Service X-Factor
Service X-Factor is the podcast where service operations stops being a cost center and starts being a competitive advantage. Hosted by Microsoft MVPs Scott LeFante and William McLendon, this show reveals the secret ingredients behind service operations success—transforming chaos into clarity and strategy into profits.
Service X-Factor
From Paper to AI: Transforming Service Operations with the Pierre Hulsebus
What happens when you put the "Field Service Guru" in the hot seat? Magic, insight, and a fascinating journey through two decades of service evolution.
Pierre Hulsebus takes us back to 2002, when field service technicians relied on complex offline synchronization and paper-based processes. With the warmth and wisdom that comes from over 20 years in the trenches, he reveals how the mobile revolution transformed not just how technicians work, but fundamentally altered customer expectations. Remember Palm Pilots? Pierre does—and he walks us through the journey to today's powerful pocket computers that handle everything from photos to customer signatures.
The conversation sparkles when we dive into AI applications. Pierre shares a story about using smart paste functionality that saved countless development hours—what he calls the "million-dollar button." His excitement is palpable when discussing how generative AI could create personalized work order summaries that technicians could listen to like podcasts on their way to jobs. It's these practical, tangible use cases that cut through the hype and show how AI is already transforming service operations.
Perhaps most valuable is Pierre's hard-earned wisdom about implementation. Having seen countless deployments from both the Microsoft and partner side, he debunks the myth that field service is too complex to implement successfully. The secret? Start with out-of-the-box functionality and focus on the organizational challenges rather than technical ones. As Pierre puts it, consultants often need to be "marriage counselors" helping companies overcome departmental barriers.
Whether you're managing complex assets like industrial valves the size of semi-trucks or tiny medical devices with firmware serial numbers, this episode delivers practical insights about inventory management, change adoption, and the future of automated scheduling. Join us for this masterclass in field service excellence and discover why following Pierre on LinkedIn is a "moral imperative."
Hey there and welcome to the Service X Factor podcast. I'm Scott LaFonte, seven-time Microsoft MVP and Field Service Strategist at CongruentX, and your guide for today's episode On this show. My co-host, fellow Microsoft MVP and service innovation guru, will McClendon, and I will spotlight the people, platforms and ideas that transform service teams from cost centers into revenue powerhouses, and ideas that transform service teams from cost centers into revenue powerhouses. Each episode will unpack real-world wins, hard-learned lessons and the emerging tech reshaping the front lines Think AI, co-pilots, predictive analytics and everything in between. So grab your coffee, settle in and let's discover your organization's X-Factor together. Let's dive in.
Speaker 2:Welcome everyone to the next episode of Service X Factor Podcast. I'm one of your hosts, scott LaFonte, and I'm here with my esteemed colleague and co-host, quad McClendon. I'm butchering your name already, it's all good, it's forgettable. It's all good in the hood.
Speaker 3:How's it going, man? Another lovely, lovely week Loving the hood. How's it going, man? Another lovely, lovely week Loving the Florida summers. How about you, man? Really excited about our next guest, though Really super excited oh yeah, yeah, absolutely he is.
Speaker 2:let's get right into it. He is what I call the original gangster for field service.
Speaker 3:He's totally on the godfather level.
Speaker 2:He's totally up there, right? Yeah, he's totally there yeah, and his, his I'm gonna go old school. His twitter handle, which is now I can't call it fs, right, the fs guru, mr pierre hulsebus fantastic, fantastic, you one of the things.
Speaker 4:You'll find it, regardless of what's happening. Yeah, I'm always good, it's always great, it's always fantastic, it's fantastic, always like an art, an arm could be falling off.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's just a scratch, but a spread, just a flesh wound love it.
Speaker 2:Love it now you've been, you've been in field service, for I mean, I don't even know how long. How long is a bit?
Speaker 3:it's.
Speaker 4:It's at least, at least 15 years right here yeah, I started in the dynamics right at the beginning when it was. Yeah, I started in the dynamics right at the beginning when it was, you know, in 2002. I came from a CRN gold mine who was at a gold mine partner boutique, boutique shop. Just me and one other dude kind of like you guys, just the two of you doing I'm just you guys and another right, one day we'll grow to be like you guys. It was just me and another fellow and Don, who taught me a lot, don Asteris, who taught me so much about, you know, being a professional consultant. You know that was a big lesson, a lot of lessons in that one. And so, yeah, and then I joined up.
Speaker 4:We had several field service projects that were part when I was doing that first initial at EHTC, which is now part of, I think, part of Velasio's network. It was a small, you know, we were a small partner and so, yeah, that was the. We did a couple of field service projects back then 2005. Back then, 2005, we sold the first, believe it or not, which is now a huge Microsoft Park customer. The Veterans Administration in Michigan was one of my first field service customers. It was all for facilities management, all the add-ons and changes help desk all that kind of stuff Back in CRM. Four days.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I left that and went to work for one side. Okay, was all dedicated field service solution, and then then on to them, to Microsoft and on to the mothership.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, that's awesome. So I mean so and that's why you are the the OG. There you go. I mean cause you. I mean you're going back. You know 20, 20 plus years of of field service experience. So in that time, I mean so much has changed and evolved. I mean what you know, going back, thinking back from when you first started this journey to now. I mean talk to me about you know what you've seen as the biggest in your mind, the biggest sort of transitional element.
