Mobile Field Force

Mobile Field Force

John Pomerleau, Motorola: How Mobility is Impacting Field Service, from Field Service 2013

In this presentation from Field Service 2013, John Pomerleau, Principal of Field Operations Systems at Motorola Solutions, reveals how Motorola's mobile field force stays on top of today's rapidly changing mobile trends.  

Video transcript:

We’re going to talk about a little bit about mobility and how it is impacting the field of service business. So to kind of state some of the obvious things that are going on in the business, you take a look at the first chart. Mobility obviously is in the top of mind for all the service businesses. In the route delivery business, my direct store delivery business, mobility is on top of the mind. One of the main responsibilities I have inside of Motorola is to look at the field service business and the route sales business for US and Canada as well as our team has investment responsibilities what the next devices are going to look like based on feedback such as groups like these. So it’s pretty exciting. We also have resources as far as working with our larger customers and partners as far as what applications are relevant and where the operating systems are going. So it’s a little bit about who I am. So we watch numbers like this. So obviously 87%, it’s top of mind. Mobility-what am I going to do with it? How am I going to do it? And I bet you, there’s a clicker here somewhere. Is it there? Back there, about 100 yards back that way… or it could be on the podium.

When we take a look at 2009, there was zero tablets basically, measurable as far as then and within 2011, I think we saw about 17 million and I think we’re expecting somewhere in 2015 about 320 million tablets. They hit the market basically to be out there and it’s all consumers all around the world. So we could see the growth there as well. The other thing we see is well, if we could see that. I’m practically blind any ways. But the organization is seeing it as a competitive difference. What can I do to equip my service technicians the right information at the right time and basically we got to do three things, right? We got to increase our productivity, it’s pretty simple. We got to deliver better service to our customers, hopefully resulting to get better customer satisfaction, and the third one is, this is the competitive part, what am I going to do and what can I equip my field service guys while they’re on the ground face-to-face, belly button-to-belly button as they say, that can delivery something meaningful back to my service guys or back to customer and differentiate myself from my competitor? So in order to do that, I have to have the right information at the right time.

Okay, so that’s the basic crux of it. At the same time, we are in a weird… we are in an incredible point in technology. The push from consumer products and the fantastic pressure from consumer products inside the organization, you can see IT organizations, is remarkable. We have never seen it. I’ve been doing this about 27 years now with Motorola and we’ve never seen anything quite like this phenomenon that’s going on. So you can see the pressure pushing up against the enterprise IT. Consumerization, obviously everybody, there’s a lot of tablets I see in the seminar today. I’m a tablet user as well. Why can’t I do that for my field service teams and how come I can’t deliver that information? The challenge with the IT groups is how do I do this exactly? How do I secure them? How do I control what applications are on them and how do I control distraction? And those types of things. We’ll talk about that in the next couple of slides. But you can see the phenomenal growth. There are 903 activations every minute in Android devices. That’s phenomenal. I mean that’s… from downloading applications. I got some interesting stats here, downloadable applications. In 2015, 108 million downloadable applications… 108 million, that’s amazing! So those are kind of the pressures.

The other pressure that we see and this is a whole separate discussion is BYOD. Do I have my employees buy the devices? Do I supply them the devices? Do I supply them with consumer devices? Do we do these rugged devices? How do we handle that? That’s a whole separate session in itself but just know that there are some interesting stats from CIO magazine, how much is it going to cost my IT organizations to support these. We’re seeing some interesting stats from full-time employees for IT organizations, costing, you got to account for head count. Somewhere around two and a half head count for every 1,000 units. So it’s like in 2009 that was kind of the average. In 2013, we’re thinking about five head count per 1,000 units to support the devices. Motorola internally went to BYOD about almost two and a half years ago now so we could bring, when we sold the cellular site over to Google, that is a major change inside the Motorola Solutions which is our part – the scanning, the public safety, and the two-way radio site. We did it basically thinking we’re going to save money. That was the idea. “If we don’t buy them, all right, we’re good.” What we found in reality was that as the employees could expense their own air time, they didn’t budget. They didn’t basically get the same air time rates that we would as a corporation. They couldn’t buy the devices at the same rate that we could as a corporation. This may sound funny coming from Motorola but I mean this is basically what we found. So it wasn’t any cheaper actually, and by the time we processed, there’s a bunch of studies as far as what is the cost produced and expense reports and those types of things. We looked at those things like wow; this really didn’t cost us anything or didn’t save us anything. It’s actually costing us versus… and then the IT guys were, screaming the entire time and they’re saying “We can’t do this. We’ll never be able to support it.” So that’s kind of the world we live in and we’re experiencing that as a corporation as well. We manage about internally for employees, it was somewhere around 60,000 devices between tablets and phones and laptops.

