If you prefer, you can read the full webinar transcript below.
[00:00:50]
Mobile Reach: Good afternoon everyone and welcome to today’s webinar. We’re glad you could join us to learn how to deploy proactive field service across the enterprise. We are delighted to have Rockwell Collins share their experience today about enabling field technicians at airports around the world, even when they’re working offline I’d like to go ahead and introduce our presenter for today from Rockwell Collins. We have Cecelia von Tiesenhausen-Hush. Cecelia is a business process analyst responsible for the ongoing effectiveness of Rockwell Collins’ field technicians and she’s been with Rockwell Collin’s for about seven years. She’s the driving force behind the company’s field technician enablement initiative. And from Mobile Reach we have Denise Larson. Denise works closely with customers to create and implement mobile field applications and she worked with the Rockwell Collins team to configure their solution. Just a few quick housekeeping items a recorded version of the webinar will be made available and shared with you. You will be able to access it also from the mobile reach Web site. We love to hear from you at any point during the webinar we encourage you to ask questions along the way. Any time you’d like to ask Cecilia or Denise a question you can submit it via the questions box on your GotoWebinar console and we will answer our questions at the end of the webinar. So without further ado let’s get started.
[00:02:10]
Cecelia: Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining me and welcome to this webinar and I am really glad that you’re here. Well, here we go.
[00:02:26] So, Rockwell Collins at a glance. We are a leader in aviation solutions for cut commercial and military customers all around the world. Our main headquarters is in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. But the division that I particularly work for, which is our main aviation portion, is actually located in Annapolis, Maryland. We operate in tons of countries all over the world and really our key markets of focus our airports, airline aviation, and business aviation. The particular area that I happen to specialize in is mostly airports and that’s where we go from here. Some of the things that we deal with everyday, specifically, would be our language requirements. Because we do operate globally, we need to be aware that not everyone is going to speak English and we need to know how to address all the different language requirements. We do have a local service desk here. But it’s kind of almost impossible to staff people 24/7, 365 for every single language possible. And so that’s kind of one of our main challenges. Employee turnover and different airline agents, when you’re in an airport you know you never see the same agent at the same check-in desk every single time. That’s one of the things that our technicians in the field really find, not necessarily difficult but definitely interesting you have a turnover of employees and agents. And one agent who’s there today might not necessarily be there tomorrow or next week. So lots of crime the hands-on training to make sure that we kind of you know are able to handle communicating and working with different people every single day. We really do have a massive variance. For us a site means an airport. An airport to us is unique.
[00:04:30] There is no single airport in the world that is exactly the same. Which is kind of funny because going into an airport as a passenger, you know, you walk up to the counter and you get your ticket you set your bag down. You pretty much have a very similar experience. For us on the other side of it. No airport is the same. Everything is ever changing every single day and you never know what’s going to come up. Divisions and diversity of equipment, as you know, you look at the screen that tells you your arrivals and departures. Those screens might be bigger or smaller compared to the screens on the check-in side than when you’re at your gate. All of that equipment we are responsible for maintaining. So the printer that prints your bag tag and the printer that prints your boarding pass, those are really the pieces of equipment that our field technicians deal with every day. And just because you have one type of printer at one airport doesn’t mean that you’re going to have that same type of printer different airport. So we really have a huge diversity of equipment. And, as you know, depending on the size of the airport I mean Baltimore is a fairly smaller airport compared to somewhere like Hong Kong, China, where you have thousands and thousands of pieces of equipment to ensure that they’re up and running all the time.
[00:05:53]
Cecelia: So here’s a little map of our locations. We are a global company and we do support different sites. At these particular sites, we have a team on site at each location.
[00:06:13] So from New Zealand to Nairobi to Canada to Santa Domingo, we have a team onsite there to maintain the equipment. And like I said, it’s a pretty it’s a pretty diverse group of people. And language is a very big one.
[00:06:36]
Mobile Reach: Actually, Cecelia, let’s go ahead and start with our first poll question. I’m going to go ahead and ask the audience if you would all participate in this poll. It asks, “How do you enable your field technicians?” If you would just take a second to complete the poll, we’ll show the results in a moment. All right, looks like everybody voted so let’s go ahead and share those results. It’s interesting to see that there’s a broad range of approaches to enabling field technicians at this point. That gives you a sense for where you stack up next to your peers. All right. With that we can proceed on to the next slide.
