Keeping the Customer Satisfied: Field Service and the Art of Automation

The “Maytag repairman” is the familiar image of field service. When servicing electronic equipment such as computers, however, the job is significantly more demanding than fixing washing machines. Not only are computers more complex than most other machines, they are also more central to the ongoing operations of an organization. Increasingly, everything an organization does depends upon electronic equipment in some way. Large computer systems are often expected to run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. When computers are such an integral part of an organization’s operations, maintaining the equipment is tantamount to keeping a person’s heart beating and blood circulating. Thus, unlike the idle television caricature, field service engineers are increasingly viewed as the paramedics for electronics who can quickly and ably respond to system crashes. At the same time that field service has become more demanding, the complexity of the job has increased. The “machinery” of the modern organization is less often composed of gears turning, typewriters clattering, and paper being shuffled. Instead, the sights and sounds of the modern organization consist of screens glowing, keys clicking, and, to the uninitiated, an assemblage of opaque, “black boxes.” Inside these boxes is a miniature world that gives no clue as to the nature of its inner workings. The field service engineer’s (FE) job and function have been growing while the size of the technology itself has been shrinking. His or her skill is less often exercised as a skilled craftworker in the repair of a part and more often as a skilled analyst who can understand the abstract workings and nature of electronics to identify the problem and trace it to the malfunctioning component. The required manual skills are often minimal, just enough dexterity to swap out a bad part for a good one usually suffices. At the same time, the scope of field service has expanded from just repairing worn and broken or defective parts to collecting information about design defects and debugging equipment that may have been released prematurely.