Whether the challenge is trying to remain profitable under the threat of increased competition, navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, satisfying rising customer expectations, or facing the looming talent shortage, service-driven companies are accelerating digital transformation as a way to navigate these choppy waters.
Jon Barr, KONE Americas’ CIO, shared insight into his organization’s digital transformation strategy during a virtual IdeaShare event sponsored by Service Council and ProntoForms. In his keynote, Barr outlined the obstacles that KONE Americas was up against and how the organization emerged victorious. He detailed KONE’s continued mission to deliver an exceptional customer experience and shared how his team empowers its field technicians with mobile tools that make their lives easier through digital field service.
KONE’s early challenges
When KONE started making moves towards digitization, Barr describes a “challenging situation” that involved many compliance issues that were difficult to identify, follow up on, and coach employees on how to improve. Overall, the company was struggling with poor audit performance. While staff may have been complying with the request to complete audits, not all of the required information was provided. In some cases, field technicians weren’t clear on what each question meant, how to answer it, or knew to check to make sure what they were auditing was correct.
Manual processes hindered KONE’s efficiency with follow-up on the audit process. Assignment of tasks, checking in with a supervisor—the entire organizational chain was manual. There was also a complete over-reliance on paper. “We had paper everywhere. We had paper in our vehicles, in our branch offices, and in our auditor’s hands. Trying to make sense of that paper and report for compliance against it was a tremendous challenge and really was a burden on our Human Resources and our teams to be able to accomplish,” Barr shares.
Harnessing the power of an LCAP
KONE leverages ProntoForms’ low-code application platform to increase the speed to implement new ideas and solutions for the organization’s business needs. Having the ability to rethink processes and capture data in new and exciting ways using a mobile workflow supports KONE’s business agility and allows the company to act on opportunities in the field faster than before.
Barr notes, “Most companies I speak with, and KONE included, their ambition is always greater than the capability and capacity of the IT department. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I think what it means is it focuses us on those projects that absolutely require IT involvement and those that have the highest return on investment and the greatest chance to deliver on that return on investment.” Speaking to the power of the citizen developer, he asserts that some opportunities their team wishes to pursue may not require IT to accomplish. Using a low-code solution, KONE’s business team can build a field service app themselves, leaving the IT team to focus on emerging areas such as digital solutions for KONE products or IoT.
A complete digital transformation
After introducing mobile forms into their workflow, Barr remarks that rather than hearing his team complain about the challenges of adopting “yet another tool,” everyone was more than delighted to replace paper. Members of KONE’s business team were able to take field workers’ feedback and implement it into the forms. Employees working in the field felt like they had a voice in creating and revamping the tools they were using. Staff were left with a strong sense of how much KONE valued their contributions.
Barr sees the power of mobile forms and field service apps in helping KONE reinforce its brand promise and commitment to its customers. Field employees can now automatically send proposals for upgrades to the customer from a mobile device or phone. All relevant information is managed using technology, so as soon as the customer signs off, the field technician can immediately start work orders without needing to involve a salesperson or a supervisor. The use of mobile forms in this manner contributes directly to KONE’s ability to provide exceptional customer service all while making the technician’s life easier via digital field service.
If that wasn’t enough, paper is no longer the obstacle that it once was. Departments in the company can retrieve actionable and relevant data with the click of a mouse or tap of a finger on a mobile device.
Want to hear the full story?
Check out the full session with Jon Barr to gain additional insight into KONE’s evolution thanks to a solid digital transformation strategy. If you’re looking to embrace or accelerate digital transformation within your organization using ProntoForms, we can help you with a wide range of support documents in our Product Documentation Portal We also have a great community of peers for you to connect and share knowledge with.
