As 2008 comes to a close, it is a good time to look forward and make specific plans for next year.  Whether your remote service program is just getting started or well on its way, 2009 will require sharp focus to execute in the current business climate.  It is time to take a hard look at what will be required to accelerate the progress in your program.

One way to tackle this in our personal lives is to make New Years resolutions.  In business, these resolutions must be goals that you can commit to throughout the year.  Resolutions that do not make it out of January are not very useful. 

In the spirit of the New Year, I have 8 Remote Service Resolutions for you to consider:

1. Save Money - The average cost of a field service visit continues to escalate. For one of our customers, the average cost including travel and labor is $1000 and the average duration is 4.7 hours. If you have 100 technicians and eliminate just one visit per technician per month, the savings are $1.2 million dollars a year! If you have not already done so, look at what visits can be done remotely.
   
2. Tame the Bulge - Unscheduled travel costs based on customer downtime incidents are an increasing variable cost for many companies.  The costs will often come from many departments and are hard to budget for.  The answer is moving from reactive to proactive support.  Start immediately and look at the top 10 failures that can cause the device to be unusable.  Commit to add one proactive alarm per quarter.
   
3. Volunteer to Help Others - If your company has a successful remote service program, share your experience with others.  As you share your experience, you will often learn something that will enhance your program as well.
   
4. Seek Out an Old Friend - Many remote service deployment plans focus on high value, high cost of support customers for obvious reasons.  Often forgotten are customers in remote locations both in the US and around the world.  By focusing your deployment plan on these customers, you will yield immediate benefits while reconnecting with customers that you interact with less.
   
5. Reduce Stress - You have found a fairly major product defect and do not know how many customers are affected by this.  Should you notify all customers?  Should you advise customer to apply a product patch immediately?  This is a major stress area for many companies.  Make sure that your remote service software can keep track of these parameters.  One ad-hoc report from the install base can give an accurate picture of who has what.
   
6. Don't Get Out of Date - There is a major trend in remote service to provide automated software updates to keep all devices on the same version level.  As long as you do it when the product is not in use, the asset owners will likely approve this approach.  If you have not done so already, implement automated software updates in 2009.
   
7. Don't Take a Trip - This is the opposite of the typical personal resolution to take more trips.  Where personal travel is usually to a fun destination, business travel is usually not glamorous or fun.  Align your company with the idea that skipping a trip and servicing customers remotely benefits everyone. 
   
8. Seek an Expert - If you are stuck in one place with your remote service program, find an expert who can guide you forward.  Axeda has a family of consulting offers under the its Maximum Results designed to help customers achieve all key elements of a successful remote service program.

Now is the time to take stock and make your own resolutions.  Just like personal resolutions, the road ahead is not always easy.  Getting results requires vision, planning, willpower and perseverance.   

And just like being in the gym in January, you will have lots of company, but the real proof happens in July.  Keep pushing!