How to Maximize Technician Productivity in a Shifting Workforce

Every service leader wants to achieve high field service productivity. However, this is easier said than done. A rapidly evolving workforce is changing the rules for supporting service technicians, complete with daunting new challenges and innovative strategies. Keeping pace with this change, your competition, and customer expectations requires you to consider and adopt new approaches, technologies, and solutions.

>>> Do you already have technology use cases in mind for your service organization? Read our buyer's guide for more information about solutions for the connected service workforce.

What is technician productivity?

Productive technicians complete service efficiently and correctly the first time. For service technicians to enjoy that level of success, they need the right know-how, experience, and service parts with every site visit. This requires the larger service organization to provide them with access to real-time data, in-context work instructions, and expert guidance.

Exceptional service success also depends on scheduling and assigning service calls based on technician experience, qualifications, and skillsets. But you may find your technician productivity is limited—by a lack of connected resources available to support service teams or your ability to deploy the best technician for the job.

How do you measure technician productivity?

Technician productivity is measured by metrics like first-time fix rate, utilization, mean time to repair, and customer satisfaction. Over time, improving these metrics with best-in-class workforce solutions can boost your service organization’s customer relationships. Conversely, if your service metrics are trending downward, it’s a likely indicator that you aren’t keeping pace with changes to your workforce, customer expectations, service complexity, and other evolving challenges.

What are common service technician productivity challenges?

Many roadblocks can stand in the way of technician productivity, from common challenges that affect the broader service industry to unique obstacles that impact a service business.

Lack of connected tools

Without connected tools, technicians likely lack advanced visibility into machine status, which can lead to costly unplanned downtime. And when they arrive on site with paper-based manuals, they might be working with outdated instructions, which can cause delays and impact first-time fix rates. If a technician needs assistance during a repair, they’ll have to call an expert—but with no way to automatically document takeaways from that conversation, sharing best practices for continuous improvement is difficult.

Skills gap

High turnover, retiring experts, and difficulty attracting and training new hires make it difficult for service organizations to keep pace, let alone optimize for productivity. The skills gap is challenging service organizations to use their existing workforce more effectively. According to a report by the Service Council, the ongoing workforce and talent shortage is one of the biggest challenges affecting service organizations today.

Source: 2024 Service Leader’s Agenda Research Report, published in April 2024 by the Service Council.

Training/onboarding new hires

Getting new hires up to speed on complex equipment and processes is not easy—but given the ongoing worker shortage, it’s certainly urgent. Unfortunately, traditional training and onboarding experiences make it difficult for service technicians to retain what they’ve learned in the long run. And without solutions that deliver valuable data and work instructions to technicians on the job, applying those learnings from the classroom in the field can prolong service and impact first-time fix rates.

Lack of schedule optimization

Effective scheduling is a critical contributor to technician productivity. But without a solution to dispatch a skilled, qualified technician with the appropriate resources at precisely the right time, you’ll likely fail to meet customer expectations, maximize technician utilization, and achieve critical business objectives.

What impact does knowledge loss have on technician productivity?

Between disconnected tools, a widening skills gap, and the myriad challenges of training and onboarding, knowledge loss doesn’t just impact technician productivity, but also service costs and customer satisfaction. Organizations can no longer meet their many obligations, including external obligations to customers (like providing quality service on time) and internal obligations to the business (like increasing equipment sales). They also have an obligation to their workforce—and younger employees and digital natives might feel that traditional tools aren’t meeting their job expectations.

With these challenges, it’s not just the business that suffers. As service organizations struggle to attract new hires, the existing workforce is picking up the slack. And with fatigue and burnout plaguing technicians in the field, there’s a greater risk of errors and quality issues. Business leaders can measure where technicians spend their time to address those issues, but without the right tools, the service workforce remains disconnected from information and insights that can help improve their job experience—and service KPIs.

How to improve technician productivity?

Leading service organizations are meeting these challenges with a powerful combination of solutions that connect the workforce with information, people, and processes to be more productive. The Internet of Things (IoT), augmented reality (AR), service lifecycle management (SLM), and product lifecycle management (PLM) have proven value by empowering service technicians, whether they’re new hires or experts.

Real-world examples of the importance of improving technician productivity

For leading OEM Harpak-ULMA, field service technician utilization was a key challenge. By partnering with PTC and implementing a combination of best-in-class IoT and AR solutions, the manufacturer improved key service metrics like first-time fix rate, mean time to repair, and customer satisfaction. It even helped one customer complete a complex tool rebuild 80% faster with AR, saving them $250,000 per line.

At Peterbilt, a leading commercial vehicle manufacturer, complex schematics were difficult for technicians to interpret efficiently—especially if they were new to the job. After partnering with PTC, a combination of AR and PLM solutions enables Peterbilt’s technicians with always up-to-date instructions, while AR alone saves them approximately 20 minutes per repair with the help of detailed “X-ray vision” functionality.

When Schneider Electric partnered with PTC to adopt an SLM solution, the power management system manufacturer realized the value of transforming its reactive service approach to a proactive one. By enabling technicians with immediate access to all the product information they need at each service visit, Schneider Electric realized improved efficiency and first-time fix rates.

Conclusion

Productive technicians are crucial for a thriving service business, and maximizing productivity in a shifting workforce requires an investment in connected worker solutions. IoT, AR, SLM, and PLM function together and independently to connect service technicians with the people, products, and processes they work with, empower them with valuable information and insights, guide them through complex tasks, and help them maximize their time in the field.

Figuring out which solutions to start with requires first understanding the maturity level of your current workforce productivity. Our Service Workforce Maturity Model is a tool for forward-looking service leaders to identify their maturity stage and what they need to reach the next level with connected worker technology. Explore the maturity model to get started today.