Do you work with field service?

Martin Rowe- June 20, 2012

As an engineer working for a semiconductor equipment company some years ago, I saw firsthand how field-service engineers worked. It started when I spent a few days in Silicon Valley with Ken, a service engineer who was installing some new equipment.

Working in the field certainly puts your lab or factory work in perspective. You not only learn how your products are used, but how their abused. You also learn how service people develop workarounds for faults in the product that may not affect the customer, but make the product hard to service. It seems that no matter what system you have for getting information from the field, there’s nothing like being there.

The life of a service engineer or technician is different from someone working in the lab or in the plant. You may have to drop everything on a moment’s notice and hit the road. That’s especially true if your product is in use for two or three shifts a day and it’s used in production. If your product fails, the customer’s production shrinks and money is lost. The longer to take fixing things, the more money your customer loses. Field-service people often work with the customer looking over their shoulder. Now that’s stress.

At Test & Measurement World, we consider field service part of test. We want to help by covering the issue important to those in the field. How should we do that? We can cover portable test products, but that’s obvious. What kind of editorial content works for you? Measurement tutorials, tips and techniques? Design for serviceability? Tell us. Use the contact link at the bottom of the page.