Service Smarts

The Service Executive’s Guide: How to Compete and Win Funding for Your Service Management Project

Wednesday, March 10, 2010
12:00pm ET/9:00am PT/1700 UTC

For many service executives one of the most difficult challenges involves preparing a compelling business case to internally compete and win for project approval and funding. When competing against many other projects in your organization, how do you ensure that your project becomes a priority and gets the visibility it deserves?

Why do some projects get approved while others that may seem more mission-critical and important never even get considered? Given the economic conditions, limited funds and scarce resources all projects are being scrutinized much more and it is imperative that you effectively communicate the business and financial benefits to win.

Attend this webinar to gain insights and helpful guidance to help you prepare a compelling business case as well as improve the probability that your service management project will get approved.

During the webinar you learn:

• Key operational and financial metrics that should be included in your business case to ease your project through the approval process
• Things to consider when communicating the impact that a service management solution can have on your financial performance, a key feature of getting your project approved.
• How to identify the cause-effect insight and the impact that particular process changes or new technologies can have on your overall operations.
• How to map out the political landscape as it affects your project, and create cross-functional buy-in to support your project.

If you are a senior-level service industry professionals committed to improving your service organization’s profitability and customer satisfaction, then this webcast is a MUST ATTEND.

Speakers:

Will McNeil, Research Analyst, AMR Research

Mitch Green, Director of Business Value Consulting, Astea International

Third Party and Vendor Management, Next Generation User Interface and support for ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) are just a few of the new features that are revolutionizing and redefining the delivery of world class service

HORSHAM, PA (February 1, 2010) — Astea International Inc. (NASDAQ: ATEA), a global provider of service lifecycle management and mobility solutions, has introduced a new version of the industry’s most robust solution for service organizations. With this latest release, Astea is introducing many new features and modules, including: an innovative user interface; a suite of workforce collaboration tools; a redesigned Studio development tool; Third Party and Vendor Management module; and support for ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library).

From the initial customer call to the closing of work orders, customer invoicing and product replacement, every step in the service lifecycle process represents an opportunity for improving customer satisfaction, reducing costs and increasing revenues. In order to deliver world class service, organizations need seamless continuity and visibility of every interaction with the customer. Critical customer information must be shared and instantly available to everyone in the organization that touches that customer. With Astea Alliance 10.0, companies can manage the entire service lifecycle with a single provider — Astea.

Below are just a fraction of the benefits that organizations can realize from leveraging the latest functionality in Astea Alliance 10.0:

• Improved Productivity & Collaboration — Leveraging Web 2.0 functionality, Astea Alliance helps companies connect and work collaboratively with partners, vendors, suppliers, customers and employees. With the new enterprise collaboration tools, vendor and third party management, dashboards, and embedded analytics, this release promotes the easy exchange of ideas and information throughout the service lifecycle ecosystem.

• Ease of Use and Personalized User Experience – Redesigned and fresh user interface provides for sleek, simplistic and personalized navigation. Combining the user experience of the internet and office tools, this new user interface becomes the end user’s personal landing page. This rich and innovative user interface leverages Microsoft®’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). The interface supports tab management functionality, smart menus and a home page that can be personalized to meet an individual’s unique needs to view the most relevant and up to date information in a single location.

• Easily Manage and Support a Company’s Entire Service Ecosystem – This new release also introduces the new Astea Alliance Third Party and Vendor Management module. This secure facility provides the ability for third party vendors and subcontractors to access the system and enables them to participate in the process of service delivery. By having the ability to manage and view both internal and external service technicians, with a single platform and dispatch console, companies can easily choose the best technician for every job while ensuring a consistent level of service. This new module seamlessly connects the service provider with partners and third party technicians eliminating duplicate data entry, easily communicating work order information and status updates, parts ordering and tracking, as well as accelerating invoice and payment once work is completed.

• Lower Total Cost of Ownership – Astea Alliance 10.0 introduces a new and flexible development environment, leveraging Microsoft® Visual Studio 2008. This new development environment makes it easy to build customizations and carry forward those customizations when upgrading to future releases of Astea Alliance. Astea has developed extensions, often referred to as “plug-ins”, to the Visual Studio 2008 environment that speed development. Organizations can use Alliance Studio’s powerful tools to define and update business rules, screens, menus, defaults, alerts and more. Users can add new functionality with user-defined fields or build entirely new screens.

• Enable and Support Continuous Process Improvement – Astea Alliance introduces support for the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) framework. ITIL provides a framework of best practice approaches which are intended to facilitate the delivery of high quality IT services. The enhancements in Astea Alliance 10.0 focus on what are seen as the core processes of ITIL: Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, and Service Level Management, which form the basis of the day-to-day operations of a Call Center. With ITIL best practices built into the Astea Alliance application, organizations can further improve response time, minimize disruption, and ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used in order to minimize impact and to improve day-to-day operations.