[00:07:35]
Cecelia: Global field technicians, like I said, we have them located onsite at our different airports around the world. They’re really our first line of defense, whether it’s facing with the agents, whether it’s facing with everyday passenger customers, whether it’s facing with the airport authority or whoever our main customer is, they’re really our first line of defense. You know, they’re the ones out there on the floor everyday making sure that they’re the ones that people see they’re proactively monitoring their relationship between the equipment, the agents, the customers. It’s kind of a juggle to do all of that at once.
[00:08:16] But that’s why it is important for them to be out there and to not be stuck behind a desk doing little tedious things that they might need to do completely mobile as you know an airport is not just one single little building it can be multiple terminals and it can be a pretty far walk from the check-in counter to the last gate. And, you know, the very far terminal. So being able to be mobile is really important to us. Being able to update and do things right in real time. That is one of the biggest things. We have an airport where from the office that they might sit in to the very end gate of where someone would get on a plane is about two miles long so you know be able to do everything you need to do while you’re being mobile and while you’re walking to that gate to go help someone or even just taking a phone call on the way there is really important to us because communication is key. It allows us to do that and it allows them to completely do their jobs without having to run back to the office and look something up or you know meeting to make changes.
[00:09:33]
Cecelia: Some of our key processes and KPIs are service level agreements. As I said before, no airport is the same. So for us it’s a little unique. Our outage response and restore times are different at every single airport that we have. You can have a response time of as little as five minutes to as big as two hours or next business day. And that’s really important for us to be able to track those things so that we know what’s happening. And then, count of tickets, for airlines, you know, every single airline is different.
[00:10:18]
Cecelia: And it’s important for us to identify trends where one airline might be struggling or having issues to be able to find those quickly so that we can identify what the issue is and provide them with the necessary help to fix things. You know, whether it’s they’ve just got a whole bunch new agents and they need training or maybe we need to talk about what kind of paper they’re using in the printers. That’s really important for us to be able to identify those and then bring up those those things. Our restoral actions. What actions are we taking to get things back up and running as quickly as possible? Are there any trends that we see what can we do to remedy those issues that are happening most often. Recently, we just found that, you know, why are the monitors off all the time during this one period of time? Well it turns out that airline agents were unplugging the monitor to plug their cell phone in and charge it. So you know how do we how do we kind of find that medium balance say hey you can’t just turn off a computer it’s a really important piece of equipment. We’re having to turn them back on and reboot all the time. Or was this one kiosk just not working? And to identify what those trends are and then remedy those issues.
[00:11:36]
Cecelia: So a couple of our challenges before Mobile Reach we did everything through email which was great when we had Blackberrys which is kind of nice. BlackBerry was our main tool. We were told that, you know, BlackBerry was starting to fade out and it was decided that we would make the transition to the iPhone.
[00:12:02] We kind of, you know, got out of our BlackBerry groove and went to iPhone which is, as you know, completely different. We’re still utilizing e-mail through iPhone. We’re like, “Man, how can we make this better?” We have technicians who need to memorize codes that there’s maybe 60 different codes that they need to memorize and they’re keeping them on a little square piece of paper hanging around their lanyard on their neck, you know, how do we make something and get something that’s going to help them do things quickly, more accurately and efficiently, but also to get all of that information back into our database. Manual data entry, sometimes they have to write stuff down on pieces of paper take it back to the office sit behind the computer. You know, go into what they needed to do and make changes from there, that’s really time consuming. That’s, you know, a precious 10, 15, 20 minutes to an hour that we could be out in the field proactively helping people. And then also, be available online. This is a really big one for us because no airport is the same. And you know you don’t always have free Wi-Fi in areas and you don’t always have connectivity. You might be downstairs under the airport in a baggage area and you might have no service at all. How do we address that challenge? But also make it so that it still works for us. We still kind of need that offline availability which you don’t always get. And it’s really hard. So trying to brainstorm as to what would be right for us.
[00:13:44] And that’s where we found Mobile Reach and the rest is history.
