A Virtual Roundtable to discuss how technology – in this case Augmented Reality– can help service businesses redesign operations as they strive to provide “uptime at a fraction of the cost” in a post-pandemic world. July 16, 2020 at 17:30 CET.

The economic crisis caused by COVID-19 will leave long-lasting scars in many industrial sectors around the world. Because of its unprecedented nature, this recession will be deeper and last longer than others. To survive both now and after the pandemic companies need to not only find creative ways to reduce contact intensity and travel but also radically boost productivity with new approaches in timeframes far shorter than usual. Technology and innovation have a major role to play here.

Service organizations are facing a familiar dilemma: As most industrial product sales plummet, service must be a major revenue, cash flow and profit driver. But the recession takes its toll on service as well: As the utilization of industrial assets declines so does the demand for service -while price pressures increase. Should service businesses try to ride it out? Or should they start reducing costs and capacity? Capacity reductions in service, however, are double-edged swords. Service cannot be stored in inventory. Delays manifest immediately in customer complaints, reputational damage, and lost business. But if the recession is long and deep enough the dilemma becomes irrelevant. No company can hold on to capacity if there is a prolonged absence of demand. So, companies need to innovate ways to provide the required services to keep customers on board -with far less capacity: Providing “uptime at a fraction of the cost” is the new name of the game.

New technologies around the Internet of Things, Machine-Learning/AI, Augmented Reality, 3D-Printing, and many others must and will play a significant role here. So will new operating models and processes on the back of these technologies. (Field) Service will be radically redesigned -whether top-down or from the bottom up.

To explore how to use technology to redesign Field Service for low-cost uptime, Si2 Partners will conduct a series of virtual roundtables and publish analyses and reports over the next several months.

Our first roundtable within the context of the Service Leaders Network on Augmented Reality in Service will be on July 16th 2020, at 17:30 – 19:00 CET. To register please follow the link.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sln-virtual-roundtable-augmented-reality-by-si2-partners-tickets-112675383104

The roundtable will be conducted on Zoom, is free and is open to Service Managers considering Augmented Reality as a productivity driver in Field Service whether they have deployed it or not.

We will present some results from our 2018 survey and management report  and discuss an updated report which we plan to publish in Q4 2020. We expect then to have a discussion on how AR could be used to boost productivity and performance, its usefulness in different situations, important case studies, the pitfalls and the remedies, and the investments needed. Participants will have the opportunity to influence the design and content of the new report so that it can provide real answers to the most pressing questions.