Speaker 4:Sure, one of them is just the evolution of the mobile solution. That would probably be one of the biggest ones the change, you know, to an action system that synchronized and worked offline and just was able to be reliant. That was a big issue. That was one of the main reasons Goldmine was so popular was that it had a. You still had it on. You couldn't run it on your mobile phone, of course, but you could run it on a laptop, which everybody did, and then you could synchronize it to the mothership.
Speaker 4:And that whole infrastructure of offline synchronization today is. We just add, it works offline, but the level of complexity that's behind that is so it's outrageous. Most people have no clue how complicated that is no clue, how complicated that is and it used to be. It was like back in the 90s when you were installing a pc and you had to build the tcp ip stack, you know, and go in and configure all your ip addresses and your subnet masks and all of the batch files you had to load up before the windows started and all of this like that's, that's, you know. It was super complicated back then. Most you know. And same thing in a field service. The mobility was one of the biggest, one of the biggest reasons and companies that got that right and were on the right software and had good synchronization, you know, loved it. If you didn't, it sucks, it sucks I.
Speaker 2:I thought you were gonna say, of course, you know, back in like 2000, I was thinking to my palm pilot days for this update. I was like you know the palm. I'll stop my little palm pilot. That's right, get things done.
Speaker 4:Yeah, uh, yeah, the evolution of ability is a big one. Mean, that's a huge disability now for a technician on their you know phone or tablet, an Android you know $500 tablet, to be able to pretty much do their entire day's worth of work on this computer in your pocket. You know. Taking pictures, editing doing your email in one device.
Speaker 2:That was pretty wild, and that's what it's interesting. You say that because when I have technicians come to the house, whether it's lawn care, pest control or you know something that needs to be fixed in the house and apply into whatever, all right, I don't want paper, I don't want carbon copies, and most of them don't do that anymore.
Speaker 2:Right, I want it electronic, so that I can file it, because you know, my wife is a firm believer in oh, I like to have the paper copy and let's put it in the filing cabinet. The filing cabinet that I have now stores other things besides paper. Yeah yeah, it has other things in there LAN cords and all these other power cords of things that I don't know what they belong to.
Speaker 2:But I mean that's just to your point, I mean it's to make everyone's lives easier. I mean it even helps us out as the end user, right? Because now I get an electronic copy that I can file. If I file it correctly, I can easily pull it back up versus oh, where did I keep that paper? Where did I file it? I put it in the wrong folder, forget it.
Speaker 3:I don't have time, forget about it.
Speaker 2:That's right Forget about it.
Speaker 3:I'm going to pick your brain. I'm going to pick your brain a little bit here, pick the brain. No, because you've been doing this for you know God, you know so long. So how have customers' expectations then right, with so much technology and they're available to them how have their expectations changed? And really, because you've been at so many different levels, how should field service organizations adopt to meet those changes?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean that's. It's really interesting the early on that transition for a lot of companies to go from paper to mobile, like that's just a chasm of change organizationally. I do remember being told the story of one of the first Field One customers that was happening and back then what they did. Of course it was mobile but what ended up happening was Jim Hare who was the boss. He was the boss, the sales manager and kind of the chief revenue officer for FieldOne when Microsoft bought him. He said he told me the story of the company they went to hey, isn't it great, you know, we can do all of this, new technical capabilities for your customers, and you know now, you know your ROI is going to be really high and all that. And the owner of the company just turned to him and said I just wanted my guys to show up with computers instead of paper, like that. Was it just the impression that they could capabilities-wise handle just being on a PC? And I think that's the biggest transition right now. It's the same chasm leap, whether that's AIologists in this space, you know we get to see a lot of things that are coming and success and a lot of the impact that's going to happen as a result of AI, but something as simple as scheduling the discussion with some companies is so resistant. They're like this is how we did it forever and there's no way that a system can be as smart as my 10 dispatchers. And it's just like interesting, interesting.
Speaker 4:And the industry has always talked about the aging out of the technical workforce and how. You know what are we going to do and we have to recruit more and invest more in technology schools, which is all happening and great. But that new group of people coming in are, you know, chat GTP users. They learn stuff on. You know, I've got a son who's 30, and he's an engineer. And you know, whenever he's got an issue, youtube was always where he would look. I, I don't know how to do this, let me just learn this on youtube. And I don't know, it's that generation growing up with the matrix and seeing. You know, all right, I need to learn about helicopter, you know. You know how to do this, and so it's just a technical experience for technicians today coming in. Then you know, the seasoned pros that you know can figure out what's going wrong with something just by feeling the vibration of the engine going. Yeah, this is off a little bit.
Speaker 3:The mystery, uh, I can't define it, but I know this is the problem I almost wanted to throw a I know kung fu reference out there, but you know we'll just I'll pause, I'll date myself on that one which one right now matrix one.
Speaker 4:So like, yes, exactly, the movie matrix, the movie in the matrix so it's.
Speaker 3:It's crazy, right, we, we, we had to throw this plug in here almost every session, but the reality is is that it's here and it's not going anywhere um you know when, when folks discover the beauty of chat gpt.