[00:13:48]
Mobile Reach: Perfect. Thanks, CeCe. Before we begin our next poll, the second of three, I want to remind everybody to submit questions as they occur to you using the questions box on your GoToWebinar console and we’ll be happy to answer those at the end of the session. So let me go ahead and launch the second poll. It asks, “How many software systems you use to manage your field of our field service operations?” Take a second, if you would to vote, and we’ll share the results. It’s really interesting to see that there is a majority of folks who use very few systems to manage their field service operations. Generally market research shows that field service organizations can use anywhere from one to 10 systems to run their field service operations. That might include analytics, it might include mobility, and might include dispatch and scheduling. So interesting to see that distribution here. Let’s move onto the next part of the presentation.
[00:15:10]
Cecelia: So for us, we are kind of unique. We are in that very small percentage where we only use one. We do use a out-of-the-box BMC Helix ITSM product. That’s kind of where we make all of our changes and everything. One of the nice perks about Mobile Reach is that Remedy isn’t the only system that it can connect to. So you know for the future it kind of gives us that that thought in the back of our minds pay what’s next. What else can we connect to it?
[00:15:47] Because we are currently only doing a one to one from Remedy to Mobile Reach. So there are so many options out there and it gives you good flexibility to build in the future if you want to. Which is one reason why we chose them. As you can see on the left hand side is just a generic Remedy picture. But on the right hand side is actually a glimpse into our app. We mainly use the four main apps. The User Preferences App really for us was we have technician’s on call and some technicians who are on call so they want the ability to turn off their notifications when they sleep so they can actually get a little bit of sleep when they’re not on call. The Asset Management App, this is really important for us because managing assets in the field isn’t always easy. I mentioned that two mile hike to the end of the gate. And that’s real when you’re having to carry a printer and swap a piece of equipment. The last thing you want to do is have to walk all the way back to the office to now input that information and make that swap in inventory in the office. The ability to do it right there from our application has been amazing. It lets us do things in real-time. Make swaps. Do preventive maintenance. Update anything that we might need to see so we can do it right then and there. Our Create Ticket App, it gives the techs in the field to be proactive and to create tickets on their own when they find an issue. We don’t like our technicians to sit behind their desk. We want them to be out there making those relationships and really communicating with people. And the people that they see every day so that they can, you know, “Hey, something’s wrong.” I don’t even need to pick up the phone and report that there is an issue. I see that person right here. Or guess what that person saw before I did it and oh look they’re fixing it. So the ability for them to actually create those incident tickets by themselves is really important so that we don’t have to, you know, maybe try and save it for later and then two hours later you get going on something else and you forget what you had done previously. The Dispatch Response App allows all the members of our team to respond to all of the tickets. Either the service desk creates the tickets or, you know, someone from the team can free the ticket as well. And this is where they respond to everything. They can update tickets. They can say, “Hey this kiosk needs a new piece of equipment but the shipment hasn’t come in yet. It’ll be in three days so I can’t close the ticket because I need to wait that three days until I get the part.” So it really allows us to have all of those responses back and forth that we need. It also allows them to directly send an e-mail straight to or a message straight to their entire team or straight to the service desk. So if they need, you know, “Hey, so-and-so can you come and bring this. I forgot this in my bag or I need help with this or you know hey services can you help me with something, they can do that directly from here which is really nice that they don’t have to close out of the app, go into e-mail, send an email, or whatever. The SLA Dashboard App was important for us. It really allows for a snapshot of all of our open tickets. We do a color coordination for tickets. You know green is healthy, red might be on the verge of, “Hey, we should kind of think about our SLAs about to expire. And then you can actually click inside the ticket and read all the responses and everything that’s been happening in that individual ticket no matter who’s worked it’s whether you’ve worked at someone else’s work. This has been really nice for the site managers because if they need to know what’s going on any given time they can open that app and they can get a glimpse of what’s going on right this second. And this is the back-end where you would make your changes. Denise can speak a little bit about this but we actually do have someone who is trained to make these changes for us and updates. We do find that we make most of our changes on the Remedy side. It’s not necessarily that the app doesn’t have what we need. It’s more that we don’t have what the app needs to work so kind of vice versa. The app has everything that we need and we’re catching up with them. So being able to make those changes in-house and, you know, not have to look to me or someone else all the time is really nice. And we have someone who works for us and he makes all those changes and make them real quick and then you have to do is refresh and everything’s right there. So it’s been really really helpful.
