Using Augmented Reality in Field Service

Why Is Service Important to Industrial Manufacturers?

As both product complexity and customer expectations increase, manufacturers are facing greater pressure to use their skilled workers more effectively while delivering profit streams and improving competitive differentiation. For most industries, the headroom for growth and improved efficiency is significant.

To succeed, service organizations need to put the right people with the right technical skills in the right places—with an eye toward increasing service margins. Unfortunately, service leaders face significant challenges that prevent efficiency and drive up service costs.

What Are the Challenges that Impact Field Service Efficiency?

One of the biggest challenges field service leaders now face is driving growth from a shrinking pool of workers. The Service Council reported 70% of service organizations will be burdened by the knowledge loss of a retiring workforce.

Skilled Labor Shortage

Increasing Product Complexity

Increased Customer Demands

Products are becoming more complex due to customer requirements around configurations and customization. The service information required to support products has also become more complex.

Customers increasingly demand more stringent uptime requirements. Service contracts are now mandating aggressive equipment readiness service level agreement (SLA) targets.

85% of technicians feel the knowledge required to service products is changing, and 83% say more technical knowledge is needed to perform their jobs.”

Source: Are You Setting Up Your Field Service Engineers for Success in 2023? (Service Council)

What Are the Service Costs that Impact Efficiency?

Challenges around the growing skills gap, product complexity, and customer demands are exacerbated by increasing service costs. Service organizations can avoid downtime, maintain equipment performance, and reduce costs by avoiding expensive on-site visits. If a site visit can’t be avoided, technicians need in-context work instructions that help them locate the right part and resolve the problem more efficiently. Service costs can be broken down into four key categories:

Labor and training costs

Labor and Training costs

The Labor Department reported that 9.3 million jobs were open in April 2022. With a surging number of Baby Boomers retiring each day and heightened turnover among younger demographics, today’s service organizations allocate a significant percentage of their revenue and resources toward recruiting and onboarding new technicians.

Source: Research Insight: Leveraging AR to Solve the Skill Set Shortage & Knowledge Gap (Service Council)

“A poll reports that among employees with poor training opportunities, 41% planned to leave within a year. Only 12% planned to leave among those who considered their company’s training opportunities to be excellent, resulting in a retention rate more than two-thirds higher than average companies.”

Source: Louis Harris & Associates

Technician training can be expensive and time consuming. It often involves mentoring, which removes experts from their work to spend time with new recruits, and doubling up on technicians until new staff are self-sufficient. However, the greatest cost comes from hourly compensation for technicians enrolled in off-site training that are not yet contributing to the active workforce. Employers need to retain a significant percentage of technicians to make the most of their HR investments, but many face an uphill battle due to their inability to offer meaningful training and career development opportunities.

5-20% of expert time is spent documenting procedures and training new hires.

Source: PTC customer results

Service Dispatch Costs

Dispatches occur when a customer cannot service equipment themselves and contacts the OEM or service provider to request on-site assistance from a technician. What happens on-site can potentially impact profit margins, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty. On-Site Visit Costs A single dispatch can cost anywhere in the range of $150 – $1,000 due to the technician’s familiarity with the product. Those costs can multiply when they cannot immediately resolve the issue—nearly a quarter of service calls (23% on average) require repeat visits, and some require multiple technicians on-site. Issue resolution delays can quickly spiral into extra costs and downtime, so metrics like first-time fix rate (FTFR) and mean time to repair (MTTR) remain a priority for continuous improvement.

Call-Center Costs Many service organizations also employ a team of call center technicians to field incoming requests and escalate customer issues before a truck roll occurs. While they’re mostly dedicated to end customers, they can also serve field technicians by identifying models or spare parts and providing other technical expertise when needed.

“In our 2021 release of the [Service Leader’s Agenda benchmark survey], service leaders signaled their attention was turning to service revenue and growth focus following months of uncertain economic climate. Thirty-nine percent (39%) of responding executives indicated “Service Revenue” as their #1 priority.”

