Field Service Technology

Field Service Technology

In this presentation, David Douglas, Senior Director, Online Service Management, Scientific Games International, reveals how his firm uses field service technology to minimize breakdowns and reduce repair time.

Video transcript:

So who has ever bought a lottery ticket out here? Anybody? If you ever noticed that I guess if you ever went into the store and noticed that the machine is not working. So they were not, not been working and when you go in there? It's rare based on our SLAs and our liquidated damages. I'll get in to that a little bit but, Astea has asked me to talk about our experience using their tool and picking the winning technician takes more than luck and kind of demonstrate that.

Here's some of challenges I'm going to talk about, business goals, recognizing the opportunity, building business case, selecting the right solution, transforming our service approach, managing through change, impact and benefits.

So Scientific Games is a global company. We've been around for 40 years. I'm not going to touch much more on these slides, but we're pretty innovative and committed to excellence. We've high degree of security and integrity in the lottery industry as you can imagine.

We're kind of broken down into 3 segments, printed products, lottery systems, and gaming. I'm in the lottery systems group. I'm managing stuff here about a parable ticket or Mega Million ticket that's basically what we do. State lotteries and/or countries provide, we provide service to those municipalities. So say California or Georgia or Texas actually contracts, there's like 3 major vendors in the industry that provide this type of service.

As mentioned we had a global…we have a global presence, that's mainly on our printing presses. We print about 80% of the world's instant tickets; out of those 10, we have 7 plants I guess around the globe. We will spend a little bit more time on this slide; we have systems based…anybody that does a lottery or has lottery we actually provide that for them, some level of service either through our systems business or instant business. There are different flavors of that across the U.S.

Pretty financially strong company, 54% of our business is printed products, 28% is lottery systems, a pretty strong balance sheet.

But into the challenges by market are driving…obviously we wanted to drive our cost down to try to stay competitive with our competitors. We have real stringent liquidated damages and service level agreements. Those of you that are in here, who manages a field force? Hold your hands up. What's your strongest or most stringent service level agreement? Is it 24 hours to repair? Is it 8 hours, 16 hours, 12 hours?

And some, in our case is I guess our tough is 90 minutes to repair. So it's, I mean we're almost in the parking lot. I like to use that phrase but I mean, to our customers its pretty standard. I mean we're, Connecticut is that customer. We have 90 minutes to actually repair the lottery terminal or swap it out. And we're going into convenience stores and gas stations and grocery stores, those types of locations providing this level of service. So we needed a tool that could be very dynamic and I guess meet some of those challenges. If our terminals are down, we'd typically pay about $200 an hour just because I mean we're based on the revenue stream. So we have a percent of that sales. It's kind of just lumped into our overall business model. It's not really right, but that's how it works. So we don't really invoice you know on each call or anything but the retailers can call us and we have to deliver supplies or we have to go out there and they think something is broke but it's not, but it's all part of our business model and the lottery industry.

So our business goals, we obviously we wanted to provide greater control and visibility. We had techs run around there not really knowing what to do and how to do it. I started this with this company about 7 years ago. And I guess we're average in and when I got to the company about 3.2 calls per day per technician just because we had a remedy system and it was just, it was home grown from the ground up and overall visibility or control across what the techs were actually doing and how they were doing. We were half way meeting some of our SLAs just based on how well the dispatch team was actually performing. They are some of our business goals obviously reduce technician idle time. We're always looking for new revenue streams based on our footprint. We have obviously quite a few technicians in the locations where we're at, and can like in the state of Connecticut we have to provide 90 minute SLA in the whole state, it's not just metro areas or certain retailers.

So hard dollar return on investment obviously, we wanted to decrease our admin overtime, increase our productivity, lower our overtime, reduce the paperwork, improve our dispatch to technician ratios. Soft dollar obviously we wanted to retain customer satisfaction. Be more professionally, have a professional appearance walking in with a handheld device, some GPS device. More timely reporting before they had, they basically will just call us and we would log the ticket and close the ticket out on the old system.

So utilization, some of the benefits, obviously reduce our head count as business grows not to deploy additional technicians. Access to customer accounts, the techs really like the ability that they have on their handheld device, they can go on look at history who has been there last, what was actually done. We had none of those features and functionalities.

Obviously inventory, we did kind of a poor job managing our inventory, we just managed the terminals. We really had no, no inventory of all of the other assets that were out in the field, the signage, satellite dishes. We actually put satellite dishes on the roofs of the convenient stores and lot of the communication equipment. Better visibility to all the parts and where they're moving through the, throughout, through the depot and actually into the warehouses and into the technician vans. So we were looking for solution, we engaged Astea about 5 years ago and based on all the…I think there was a challenge for them as well was for us just based on our tight SLAs and liquidated damages. It's kind of a different model than the typical break fix organization just again based on our business model.

