Post-Crisis Handbook – Managing The Backlog

By Coen Jeukens, VP of global customer transformation at ServiceMax

We’ve been talking about disruption for quite a while, but many could not fathom its consequences or that it would even hit us. Nations, organizations and individuals have discovered that their business continuity plans could not mitigate the impact.

Now that we’re past the initial shock, what is business-as-usual going to look like? How do we pick-up and how do we process the backlog created by three months of lock-down?

In Part I of our Post-Crisis Handbook, ServiceMax’s Daniel Brabec provided four areas that are top of mind when navigating the service world in the new normal. In this article, I will focus on how leaders can manage the impending backlog.

Perpetual Backlogs
Right now, all focus is on Covid-19 and its impacts. But if you look deeper, you will see that many COVID-related themes have pre-existed in varying degrees; it’s only now that we look at them through a magnifying glass.

• Remote service procedures have been around for more than 30 years. Rethinking business continuity plans will likely expedite their adoption.
• Digital tools allow you to remodel your business processes and simulate the amount and mode of touch points. Social distancing guidelines add an additional ingredient to that business process (re)engineering.
• Balancing the availability of technician capacity and contracted workload is an ongoing exercise for each service-focused executive. Disruptions and imbalance exist at all times. Only Covid-19 is a major shock, illustrating that business-as-usual balancing mechanisms can’t cope.