When Athani Krishna co-founded ServiceMax nine years ago to provide equipment manufacturers with a cloud-based software platform to manage fleets of field technicians and work orders, he says most maintenance operations were carried out in a manner similar to driving a vehicle with the windshield blacked out, relying only on the rear-view mirror to determine why a given machine or system had failed. But now, as manufacturers begin to integrate sensors into equipment to monitor mechanical intricacies and enable more proactive, preventative and even predictive maintenance, things are beginning to change not just for equipment manufacturers but also for companies that they rely on to execute maintenance services in an effective and efficient manner.
“The most exciting shift in our business model is that if you can instrument your fleet of installed products and really understand how to keep them up and running, you can sell reliability itself instead of selling the machines,” Krishna says. “But if that happens, the manufacturers will still need to track the health of the machines and will still need field workforces. Plus, if manufacturers move into outcome-based contracts, the revenue will be coming from management of the contracts. Being able to [help them manage field workforces]—we see that as part of our roadmap.”
Last week, ServiceMax reported that a partnership that it forged early this year with manufacturing software provider PTC has resulted in a number of successful joint deployments. Through the partnership, companies that use ServiceMax’s Connected Field Service (CFS) platform to manage their field technician teams, as well as PTC’s ThingWorx IoT platform to manage networks of sensors used to monitor equipment components and performance, can now pull that sensor data into CFS. By doing so, field technicians can access that sensor data through CFS, via iPads or laptops, as soon as a work order is issued.
Armed with this new visibility, technicians are, in some cases, able to rely only on phone support to walk an end user through the steps required to fix a problem they otherwise would have needed to address through a site visit. In addition, by analyzing sensor data, some joint customers are beginning to deploy preventative maintenance programs, in which technicians call or visit customers as soon as sensor data shows a given machine is likely to suffer a failure in the near future, thereby helping the customer to avoid down time.
Mediavators, which makes products used for endoscopy procedures, says that when customers contact its support team, technicians can now resolve issues through remote, phone-based support in more than 75 percent of cases. Before it began using CFS, it could not address issues remotely at all.
“The relationship between manufacturers and customers has traditionally been that the customer acts as the sensor for the product—when something goes wrong, the customer calls the manufacturer,” says Steve Morandi, the general manager of PTC’s Service Lifecycle Management business. “But we’re trying to change that, so that the product [itself] is the sensor.” In some cases, he says, a machine can send alerts to its manufacturer—through CFS—before the customer even knows there is an impending problem.
McKinley Elevator, a distributor of elevator systems used in residential and commercial buildings, is also using CFS to provide usage history (how many trips have been taken, for example), as well as live data on sensor status, so that McKinley technicians can call a building’s maintenance workers and remotely guide them through repairs. Kevin Rusin, McKinley Elevator’s CFO, says that by remotely tapping into elevator status and usage data from sensor systems integrated into its products, CFS has allowed McKinley to make significant improvements to its level of service.
“They’re not all that big,” Morandi says, referring to McKinley. “I think there is a misconception that Industrial IoT is only for big companies, but [McKinley] has created a differentiator [for its] service—they can be proactive.” The company achieves this by monitoring sensor data in order to create preventative maintenance schedules, such that elevators that have been used the most receive priority. Through CFS, McKinley’s technicians also receive up-to-date machine-generated error codes, which they can then use to perform maintenance that can prevent downtime.
So far, Krishna reports, only a handful of customers have begun using CFS, but he is confident that the connectivity and platform for proactive maintenance provided by the service will become a game-changer for his firm. “We’re excited about this,” he states. “We see a lot of opportunities to deepen partnerships [with our customers].”