 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering IFS World Conference 2018. Brought to you by IFS. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference 2018 here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. What you're seeing right now are the hordes of people here at IFS World and we are here to talk to our two guests, Samir Dutta, who is an analyst at the Service Council and Mark Brewer, his Global Industry Director at Service at IFS. Thanks so much for joining us. Well, thanks for having us. Thanks for having us, yeah. We draw you away from the Cappuccino machine. I know, I know, but it is, it is quite, it's very buzzy, it's very exciting. So talk to us a little bit about FSM 6, which is going to be released at the end of this year. What's new? What's exciting? Right, so IFS Field Service Management 6. Yeah, I think the first point to make is that we already have what is recognized as the most complete solution in Field Service Management. So this release was really focused on improving the user experience. It's a common theme throughout this conference, I think you'll hear. So how do not only our customers, but our customers' customers, their partners, all stakeholders, get the most intuitive user experience out of this solution to derive the value that's encapsulated in there. I think another thing that goes along with that is we're moving to a zero customization goal. That is to say, you'll still have, you know, ultra levels of configurability in this product from a workflow perspective, from a user interface perspective, from a business rule perspective. But instead of doing that through customization, you're doing that through configuration, which means you can sit on an evergreen model, you're not restricted on your upgrades, you can stay on the latest and greatest. In other words, our customers are able to encapsulate an excellent experience and their business rules, all within a standard offering. But field service management, you don't really necessarily think of it inside the ERP suite. It's kind of a hang-off, I don't know what the right term is. So how does that make this offering different within all the offerings that IFS has? Yep, it's a great question. So one of the uniques about the IFS-FSM solution is that it is complementary to whatever backend systems that you already have. So let's say you have something from one of our, you know, our peers in the business. So you're not running IFS apps for your ERP, you're running something else. That doesn't matter. You can still derive best-in-class field service management from the FSM solution. It integrates with pretty much any other backend. So if you truly are a service-focused operation of which many companies, you know, 70% of the revenue derived from service, you can get that, if you like, best-in-class service capability without throwing anything out that you've already got. And that's why FSM is somewhat different to the majority of the other portfolio applications in IFS. So talk a little bit about how closely you work with your customers. I mean, that is a real point of pride for IFS, is how customer-focused, how customer-centric you are. So describe your process and how you collaborate with customers in terms of what they want the end product to look like. Really glad you asked that question. And it's incredibly timely for this event because when the event closes on Thursday, we actually have a day dedicated to what we call our Customer Advisory Council. So we have 12 of our strategic field service customers gathering in Atlanta to effectively help plan the roadmap. So we're not talking about, you know, tomorrow's feature functions. We're talking about a three- to five-year strategy from their business. So this is not, if you like, the user's asking for features. It's actually C-level and executive management level from our customers that are actually giving us insights into where they're taking their service operation in the future. Not really a technology discussion, but a business strategy discussion. We can then take that away. That involves our R&D organization as well, but we take that away. We augment that with our own run-up goals. Technology that is obviously, you know, within the field service space already, AI, AIR, IoT and so forth. And, you know, bringing those three things together, that's how we ensure that we are building applications, not just for today, but for what's next as per the conference tagline, you know? So, heavily customer-centric, and just on Friday, all those customers in the room telling us where they want to go. Samira, what are you seeing as sort of trends in this field service market, and how are you seeing IFS responding to those? Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, field service as a whole wasn't something that was talked about previously, and we see so much more interest in the field, of field service, and the overall equation of aftermarket service and support. You know, previously that was a byproduct of being in business. We have a product, we need to support it, so we need to maybe throw some resources, but let's do that at the lowest cost. Now you'll see more and more companies talk about, you know, service as a profit center, that we need to make money as service. And this is, you know, this is primarily being driven by three major themes, three major disruptors. You have technology, of course, and all of the new tools, AR, AI, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, IoT, and that's driving companies to figure out what is their story in each one of those solutions. We're not all there, no one solved the problem, but we're all trying to figure out where do those fit into the way we deliver service and the way our customers consume service. Then you have in field service, specifically, workforce-related challenges, disruptions. In our research, we find about 70% of companies are going to face a talent shortage in the next five to 10 years, and this is research that's done across manufacturing and other disciplines as well. So your capacity in the sense of the number of workers you have is not going up, and you have to bring in new workers so you have to attract new talent, but then you have that outgoing flow of workforce and knowledge that's leaving your organization. So you're trying to balance all of those needs. And then eventually, customers are demanding more. You might say, what does that mean in an industrial setting? Well, we're all consumers in some form, and we have consumer experiences. The Amazons of the world, the Ubers of the world who give us an element of convenience and access to information, and that is beginning to translate more and more so into the B2B service environment. So as a service organization, you're balancing customer needs which are rising. You've got a talent pool or a labor pool that's probably declining, and all of these disruptive