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October 24, 2024Recently, I spoke to Shahar Chen, co-founder and CEO of Aquant, a field service management software provider, about some new research they had just published. One of the things that really stood out for me within the research was their finding that, according to their internal research, “30% of service solutions are not found in historical service data. Instead, the knowledge of veteran service experts contains the best answers.”
This is a troubling finding, considering all the efforts that companies make to capture, digitize, and make knowledge available to their customers and technicians.
However, I would suggest that it also speaks to the reality of the average age of B2B equipment and that many pieces of equipment have been around for so long that capturing and digitizing knowledge about them is not the easiest thing to do.
For example, manufacturing equipment, like heavy machinery, or construction equipment, like bulldozers and cranes, can last anywhere from 10 to 30 years, depending on their level of use and how they are maintained. Meanwhile, a hospital MRI machine can have an expected lifetime of 15 years, but other medical equipment, if looked after, can function for decades.
According to Chen, the bigger and more pressing problem is the ‘retirement crisis’ that is currently playing out in the manufacturing and associated field service space. He says that “seasoned older workers are departing at an alarming rate, posing a significant challenge in swiftly replacing their roles and training junior talent. More resources are required to keep up with customer expectations and demand.”
Research shows that this ‘crisis’ is real, is growing and is being fuelled by a number of factors.
The first is that many organizations around the world are struggling to find and recruit the right talent. According to The Manpower Group, 75% of employers say that they find it difficult to find and recruit the skilled talent they need to staff their organizations. That is more than double the rate of employers that were reporting difficulties ten years ago.
The second factor is that the workforce in many economies is getting older, and many skilled individuals are now retiring or nearing retirement. In the US, a Congressional Joint Economic Committee Report published in December 2022 found that nearly a quarter of the U.S. labor force is 55 years or older, with that number set to grow steadily over the coming years.
Finally, the number of younger employees entering the field service technician space is falling dramatically. The online recruiting platform Handshake found that the number of younger people applying for technical jobs fell by nearly 50% between 2020 and 2022.
This is a significant problem and one that has the potential to impact not only B2B customers but also economies more broadly, given that that equipment is essential to the functioning of our daily lives.
Now, we could discuss the whys and wherefores of why these industries are not attracting the right sort and amount of talent. But that doesn’t solve the problem at hand.
Luckily, the emergence of new technologies like Generative AI in combination with Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technology is being applied to this problem by companies like Aquant and others like TechSee, a software provider that uses computer vision AI and augmented reality to recognize devices and issues and provide visual automation and real-time guidance.
To illustrate its potential impact, Eitan Cohen, CEO of TechSee, told me that Comdata, a leading U.S. fleet management and B2B payment solutions provider, is leveraging its technology to improve real-time support for truck stop operators. This has allowed them to reduce truck rolls by 34% and Average Handling Times (AHT) by 20% while, at the same time, improving merchant satisfaction by 20%.
Now, these technologies and the results that they are driving are impressive. Moreover, they are likely to go a long way towards addressing this problem.
But, to truly capture most of the tacit expertise and insight that sits inside the heads of senior technicians, I suspect we will need to further and will need to engage senior technicians directly to help do that.
Imagine a scenario where a senior technician is sent out to solve a customer’s equipment problem. Diagnosing the problem on-site the technician, aided by the system, recognizes that this is one of those problems that falls within the 30% of problems mentioned at the top of this article. The system then asks the technician to don a GoPro-like device so that they can be recorded talking through the solving of the problem as they work.
That would enable the capture and codification of a lot of that tacit expertise.
The bigger challenge may, however, be getting ‘old dogs’ to learn new tricks. Those who can engage, train, and incentivize their senior technicians to help in this regard are likely to be the ones who go the furthest in addressing the crisis and minimizing the knowledge gap that currently exists between what is and what is not codified.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com.
Credit: Photo by Diane Picchiottino on Unsplash