board. I took some slides and it's a live system that we use and purposefully make sure that I didn't have his data in it. So, I went through it, some of his staff had worked in places where NPS was used. This is like 7-8 years ago. And at the end of it, the guy went up to me and said, that's fantastic, but that's not my data. So, I said if I put that in front of you next time I come, and it's your data and I'll even point out your top ten negative customers. And he bit to it. The next conversation we had, he wanted to start with NPS. The token person for crucifixion wasn't the one engineer anymore, because I didn't even have 10 customers who complained badly. What I had was, and it matched their list, and I had the response times, and they had the setup we had behind it because I had a story behind how things worked. If something was less than a 6, the local manager had to ring the person who put that complaint in, talked to them not as a complaint, just talk to them about what did we do wrong? What could we done better? A lot of people who give you a 5 or a 6 will always say to you, oh, I just give fives. You go, yeah, that's great. How do I get a 6? How do I get a 7? So that's what we did. And again, I'll go back to what I said to you about influencing your board. Look at your crowd, look at your customers, join in. Service shouldn't be something in the background of your business. It should be right at the front of your business. Usually, your competitors got a yellow one of what you sell or a blue one of what you sell. And two, the non-initiated. Outside the print there's nobody gets excited about print except people in print. I know the insides out of different machines and what would be good and what would be bad. You guys know what's a good product in yours and what's a bad product in yours or what would really suit a certain type of customer board and suit another one. And we should be at the front of our businesses. We shouldn't be hiding in the corner. The most frightening thing for me to do is stand on stage in front of people and I have to practise. I have to think what I'm going to say because if I get nervous everything goes backwards to me and generally. It's not the nicest place, but as a leader you have to go on the stage for your team. When there's a trophy to be picked up, don't go on stage, let your team go on stage and pick it up. And you walk away with a smile on your face because you know that they took the tools, they took the strategy, they took everything and they delivered on it. And your job is to make sure you get those tools for them. So, my advice is, be upfront, be in front of people. Listen to what your customers are telling you their problems are and work out how your product can help them help their customers. Because you do that, you become part of their business. Do I get it right all the time? No, but it seems to have worked over the years.
• F: And that's a theme. The same thing you said about knocking on the door when you're talking about innovation, you're not going to win everyone over the first time. You're not going to get it right every time. But you keep showing up. So it's that resilience. It's that tenacity. I think that that's really important. The other thing you mentioned that I just think is worth reiterating when we think about, again, moving toward a remote by default or an increasingly remote service delivery model is, you said, a lot of these technicians are afraid they're going to lose their job because of this. And I think this is something that I find interesting because in leadership roles, we know there's this tremendous shortage of talent. We know that regardless of how much technology we're introducing, it's not to replace the workforce. It's to help be able to continue to meet the needs with all of the constrictions and complexity that exists. But we have to remember they don't know that. They don't necessarily see that bigger picture, and regardless of what we know, that emotional response for them is very valid. So, I think sometimes we can overlook the need to reinforce and reassure, specific to that point because we know that there's so many jobs to fill. But for these people who are facing the introduction of these tools, that is in the back of their mind and we have to remember that.
• The other thing I was thinking of when you were talking a little bit about the future state and this idea of people that have reached retirement age that maybe don't want to work full time or they don't want to travel anymore, but they want to tag in at times and how do we take that knowledge and expertise and still be able to leverage it for the business. I think there's also an element here of again the art of what's possible and the reimagining service delivery. There are also ways that that becomes more compelling for new talent, right? So, the ways that you can introduce different structuring of roles, more flexibility, those sorts of things. It can help on both sides, right? It can help you think about how you can continue to leverage some of the talent that might not want to be full time, might not want to be in the field all the time, but may still want to be involved. But it also offers you the opportunity to really get a lot more creative in ways that can attract the new talent.
• R: I totally agree. When I did a project in 2019, because we were talking about outsourcing the A4 products. They are marginal on profit compared to the year 3, so I talked to lots of nice people, lots of nice third parties, our dealers, some of our distributors. And the thing kept on coming back the same. If we're going to control from the desks backwards, we need a much more flexible system instead of giving everything away. And then at that point I started reading about the gig economy. I have a 41 year old son, so it's always been my fear when he got into his 40s and became an influencer in his company that he didn't use paper. He never used paper. So, you could see that was a changing way of thinking. But also his way of working is completely different than my idea of getting up at 5:00 o'clock in the morning, walking my dog, getting nutritious for 7:00 o'clock doing the work, being away from home, coming back on a Friday night, if I was lucky, being away on a Sunday night. That wasn't the work ethic and his thing was well, I’ll do a job here and I'll do a job there. I might have two jobs. And when I started reading about the gig economy, that's exactly what people want. They want to be able to have flexible skills. And in the summer months, I'll go ride my bike around London delivering Courier, and in the winter months, I'll be a printer engineer. And if you look at your algorithm, I don't know how your businesses work, but mine very much follow the universities and the schools. So, for instance, September, October, my wife didn't see me when I was a field engineer because literally the 5th of September came, the universities from our schools were back. And then you get into July and August and you go down to 60% volume. And then any other sort of demands that you've got, people don't want you on the sites because they're on skeleton staff. So, you start thinking about it and you start going OK, so I don't employ the staff. I employ the staff to do the work when I need to work, so I don't have that 20% of staff just to cover for the burst. I don't have that 20% stuff where I'm paying for their holidays and I know I sound really awful at this time. I'm not because I really do like engineers and I really do believe in people are the business. But at the end of the day, if you're going to be profitable, you want to be focusing your revenues in the right direction so you could spend a little bit more per incident, because actually you're not paying for the dead time. And those were things that I saw and you could attract younger people into the businesses because what you're doing is giving them a multitude of skills instead of just one. So they with their other type jobs that they do come with come with new skills. And I have to be honest, customer service skills are dying for me. It's very it's very transactional. So, people who come and they've worked with multiple industries or they do work with multiple industries, they're sort of entrepreneurial. Actually, they're really good usually in that customer service because they know the next job could be the last job. So yeah, it's not just the top end, it is the bottom end.
• F: I think it's interesting and I love your background, rethink what's possible. The event we had last week, there was one of the attendees did a bit of a write up about it on social media and it was about breaking the norms. It's great to have 150 year history, but it's not great if you're dragged into that legacy. So, you have to continue to think about what's possible. I love that message. And the specifics of what you shared today about how you're doing that, how far you've come, what's next, and also that reality that there isn't a finish line, it's not an end goal you're trying to get to, it's a continuous journey, I think is all wonderful insight. So thank you so very much for taking the time to share with everyone.

Next Meeting:  September 2024 TBD

IFS Service CollABorative - Tech Talk Session: How IFS is innovating with AI

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