We have been obsessing over the P-F Curve a lot lately. If you’re in field service and haven’t heard of the P-F Curve — and chances are you haven’t as it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page yet — the P-F Curve illustrates the condition of equipment over time.

As you can see, the condition of any piece of equipment, or asset, degrades over time, until a potential failure (P) is detected. If nothing is done about it, then actual failure (F) occurs. While there may be some debate over the actual shape of the curve, the important thing is that you never want to let the failure happen. And that brings us to service.

Service is what keeps the asset from degrading, and your customers happy. When failure occurs, it’s too late. The only service you can provide at that point is reactive, break-fix service that is costly and comes after the asset is out of commission. Shifting from reactive to proactive service is the name of the game because it keeps equipment working longer and helps keep your customers happy. The goal is to move to the left on the P-F curve.

The ServiceMax application provides a variety of capabilities that help you and your customers do just that. Planned Maintenance enables you to create a maintenance plan for each customer asset in ServiceMax, and the system automatically generates a service request when it’s time for service. Dynamic Planned Maintenance, introduced in the Winter ’17 release, enables automatic adjustment of the next maintenance date based on when the last service was actually performed.

Just a few weeks ago, we announced the integration between ServiceMax and the Asset Performance Management (APM) application from GE Digital. APM enables very sophisticated asset modeling that results in automated service requests based on specific asset strategies. This predictive maintenance solution shifts the service requests far to the left on the P-F Curve as it enables service based on asset-specific operating strategy and real-life conditions.

Today, we have announced the ServiceMax Summer ’17 release, which introduces several new capabilities related to customer experience. Among them is what we call Condition Based Maintenance, a new feature that enables customers to assign condition attributes to the installed base records in ServiceMax and to automatically generate service requests when these conditions are reached. Examples of the conditions that can now be tracked include odometer readings, operations counters and power or gas meters.

The attributes can be updated directly by the connected assets themselves via the IoT infrastructure. However, since not every asset is connected today, service engineers can use the ServiceMax app to capture the latest asset readings manually.

Condition Based Maintenance adds an important capability to ServiceMax that helps customers move from reactive break-fix service to proactive service models. Proactive service reduces potential failure and the resulting unplanned downtime. After all, what customers want the most from their experience is to never see their equipment fail.

In the end, it’s all about moving to the left on the P-F Curve.

ABOUT Lubor Ptacek

Avatar photoLubor Ptacek is a former SVP of product & solution marketing at ServiceMax, the leader in Service Execution Management.