So how we thought technology can facilitate driving the service performance, obviously all of our contracts are different. We manage 12 lotteries across the U.S. on the system side. All of them are different, they all have different SLAs, different PM commitments, different response times based on different priorities if the terminal is down or not down or not selling.

Obviously the mobility was going to give us an edge just based on hopefully productivity, more jobs per day. PM management, this is something else that we kind of did on the fly or on spreadsheets we printed them out every week, handed them out to the technicians. They kind of managed them you know by crossing them off the list and then calling them in as they, as they did that.

So taking all those and in consideration the service management piece, the scheduling optimization and mobile. We chose, again we chose Astea to partner with to provide that solution for us just based on all the due diligence that we did.

So a little bit on service management, I have an ITEL background. I don't know if you guys are familiar with ITEL but trying to manage our field service more like an ITEL framework but managing each ticket like an incident and then we actually looking at the cost, the real cost, the mileage, the overtime, etc. We also have a pretty extensive problem management team from our hardware side of the house. We have our hard work engineers manufacturing and then all of our key field service technicians and in management. Looking at pain points, why are we going on service calls, what's causing the most pain, what can we do to reduce those because again we're not getting paid by the job? It's all lumped into our overall business model. And then obviously resource utilization, we put this tool in place we cut our dispatch staff by half just managing the overall ticket volume that was going in and out and cutting down the number of phone calls. So scheduling optimization why this cannot be done manually, again we went from 14 dispatchers down 7 by putting this tool in place. We basically relied on the dispatch team just them knowing the geographic location of Pennsylvania and Maryland and Delaware, the customer entitlements, knowing the service level agreements, what exactly was expected based on that jurisdiction, just kind of leaned on the dispatch or skills and experience to manage our field organization. So picking the winning technician takes more than just luck.

After we rolled all that stuff together obviously it, it's taking in you know, SLAs and drive time, spare parts, skill set, all the stuff and actually running through their dynamic scheduling engine.

Here's another list of all the criteria that we have it doing for us. Managing over time, it breaks down each, each service call is…and so we call it shuffling the deck but every service call shuffles the deck and in the system every 3 minutes based on how dynamic our business model or our needs are, but then goes through and actually selects a winner for each technician. It's doing a lot more complicated algorithms than our online system is doing. But as you can see there goes through and looks at cost, the penalties, the revenue, we put a dollar amount to each call and break each call down. And it's running through this algorithm’s on each call every 3 minutes and then reshuffle in the deck. If you sit there and watch our dispatch council, you'll see calls going from one technician to the next. We only allow one call to go then we draw, we kind of spoon feed them just based on how dynamic our business model is. They only get one call at a time until they close that call out then they will get the next call.

So mobile kind of ties it all together for us. I mean, before what we had…what the retailers would call us if we couldn't close it over by the phone then we would dispatch it and we would have to reach out to the technician and make the phone call and try to figure out where they were. They were at home or at the store or at lunch or whatever the case was. Today, we branded the tool of Smart Services. So the actual, the tool is doing most of the lifting, we're still managing exceptions with the dispatch crew that we have, but it's definitely cut down the number of phone calls into our dispatch center. And we're probably allocating about 80% of our calls at this point.

So again, the techs like the mobile side and they feel like they're connected to the office, the back end. We actually capture signatures at the retailer, we drop off ticket stock which is very secure. As you can imagine that the serial numbers on each roll, there's a process from security at all the lottery offices that we have to track that, and we have to get a signature for that, and it's actually tied to the actual ticket. But again, we can I guess are most probably aware of…you know we can send turn by turn directions out to them. They have real time access to inventory parts. It's kind of helped us tie it…tie it all together.

The service transformation, it was very painful process as you can imagine with our technicians. We tried to use the three Es of the Fair Process, trying to engage them. We kind of rolled it out state by state and learned from those lessons. I'm trying to actually you know, I guess, was mentioned in one of the other ones the other sessions that you know what could you have done better is we probably could have engaged the folks and given the big picture of why we are doing this, not big brother wanting to know what you are trying to do, we are trying to drive down our operating cost and help them understand them.

Obviously we need a mutual trust between the managers and the field service technicians, that’s key. They have to trust each other going both ways. One saying I try to like to use, this character is doing the right thing when no body is looking, there are too many people who think that the only thing that is right is to get by and the only thing that’s wrong is to get caught. We have taken action on quite a few technicians and not leaving on time and telling us or not being where they are supposed to be based on the tools that we have today, more visibility.