[00:20:59]
Mobile Reach: All right, well this is the point we’ve reached our third poll. Let me go ahead and watch that and give everyone a minute to respond. “How well do you currently enable your field technicians with the technology they need to do their work?” All right. Another good opportunity to benchmark around the state of the state against your peers. And with that let’s jump back to the presentation. We have one more slide Cecelia and then we’ll move into the demo. So for us Mobile Reach has been a really big success. Like I said, we were doing everything through email before. It’s actually reduced our time to respond and restore. At first we actually thought that we’re like, “Well, is it really doing that? Someone brought up, “Hey, you know I think Mobile Reach has a lag. So we went back and did kind of a research overview. When we were utilizing e-mail and kind of how much of a lag time there was from the time you know that email was sent processed through the system and then actually hit the database we found that it could be anywhere from 7 to 10 or more minutes of a delay of a lag for e-mails to process all the way through the system to actually hit the database. Whereas, when we had mobile reach it was one maybe two minutes at the most. You know obviously dependent on how great your service might be at that exact period of time.
[00:23:00] But really it was just it was a really big profound difference in our ability to be super accurate and do things in real time which was very important for us. And also a big one for us was originally the technicians had to remember Zulu time. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to memorize Zulu time but it’s really hard especially globally when everyone’s calculations are different. So, now, it just depends on what time is on their phone. And we don’t even have to think about it. Reduction in travel time. This is important for us because they can pretty much roam around the airport with everything that they need right in their hand in their pocket and they don’t have to keep coming back and updating the database from their desk or wherever it might be or hand that off to someone else. They can do it. We give them access to exactly what they need and it allows them to do everything right there in real time. And get it just overall. It just has really made things easier. And you know the technicians now come up with some really good ideas of hey can we do this. Hey can we do that. And I would say 99 percent of the time the answer is always yes. So it’s really been something that’s really been helpful and has been nice to have on site for sure and on site. We have about 250 different employees utilizing the apps every single day across the globe. And just about only 10 of those airports are domestic, Canada and the United States. So it is pretty incredible the diversity that it allows us to have.
[00:24:48]
Mobile Reach: Thanks, Cecelia, that’s great. I really appreciate you taking us into a deep dive there. Let’s switch over to Denise Larson. And Denise will go ahead and walk attendees through a brief demonstration of a part of the Rockwell Collins app set.
[00:25:10]
Denise: Thank you, Dan. And first I want to just say that the project with Rockwell Collins with Cecilia and her team was an excellent project. I really enjoyed it. They were a really good team to work with. They were organized. Their Remedy developers were very competent and AK and they knew their requirements and we just we were very productive with those applications. So as Cecelia showed, we developed all those applications. And at the end they worked perfectly for them. So what I’m going to show you today is just a simple, sample out of the box asset application. This is not Rockwell Collins’ application because we don’t have connectivity to their Remedy system anymore. So this is just one of our sample out-of-the-box applications. So I started Mobile Reach. I’m running on my iPod. That’s what you see here. And I have reflector running on my PC so I’m showing my iPod screen on my PC and I’ve got a Bluetooth scanner in my hand. And it is connected via Bluetooth to the iPod and also you can see here if I go into my preferences screen you can see down here under Socket Mobile scanner section, my device is connected. So that’s how my scanning will work with my inventory application. And these are just sample out-of-the-box applications that we have, but I’m going to start up the inventory app. That’s the one up there in the middle top, that’s the asset scanning application. You can see with the gray bar at the top, it’ll be downloading the background data. It’s downloading models, users, various things from the backend database. It’s just information that will need to run the application. I could have done that beforehand but I wanted the attendees to see what happens when you actually start up an application. Are you seeing everything, OK? OK, alright, we’re getting there. And I have everything downloaded in just a second. We have a few locations to get onto the device and then we’ll start it up. And what it’s going to open up to here is a location screen where I can pick a location to download the assets in this particular location. So let’s just assume that I am in a warehouse and I want to download my asset and work on those assets. I want to change the users for those assets or maybe change a location. But I only want to work on the assets in this one particular location, so I’m going to first enter my location. It’s 100 South Charles Street in Baltimore so I’m going to pick that. And you’ll see as soon as I hit save, my assets will download. I’ve only got a few at this site but when I scan one of these assets, right now it’s got a barcode in front of me that matches the asset tag on the screen here I’m going to scan the test asset tag. And you can see it opens it right up. It shows me the data that available for that asset. I’ve got my asset tag and my serial number if I needed to edit them I could.
