Automation Field Engineering Jobs To Be Done

One of the first steps in analyzing a business to find growth strategies is to find out what the “Job to be done” is in that line of work. I am a field engineer in the automation industry, so I decided to come up jobs to be done of my line of work.

As field engineers we get called up to go to a plant / factory and fix things or add small new features to existing production lines. The job to be done for us is not necessarily fixing things. It actually never is. To find that we must analyze what fixing those problems bring to the customer.

The goal is to list as many jobs to be done tasks and then go through them and rank them. More than likely we have the higher ranked tasks down pretty good. So after the analysis we can either find ways to improve on the high ranked “jobs to be done” or start offering services to get lower ranked tasks done as well. In my opinion getting those lower ranked jobs to be done is what can set us apart from the competition.

• Getting production line back working to produce new products.
• Getting production line back working to stop loss of money (that would be occurring while the machines are down).
• Getting production line back working to get the employees back to work again.
• Increasing the customer’s confidence in our company and reassure them they’ve made a good purchase. This can be done by offering great service, showing up at the troubled plant fast, and fixing the problem as soon as possible. This is very important, because one of the main factors that set Rockwell Automation apart from our competitors is our great service.
• Making the customer happy (more like getting him / her out of frustration).
• Identifying potential new sale opportunities.
• Not making the plant manager look bad.
• Saving the customer money by fixing the problem fast to reduce our field engineering charges to them. This might not be as important as our charge is only few hundred dollars an hour where the plant could be losing few thousand dollars or more for every hour the the production line is not working.
• Identify how to prevent the same problem happening again.
• Identify how we can improve our products in future releases.

As you can see most of the above jobs to be done have little to do with my skills in different advance automation program (motion, drives, software, etc). I (and other field engineers) need to find a way to fix the problem even if it means learning about new products or programs on the job site.

The jobs to be done also have little to do with Rockwell Automation products. Granted that most of the times we’ll be called out to go and fix Rockwell Automation products.‌ However if we encounter a problem with a competitor’s product, it might be a good idea to fix that as well. That only increases the customer’s confidence in our company for their future purchases.

Soon in another post I will try to rank the above jobs to be done and put them in a chart.

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2. Stop Outsourcing Engineering & Product Design
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