technologies that you have to incorporate into your business. And so as a company as IFS, that has been very, very customer centric, IFS has done a lot around field service management to improve some of the workforce capacity challenges with their solutions around FSM. They are taking a greater stake in some of the customer engagement solutions with the acquisitions of MPL systems, and potentially future acquisitions down the road. And then from a technology point of view, I like IFS's approach. They've been, they're not quick to jump to the end to say, you know, here's our AI solution per se, but they're essentially trying to establish those steps for companies to get from point A to point B to point C to say, here's where analytics can help you, here's where mobility can help you. It's a little bit more of a pragmatic approach as opposed to a marketing-first approach. And so IFS has done a really good job in terms of the workforce elements, the technology elements, and now more so on the customer engagement side as well. You know what really strikes me as we're having this conversation is, you know, the way that customers engage with companies has changed dramatically, right? And certainly on the consumer side and the business side, so much now the engagement is via an electronic interface. And I can see where the increasing importance of the field sales person in that truck is actually the face of the company and probably quite often the only person that the customer actually engages. So that's a really different type of service level requirement, not to meet an SLA delivery because of a contractual obligation, but in terms of actually being the face in the engagement and the touch point of your company with an actual customer. Probably happening more and more in the field as a percentage of the total than it ever has. It's a great observation. You know, we actually, many of our customers today regard that field engineer as the trusted advisor of the customer. He is the trusted advisor. You know, they don't see him as a sales person. They see him as their, you know, confidant, their trusted advisor. He's not only going to be the hero to fix their problem, he's actually going to tell them how they can prevent such a problem in the future. And he's also going to try and offer them, you know, I can fix this problem today, but actually if you're boarding to a wider service contract, you wouldn't need to care about how many visits and how many parts you consume. It will actually cover you completely with a gold contract. He upsells and cross sells at the same time as becoming the hero. So perfect observation. So are they actively, you know, kind of retraining those folks to really start to think of themselves more as a kind of a customer engagement representative versus just a field service person? You see that in the real world? Most definitely, most definitely. Because, you know, more and more, we've got an educated buyer, the buyer's savvy. You know, he's done a lot of his own work before he's actually committed to a purchase these days. It's much the same in this space. You know, rather than be sold to, they want to be advised. And it's a different experience again to use that phrase from a technology perspective. You know, that mobile application that used to be about here's your jobs, go visit these locations. It actually now is, oh, when you're there, maybe you should talk about this particular offering. We have a promotion on that particular unit. This customer uses X, Y, and Z features. Talk to them about another, you know, incremental gain from that. So the intelligences move from just fix the problem to actually become their trusted advisor, like I said. And I would add to that, it's not just about training. It's about hiring. So it's the profile of who you bring in as a field service technician. You're not only bringing someone who's technically savvy or mechanically savvy or digitally savvy. You're bringing someone who can communicate with customers. Someone who can work as a team. So internally, you're internal customers, and then you're external customers who can communicate, who can provide solutions, who can provide guidance. We've done some studies of field service engineers and they say, you know, our work is 10% fixing things and 90% of solving customer problems. So it's having that empathy, having that knowledge of what the customer's going through and potentially what the customer might go through in the future and being able to preempt some of that with advice, potentially selling, potentially guiding your customers with information. And so it is a much more holistic experience because they are the face of the organization. And as a consequence, expectations have raised in the customer base. They want more than just a fix. It's so wild, right? This whole conversation about machines taking our jobs. And yet everyone that we talk to, there's not enough people to do the jobs. And so it just, A, reinforces that we need to help, but B, more importantly, that it's the combination of a machine helping do the scheduling, helping decide where to go, helping to know what the opportunity is for that particular engagement with the person who's empathetic, has history with the company, history with the problems. That actually is a much better solution than either one or the other. Yeah. You know, to talk about artificial intelligence again, you know, we see it does a couple of things. One, it allows scaling of the human, if you will, not replacement of the human. We don't have sufficient skilled employees. Secondly, I think it augments the human experience because I'll give you an example. We got a customer that's in like the breakdown of recovery service for vehicles in the US, in fact. And today a call center agent in the contact center, they'll take a call, but the virtual assistant is actually listening to the conversation, kind of like a Siri in the background. And they pick up on phrases like tow truck, automatically pops up on the agent screen. The nearest tow truck is 10 miles away. It's Steve, you know, in this location to the customer. They'll pick up on emergency. We can get there with a closer engineer. We can pull him up another job. That's actually going in the year of the agent and it's going on the screen of the agent. They are providing a level of service. You know, the customer is pretty, you know, impressed by as a consequence. That's a great example of it's not just the human experience or the AI experience. It's a combined experience. It's the human empathy along with the automated knowledge that you're finding there, that's great. Well, Mark, thank you so much for joining us. Mark and Samir, I really appreciate it. It's been a great conversation. Well, thank you very much. Thanks. Thanks. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. We will have more from IFS World Conference just after this.