[00:28:57] The model category and the model are set and they are read only those fields are grayed out to be read only, not editable. I can change the state to something else if I needed to put it to missing or something if I wanted to assign it. Let’s let’s go back to in-use. If I wanted to assign it to somebody, I can pick a person and assign it to that person. I can change location, I can do whatever I need to do here. Change the company change to the department and then save the record. Another thing I can do is go to the file attachments and if I needed to attach a photo of a problem with the asset, I could attach that right here on the the record and then I go back here to save screen, save that record. You can see it has a green arrow so it’s ready to upload to Remedy or to the back-end database and then I can upload it and move on to my next asset or I can go ahead and scan my next asset and it will find it. Open it up. This one actually has a photo attached. So you can see that there’s a photo attached there should I need to delete it or change it or whatever. And then the fact that I again I can I can change the state I can change whatever I need. Now this is again just a sample mobile application. The Rockwell Collins applications were very specific to their needs and that’s how we develop our applications for our customers.
[00:30:27]
Mobile Reach: Thanks so much, Denise. I apreciate that. Let’s go ahead and move them on in the presentation and we will start with questions. The first question we have actually deals with training. And the question says, “How much training was required for your field techs? And how long did it take for your entire field to adopt Mobile Reach. Cecilia that one’s for you.
[00:31:02]
Cecelia: Ok, well, in truth for most everyone, you know, change is hard. I think the fact that we had just changed from BlackBerry to iPhone actually kind of gave us a one up because the technicians already knew the changes were happening and they already kind of had to have that mindset of, “OK, things are changing. I might have to, you know, change the way I do this a little that or change the way I do that.” I think from start to finish, once we got going and rolling things out, it really didn’t take that long to kind of roll everything out. It took me longer because I was the person rolling things out. And I’m one person and there you know 40 odd sites. But we would do one site at a time. You know, basically, just giving them a set of instructions and walking them through how to do things. Because I am located here close to Baltimore, I actually had gone up to Baltimore and kind of use them as my guinea pigs to say, “Hey. Can I go over how to use the app and how we’re going to do this?” So I kind of got to practice while we’re still kind of in the test phase to see how we could best do it. I find that a lot of my technicians are really visual based, so a PowerPoint was honestly the way that we went to train everyone. It sounds super simple but that’s the way that they seemed to, you know, grasp anything that I throw at them. So lots of screenshots. Click here. Click here. But the nice thing about Mobile Reach and the way that we designed the app is it already did all of the things that they used to do. So there wasn’t really a ton of differences that we threw at them right at the get go. And we really made sure to make sure that the flow and the process flow was exactly the same as they were used to. So they didn’t have to learn a new process flow. They may have had to click into different things. And for example like I said they were carrying all those codes on their lanyards. Now they didn’t have to do that anymore. That was all built into the app. We made it just a dropdown. So for them it actually, they were like, “Oh. I only just have to click the little arrow and choose whatever I want” So we made it really intuitive, which is really nice because it actually kind of lessened that. That big change flow that you kind of have sometimes when you roll out something new.
[00:33:38]
Denise: Right. And I just wanted to add to reinforce what Cecelia said, as well as being intuitive, it was very good at reducing errors. Because they didn’t have any choice as to what they could do. If they picked that they wanted to reply to a ticket or take another action for a specific ticket they were only allowed to do certain things they there.
[00:34:04] There was no question as to what the user can do. So it’s very easy for the user to use it. I thought it was very well designed.
[00:34:12]
Mobile Reach: All right thank you both. Cecilia next question is for you as well. And Denise, please chime in as as you as you deem necessary. For the Dispatch Response app, how do techs know when a ticket has been claimed and is being worked.