So the impact for us, I am not going to read all these but we will touch on each one of them. Increased customer satisfaction – we are selling it in our proposals as value add, we have retained all the customers that we’ve actually implemented this for. We are selling it in as increased sales based on our model and our structure. We get paid based on actual terminal is working, so we have an incentive to get there and get it fixed as fast as possible, and them a PM program, all the old contracts were based on just calendar days, so you had to go touch the terminal every 120 days and based on what we can do today with the system, we can look sales into it and actually classify those retails in different tiers and be able to manage drop feed those PMs into with the service calls that hit the high tier retailers…maybe hit the high tier retailers in 90 days versus hitting the ones that are selling 10 bucks a week. We got to go out there and hit them anyway in 120 days, so that has helped us quite a bit. Focus on the retailers that are actually selling tickets.

Decreased service costs – As I mentioned we eliminated half of our dispatchers. We increased our average calls per day from 3.2 to 5.4. We have reduced our liquidated damages and cost avoidance, we increased our terminal base without increasing technicians.

Increased technician productivity – As I mentioned before 3.2 to 5.4. We are kind of proud of that. We have been able to move the needle quite a bit, and then holding them accountable, within the tool it also allows us to put private appointments in so we know when they are at the shop, getting their van fixed or in the deport repairing or stocking up or getting new cards. So we have full accountability of their time. So it has helped us to reduce overtime and manage the PMs.

So created significant competitive differentiation. Again we were selling increased lottery sales, faster response to service calls, no body else in the lottery industry had any kind of tool like this whatsoever, they were all doing it the old fashioned way. So we have made good ground and they are still kind of way behind where we are today. So we have been able to use it as competitive advantage to keep our customers.

Obviously increased visibility to our technicians and parts. We can actually see where all of our ticket stock is. All the vans are actually mini warehouses and we can see good and bad parts in there, that took quite a bit of time and major hours trying to define what’s good and what’s bad in the field and today we just basically run a report.

Customer portal – We have customer portal view so our lottery customers could go in and look at the status of the tickets and we can almost guarantee technician arrival time based on looking at the dispatch council. We don’t based on our model because something may change, a call might get inserted in there. So we don’t do that.

We think we have a winner with Astea, it’s been a good partnership. It has been about 6 years but we feel like we have a good solid solution that has worked for us.

Field Service Technology

In this presentation, David Douglas, Senior Director, Online Service Management, Scientific Games International, reveals how his firm uses field service technology to minimize breakdowns and reduce repair time.

Video transcript:

So who has ever bought a lottery ticket out here? Anybody? If you ever noticed that I guess if you ever went into the store and noticed that the machine is not working. So they were not, not been working and when you go in there? It's rare based on our SLAs and our liquidated damages. I'll get in to that a little bit but, Astea has asked me to talk about our experience using their tool and picking the winning technician takes more than luck and kind of demonstrate that.

Here's some of challenges I'm going to talk about, business goals, recognizing the opportunity, building business case, selecting the right solution, transforming our service approach, managing through change, impact and benefits.

So Scientific Games is a global company. We've been around for 40 years. I'm not going to touch much more on these slides, but we're pretty innovative and committed to excellence. We've high degree of security and integrity in the lottery industry as you can imagine.

We're kind of broken down into 3 segments, printed products, lottery systems, and gaming. I'm in the lottery systems group. I'm managing stuff here about a parable ticket or Mega Million ticket that's basically what we do. State lotteries and/or countries provide, we provide service to those municipalities. So say California or Georgia or Texas actually contracts, there's like 3 major vendors in the industry that provide this type of service.

As mentioned we had a global…we have a global presence, that's mainly on our printing presses. We print about 80% of the world's instant tickets; out of those 10, we have 7 plants I guess around the globe. We will spend a little bit more time on this slide; we have systems based…anybody that does a lottery or has lottery we actually provide that for them, some level of service either through our systems business or instant business. There are different flavors of that across the U.S.

Pretty financially strong company, 54% of our business is printed products, 28% is lottery systems, a pretty strong balance sheet.

But into the challenges by market are driving…obviously we wanted to drive our cost down to try to stay competitive with our competitors. We have real stringent liquidated damages and service level agreements. Those of you that are in here, who manages a field force? Hold your hands up. What's your strongest or most stringent service level agreement? Is it 24 hours to repair? Is it 8 hours, 16 hours, 12 hours?

