Our capability and services centre on satisfying management needs and controls, creating/ building positive field employees and end-user experiences and fostering beneficial customer relationships.

Aligned with these guiding, people-centric, principles, are strong beliefs in technology as the business enabler, efficient and streamlined business processes that are themselves supported by the need for high quality data.

We strive to bring simplicity and cohesion to complex and fragmented mobile field service businesses.

 

MFSM are skilled and experienced in shaping new, and revitalising faltering, mobile service delivery programmes; we provide the “glue” !

Mobile field operations literally touches on many, if not all, areas of an enterprise from the 'man-in-the-van' on the front-line through to Sales & Marketing, Supply Chain, HR and Finance in the ‘back-office’.

Consequently, it is one of, if not the, most complex environments to manage. The inter-relationships between people, process, data and enabling technology, coupled with extended communication channels to geographically dispersed and mobile end-users bring a plethora of challenges. If you have experienced a CRM deployment, then you will understand why delivering a successful mobile service operations delivery programme is more complex.

Programmes to improve or transform mobile field operations are, therefore, inherently complex and require a high degree of skill, experience and knowledge to be measurably successful.

Underestimating the enormity of such programmes is a common trap, and escaping from ‘trouble’ can be both difficult and daunting. Using in-house and/or home-grown 'experts' to transform the business may bring prejudiced and jaundiced views as well as allowing existing malpractice to prevail into the new world, resulting in anticipated business benefits not being fully realised.

With our experience of managing and rescuing significant and complex programmes, we can work with you in a number of ways - to design and establish a strategic continuous improvement programme, to deliver a specific project or workstream within a wider programme, or alternatively we resuscitate faltering in-flight delivery programmes by bringing focus and momentum.

Our style is to get involved, to become the ‘glue’ that brings, and holds, the programme together.

For new initiatives, MFSM can bring experience and insight into developing requirements from across the enterprise, translating them into a suitable business case including (for example) management of third party vendors, facilitating technical and business solution design activities.

To support faltering in-flight programmes, we identify the programme risks and weak-points, such as supplier relationships, poor governance, inadequate communication, insufficient resourcing, technical and functional design, nature and extent of business change, and find pragmatic solutions to put the programme back on course and ensure positive outcomes.

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Articulating the business process technology problem(s) and impacts of solutions & potential benefits

Organisations, regardless of position on the “maturity profile” can benefit from independent assessment – whether it is to help fully articulate problems, or to or to create a baseline for improvement, or even just to validate existing performance (“we’re doing ok”).

The primary benefits of any independent assessment are that it can remove the potential subjectivity and prejudicial views held internally, create a foundation for measurable future growth and bring quantifiable improved performance against an agreed baseline.

Satisfying management control, creating positive employee experience and ensuring beneficial customer relationships, are at the heart of our thinking when undertaking the Discovery phase ...

Our fact-based approach is to undertake an initial ‘discovery’ phase during which we are able to quickly elucidate a deep understanding of the operation...

... conducting structured interviews and consulting with all organisational levels to develop a balanced view; this includes business sponsors, stakeholders, end-users and we may even extend this review to include your customers and/or your software/ systems providers (by agreement) )
... ‘shadowing’ the field employees collecting real-time data on their activities, and anecdotal evidence from the ‘coal-face’
... reviewing operational KPIs and metrics, key system documentation, assessing process adherence levels, data quality, communication effectiveness.

During Discovery, we continually and iteratively refine our views on ‘service maturity’, we identify hot-spots that require immediate attention (triage) and/ or can bring immediate benefit or operational stability. In parallel, we gain insight into the challenges faced by the business, the business aspirations and can (depending on the assignment) identify foundation opportunities for developing a robust “roadmap for change”.

We often find the “discovery” phase to be enlightening and surprising !

Depending on the need, the Discovery phase can be fast-tracked into “operational triage”, which can be focussed on specific target problem areas (e.g. poor process adherence, low data quality levels, people engagement and buy-in)

Our experience shows that organisations are having to ‘squeeze more from less’ and work smarter not harder (old clichés, but nevertheless, true).

The outcomes and next steps beyond Discovery are naturally dependent upon the assignment and no two assignments are the same. Nevertheless, an independent assessment allows our clients to make informed decisions on future business investments. Quite often, we find organisations need time to themselves to contemplate the outputs and to decide upon the best course of action. Whether or not an organisation takes the Discovery outputs forward is entirely down to them; however, we do like to believe that the Discovery insights help and support organisations to evolve and improve incrementally.

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“Its not working, we need immediate interim assistance”

Managing continually high-volume workloads with a busy mobile field workforce in real-time can be stressful and may also unwittingly overstretch an organisation. The operation becomes reactionary with fire-fighters. Whilst this can be appropriate, it is not sustainable in the medium to long-term. The consequences can be demoralising as an operation enters a tailspin with no apparent way to break the cycle.

Recognising and acknowledging these symptoms is the first step towards creating a healthier operation. Accepting that external assistance and support is required can also be a difficult, yet necessary, step.

By providing interim assistance, we bring calm, objectivity and structure to an underperforming operation. How we do this depends on the client, their specific circumstances and the nature of the problems. Nevertheless, our iterative approach can be applied to many situations. At the commencement of any such assignment, we set clear transition goals and timescales to ensure knowledge-transfer to the internal organisation and resources is completed effectively.

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• Feasibility studies
• Business Case Development
• Continuous Improvement Programmes
• Requirements Gathering
• Business Process Re-engineering
• Solution selection, including tender management (e.g. service management software, mobile devices, networks, telematics)
• Corporate and Operational KPIs, BI and MI
• Operational Optimisation
• Benefits Realisation
• Unifying workforces as part of Merger & Acquisition
• Target Operating Models
• Automating manual-based field workforces

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In today’s rapidly-changing world where immediacy is seemingly paramount, and where complex enterprise and operating environments converge, organisations can easily become reactive and short-term-ist; having a clearly articulated vision and strategy is an imperative.

The Mobile Field Workforce Strategy is the most fundamental and powerful business management tool… it provides a contextual framework for making informed business and investment decisions. The absence of this framework can increase business risk and exposure, as well as increasing the chances of any initiatives and delivery programmes failing.

Typical circumstances where strategy definition is required:

• embarking on mobilising the operational workforce, but uncertain where Operations is heading and why
• existing operation is problematic but not sure where the problems truly lie
• existing operating model does not effectively support the business
• incumbent technology does not enable the evolving and future business vision and requirements
• considering outsourcing the mobile operation

Our collaborative and consultative approach, liaising closely with all areas within an organisation, is to assist an enterprise with developing the key elements of the strategy. We help to understand the starting point (today’s position) and the end-game (“what does good look like at a future point in time ?”) – we create a baseline assessment of today to enable definition and articulation of vision/ strategy.

Having defined these, and drawing on business transformation and programme delivery experience, we determine the roadmap of practical and sensible steps an organisation can take to achieve its goals. This includes the development of suitable investment business cases to support the roadmap for change and may cover changes to operating models, business process re-engineering, technology refresh, data alignment.

Crucially, the Mobile Field Workforce Strategy also performs a variety of other purposes and must support shareholder aspirations and Board objectives, dovetail with other enterprise functions and, in this technology-focussed world, be tightly integrated with, and supported by, the IT Strategic Roadmap.

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