[00:34:28]
Cecelia: Ah, good question. So we actually have a response time and a restore time, like we said. So our response time is based off of you know how quickly someone can say, “Hey I got it.” We actually have what’s called an acknowledgement. And anytime, you know, a ticket comes and it goes to the entire group of people. So if I said, “Oh, hey I’m going to go and I’m going to take that ticket.” I would go into the app, into my dispatch response, and my response would be an acknowledgement. That acknowledgement will send a notification to everyone on my team that says Cecilia has said that she acknowledges this ticket. Which to the team means, “OK, I don’t have to worry about that ticket. She’s got it. She’s going to go work it.” So we built in that response to then be sent to the entire team. So that, you know, they do know and we don’t have four people running to a printer to go fix it, but I’ve already been there.
[00:35:28]
Mobile Reach: Thanks, Cecelia. The next question is, “Do the the field techs use Mobile Reach only or do they also use Remedy? And if they use both, what percentage of each?”.
[00:35:42]
Cecelia: It is very rare for an actual field technician to also be using Remedy. It’s not absolutely unheard of but they mostly just use Mobile Reach. And since Mobile Reach reaches back into our Remedy database, and whenever they’re updating something it updates our Remedy in real time. So really there’s rarely ever a time when they need to be going into Remedy. There’s, obviously, you know wanting to download reports for trending and stuff like that we do on our Remedy side. So you know if a manager wants to know what happened yesterday, he can go and do that. But as far as arming field technicians, you know, they are pretty much just using Mobile Reach and that’s it.
[00:36:32]
Mobile Reach: Thanks, Cecilia. It looks like we have one more question in the queue so if anyone has any final questions you’d like to ask please submit them now. “Cecilia when you decided to move off of the Blackberries, how did you decide to go with iPhone. And what kinds of considerations went into that platform decision.”.
[00:36:51]
Cecelia: Yes well the ever evergrowing BlackBerry, Android debate still happens all the time I feel like. For us, it was really a matter of security. And what we thought worked best for our company as a whole. Rockwell Collins did very extensive research and decided that iPhones were the very best for us. We actually have to VPN into our network, before that they can utilize the Mobile Reach app because it is reaching into our database directly. So they will VPN in using their using their iPhones and then go from there.
[00:37:36] We deemed that the security features on Android weren’t as great and weren’t really fitting our personal needs. So we decided on iPhone which I was pretty happy about. I’m an iPhone user.
[00:37:51]
Mobile Reach: Excellent. Ok, it looks like we have one last question that’s just come in, Cecelia. “How do the techs work when there’s no mobile service available?”.
[00:38:02]
Cecelia: So a couple different things we do have some airports that do have free Wi-Fi that they’re connected to or, you know, they know that they can connect to the British Airways lounge if they’re working in there on a piece of equipment. But the one nice thing about Mobile Reach, when Denise did that demo and that little arrow that comes up, we have another little arrow that says hey you completed this but you don’t have service to send it. And so we kind of did a lot of testing where, “All right. Well what if I lose service for one minute and then I get service again. Will it, you know, will it send back out. What if I lose service for an hour or what if I lose service for 10 minutes?” So we kind of did our own experimenting and we found you know quick little blips in service don’t really do very much for us. They kind of just if a technician has done something, it sits in the queue until they get service and then it sends back out. If they lose service for a very extended period of time they might need to just tap on it and click send again. But all the information that they’ve already done is already there. They don’t have to fill back out the form. They’re not having to dig through their sent message e-mail box to see if it’s there or go out of their inbox into their outbox to see if it’s sitting in there. It literally will sit in their queue with everything else that they have. It will just have a little flag to tell them that it hasn’t been sent yet which has been really nice because then at least you know, “All right, well if this was sent and it would be out of my queue it’s not. So let me see what’s going on. Oh there you go. I lost service. That’s my problem.” So it allows them to see that quickly.
[00:39:51]
Mobile Reach: Great, thank you so much, Cecilia. That was actually the last question we had. So we’re going to wrap up the webinar. Cecilia, thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:40:00]
Cecelia: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:40:03]
Mobile Reach: And Denise thanks so much for them going for us today.
[00:40:05]
Denise: You’re welcome.
[00:40:06]
Mobile Reach: Thanks for joining us, everybody. Have a great rest of your day.
Learn more about fully enabling your field techs via our comprehensive guide to mobile field service apps.