And some, in our case is I guess our tough is 90 minutes to repair. So it's, I mean we're almost in the parking lot. I like to use that phrase but I mean, to our customers its pretty standard. I mean we're, Connecticut is that customer. We have 90 minutes to actually repair the lottery terminal or swap it out. And we're going into convenience stores and gas stations and grocery stores, those types of locations providing this level of service. So we needed a tool that could be very dynamic and I guess meet some of those challenges. If our terminals are down, we'd typically pay about $200 an hour just because I mean we're based on the revenue stream. So we have a percent of that sales. It's kind of just lumped into our overall business model. It's not really right, but that's how it works. So we don't really invoice you know on each call or anything but the retailers can call us and we have to deliver supplies or we have to go out there and they think something is broke but it's not, but it's all part of our business model and the lottery industry.

So our business goals, we obviously we wanted to provide greater control and visibility. We had techs run around there not really knowing what to do and how to do it. I started this with this company about 7 years ago. And I guess we're average in and when I got to the company about 3.2 calls per day per technician just because we had a remedy system and it was just, it was home grown from the ground up and overall visibility or control across what the techs were actually doing and how they were doing. We were half way meeting some of our SLAs just based on how well the dispatch team was actually performing. They are some of our business goals obviously reduce technician idle time. We're always looking for new revenue streams based on our footprint. We have obviously quite a few technicians in the locations where we're at, and can like in the state of Connecticut we have to provide 90 minute SLA in the whole state, it's not just metro areas or certain retailers.

So hard dollar return on investment obviously, we wanted to decrease our admin overtime, increase our productivity, lower our overtime, reduce the paperwork, improve our dispatch to technician ratios. Soft dollar obviously we wanted to retain customer satisfaction. Be more professionally, have a professional appearance walking in with a handheld device, some GPS device. More timely reporting before they had, they basically will just call us and we would log the ticket and close the ticket out on the old system.

So utilization, some of the benefits, obviously reduce our head count as business grows not to deploy additional technicians. Access to customer accounts, the techs really like the ability that they have on their handheld device, they can go on look at history who has been there last, what was actually done. We had none of those features and functionalities.

Obviously inventory, we did kind of a poor job managing our inventory, we just managed the terminals. We really had no, no inventory of all of the other assets that were out in the field, the signage, satellite dishes. We actually put satellite dishes on the roofs of the convenient stores and lot of the communication equipment. Better visibility to all the parts and where they're moving through the, throughout, through the depot and actually into the warehouses and into the technician vans. So we were looking for solution, we engaged Astea about 5 years ago and based on all the…I think there was a challenge for them as well was for us just based on our tight SLAs and liquidated damages. It's kind of a different model than the typical break fix organization just again based on our business model.

So how we thought technology can facilitate driving the service performance, obviously all of our contracts are different. We manage 12 lotteries across the U.S. on the system side. All of them are different, they all have different SLAs, different PM commitments, different response times based on different priorities if the terminal is down or not down or not selling.

Obviously the mobility was going to give us an edge just based on hopefully productivity, more jobs per day. PM management, this is something else that we kind of did on the fly or on spreadsheets we printed them out every week, handed them out to the technicians. They kind of managed them you know by crossing them off the list and then calling them in as they, as they did that.

So taking all those and in consideration the service management piece, the scheduling optimization and mobile. We chose, again we chose Astea to partner with to provide that solution for us just based on all the due diligence that we did.

So a little bit on service management, I have an ITEL background. I don't know if you guys are familiar with ITEL but trying to manage our field service more like an ITEL framework but managing each ticket like an incident and then we actually looking at the cost, the real cost, the mileage, the overtime, etc. We also have a pretty extensive problem management team from our hardware side of the house. We have our hard work engineers manufacturing and then all of our key field service technicians and in management. Looking at pain points, why are we going on service calls, what's causing the most pain, what can we do to reduce those because again we're not getting paid by the job? It's all lumped into our overall business model. And then obviously resource utilization, we put this tool in place we cut our dispatch staff by half just managing the overall ticket volume that was going in and out and cutting down the number of phone calls. So scheduling optimization why this cannot be done manually, again we went from 14 dispatchers down 7 by putting this tool in place. We basically relied on the dispatch team just them knowing the geographic location of Pennsylvania and Maryland and Delaware, the customer entitlements, knowing the service level agreements, what exactly was expected based on that jurisdiction, just kind of leaned on the dispatch or skills and experience to manage our field organization. So picking the winning technician takes more than just luck.

After we rolled all that stuff together obviously it, it's taking in you know, SLAs and drive time, spare parts, skill set, all the stuff and actually running through their dynamic scheduling engine.