Speaker 3:You know some of us looked at it as basically an overrated solid shooter, but in the last two years I would say it's done a great job with plugging in legitimate use cases for AI and automation. So, if I can narrow it down, can you have some practical examples on how Copilot or even Azure AI Foundry are transforming our everyday field service operations?
Speaker 4:Sure, I can give you one write-off, because I just worked on it yesterday for a customer. One write-off because I just worked on it yesterday for a customer. So they have a very sophisticated evaluation that they have to fill out. There, in this very unique industry, they build machines and then they install them and then service them. Of course it feels super complicated. And so the account reps and the slash engineers go out and do an annual evaluation of how their operations do. Are they safe? You know what is their program for emergency shutdowns? You know it's just an audit. Basically is what they call it an audit? So that's really complicated.
Speaker 4:It's taken them years and years to build a really good spreadsheet system, that in Excel that you put in the different systems you could have in there, that it gives you all the right questions and it scores it and all of this. And we looked at that and go you know, oh, this would be great, for you know the inspections entity, this is what you need, this is what inspections was built for. And then, as I looked at it, it's more like, you know, because of all those different options, it's like 30 inspections in one spreadsheet. So it's like I'm gonna have to write 30 inspections and then they're going to have to maintain this and the inspections entity doesn't score anything, so it just captures the detail. So now I've got to build a scoring engine and an output for a report. You know, I have to deconstruct this whole thing. So it's like, oh, cotton pick, this is not gonna be good. It's like, can we do it? Yes, but you know, tell the customer, like, maybe we should think of this from a different perspective.
Speaker 4:So what I did was built a simple entity with the scores in there, the results of that score. They're printing this out to a pdf when they're done and gart paste. I went in to use that smart paste function where you can upload a doc to an entity, and literally it mapped all the scoring fields. I just named the scoring fields, exactly the same as they were in the spreadsheet upload, push the little magic button, bam, it just went zip and like, read through that document. And so that little smart paste function is amazing, amazing and that not only eliminated all the work that I talked about, but just the other. The other stuff like we can still do this with azure has a whole document. You know, cognitive service that will effectively ocr, turn it into a json and then map, you know, into the field. So we, we could still do that, but it's like well, this thing, why do we even need?
Speaker 2:to you know, Buzz it for you.
Speaker 4:Yeah, buzz it for us. It's a wow.
Speaker 2:I've used it once or twice and I've got to tell you. I agree with you. I was just floored Because you know, first time you use it you're skeptical. You're like, yeah, how well is this? Yeah, but it does a really good job.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'm super impressed so so it's interesting. I might just go in and we're now through testing it, but anyways, that's a, that's a. I see that in some ways as a use of copilot, because that really is a chat, gtp kind of LLM is what's happening in the background. It's it's taking that JSON and reading and reading it and then you know kind of finding matches and stuff like that. So it's very interesting to see how this is evolving. I love little features like that. I call it the million-dollar button. You know it's like when you have these little features in the app and you push the button like you know, like the scheduling assistance or the convert case to work order, like that's worth a lot because a lot of systems don't have that you know, and so I see, honestly, I know we're not all sold on this consumption model, pay as you go and all of that kind of business.
Speaker 4:I love it when the app has just got this feature in it. It works, it's super reliable and I just it's just part of the application and I think in several years when Microsoft figures out how we're going to pay for all of that stuff, those kind of features, really using that in the background we can tweak it a little bit is a fantastic feature. It's just right in there. So that's one that was not super obvious but pretty cool. And of course, the scheduling one's the other area.
Speaker 4:That, scott, we were at that conference in March and you talked a lot about AI and one of the things I walked away from that entire conference was one kind of almost universal truth is that AI democratizes decision-making and so you know, at one level it's very counterintuitive to the world that we're selling into or we're part of and enabling, which is expertise. You know most tech, these service companies have an aura of expertise. So you know, an individual is the best in the world at this one thing. You know fixing the tires on a you know giant earth mover or something like that. Like that's one of the things that's really cool about our business.
Speaker 4:But when it comes to AI components, that is exactly the opposite of this. So the idea that the engine could schedule things and I could put in the hands of salespeople the ability to take an email that says, please come and show up tomorrow, something's broken, and bypass the entire vetting part of that organization that's built to vet out, vet out is this really good? Who's the right resource? Should I send you know all of the kind of politics internally that have to happen to get from sales to you know two days later, we can, okay, we'll send somebody out. Or it's a firefighting mission where somebody email, create a case or create a work order, schedule the work order, communicate to customer Done, we're just done. And that works. Actually, it's kind of wild. It's kind of wild. So sometimes you know we're always ahead. You know it's like the trio. You know it's the. It's ahead of its time, it's ahead of its the Palm Pilot and the Trio.
Speaker 2:So based on that, I mean we're talking a lot of. Ai. I mean what if you had to pick one? You know what use case you know really excites you the most for the use of Gen AI within the field of service? And I know that's hard because there's so many different areas. But if you had to pick just one.