“Building on our extensive history and expertise in the service management industry, this release is by far the most comprehensive release Astea has ever introduced. This release focuses on enabling and easily facilitating service organizations to confidently and effectively create, support and manage a truly virtual service delivery network for both financial and operational efficiencies. With workforce collaboration, analytics, third party and vendor management, ITIL support and much more, organizations can feel confident that they are implementing best practices and delivering a consistent level of service around the globe, greatly improving customer satisfaction,” said Zack Bergreen, CEO of Astea International.

Astea is the only solution provider that offers all cornerstones of service lifecycle management: customer management; service management; asset management; forward and reverse logistics management; and mobile workforce management with enhanced scheduling optimization. Astea’s solutions are seamlessly orchestrated to share and leverage information throughout the service lifecycle – removing the traditional barriers between the field and back office. With Astea Alliance’s modularity, companies can introduce one module at a time or deploy a seamless information backbone across the entire service lifecycle continuum, thereby eliminating the patchwork of disparate systems that can hamper a company’s ability to provide best-in-class service due to the “siloing” of customer information.

Astea works with hundreds of companies worldwide, maximizing the value of an organization’s service operation by optimizing critical business processes across the globe. The company can be reached at 215-682-2500.

Aberdeen Group: The State of Service Management: Forecast 2010 – Webinar Recording Now Available

Discover the strategies that will serve as the foundation for success of Best-in-Class organizations in 2010, and stay ahead of the competition. Did you know that more than a third of the companies surveyed cite the need to improve existing levels of customer satisfaction (41%) and desire to stimulate overall revenue growth within the existing customer base (39%) as the primary pressures they currently face, and that post-sales strategic service management is one of the principal ways by which they believe they can attain these goals? Bill Pollock, Vice President and Principal Analyst of the Strategic Service Management Practice at Aberdeen Group, shares the key intelligence insights.

 What you will learn:

• What makes the Best-in-Class leaders in their respective fields
• Where your organization currently stands with regard to attaining its own Best-in-Class levels of service management, focusing on such key areas as service revenue creation and profitability, customer satisfaction and retention, and workforce productivity.
• What future things to consider for continual service process optimization!

In today’s world, too much attention may be focused on buzz words, fads and whatever else might be “hot” in the blogs or other social media, rather than on the core attributes of substance and sustainability. Many solution providers also tend to parrot David Letterman’s Top 10 list routinely making it seem like there are at least 10 good reasons to use their solution instead of another vendor’s. However, with Service Lifecycle Management (SLM), you don’t need 10 good reasons to adopt a Best-of-Breed solution over Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) – you just need one compelling reason, supported by the ability to implement with little to no disruption to existing business operations, allow the solution to grow along with the your – and your customers’ – needs, and attain a predictable and reasonably high ROI that even your CFO will embrace. Again, 10 good reasons are not entirely necessary – all that is needed is at least one compelling reason, supported by clearly defined, quantifiable and documentable results. That is why we believe that, when it comes to SLM, a Best-of-Breed solution is a much better choice than ERP. Let me explain.

Our experience has shown that the ability to pick and choose the specific components to support an organization’s SLM activities offers a much more tailored solution that is able to address all facets of this service-centric process. That is not necessarily to say that an ERP solution will not, or cannot, support SLM – rather, that a robust, application-specific, Best-of-Breed solution can do it better.

Many ERP solution providers go-to-market with messages that proclaim “everything your organization needs to support its services activities”. However, the “everything” that is usually offered by these vendors typically only follows the 80/20 rule, providing only “80% of the SLM functionality required”, but delivered by a “brand name” company typically as an add-on to a more extensive – and expensive – ERP solution. On the other hand, a Best-of-Breed SLM solution typically offers 100% – or close to it – of the specific functionality required by the service organization from a service-oriented solution provider that truly understands the user’s needs from the requisite functional specs; to the terminology and buzz words; to the requirements for installation, burn-in and training; and ongoing service and support. In this way, a Best-of-Breed solution provider typically positions itself as a 100% provider of the specific SLM functionality and support required, and not merely as the provider of an add-on module from an 80/20 ERP solution vendor.

Any business relationship must be a two-way street in order for there to be a true partnership between the solution provider and the customer, and SLM is no exception to the rule. In fact, this is where a Best-of-Breed solution provider has a clear and distinct advantage over a more ubiquitous ERP vendor in that the former is more likely to be a specialist within the client organization’s field (i.e., service), rather than a generalist among a multitude of fields ranging from R&D and product development, to manufacturing and production, to sales and marketing, and various other business processes.

Best-of-Breed solution providers in the service segment have typically supported clients in their field for decades, gaining a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of the marketspace including who the key and niche players are (i.e., vendors and users), how customers’ service organizations operate, what specific functionalities are required (and available), how usage has been and will be evolving over time, and what the key pain points are for all parties involved. Many of them have been around since the early days of equipment maintenance service and support where solution providers were first known as FSMS, or Field Service Management Systems providers. They then evolved into SMS, or Service Management Systems vendors; then into Customer Interface Systems, or CIS vendors; and ultimately into CRM vendors, or the like. Today, only some of these vendors have fully evolved into true Service Lifecycle Management, or SLM, solution providers covering the full range of service-centric functionality required by their respective user base. These vendors represent the Best-of-Breed that have been successful in differentiating themselves beyond the enterprise-wide capabilities of the ERP generalists and the 80/20 CRM vendors.