Here's another list of all the criteria that we have it doing for us. Managing over time, it breaks down each, each service call is…and so we call it shuffling the deck but every service call shuffles the deck and in the system every 3 minutes based on how dynamic our business model or our needs are, but then goes through and actually selects a winner for each technician. It's doing a lot more complicated algorithms than our online system is doing. But as you can see there goes through and looks at cost, the penalties, the revenue, we put a dollar amount to each call and break each call down. And it's running through this algorithm’s on each call every 3 minutes and then reshuffle in the deck. If you sit there and watch our dispatch council, you'll see calls going from one technician to the next. We only allow one call to go then we draw, we kind of spoon feed them just based on how dynamic our business model is. They only get one call at a time until they close that call out then they will get the next call.

So mobile kind of ties it all together for us. I mean, before what we had…what the retailers would call us if we couldn't close it over by the phone then we would dispatch it and we would have to reach out to the technician and make the phone call and try to figure out where they were. They were at home or at the store or at lunch or whatever the case was. Today, we branded the tool of Smart Services. So the actual, the tool is doing most of the lifting, we're still managing exceptions with the dispatch crew that we have, but it's definitely cut down the number of phone calls into our dispatch center. And we're probably allocating about 80% of our calls at this point.

So again, the techs like the mobile side and they feel like they're connected to the office, the back end. We actually capture signatures at the retailer, we drop off ticket stock which is very secure. As you can imagine that the serial numbers on each roll, there's a process from security at all the lottery offices that we have to track that, and we have to get a signature for that, and it's actually tied to the actual ticket. But again, we can I guess are most probably aware of…you know we can send turn by turn directions out to them. They have real time access to inventory parts. It's kind of helped us tie it…tie it all together.

The service transformation, it was very painful process as you can imagine with our technicians. We tried to use the three Es of the Fair Process, trying to engage them. We kind of rolled it out state by state and learned from those lessons. I'm trying to actually you know, I guess, was mentioned in one of the other ones the other sessions that you know what could you have done better is we probably could have engaged the folks and given the big picture of why we are doing this, not big brother wanting to know what you are trying to do, we are trying to drive down our operating cost and help them understand them.

Obviously we need a mutual trust between the managers and the field service technicians, that’s key. They have to trust each other going both ways. One saying I try to like to use, this character is doing the right thing when no body is looking, there are too many people who think that the only thing that is right is to get by and the only thing that’s wrong is to get caught. We have taken action on quite a few technicians and not leaving on time and telling us or not being where they are supposed to be based on the tools that we have today, more visibility.

So the impact for us, I am not going to read all these but we will touch on each one of them. Increased customer satisfaction – we are selling it in our proposals as value add, we have retained all the customers that we’ve actually implemented this for. We are selling it in as increased sales based on our model and our structure. We get paid based on actual terminal is working, so we have an incentive to get there and get it fixed as fast as possible, and them a PM program, all the old contracts were based on just calendar days, so you had to go touch the terminal every 120 days and based on what we can do today with the system, we can look sales into it and actually classify those retails in different tiers and be able to manage drop feed those PMs into with the service calls that hit the high tier retailers…maybe hit the high tier retailers in 90 days versus hitting the ones that are selling 10 bucks a week. We got to go out there and hit them anyway in 120 days, so that has helped us quite a bit. Focus on the retailers that are actually selling tickets.

Decreased service costs – As I mentioned we eliminated half of our dispatchers. We increased our average calls per day from 3.2 to 5.4. We have reduced our liquidated damages and cost avoidance, we increased our terminal base without increasing technicians.

Increased technician productivity – As I mentioned before 3.2 to 5.4. We are kind of proud of that. We have been able to move the needle quite a bit, and then holding them accountable, within the tool it also allows us to put private appointments in so we know when they are at the shop, getting their van fixed or in the deport repairing or stocking up or getting new cards. So we have full accountability of their time. So it has helped us to reduce overtime and manage the PMs.

So created significant competitive differentiation. Again we were selling increased lottery sales, faster response to service calls, no body else in the lottery industry had any kind of tool like this whatsoever, they were all doing it the old fashioned way. So we have made good ground and they are still kind of way behind where we are today. So we have been able to use it as competitive advantage to keep our customers.

Obviously increased visibility to our technicians and parts. We can actually see where all of our ticket stock is. All the vans are actually mini warehouses and we can see good and bad parts in there, that took quite a bit of time and major hours trying to define what’s good and what’s bad in the field and today we just basically run a report.

Customer portal – We have customer portal view so our lottery customers could go in and look at the status of the tickets and we can almost guarantee technician arrival time based on looking at the dispatch council. We don’t based on our model because something may change, a call might get inserted in there. So we don’t do that.

We think we have a winner with Astea, it’s been a good partnership. It has been about 6 years but we feel like we have a good solid solution that has worked for us.