Speaker 4:Golly the areas. I don't have all the insider info at Microsoft in terms of where they're going, but I would you know, as I look at generative AI cases and I have a whole boatload of them listed out and going okay, team, if we can do this, find opportunities for this so we can build something really cool. A lot of it has to do with summary and preparing. So if I think of a lot of the work like shift handover work, for example, why we have a whole, you know, a supervisor on a job site has to rifle through every work order that was completed today, all the email appointments that came today, and write up a structured here to the next guy that comes or gal that comes on site. Here's the summary of the work for the day that we did the shift handover process.
Speaker 4:Generative AI is perfect for something like that. We don't need to have everybody read through all of this. It can do a great job at summarizing the work that was done on a job site today. The same thing with preparing a technician for the day. We've, you know, a lot of the technicians before they leave the shop have safety things. They have to check their inventory, make sure they have all the right parts. They know where the manuals are for the complicated stuff that they haven't worked on before. They even even a couple ideas that you know.
Speaker 4:Hey, when you're out there, check this out. What are some of the open items that might need to, that were left over from last time, all that kind of stuff. Same thing, just like generative AI. Would be very good at this process to look at all my pending work orders that are assigned to me today and put that all in a little podcast for me so I can listen to it in the van on the way to my first job. Like that's the thing that I would love to see, our generative AI stuff. And so those are the little projects, little sub projects that we're working on until we get a good customer that's going to go. Yes, that's awesome, let's awesome.
Speaker 2:Let's make that happen yeah, no, that's great because I think, you know, one of the things that I always think about is you know, how great would it be if, if a technician comes in for the day, right, whether they're the, you know, the office slash warehouse, or they just take their van from home, from from home. But hey, here's a summary of your, your work orders for today. Here's all the parts you need, oh, and, by the way, you're short a part, so you're going to have to go get it Instead of going out.
Speaker 2:Oh, mr Customer, I don't have the part, or maybe they can't get the part today. So, instead of inconveniencing the customer, let me call them up and say I know I need this part, I don't have it, I can't get it until two or three days from now, so let me have the office. Let's reschedule you, and then AI could reschedule.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's good. Yeah, generative, Very cool.
Speaker 2:You were going to say something. Quad.
Speaker 3:I am. I was like going into that, we can go into it because I love solutioning that out. I mean, there are so many possibilities. It helps with the delineation between AI versus automation. Ai will present the information to you, but automation will trigger and consume certain areas and, you know, give it to an LLM to present to this end users. There's so many tools that we can use that customers, I think, would find incredible value with that, especially with inventory management and asset management my favorite subject, yeah.
Speaker 3:I'm going to throw it out to you because we all know field service and inventory management. Yeah so, pierre, dun, dun, dun dun, I'm going to throw it out to you, because we all know field service and inventory management. Yeah so, pierre, let me ask you a question about inventory management. So how do companies better manage serialized inventory and asset life cycles, especially for rentals or complex equipment?
Speaker 4:Yeah, complex equipment is one that I think is a good use case for our brand of application. You know, when I was at Microsoft you get to look at the customers and you kind of get to see where the industry is and what are using that are successful, and that seems to be a pretty common part of the process that not a lot of the customers in the Microsoft ecosystem are. You know, the dishwasher repair guys that's not the most of them are working on really complicated equipment. It's complex, very, very complicated, so that serial number tracking ends up being got to have in many ways. So when we talk to customers about that, that obviously there's an entity in the system called asset and there's, you know so, each one of those pieces of equipment as they go through their life cycle. We'll talk, we can talk a little bit about the life cycle management. But as they go through the life cycle and get installed and then taken off, that piece of equipment referred, sent back to the you know warehouse and then sent off. That piece of equipment referred, sent back to the you know warehouse and then sent back to another customer, that entire life cycle of that asset or that subasset, the serialized component, has a life has a record in the system.
Speaker 4:I was talking to a customer this week and they're a new company and so they only have a handful of these assets out like literally a spreadsheet exercise a couple hundred in the field because they're a startup company and they're in the medical business, but within a few years there'll be 100,000 of these assets in the field. That's how quickly their business will grow. Business will grow, and so you know, just in. You know when you show them here's the asset asset history, how this all works. Here's all the work orders you did it, here's when you moved it from one machine to another, and et cetera, et cetera. It kind of blows them away. That you know in this system could be a hundred thousand. I'm like no, you're going to end up with a hundred thousand plus of these you know records in the system. Now I'm not worried that the Dynamics platform can handle that. That's not a problem. That's like that's nothing. That's nothing for that platform to handle. But so that's just the out-of-the-box functions of tracking serial numbers as we go along the way. Now there's additional things that can be configured within the system. We can add a simple field into other parts of that or do lookups on line items. You know the sales order line items and the work order line items, so we can relay the line items back to the service also. So, yeah, it's not as complicated as most folks think.
Speaker 4:The complexity comes from the warehouse integration and when I put something in the field and that becomes the complication, that I'm picking this one particular one out of a bin and, okay, hitting it with the gun, with the barcode gun, and putting it on the line item and that becomes an asset inside of the customer and then it begins, or continues its journey, if you will. So it's a lot of discovery work, so to speak. You have basic framework but in terms of it being born in a factory somewhere or being received into your inventory and then tracking it at a warehouse level, like where is it at? And having that integration is. You know, it's unfortunately not a cookie cutter approach, even with finance and operations, and our team does a lot with finance and operations integrations, and so that is one of the areas or, you know, it's just lacking in the platform. It doesn't have that, so so so we're working on, we're working on one of those for medical device company right now no, that's awesome.