The other interesting thing that IT staffs are being challenged with is how do we manage these devices. We look at this very seriously and when we come up with the enterprise side. So the… I can’t do this without the microphone going bananas, but basically, my cellphone is one thing to control the security on that device because basically, it’s just my contacts, my e-mails essentially on it. But if I have a field of service unit that has all my customers in it, it may have pricing data in it, it may have advanced orders in it, it may have sensitive new product information in there. That’s a little different, right? That’s some fairly sensitive information that we don’t need to get out there. So how do we secure the device? How do I secure the device from, if a new application on my Droid Razor X is coming down, I basically choose yes, I want to update it, right? Or my iPhone, yes, I want to update it and take, update all that kind of thing, but the enterprise, you may be pushing out an update to your application that the employee has to take. I mean that’s an update to your field of service application. While on the consumer side, there’s no way of doing that. So when we look at the enterprise devices, like these tablets, these enterprise tablets, one of the main differences is okay, we got to be able to control to accept and force application updates automatically without the user intervening with it or accepting it or even realizing what’s going on and all of a sudden, what’s up with the screen, like it changed the layout, I got a lot more data, a couple more new fields but there’s no interaction. So those are the things to start to make it simpler for the IT organization as well as more productive.

So as we take a look at kind of the six main areas around what to look for, as we look at the business case. What is the business case? How are these things being used? What’s the environment? What’s the distraction level? We’re working with VDC right now on looking at some of the analytics. What’s the distraction level around tablets? What are we actually doing to increase productivity? So we put a tablet in front of a guy and we give him access to everything and how much is actually being used for what I want and to use it for versus updating his Facebook or LinkedIn profile, right? So what’s going on? And these are all fine things that we don’t want to dish them but let’s keep them in proper perspective at the end of the day, right? Productivity, revenue, and customer satisfaction. So what’s the distraction level around it? What’s the environment? What happens if I… okay, it will be nice to have a tablet, but what happens if the field of service company and I’m delivering hospital beds or equipments and there are several of them here and I set the device on and it starts to fall. What’s the service ability about? How am I going to replace it? What happens when the glass breaks? Do I have replacement units?

Okay, let’s move on. Reliability, environmental and peripherals. Let’s pick this guy up. It’s still working. Nothing on my sleeve. It’s still working. So what kind of peripherals do I need? If I’m doing asset tracking for example and we do a lot of that in this business, right, field of service. Again, yesterday, I was talking to some of the hospital folks and they bar code everything as far as every part, every piece so that the technician knows exactly what he is working on. He can pull up the history and what’s going on. So if I’m going to barcode a lot, the cameras on our consumer phones are fine, , especially with the QR codes, they work really well but if I need a dedicated scanner because I’m bar-coding a lot, then sometimes that experience isn’t so good. Sometimes it’s slow, sometimes it’s cumbersome for the camera to come up, it focuses, it does that thing, if I got it on the right one. But if I use a dedicated scanner like we do on traditional task-specific devices, basically it will scan all day long as fast as you can pull the trigger but then you got to design it so it doesn’t look like something that could look like a rail road track, right? So it kind of has something that someone will actually use. So we look at the peripherals. We look at the environment. We look at what kind of holsters you need.