Automation Puts Field Service in Focus

 Integrated Solution Cover Story:
Automation Puts Field Service In Focus

An automated field service management solution helps Fujifilm increase productivity and service level agreement compliance. 

Once strictly thought of as a cost center by many manufacturers, field service departments have evolved into a major source of revenue and, increasingly, a key part of a company’s value proposition. A successful field service operation, though, depends on effectively delivering service in a timely, efficient, and consistent manner.

For Valhalla, NY-based Fujifilm U.S.A., building a world-class service division meant deploying a best-of-breed customer relationship management (CRM) and field service automation system that has helped the company improve productivity while increasing revenue and providing additional value to customers.

Fujifilm needed a system that could manage the entire service experience, including the help desk, contract management, and inventory management. The company needed a system that included a mobile computing solution for the technicians and the ability to track the service history for each customer, along with data mining and reporting capabilities. They selected the Alliance product suite from Astea International.

Fujifilm achieved a return on investment in one year by improving field technician efficiency, increasing the number of service calls completed per day, and streamlining the invoice cycle. The company also improved parts tracking in the field and reduced the time technicians spent on administrative duties. The company also expanded its service revenues and increased its service contract business to encompass approximately 87% of Fujifilm’s customers without having to hire a substantial number of new employees.

Check out the whole story

The concept of service lifecycle management, or SLM, has been around for some time now; however, the tools to actually make it happen are still relatively new. Not only that, they are continually evolving. Additionally, these tools continue to build upon themselves to provide users with more power and flexibility to manage their services operations. The upside of this growth in empowerment is that if your organization has already implemented SLM, then it is already on the fast track toward being able to effectively manage its total base of capital equipment, mission-critical assets, and human capital. The downside, however, is that if you have not already embraced the concept, you may be wasting precious time.

While we have seen a great deal of growth in the acceptance of service lifecycle management over the past year or so, I still believe the market to be grossly undertapped with respect to its widespread availability. For example, there are many vendors that claim to offer complete suites of customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and asset management (AM) functionality; but few, if any, can fully deliver on their claim. However, I believe, that through the use of a credible, comprehensive and modular model that effectively integrates state-of-the-art technologies to support the most critical business applications, there is an SLM solution that can deliver what it takes to effectively run a services organization.

In an age where CRM, SCM, ERP, AM and all the other acronym-based solutions simply cannot cut it in and of themselves, only SLM addresses each of the factors that are important to organizations for whom downtime is not an option, and resource utilization directly impacts financial performance. This is what SLM is designed to do, and an SLM solution is what the most progressive types of services organizations are using to differentiate themselves from the also-rans.

However, there are still presently many alternative definitions of service lifecycle management being tossed about in the marketplace – and not all of them reflect the full value proposition. From a practical operating standpoint, I believe there is really only one all-encompassing definition that addresses every critical aspect required in managing the business; a definition that is both universal, as well as customizable to each individual user’s business environment.

At Astea we define service lifecycle management as “a solution that supports the complete service lifecycle, from lead generation and project quotation, to service and billing, through asset retirement”. We further define SLM to encompass the integration and optimization of critical business processes including the contact center, field service, depot repair, logistics, professional services, and sales and marketing. We believe a comprehensive SLM suite also extends into portal, business intelligence, dynamic scheduling, and mobile solutions; and must be applicable to services providers supporting customers in all vertical segments, and in all geographies.

As service-related costs continue to escalate and customers continue to demand faster response times, but just because the technician shows up on time does not mean your problems are solved. There is a compelling Managing Automatino webinar with Astea, Aberdeen, and Motorola that focuses on how to better connect your field workers to the resources and information they need to do their jobs so they can be more productive and minimize their dependence on dispatchers. This is becoming increasingly important to today’s field organization for a variety of reasons – the most significant of which are reducing service-related costs and meeting customer demand for faster service issue resolution. In fact, in a recent survey by Aberdeen Group 41% of organizations reported that consumer expectations for speed of service have increased exponentially over the last 12 months. To address these challenges, an increasing number of field service organizations are looking to adopt mobile technologies as a means to better connect their field service technicians with the data they need to complete a job faster and more efficiently.
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In this complimentary Webcast Recording:

• Gain insights into key technology enablers and deployment models to optimize your mobile field workforce.
• Hear about best practices and the ROI implications that service organizations have achieved from leveraging technology solutions and see how your service organization stacks up in comparison.
• Learn from industry experts how you can evaluate, select, and successfully deploy field service mobility solutions that addresses your specific needs.
• Understand the challenges and benefits that accompany the adoption of a mobile field service solution.

To view recording go to:  http://www.astea.com/en/forms/request.aspx?t=webinar27