Source: Service Leaders Identify Field Service Engineers as Key Revenue Drivers (Service Council)

Downtime Costs and Breaches of Service Contracts

Service contracts act as a safeguard against unplanned downtime, but technician errors from unclear work instructions that lack context frequently cause contract breaches that slow resolution times. Most contracts stress this delicate relationship by carrying hefty penalties and fines. Furthermore, multiple contract breaches may weaken customer loyalty and impact contract renewals.

Service Documentation Costs Field technicians traditionally rely on instructions from printed repair manuals to complete procedures. Accurate documentation is a prerequisite for an effective service model, but scaling standard operating procedures (SOPs), work instructions, and regulatory documentation for a global workforce can be expensive and logistically challenging.

“44% of enterprises say hourly downtime costs top $1 million—with COVID-19, security hacks and remote working as driving factors.”

Source: ITIC

Providing Accurate Service Documentation OEMs must first author precise step-by-step work instructions for their products. This typically involves collaborations between subject matter experts and highly-compensated technical writers.

Localizing Service Documentation Service instructions often need to be translated for use in different regions. The cost of localizing documentation can vary, but organizations need to account for the expense of third-party translators on top of the initial documentation authoring costs.

Maintaining Accurate Service Documentation New versions or iterations of products may require updates to existing documentation. Product enhancements can drastically alter service workflows, so OEMs with multiple product variants must account for documentation upkeep costs.

What Is Augmented Reality in Field Service?

Service providers are leveraging augmented reality (AR) to provide their technicians with a more efficient way to access the information and resources they need, so they have better context and clarity in training scenarios and on the job. What Is Augmented Reality? AR overlays digital information onto your view of the physical world, so you can “see” things like product data, work instructions, and hidden components while simultaneously interacting with your surrounding environment. AR devices such as smart glasses, wearable headsets, and even tablets and mobile phones deliver AR experiences to connected workers, providing them with real-time or pre-authored guidance from subject matter experts. How Does AR Drive Digital Transformation? Poor service documentation and workforce inexperience hamper technicians’ ability to reach peak productivity, resulting in high operational costs and low contract renewals. Service organizations are solving these challenges with AR.

Costs of Enabling Customer Self-service

Lastly, customers are left with cumbersome 2D instructions that lack much needed context to complete maintenance and repairs on their own. This results in longer customer wait times while they wait for a technician, increasing the costs of downtime and travel. Between unhelpful instructions and downtime, insufficient methods of self-service can negatively impact customer satisfaction over time.

"Important factors for our customers are time and efficiency. For our technicians, they’re being told that every minute counts and to maximize customer uptime...”

—David Yin, ARTech Product Manager, Peterbilt

Source: McKinsey & Co.

AR is improving workforce productivity by:

What Role Does the Digital Thread Play? The ability to visualize real-time IoT data within service workflows further increases the value of augmented reality. Insights from IoT data can help operators and technicians prevent failures and downtime and keep equipment running as efficiently as possible. And leveraging CAD, PLM, and IoT data to create a digital thread allows service organizations to keep service instructions and other critical data up to date. This connectivity also enables organizations to share and scale that data across the business.

frontline workers with contextual and relevant information superimposed on their work environments, precisely when and where they need it most.

How Does Augmented Reality in Field Service Reduce Costs?

Providing technicians with AR-powered service instructions and remote access to experts dramatically reduces repair times and costly errors, while also minimizing the threat of personal injury. Improved Training and Workforce Efficiency

Less Downtime and SLA Penalties Clear, in-context AR work instructions with an X-ray view into equipment simplify work instructions, reducing downtime and SLA penalties. Combining AR with IoT insights provides a level of detail to the operator or service technician that was not easily accessible before, including predictive insights which help reduce the cost of downtime. Better Self-Service Opportunities AR makes following step-by-step work instructions so foolproof that OEMs can now enable their customers to self-service their own products. By including pre-authored AR experiences or remote assistance as a part of product ownership, OEMs can both show and tell customers how to service and troubleshoot equipment—resulting in fewer call center inquiries, fewer truck rolls, increased uptime, and higher contract renewals. According to the Service Council, service leaders expect a 61% increase in assisted service or self-service activities in the next 12 months.