Speaker 3:I mean they're, they're trying, I mean they make the integration with VC, which I like to think inventory management was one of the reasons why that came about. You know we had F&O, but that was more or less for data, not necessarily around product, and so it's like you said, if you're a pretty project, you have to bake in those hours heavy on the front end for discovery, because it's a monster, man, it's a monster.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you have to keep track of it. You know, it's like any of this stuff, especially if you're talking to a mature customer that's adding this. It's like they. It's like asking a sales director and a marketing manager and the best salesperson tell me about your sales process. It's like the five blind people describing an elephant. You know, like they do. There's an elephant, but one guy thinks it's a tree and the other guy thinks, well, this is a spiky, it's like a snake.
Speaker 4:You know it's kind of like nobody agrees to what their process is. The warehousing is kind of the same thing. It's just pretty funny to see the whole thing unravel in front of them as they do their talk about no, then we do this. Oh well, you forgot this one too. We also inspect the thing upon return. You know, it's just it's good to have a good framework, I guess, to say this is kind of how it works. And then you guys tell us so they're figuring it out the first time. You know they have never really systematized it or, you know, never had something that forced a certain discipline on them. Everybody does. You know a little bit of the work and that's the system, and the five departments that are involved don't really know what the other departments do.
Speaker 2:It's funny that you mentioned something like, yeah, we inspect the part when it comes back. And I always sat there and it's like you know, when we look at a work order and we're installing a part, and I always sit there and say, well, are we removing a part and what are we doing with that part? Is it going back to warehouse? Are we scrapping it? Is it being returned to? Yeah, like there's so many different things and I get it.
Speaker 2:The the platform is is flexible enough to for partners like our, like ourselves, and yeah and others to go ahead and figure it out, but it's just like man, like it would be great if it was just there, yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. It would be great if it was just out of the box and there was a standard packet for that. There's just not a standard packet for that, there's just not a common solution. I mean, even you know, some people think it's even in the unified. Okay, so if I had everything in one system, then that would fix it, and it's like, nah, even that is a problem.
Speaker 2:So your point. Go ahead, Claude.
Speaker 3:No, you're putting on your advisor hat for that. Anytime it goes to serialized inventory, you're becoming an automatic advisor as a partner for that customer. There's just no getting around it, man.
Speaker 2:And everyone handles it. It's funny I've had so many different for the years manage serialized inventory completely different, because everyone's like oh, it's just you do this and this and this. And it's like oh, it's just, you know, you do this and this and this, and it's simple. It's not quite right. There's these little nuances that organizations every organization does things a little bit differently and handles handles their inventory process or return process differently, or their inspection process differently, and so it's just. You know. There's no to your point, there's no single way of doing it, it's just more of like right, can we, can we?
Speaker 4:get to a starting point yeah, it's interesting, it's just very interesting. Every company has a little different, like you said, that kind of subtle nuance, say you know, everywhere from. Hey, we have the smallest device, it's a circuit board and you know, here's the serial number in firmware. That's what they're keeping track of and that's really critical because it's a medical device and you know it's part of so. There's FDA regulations and all of this has to be traceable all the way from the you know manufacturer and commissioning through its entire life cycle, all the way to the other end of that extreme.
Speaker 4:I remember working with one of the big companies out of Chicago that build valves. And these aren't just little teeny valves, they're valves that are like on a dam or in a power plant or something like that. They're as big as a semi-truck cab. You know, they're just giant. And when they refurb them and return them and put a new one in, you know that entire process takes months on time and their inspection, their return inspection and their testing. But instead of, you know, sending it back when they're done with it, they bring the customer off to their site because the thing is so massive and then, you know, test it there in front of the customer to their UAT happens in their factory instead of at the customer site. It's really interesting. So you have this. Like I said, customers that we're dealing with that are all the way from the tiniest components all the way up to the biggest piece of you know precision engineered equipment know pretty wild yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And I've seen some of those pieces of equipment and you wonder, like what kind of truck is taking that from point a to point b? Like how big does that truck need to be?
Speaker 4:that's cool stuff. You know, one of the one of the deals I did when I was at microsoft, one of the project I was in was komatsu. It was a big. You know, we had a, we had a. It was a oh yeah, a little case study that went around komatsu.
Speaker 4:And so the coolest part for all of us and most of people don't realize, but as a consultant, really the thing that we love to do the most is go to the factory and see these things in action is like they have a big sandbox and they, you know, move dirt around and test them out there. Right, and these machines are just marvels of engineering. Just, I love that stuff, I love the. That's one of the thing that that it really attracts me to this business is, you know, my dad was a truck driver, my mom was a bank teller. I'm super blue collar guy. Just I love to see, you know, like that Midwest engineering. You know, big equipment, big iron, that stuff, just, you know, inspires me. That's the stuff that you know we're on the opposite end of the spectrum. We sit behind a computer and do our thing and we craft our stuff and try to find mastery there. But you know, I just have a high degree of appreciation for the men and women that go out there and do that stuff every single day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree totally and I think part of what I enjoy about working with organizations in the field service operation space is, to your point doing, whether it's a ride-along or going to the factory in the warehouse and seeing you know everyone from their jobs and talking to different individuals about the process and what they go in, you know what goes into their day and you know how they handle exceptions and and in getting to just listen to them and I think things you know, I think they enjoy it because it's like okay hey.