The next thing is around support, this top circle here if you can see that red laser button. Support. What’s the road map? Briefly, what is the manufacturer’s road map as far as how long the deployment? We talked in the last session about the prototypes and how long you need it to ramp the production of the unit. In our consumer side of the Motorola business that we sold to Google, for example the Droids. I’m running those on Droids, probably a couple of them in the room here. There are generally about 22 to 25 new models that could be brought out every year in our consumer side of the business. If I brought out 22 new MC75s or new ET1s in a single year, my largest customers are going to kill me. FedEx is in the other room right there. We account them about 70 to 80,000 of our devices for their couriers, and you bring out 22 new versions to that, they’d have a gun to heads saying “What are you guys thinking? New accessories? New batteries? How are my IT guys are going to be able to keep up with that?” So what’s the road map? Open up the kimono. I want to know… I want to get through my pilot with the same unit I started with. Sometimes it takes longer for our pilots. Maybe their pack in isn’t ready. Maybe the application isn’t ready. Maybe we haven’t worked out all the, what pilot groups we’re ready to use and what teams we’re going to use internally. There’s nothing worse than starting a project and we start on one device and then 6 months later, we are ready to move forward a little bit more and that device is no longer available or it’s coming at the end of life. So how long is this going to be available? How sustainable… it kind of gets into sustainability. What’s my support going to be like?

Security. We talked… we touched on it a little bit. A couple of main things we see the difference from the enterprise demands and what we see in the consumer sides. So in the enterprise side, we have to be able to push those updates and those application updates on command without any user interaction. So when the guy turns on, the service person turns on the device, I know he has got the latest version. I’m not relying on him. He may be in Oklahoma for all I know. My business is in New York. I got to know… I mean I got to know that they have… we all have the same device, we’re all reading from the same sheet of music guys over here, right? A couple of other things, I want to be able to remote control those devices. So in my Droid side of the world, you can’t remote control them, right? And same thing with the other guys, with the fruit on the front, you can’t remote control them very well, right? So I want to be able to install the applications. I also want to be able to remove applications that are on there without user interface. So if I go out there and interrogate the device, I can do, what’s this, he’s got Pandora on here. He is running Pandora, he is running Netflix. Look at the… No wonder his data package is killing me. Holy cow. Remove that off there. Right? It’s not that we’re trying to destroy any body’s lifestyle but, in our business, we got to bottom-line, we got to manage at the end of the day.

So those are the kinds of controls on devices that we look at when we’re designing an enterprise device versus the consumer side. We have to take pages of call them music again out of our consumer side of the business-the look, the feel, the interaction, the way you look at the pen, the zoom, and all those types of things, but then we have to make them ready for the enterprise. We have to do things like multi-user log on. Maybe the device is set up to use across a couple of different devices. In the consumer side, it’s not really set up that way. Your device is your device and we don’t share, right? But if I’m a field service technician then maybe I need to share these across people or I need to share it across shifts, I want to have different user log-ons. We kind of come to accept it in laptops and in that kind of world but it’s kind of strange to the mobile world. So those are the kinds of things that you build in when you are considering your mobile projects. These are kind of… those are the things that kind of all feed into that project.

So, I promised to be 15 minutes and that seems to go by quickly. Any questions, comments? If I don’t know the answer, I’ll make up. I mean, we’ll… Is this resonating? Is this on target? …Yeah. Okay. Good.

The last area we’ll do to wrap it up is we’ll take a look at some of the things we look at internally is what’s the total cost of ownership? In our consumer side of businesses, consumer tablets and consumer devices and phones with our more durable product devices. So if I’m comparing something like this, right? This is obviously not a consumer phone. So why should I buy one of these versus one of our other devices? This is a little more price sensitive. So we take a look at what’s the application, what’s the total cost of ownership, what’s the use case? So if I’m delivering like the FedEx guys here, I’m delivering everyday and I typically got probably 50 to 60 stops a day and they’re setting it on top of packages and it’s going to fall or if it gets submerged in water and stuff, it’s a whole different use case, then maybe I need something smaller that fits my pocket and I could still do some scanning but, it’s still going to work. So we take a look at those, what’s the total cost of ownership? How long is it going to be used? And we build these models out and it’s an awful tab, awful sheet to look at but essentially the bars tell you what is the life cycle. The red one is the consumer device in the middle, that maroon color. We can take a look at it over a five-year, six-year total. We’re replacing the consumer side about every two years which follows kind of like air time package. Typically, they get refreshed than other times. So then we take a look at it. Okay, so at the end of maybe a five-year package my total cost of ownership we could see is, X.

So those are kind of the outputs that we look at when we are comparing industrial and consumer devices. So those tools and resources are available to you, to everybody in the room. If you like to talk further about them, I’m happy here, I will be at the back of the room to answer any questions. I have exceeded my time by one minute so to stay on task. Any other questions? Thank you very much. I appreciate your time.