According to the Service Council, service organizations can save $20,150,000 per year by moving from average performance with an 82% first-time fix rate to high performance with a 92% FTFR

Cognitive science research has shown that AR helps trainees understand material faster while improving knowledge retention, so new hires need less on-the-job mentoring. As a result, expert workers spend less time training and more time doing their jobs.

How Will Augmented Reality Transform the Future of Field Service?

How Are OEMs Reducing Service Costs with AR? Companies like Peterbilt and Harpak-ULMA are using AR to completely change the perspective on what it’s like to own their products.

“AR’s capabilities have become mission critical to industrial and automotive organizations because they minimize the need to rely on paper-based manuals for the ability to share, scale, and update instructions at any time.”

Source: Empowering Technicians and Enhancing the Customer Experience at Peterbilt

Learn how Peterbilt is providing a better customer experience by improving service quality and speed with AR.

“We see the AR value proposition as delivering significant productivity gains in human labor; improvements on the order of 30-60%, depending on the specific application.”

—Alexander Ouellet, Innovation Engineer, Harpak-ULMA Packaging

Learn how Harpak-ULMA is using AR to optimize efficiency in its packaging operations.

Skilled Labor Shortage

Increasing Product Complexity

Increased Customer Demands

Service dispatch costs

Enabling customer self-service

According to the 2021 Voice of the Field Service Engineer (VoFSE) study, 60% of FSEs (Technicians) ages 25-44 do not plan to be an FSE (Technician) for the duration of their career.”

outdated, inaccurate, or non-existent hard copy instructions with up-to-date, real-time augmented information.

a compelling alternative to traditional printed manuals that empowers technicians to fully concentrate on their tasks.

communication, knowledge transfer, and training from retiring experts to the new and existing workforce.

Empowering

replacing

Providing

facilitating

AR:

Delivers tremendous value for training use cases with highly engaging training experiences that improve comprehension, retention, safety, and time-to-productivity.

delivers

Equips on-site technicians with easy-to-access visual aids and service instructions.

Equips

Enables customers to service machines themselves, improving the customer experience and better optimizing skilled technicians’ time.

enables

Allows service organizations to create virtual training curriculums that lower the costs associated with off-site training facilities, travel expenses, and offline resources.

allows

Downtime and SLA penalties

20%

on-site Repair Estimate:

Low:

$150

High:

$1,000

How much does hourly downtime cost for 44% of enterprises?

Do You Know?

$50,000

$500,000

$1,000,000

15%

25%

"Well-executed services businesses can increase customer satisfaction by 10 to 20 percentage points and reduce costs by 15% to 25%."

Average Performance

Cost Savings and FTFR

82% FTFR

Cost Savings

Unknown

High Performance

Cost Savings

92% FTFR

$20,150,000

Source: Research Insight: Visual Support Technologies Key to Field Service Effectiveness (Service Council)

Source: The Total Economic Impact™ Of PTC Vuforia, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of PTC

50%

Organizations experienced a 50% decrease, on average, in time-to-productivity for their new workers trained with Vuforia AR experiences.

AR minimizes the cost of creating, maintaining, and translating training materials

AR provides a more cost-effective way to update existing service instructions

AR reduces training costs through faster time-to-productivity for new or redeployed workers

Minimizes

provides

reduces

Higher FTFR and Lower Travel Costs AR helps technicians follow step-by-step work instructions more accurately by providing them with information in the context of the physical task they’re performing. Technicians using AR resolve issues faster and complete a higher number of jobs per shift, so fewer repeat visits and on-site technicians are needed per dispatch. When a field technician requires assistance, an SME (regardless of location) can view the situation and provide instructions remotely, which further reduces truck rolls and safety incidents.

Source: The Total Economic Impact™ Of PTC Vuforia, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of PTC

15%

10-12% Spend Reduction

Vuforia AR improved field service quality and productivity, reducing overtime spend by 10% to 12%.

to Reduce Service Costs

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