Speaker 2:I'm. You know I don't want to just take, you know, what you have over here and shift it into, you know, a new solution. I, yeah, I want to. I want to understand you know what, you know what is frustrating you, what makes you want to throw that tablet or something else out the window. Right, because those are the, those are the areas that you want to to really look at and adjust and and optimize. You know we don't want to just do a lift and shift and say, hey, we're on, you know lack of measure. You know we're using, you know you know, field service lightning and we're going to move to, you know, dynamic service. And hey, we're just going to do a lift and shift sure but that's great.
Speaker 2:You're moving for a reason. You're going from whatever you have today maybe it's nothing to field service. Well, something's not working right.
Speaker 3:Something's not working. That's right, I'm going to change gears a little bit. Change gears. Here's the fun part. You're such a strategic thinker Like. I follow you on LinkedIn and I oftentimes love when folks yeah, yeah, I cyber-stalked.
Speaker 3:Pierre Pierre gives some great hotlines. If you're not following him, man, you're nuts. So like if somebody puts something that's way out there on left field on LinkedIn. I love how Pierre kind of like just casually brings them down to earth. Or it's like a game of duck hunt sometimes, I guess, depending on you know how you feel, but you oftentimes help bring people down to reality, man. So here's the cool part. There's a lot of hesitancy with implementing field service for some of our partners because they hear oh my God, field services, it's so complex to install. Install it's just you're going to have a terrible, terrible time. You know it's the end of the world. Can you help break folks down? What's your advice for rolling out new systems like field service successfully?
Speaker 4:well one. I think it's important to ground that that particular uh component there and uh have the right mindset going into any one of these projects. And you know, one of the things, things that I had the privilege of at Microsoft when I was there, was to see all the case studies and listen to customer complaints and feedbacks and like be parts of those different inputs and things on that. And I always go back to one of the first case studies. Microsoft wrote about their own internal use of field service for facilities management and I remember working with that group to help build presentations so they could, let's say, market that internally and also use it as marketing. There's several blog articles out there that got written at the time. But when I looked at the solution that they built to manage 6,000 buildings you know around the world, and the facilities for Azure, all the data centers like when literally a light bulb goes out, somebody has to there's a work order, somebody has to, they have to find a contractor to come in and screw the light bulb in Like that entire process that was just vanilla out of the box. There was literally no customizations to that system. They literally just deployed Field Service out of the box, integrated it with. At the time great planes was RIP, what's the ERP application on the back for all of the inventory, like where the light bulb inventory was, and all of that, and like they saved a million dollars within the first like six months. You know, just because the technicians that got the work orders knew if there was light bulbs in the inventory in in the warehouse in seattle, like right there in seattle. So instead of driving across town going knocking on the door hey do you have? I need 14 of these light bulbs I gotta go. Oh, we're out of them right now. So that's the. That's the kind of so that just giving insight to inventory save like millions of dollars literally, and just driving around Seattle trying to find light bulbs and um, it's so going into some of these projects everybody thinks about. You know what it's going to be like five years from now.
Speaker 4:Not like if we just deployed the very straightforward out of the box solution and didn't, you know, do a ton of configuration or customization. You know, maybe change the names and got rid of things that we're not using in the site map. So you know it looks right that it's. It's not as complicated. You know you can get a lot of good results just out of the out of the box function without without doing that, so that grounding, the grounding, the solution and kind of some reality with the opposite side or the flip side of that coin is it isn't just like going and starting up a demo account either and just there you go, just deploy the out-of-the-box solution in the sense that there's always going to be an ERP system and you have to look at it in that context. There's an invoice that has to be written, there's a transfer of some sort of inventory items that have to occur, we have to send a bill to somebody, there has to be taxes that get calculated, you know, on the invoice and at this point, because the solution is mature, you can go a lot there's a lot of different paths down to make all of that happen and that it's more akin to an ERP deployment than it is a CRM deployment.
Speaker 4:You know, or that there's complexity, is in the environment that you're in. It's not the application, it's the complexity of the environment. In many ways that's what attracts us too, as consultants, to that world, because any time we talk about business process integration across departments, you know, now all of a sudden we're more like guidance counselors or marriage counselors to try to resolve, help the company resolve these inherent barriers that have kept them from being productive that this department does it this way and this other department does basically the same thing but a little differently and to try to help them find common ground and deal with all the organizational barriers they built over the years to basically cope with one another in these different departments. Whenever we have business processes that are going to be orchestrated across an application that impacts an organization, that impacts people in their jobs and that's the fascinating part, that's where the complexity actually is it's not in the application, the application.
