Our Brand is the Quality of our Execution

It's hard to believe it has been almost two years since we created FieldCore with the purpose to reimagine field services. As we combined the field service resources of GE Power Services and Granite we established our core values of Safety, Quality, and Integrity.

In my earlier post, I talked about safety, our sacred obligation to keep our 10,000+ people safe every day. Safety is, and will always be, our overriding priority in FieldCore.

Immediately following our core value of Safety is our core value of Quality. Today, I’d like to share my observations about quality in our industry and my company’s direction.

For me, great customer service is simple: When I get great service in my personal life, I know I will be back for more. We are working to the same principle in FieldCore. Service excellence will define our brand. I want customers to bring us back in their facilities time after time because our service is so good that they cannot imagine working with anyone else.

When we serve our customers anywhere in the world, on any equipment, in any industry, we strive to do two things:

1)   Mobilize the right teams and everything they need to succeed, where needed, on time, and at a competitive cost.

2)  When we are on site, execute well. Our goal is to execute to what we planned: Safely,  with expected quality, on-time, and on-budget.

Having been in the field service space for almost 30 years, I realize there is major room for improvement… too often in our industry we rely on solving problems as they arise. We have a reputation of being great “fire fighters.” But, do we question how often we need to “fight fires” due to our lack of planning or lack of proactive risk mitigation? Sadly, over the years we have become too comfortable being the hero when our customers would prefer “lower drama” service with no need for heroism.

So, how do we overcome the challenges to providing service excellence in our industry of complex projects on high tech machines under round the clock time pressure and a hero culture?

I believe it’s simpler than you might expect. We just need to go about it in structured way. Here are some of the things we’re doing at FieldCore to deliver a better experience for our customers by preventing fires:

1)   In the past year we have put a huge effort into being better planners. Whether it’s planning our resources to get onsite or developing our execution plan, we believe if we do this part of our jobs well this is the area of greatest impact … better planning equals less fire fighting. Our heroes are fire preventers.

2)  Once we get on site, we need to measure how well we track to our plan. How much did our proactive risk mitigation pay off? Tools like process FMEAs on critical tasks are key in thinking ahead.

3)  At the job task level, we should be following procedures which should be in the right level of detail and easy to use on site. These should be aligned to a holistic project plan which can be routinely communicated to our customers. Our challenge here has been to industrialize these procedures to achieve the right adoption. These cannot be seen as a bureaucratic checking of a box … they must be meaningful to the person performing the task and the must assure great quality for customers.

4)  Finally, we accept that reacting to the unexpected will be necessary from time to time. When a change of plan is required, we need to have the right change management process to assess the risks to safety and quality. Through our quality management system, we need to track each unexpected event as a “defect” so we can improve our planning and proactively mitigate risk in our future work.

In our management reviews, we monitor the progress of our journey listening to customer feedback as the ultimate measure of our success. While we’re very pleased with initial progress, we are far from our vision of service excellence. 

In FieldCore, we have developed a straightforward strategy to delivering World-Class Execution and are overcoming the challenges of transforming an industry which has been too reliant on heroism in the past. 

Our plan is not complicated, and we will execute our plan. We’ll continue to listen to our customers’ experiences and use their feedback to drive repeatedly great service and value for GE’s customers. In short, we’re working hard to become that company you can’t imagine doing without.

Let me know what you think,