Speaker 4:You know we've got smart people all over the world that can figure out how to do pretty much anything in the app we want. So it's not really the technical issues as much as it is the organizational challenges of you know, trying to get those, just like in CRM, the five of you know, trying to get those, just like in crm, the five. You know different people that'll tell you what their sales process is. You know everybody's got a different perspective and it's like perspectives. As a company, we need to have a perspective on how we do it and and so that's, that becomes the challenge. That becomes the challenge yeah, that's, that's.
Speaker 2:I think that's fantastic insight and I'm in a thousand percent agreement with all that. There's definitely challenges. Everyone's got their own opinions and it becomes interesting, of course, especially when I think a lot of times when we're dealing with conflicting priorities as well, or there's multiple divisions and groups within an organization and they have different goals and objectives, and so how do we come up with a solution that works for all and come up with efficient processes that are going to benefit each other and not sort of step on each other's toes, and that, of course, takes a lot of coordination, skill and effort?
Speaker 2:I think on you know various parts, I think one you know sort of navigate that those waters, but also you know, facilitate and come with an open mind.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely A lot of these companies are here looking at these systems because they think the systems are gonna, you know, as long as if we just have everybody follow that exact system, then you know it's going to be all good and that's going to align. You know, our company and we've grown through acquisition or something like that, which we see this all the time in service companies. They grow through acquisition. So let's say they're a fire and safety company and they just buy another fire, they merge with another fire and safety company across on the other, let's say, big city or something like that. So now we've got three fire and safety companies all trying to use the same system and you know there's a little bit of a fight internally over. Yeah, exactly how are we gonna, you know, do returns or something like that? And everybody thinks they're, you know, special snowflake. They have to. You know we've got to do everything the same very differently for each one of those groups in there and try to vet that all out.
Speaker 4:But at the core of it is, you know, sometimes just get the basic blocking and tackling done. You know, first everybody should be able to fill out a work order. It all should be able to pull something from an inventory, keep track of the time you know, communicate to a customer. All those fundamental principles, regardless of the nuanced components of the different departments, or something like that, that core functionality. Like there's no debate in in finance and operations over how to send an invoice out, but get you know five field service directors in the room they will. This is literally an argument that's happening at the company, like what should we send the invoice? We will perform an invoice. Or when do we calculate the? You know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 4:So yeah, oh yeah, so yeah, yeah, we just lack. We just lack general accounting principles, the gap stuff, yeah, you know, in service operations where do you feel change management like?
Speaker 3:I mean change management is huge. How do you feel like change management or you could use field service out of the box to help guide you through that change management journey? What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 4:yeah, I think you should have that change management discussion. As a customer, I'm surprised at how many companies think they can just do it themselves, or they, they, they make lip service to it but don't actually do any of it facts, you know.
Speaker 4:So fact right there yeah, that it's really funny. I, we, literally I was in a meeting a week ago because we're put together a proposal and we always go through this part of the process, one of the. You know, go through the technical aspect of it but also go, look, you have three different offices. They all do things three different ways. You know, do you recognize that that actually is a biggest, bigger problem than the technical kind of components? And so, as we put this in, you know you need to align your training. There needs to be an executive. You're going to communicate this to your field. You know you have to look at all the I call it leakage where I used to be able to do it this way and now I have to do it this way, but I can still do it the old way, so I don't have to adopt your new system and how that can get into the.
Speaker 4:You know technicians and engineers they're very habitual. They do the same thing the same way often and they refine that process down so they can be super efficient and they know where they're at in their processes right and they know where they're at in their processes right. That kind of guidance they have internally gives them, you know guardrails and helps them understand by feeling the motor you know if this thing is off or not. So we get super habitual about that kind of work and so when you talk to the management team they're like, ah, you know, people will just pick it up, you know.
Speaker 4:And it's like yeah, you've got to have a plan for managing change, whether that's a framework, a pro-sci or something like that, ad car, there's all these different methods and methodologies. But when a management team looks at that and kind of goes, I don't think we need that, I think we'll handle the training ourselves. And it's like you kind of missed the point of the whole conversation. That wasn't about training. Like, yeah, training is one thing, but having a plan for change is another thing. And I think a lot of the mid-market companies they just don't have that discipline. Some of them do, but it's pretty rare, pretty rare that I've seen it but it's pretty rare, pretty rare that I've seen it.
Speaker 3:That makes so much sense, say I. We got a few more moments, so I gotta pick your brain about a topic that's near and dear to my heart dispatching. So I gotta ask what do you think is the real future automated scheduling or is it just like a promise and you know? But just gotta pick your brain on that. What are your thoughts on that man?
Speaker 4:yeah, I, I think it's a little bit of a spectrum, some, obviously, some, some dispatching and automation be expected in the near future for a lot of companies where the customer goes and self schedules. And you know we haven't seen from microsoft, for example, the kind of the current development cycle of where this is going. They haven't shown anything. So the customer portal, which has been in preview for four years now, is one of those areas where that sounds like five, yeah, something like that. It's been out a little bit.
Speaker 3:Bad jab, bad jab.
Speaker 4:I complain to Microsoft, it's okay. It's okay, there's reasons, there's reasons, there's reasons and I also often have an optimistic view of that. Um, that, just seeing the way sausage making happens, a lot of times one product group let's say the field service has a great vision and they try to execute on that. And then there's a platform thing like ce is a platform that has a whole. There's a whole nother engineering team that think about it from a different perspective, like the whole, like this is how we're going to actualize some of this in the platform. We saw that with the Field Service Mobile application, where the Field Service Mobile was way ahead of what the Power Platform could do. Even you know they were pushing. They had the most sophisticated features in there for offline and all the like we were talking about early on, you know. So it's kind of the same way, I think, with dispatch. We're starting to see the generative AI and some of the AI-assisted scheduling components that aren't the big RSO, that are just that democratized decision-making where I can just, you know, click the button and we get four or five different choices. We push the magic button and we got a dispatched you know kind of person. So that's, you know one area where I think we're going to see more an end-to-end and maybe a little better front-end experience for customers, maybe through a bot or some other kind of type of framework, as opposed to just a landing page on a website. But with that said, who knows what Microsoft will end up doing? I know partners have come up with lots to address the initial dispatch, but then you have the next layer, which is that kind of scheduling automation, which is to look at all the work orders and all the resources in there and try to rejigger the whole. You know, like move the work orders around. What RSO does, and you know I'm sure you guys have a very similar experience to mine, which is you talk to a company and you show them that and they're like well, that's out in the future, we'll maybe do that later on, or you can.
Speaker 4:Just the resistance is immediate. There's nobody literally can do what that dispatching team can do. We've got. You know, there's no way. There's no way that that AI system can beat my dispatchers. So I think that is coming to an end. That world, honestly, is going to come to an end at some point here in the next three or four years, I think. You know we've all seen it. You're mentioning just chat, gtp, large language models, and just now they put math in those systems. That ability for some of the AI systems that we've had and what we work with, like RSO, is an amazing piece of tech, and there's other partners in the ecosystem, like FS Health or FLS out of the UK that has a pretty sophisticated routing engine and we can do some really amazing on-the-fly recalculations of work orders and whatnot, and so I think we're going to see more from them. In the fall, I think they're going through some upgrades in their system and I'm really excited to see what they're going to produce too.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I can't say enough good about the guys at FLS. Man, shout out to the guys at FLS. They have an amazing piece of tech and it's good to refer some of our customers to it. But I think there's that big difference between real-time scheduling and then batch scheduling where we have to kind of like, you know, set reset, as I don't know if they'll ever have a real-time scheduling engine, and from the microsoft piece I mean. But they have capabilities now with linear programming and azure, ai, foundry, basically running these python components. If you have the math, again this goes back to your data. If you have the math maybe you can build something on your own. I don't know, it's just. I mean I think now the capabilities are there, but again, I don't want to. That's a whole nother.
Speaker 4:Two-hour podcast yeah, so maybe we'll save that for another time. Right, real-time scheduling is something cool. Now I was it that? Who did I just see that it has isn't salesforce. Just came out with that in there. There's an option they have. I believe I I wanted, was it salesforce?
Speaker 3:you're trying to get me in trouble, man. No comment oh no comment okay I think it is, though, pierre. No, I'm just being funny, I think. I think salesforce did just bring that out, man yeah, so maybe they'll be.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so, gittler, and then the team over there I'm sure are getting, because I know, you know, usually this is the leapfrog with the big vendors, where someone comes out with something cool and everybody else kind of responds to that and goes, oh, I think we can do one up better than that. So, like you said, this is not, it's not rocket science like the, it's science. It definitely like routing optimization. I had that book, you know, traveling salesman problem. That's basically solved at scale. So it's just math. Like you said, it's a math problem and there's a bunch of large math engines that can do do this kind of work and rejigger the, the schedule territory and there's definitely compute power behind it at microsoft.
Speaker 4:So so it's just do they have the will? Do they have the will to the for the fight? You know, I want to play right hockey theme or something. If they have the will for the fight. No, I'm sure they have the will for the fight. Let's see they have the budget. That's what I did after working at microsoft. There's no, there's no lack of awesome ideas or excellent people to execute on those awesome ideas. It's do you have the budget to do them down too often. So it's amazing. It's an amazing company when you see software developed at scale like that, with hundreds and hundreds of people working together and trying to build something. That's pretty wild to see that it's always.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know we're about out of time and and I don't want to cut off quad again. I've been doing that all episode. He's gonna really beat me when I see him in person. Stop, don't hurt me anymore. Quad don't hurt. No, stop, feel safe in your home, scott? I don't know. I need a safe word, pierre. I need a safe word.
Speaker 3:Pineapple. No, pierre, it's always a pleasure. Scott man, you are the best. But Pierre, man, it's always a pleasure and we can't wait to have you back, man.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yes, we're going to keep watching you If you're not following Pierre on. Yeah, it's a fun party.
Speaker 2:It's a fun party. Follow Pierre, it's a moral imperative, yeah.
Speaker 4:That's what an 80s movie is.
Speaker 2:Wow Come on, come on. What movie is that from?
Speaker 4:It's a moral imperative.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I don't know where that one's from. It's a Val. You know what I'm going to end on this? It's a Val Kilmer movie way back in the day. Is it the one with the lion, the ghost in the darkness? No, I don't know. I'm just going to throw it out there. I'll tell you later.
Speaker 4:Alright. Well, I have to.
Speaker 2:Take care everyone.
